Comment On That Internet Over There

The Internet crashed!

Maybe there were too many poker chips clogging the tubes.

I hate when pages are being difficult for no reason.

Which Internet?

The difficult one.

I heard a rumor on the internets.

What's this? Windows telling you to not restart? Blasphemy!

Netz:

What's this? Windows telling you to not restart? Blasphemy!

Actually, if I'm reading that correctly, Windows has dithered the restart-later option thus forcing you to restart now. Reboot-tease!

snoofle:

Netz:

What's this? Windows telling you to not restart? Blasphemy!

Actually, if I'm reading that correctly, Windows has dithered the restart-later option thus forcing you to restart now. Reboot-tease!

Or perhaps I should read it more closely - it's Friday, it's late, mea culpa.

I missed the funny bit on the last one. Adobe Acrobat is trying to read a document but had some trouble; it's indicating that some pages (26 of them, likely) are potentially mangled due to being "difficult". That's ... hilarious?

snoofle:

Netz:

What's this? Windows telling you to not restart? Blasphemy!

Actually, if I'm reading that correctly, Windows has dithered the restart-later option thus forcing you to restart now. Reboot-tease!

Actually, it has a tick in it...

CAPTCHA: yummy

Good god... if I had a dime for every time the non-technical people I know ask me which internet I use, or are convinced that their "internet" is whatever their homepage is set to. "I use the Yahoo internet... I don't have Google." Or things like, "Call up (site) on the internet." WTF does "Call Up" mean in the context of the internet? I don't know why but that phrase irritates the hell out of me.

The second one seems weird... The "Do Not Restart" box is disabled with a check mark in it...

My theory is that this screenshot was taken in mid-click, so that the check box was in it's "indeterminate: previously true" state, which mimics the disabled state.

They didn't even include the BEST Internet option!
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread69215.html

008:

My theory is that this screenshot was taken in mid-click, so that the check box was in it's "indeterminate: previously true" state, which mimics the disabled state.

Not quite. Mid-click, the text isn't grayed out.

jread:

Good god... if I had a dime for every time the non-technical people I know ask me which internet I use, or are convinced that their "internet" is whatever their homepage is set to. "I use the Yahoo internet... I don't have Google."

It took my mom about a year to stop referring to the MSN browser (!) her ISP's dialer set to default as "the Internet".

jread:

Or things like, "Call up (site) on the internet." WTF does "Call Up" mean in the context of the internet? I don't know why but that phrase irritates the hell out of me.

You know...dial it up on the keyboard. Punch it in. Click over to it. That kind of [annoying] thing.

("Call up" in the same way one "calls up" their friend on the phone, one presumes...yuck.)

David:

They didn't even include the BEST Internet option!
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread69215.html

That would be because i have "The best internet", at least the friendly telemarketer from my ISP told me so when he called earlier today.

F*cking telemarketers...

Trevel:

...it's indicating that some pages (26 of them, likely) are potentially mangled due to being "difficult". That's ... hilarious?

Actually, no. What's funny is what we do with it. Having trouble thinking up anything?

incoherent:

I heard a rumor on the internets.

...which is why I have always loved seeing a post by "Look at me! I'm on the internets! (unregistered)" The dude (chick?) is a regular and should go ahead and register that name... but, whatever. I laugh every time I see it.

Forgive my confusion. Is a disabled, checked checkbox, checked or not? As I understand it, a checkbox that is disabled is in fact ignored, and as such, the program will use a default value instead of what the checkbox is set to. Since that checkbox is disabled, it's impossible to either check or uncheck it, so it will likely behave, in this instance, as if it were nonetheless unchecked.

At least, that is the impression that I've gleaned from the past.

To me, personally, this has been a sticking point in standard GUIs, a subtle ambiguity.

It's actually quite simple. Almost all Windows updates, including service packs, use the same installer, which is most often referred to as simply update.exe. Microsoft even exploited this fact in Windows XP and newer by putting the installer on the user's machine instead of including it with every update, making the individual updates smaller.

For a lot of updates, you have to reboot. Also for a lot of updates, there's no harm in postponing it. For a service pack, so much has changed that not rebooting would leave the system in an inconcsistent state. Thus you're not given the choice, and the checkbox is grayed out.

The only "wtf" is that it the text on the final wizard page hasn't been updated to reflect that. This may have been fixed in later versions, as Windows 2000 SP4 is quite old.

Trevel:

I missed the funny bit on the last one. Adobe Acrobat is trying to read a document but had some trouble; it's indicating that some pages (26 of them, likely) are potentially mangled due to being "difficult". That's ... hilarious?

Being the submitter of the image (which got posted without my followup text), the reasoning for the WTF is that I was converting a large-ish pdf to doc and I got Acrobat complaining about the task being ... "difficult"? Well, if it was easy I'd have done it myself! Computers *exist* for difficult computational work - that's why we invented them. And now they complain?

uhm, no. All the disabled flag does is determine whether or not your can interact with the control. The value of the control remains the same, thus, if the control's value is 'checked', then disabled or not, the value is 'checked' (or .checked = true, depending on the language).

If we look at some (hypothetical) code from the installer:

//checkbox.checked==true;
//checkbox.enabled==false;

//within Finish button code

onClick(){
if(checkbox.checked){
exit(0);
}
if(!checkbox.checked){
//This is a guess, don't quote me on this...
restart();
}
}

Goran K:

Being the submitter of the image (which got posted without my followup text), the reasoning for the WTF is that I was converting a large-ish pdf to doc and I got Acrobat complaining about the task being ... "difficult"? Well, if it was easy I'd have done it myself! Computers *exist* for difficult computational work - that's why we invented them. And now they complain?

