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October, 2010

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October 18, 2010 1:55 pm

Musings on a chip shop menu

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by Martin A. Brooks    in humour,rant

Berwick Street hosts a very very nice fish & chip shop.  When I was there last week, I noticed some discrepancies in food item pricing on the menu.

Lines items one and two:

  • Chips, 1 egg – £3.20
  • Chips, 2 eggs – £3.80

So from this we can deduce that an egg costs 60 pence and that the base cost of chips is £2.60. Next:

  • Chips, 1 egg, 1 sausage – £4.30
  • Chips, 2 eggs, 1 sausage – £4.90
  • Chips, 2 eggs, 2 sausages – £5.70

The first item tells us that a sausage costs £1.10. This is confirmed by adding 60 pence to get the £4.90 for the extra egg, but suddenly we’re getting a discount on the second sausage, costing just another 80 pence.

  • Chips, 1 sausage – £3.70
  • Chips, 2 sausages – £5.30

This starts well, our baseline of £2.60 for the chips and £1.10 for the sausage gives us the £3.70 we’re expecting.  But hold on a minute, the second sausage here is costing a whopping £1.60, twice the previous price for sausages!

  • Chips, 1 saveloy – £3.70
  • Chips, 2 saveloys – £5.30

Our first saveloy is costing the same as a regular sausage, and the second saveloy is twice as expensive as the first. In any case, surely the saveloy is a superior sausage and should cost more?

I don’t know why we second-sausage lovers are being charged such an exorbitant premium, can the injustices of this world never end?

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October 7, 2010 11:09 am

Email: Managing users’ expectations

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by Martin A. Brooks    in email,rant

That email has established itself as a universal communication medium is a credit to all those who contributed to the standards that define its implementation.

Truly, only “www.” is a more familiar as an Internet medium for information exchange and, even then, HTTP is routinely dumbed down to “it’s on my Facebook” and other similar paradigms.   This is not a criticism, it’s a tribute to the Internet’s ongoing integration into our everyday lives.

People seem desperately confused about email.  It’s an aged beast and it suffers from having been reinvented and redefined over a long period of time to meet the demands of a succession of users with different expectation levels.

Stepping back a bit, SMTP  as a protocol was originally designed to be incredibly tolerant of all kinds of problems.  It had to be.  Shonky links, low bandwidth and infrequent network connectivity meant we needed a protocol that could deal with the idea that messages could be significantly delayed.  SMTP has a built in a mechanism for notifying when things aren’t going well, and makes a really good effort to tell a sender that things didn’t work out and the message didn’t make it. Then things changed.

Sending files over the Internet is sometimes hard.  I know!  Let’s extend email so it can transfer files.

Not everyone can type in 7 bit ASCII. I know! Let’s extend email so all character sets can be represented.

Sending messages in plain text isn’t always desirable. I know!  Let’s extend email so it can handle PGP/GPG mail.

Attachments are okay, but what if there were some way my image could appear in my email body. I know! Let’s extend the message format so it can do that.

Text is boring. I know! Let’s extend email so I can send HTML content.

 

You get the idea.   Email has evolved far beyond the original specification and still fails to meet users’ expectations.  And it should not, because they confuse email with instant messaging and with a reliable file transport mechanism.  If your users want messages to be delivered instantly, use an instant messaging system, not email.  If you want files transferred, use some kind of file transfer protocol.   Anyone training users to expect anything other than “it’ll almost certainly get there, probably today” out of email is creating a rod with which to beat themselves when deadlines tighten.  The right tool for the right job.

 

 

 

 

 

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