[conspire] the flashing 12:00 problem (Re: Twitter successors)

[Michael Paoli]

Well,

First of all ...

Just because it became quite inexpensive to put an electronic digital clock
and with no battery backup in many AC line powered devices and appliances,
doesn't necessarily mean it is, or ever was, a great idea.  I mean sure, VCR,
notably for those who'd program it to record shows - accurate timing
essential for
that.  But a lot of stuff, why bother.  Microwave?  Really?  What percentage of
people actually use the clock on the microwave to program when something will
start and stop cooking and any other changes on the way?  I'm guessing
<<0.5% or so?  In such cases, clock becomes much more of a nuisance than
a useful advantage - at least to the vast majority of folks.  If it's
not set properly
it's an annoyance, or worse yet, bad or inaccurate information, giving
or flashing
an impossible time, or worse yet giving or flashing a possible time -
a problem which
also plagues the analog mechanical versions of otherwise similar AC line powered
clocks.  Now, maybe a conventional oven might be useful ... but I'd
bet that still
<<5% use such on a conventional oven to set a time to start and stop cooking
something in the oven.

And secondly ...

And bloody hell ... yeah, defaults matter, so okay lose power, power comes
back, no battery backup for the clock.  Okay, so it won't show the correct time.
But bloody hell, why show or flash an incorrect but possible time?  That's even
more of a problem and now even more of a nuisance/hazard.  Why not just show
(and preferably not more annoyingly flash) 88:88 or 99:99 or
better yet show nothing at all or just a bare : - flashing or better yet
not even flashing at all.  Yeah, I think a bare colon would probably be
best ... and sure, have it flash once per second - since the clock generally
won't show seconds on the time (unless counting down your microwave
remaining cook time on the timer) - so if someone wants to watch the
minute flip and know the seconds past the minute, they can count flashes
of the colon (yeah, some of us sometimes do that).  I think that ought be
the default behavior of such clocks.

Ah, and if you think the 1970s had such issues of poorly thought out
mis-features and stuff that shouldn't have been done or should've been
done much better ... yeah, those problems were barely in their infancy then.
They've mostly just gotten a whole lot bigger.  You know that little kid that's
a brat and annoyance and that problem isn't corrected and issue isn't nipped in
the bud?  And they grow up without any discipline or appropriate feedback,
and now their all grown up and now they're a much bigger problem to a lot
more people.  Yeah, a whole helluva lot of software has unfortunately done that.

On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 3:55 AM Nick Moffitt <nick at zork.net> wrote:
>
> On 11Mar2024 01:10pm (-0600), Akkana Peck wrote:
> > But maybe a lot of people never question defaults.
>
> In the 80s and 90s, we used to call this "the flashing 12:00 problem".
>
> Some of that was the inaccessibility of configuration tools, but there was another dimension: setting a digital clock on some non-clock device created a level of cognitive load over and on top of the frustration of having to work out the arcane pattern of keypresses on a limited number of buttons.  Some folks would find it important enough to set the clock on a kitchen appliance, but wouldn't bother with a VCR even if they could work out how to do it.
>
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