Google+’s recent enforcement of a “real names” policy strikes me as an engineer’s approach to accountability—black-and-white, when there’s plenty of grey. While G+ developers didn’t fall for many of the falsehoods listed in the article, it’s an amusing look at what happens when inexperienced programmers create identity systems.
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6 Comments
chrisheath
well that surely is a long list of falsehoods!
#6 “People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.”
Hits home for me since on many of my bills i’m “Christophe R Heath”
Charlie O'Keefe
I’ve been a victim of “names don’t have punctuation, especially punctuation that could be interpreted as a quotation mark” all my life.
(see http://xkcd.com/327/ for why you should consider this as a programmer even if you don’t care about getting people’s names right)
I often have to say things like,
“try it with and without the apostrophe”
“try it with an uppercase and lowercase K”
“try it with ‘Charlie’ or ‘Charles'”
Already 8 different possible combinations.
The apostrophe actually screwed with the security system in an access controlled facility where I had a badge. Some doors that should have opened, didn’t. But even more surprising, some doors that should not have opened, did!
Meggin
I feel the key word in your above observation is ‘inexperience’.
‘Grey’ is a tough concept for any of us to swallow, and tends to only make sense after coming to terms with something fairly complex, making our peace with it, and eventually coming to embrace what it has given us.
Even the purest scientist, the most truant software engineer, will eventually learn the beauty of no-one-true answer or falsehood.
The beauty of grey.
Mikhail Garber
Google+ overall strikes me as engineer’s approach to social 😉
Maurice
Mikhail an amateur engineers approach you meant – back in the day used to work on OSI based systems which where very much better engineered to cater for world wide use.
Look at the screw ups google made over schema.org rdf markup – they cant even define a flipping country in a canonical way.
Vint or some actual adults needs to revoke some of the kids desert privileges at lunch and get them to stay late to do it right.
Maurice
oh and the article forgot the IJ digraph in dutch 🙂