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UK's National Rail Shuts Down Free Timetable App 145


UK's National Rail Shuts Down Free Timetable App

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  • WTF (Score:5, Insightful)

  • by Kilrah_il (1692978) on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @07:52AM (#34109702)

    And you are a silly person. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time, you silly English Knnnniget!

  • Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)


  • Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)





  • Re:WTF (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @08:13AM (#34109790)

    A successful service is not just a profit making service.



  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @08:22AM (#34109824)

    You obviously haven't worked in professional software development at all if you think he's wrong.

    Most software or IT projects, especially in the US and the UK, actually are nothing more than resume padding. They're almost never done to benefit the employees using them, and especially not the customers being served by those employees.

    That's why Swing apps were considered acceptable for so long, even though they were absolutely hell to use and often reduced productivity. But buzzwords must change as time goes on, so those got replaced with in-house "web apps". They're even shittier to use than Swing apps, but there's a much richer ecosystem of buzzwords to pad one's resume with.

    Now even they are being eclipsed by "cloud apps" that combine the worst of web apps with the worst of third-party hosting, to create an environment that's absolutely horrible to work with. Employees forced into using cloud-based apps actually want to go back to the Swing apps!

  • Re:WTF (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sockatume (732728) on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @09:01AM (#34110074)




    The key bit in their Code of Practice for access to the data ( http://www.atoc.org/about-atoc/national-rail-enquiries/code-of-practice [atoc.org] ) is:



  • Re:Me too... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JohnBailey (1092697) on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @09:09AM (#34110150)


    You are obviously not compartmentalising enough.

  • Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MonsterTrimble (1205334) <(moc.liamtoh) (ta) (elbmirtretsnom)> on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @10:20AM (#34111090)

    by jimicus (737525) on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @11:27AM (#34112292)




  • by gknoy (899301) <gknoy AT anasazisystems DOT com> on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @12:09PM (#34113086)

    Those pedantic about either spelling or grammer are ultimatly the sad pathetic people who sit alone out in the kitchen at parties picking at their nails trying to not make eye contact with anyone.

    Conversely, they may be people who care passionately about using language The Right Way -- much as Star Wars nerds will correct you if you assert that Han was Leia's sister, or that Luke build R2-D2. Pursuit of perfection is something which all nerds do to a certain extent, especially programmers. If I tell you, "your code example is missing braces on your 'if' clause, so it won't evaluate the way you want it to", I'm not trying to be an asshole. Think of it as a verbal compiler error. Ironically, many programmers take the perspective that writing in English is something in which correctness and conformity to convention doesn't matter -- and yet we must be extremely correct when coding.

    Think back to school? did anyone like that kid who used to correct the other kids grammer? no. no they did not.

    What can I say - no one likes being exposed as wrong.

    There is no standards body for the english language, if someone says something and you understand it and the meaning you get is close enough to what they intended then it's perfectly good.

    Natural language is too ambiguous to parse. You cannot always guarantee that someone will understand what you mean, and errors in word choice, punctuation, or spelling only compound that. People who care about communication take the time to be courteous to their listener/reader, and write/speak in a way which they know the audience will not mistake. If you can't be bothered to follow the conventions which guide English language (even if they aren't codified the way French is), you're either a visionary literary mind (e.g., e e cummings) or you need an editor.

    The OED is considered by many to be a definitive reference for spellings and word meanings. I'm not sure where one would find a grammar reference - googling for one was not immediately useful. Still, not poor spelling is, in the age of the internet, a sign that one doesn't care about spelling it right, rather than not knowing the spelling. Unless you've mangled the word (and even then), Googling for it will give great answers. Sometimes Google corrects it, and other times the first page of results gives the answers many times over. ("orderves" -> "how do you spell orderves" -> "hors d'oeuvre") In short, spelling errors are a sign of either unnoticed typogaphical mistakes or of laziness, and when they're systematic people will tend to assume the latter.

  • by Kilrah_il (1692978) on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @02:07PM (#34114754)

    I know that spelling!=grammar, but still, you would expect someone who is pedantic about a person's grammar to at least go over his post and make sure there are no spelling mistakes.

nohup rm -fr /&