The film industry has used them perhaps since its inception to denote the year a film was made, so that it could be redistributed later either locally or to a foreign country with many not knowing the wiser; this became more useful when films were broadcast on television to prevent people from reacting against an older film. From this came the policy of the broadcasting industry, including the BBC, to use them to denote the year in which a television program was made (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has largely stopped this practice but still occasionally lapses).

If that really is the reason, I reckon it’s time for a rethink… doesn’t it seem silly to mask this information? The BBC use Roman numerals for copyright statements on the web too — consistancy is a good thing, but it seems a bit fusty.

I suppose to those with decent EPGs and chunks of programme meta-data available at the touch of a remote, this little whinge seems rather quaint — “Look! They have to wait ’till the end of a programme to find out when it was made, then translate the date from some weird arcane number system!”

“Contingency Design” is necessarily a difficult thing to sell (“we’ll make your application user-friendly, even when it goes wrong!”). The tricks and techniques to get people “back on track” need be pointed at and applauded. That’s what half of Design Not Found. The best and worst of contingency design does:

Contingency design – a field pioneered by 37signals – is design for when things go wrong (error messages, no search results found, missing pages, bad form entries, etc.).

I like the site because the good examples are worth pilfering and the “bad” examples have a “Simple solutions to this problem” section that demonstrates the Zen Like Power Of Common Sense.

As cable companies and Internet access providers compete for customers by offering broadband service, cable modems and digital subscriber lines (DSLs) as faster access to the Web, slower download speeds sometimes prompt greater user response than faster download speeds, a study says.

Hint: ^+.