Yes, as others have pointed out, the crosswalk buttons usually insert a walk cycle into the light pattern. If you don’t press it, you will not get a walk signal at all. I’ve seen this verified many times. It does NOT, as some people think, immediately cause the light to change and allow you to walk. At least, not I have ever seen have done that.
I can’t speak for the other placebo buttons. (Except for a couple elevator ones that I tested when I was kid. It for sure made them close faster than not pressing it.)
The case of some intersections ALWAYS having a walk cycle is the case in Victoria as well, while the areas a little ways out of downtown require a button.
We have an issue with that kind of system at work: We moved into a new building a couple of years ago, and for whatever reason it’s annoyingly chilly. In every office there is a little nob that goes from blue to red, and everyone has theirs set to red … to no obvious effect. I have to bring a sweater to work even on the warmest days, and in the summer we go outside to warm up. (In the winter, we have appropriate clothing.) We’ve complained to the maintenance people, who don’t seem to care, and eventually bought fleece sweaters for the entire department.
There are also lounges on every floor, and at 16:00 they go from survivably chilly to downright cold. Again, there is a controller that looks like it should do something to the temperature, and again, having it at what looks to be the warmest does very little.
I’m not sure if they’re actually placebos, though; it might well be that they just have a very small adjustment range (on the idea that the midpoint is supposed to be about right, and people’s preferred temperatures won’t be too far away), or that the cold side is really cold indeed.
Wow, that is really poor UI design on FMP’s part. Do they ever use ANY software other than their own? Do they expect people to just know this? Do they think applications should have banners that say “click anywhere outside a form field to save data”? It feels funny to people because it IS funny. Why on earth would they hold on to a convention that is pretty much opposite the entire computing world of software? Weird.
About three years ago we moved into newly-constructed offices built in an 80-year-old sawmill. We have electronic touch-screen thermostats in most offices. Mine looks like this:
They’re pretty nifty, and remotely programmable to limit the number of locally-accessible functions. I can’t set mine higher than 74, nor lower than 70, for instance. And it’s pretty nifty how the humidity can be controlled, too. Our first month in the space, they were cycling through some tests one day, and the humidity when from skin-crackingly arid to literally window-fogging swampy in the course of ten minutes.
Now and then we need to get a bit more local control (like for the server room, which gets warm during the summer even though it has two A/C vents feeding its whopping 380 cubic feet closet, and the server only has three 8TB chassis), so we call the A/C office for help. But when the system’s working, it works well. Nobody seems to miss the old Honeywell dials.
I once worked in a combined engineering/manufacturing facility. The thermostats were set up to control the temperature in zones which included a mixture of manufacturing and office space. There was a wave solder machine in our zone chucking out ridiculous amounts of heat meaning that we had to live with the A/C being on full all the time at our desks. There was a permanent breeze all the time and managers got annoyed with us because we refused to take our lab coats off.
Lovely place to work. As it was an old factory, there were no windows, so for several months each year I saw no daylight during the week.