The first image of the Windows restart dialog confused people a bit (many are easily confused).

But your Adobe message is actually quite amusing. Great example of a needy program with "issues." Maybe you spoke harshly to it or ignored it too much?

So I just type whatever I want here and it shows up on an internet?

008:

My theory is that this screenshot was taken in mid-click, so that the check box was in it's "indeterminate: previously true" state, which mimics the disabled state.

Incorrect. Service Pack 4 was installed from Windows Update; this is the behaviour you get when you install the SP through WU.

Sven:

It's actually quite simple. Almost all Windows updates, including service packs, use the same installer, which is most often referred to as simply update.exe. Microsoft even exploited this fact in Windows XP and newer by putting the installer on the user's machine instead of including it with every update, making the individual updates smaller.

For a lot of updates, you have to reboot. Also for a lot of updates, there's no harm in postponing it. For a service pack, so much has changed that not rebooting would leave the system in an inconcsistent state. Thus you're not given the choice, and the checkbox is grayed out.

The only "wtf" is that it the text on the final wizard page hasn't been updated to reflect that. This may have been fixed in later versions, as Windows 2000 SP4 is quite old.

That may well be the explanation, but it's still a WTF. (In its new form -- yay!)

Why present the user with a greyed-out, ticked, check-box when no possible action would ever (a) un-grey or (b) un-tick the box?

This is akin to insisting that, every time you write the words "to be", you have to surround them with the rest of Shakespeare's Hamlet, only greyed-out.

To paraphrase Knuth, it's "illiterate programming."

jread:

Or things like, "Call up (site) on the internet." WTF does "Call Up" mean in the context of the internet? I don't know why but that phrase irritates the hell out of me.

Actually, "Call up (site)" makes perfect sense if literally translated to german. The word is "aufrufen". literally "call up", but more appropriately would be just "call". Like "call a subroutine or function". Thus, in a sense, "call up (site)" is technically correct. You "call" the site's data by entereing its url and, by pressing enter, tell your browser to call the necessary function of the server. Well, it's difficult to explain in english that the phrase makes perfect sense in german.

TheRider:

jread:

Or things like, "Call up (site) on the internet." WTF does "Call Up" mean in the context of the internet? I don't know why but that phrase irritates the hell out of me.

Actually, "Call up (site)" makes perfect sense if literally translated to german. The word is "aufrufen". literally "call up", but more appropriately would be just "call". Like "call a subroutine or function". Thus, in a sense, "call up (site)" is technically correct. You "call" the site's data by entereing its url and, by pressing enter, tell your browser to call the necessary function of the server. Well, it's difficult to explain in english that the phrase makes perfect sense in german.

Good explanation, actually. The link to English is probably "invoke." German and English went two different ways on this in the eighteenth century: English went, well, anglo-saxon, and replaced latinate forms with the demotic equivalent ("call up"), whereas Germans, being more literal-minded sorts of blokes, tended to dissect the original word and replace each individual component. Thus, "umstand" for "circumstance."

Mind you, we still use "circumstance," so we're a little way behind you.

I think I've seen the second one when a service pack is installed using Windows Update. The service pack installer itself does not allow to restart the system, but after the installation Windows Update notifies the user that the system has to be rebooted.

Goran K:

Trevel:

I missed the funny bit on the last one. Adobe Acrobat is trying to read a document but had some trouble; it's indicating that some pages (26 of them, likely) are potentially mangled due to being "difficult". That's ... hilarious?

Being the submitter of the image (which got posted without my followup text), the reasoning for the WTF is that I was converting a large-ish pdf to doc and I got Acrobat complaining about the task being ... "difficult"? Well, if it was easy I'd have done it myself! Computers *exist* for difficult computational work - that's why we invented them. And now they complain?

Next time it'll probably complain about the job being tedious. And then what? Will it quit it?

Bonzo:

Which Internet?

http://www.internet2.edu/

we only have two so the answer can't be that hard.

As a former tech support rep for Acrobat, I can explain the Acrobat error message; it's a perfectly cromulent error, if one knows a little about how Acrobat actually processes a PDF into a Word document.

Most PDFs are created using PostScript output intended for a printer. That means there isn't necessarily any logical context inherent in the PDF, since the source application cares more about page layout than sending PostScript commands in a logical (relative to page content) order.

Acrobat does have a built-in tagging function that allows an application to define logical structure along side layout structure; some source applications do this automatically, and Adobe provides plugins to Word/Excel/Powerpoint that add tagging functionality and direct PDF export. However, these settings are optional and many users turn off tags to reduce the file size of their PDFs.

Now when Acrobat is going from PDF to Word, there may not be any tags; most PDFs are not tagged. So, the first thing Acrobat does is try to automatically tag the PDF if the tags don't already exist. Then it generates a Word document based on the document structure.

The tagging process is what generated the error message. It's Acrobat's way of saying, "WTF is this shit?" and probably means that Acrobat couldn't make any coherent sense out of the object structure for those pages in order to add tags. I bet if you took the PDF in question and added tags manually, you would probably be able to successfully export it to Word.

Nathan

The most commonly used internets are :
1. Wireless internet
2. Cable Internet
3. VPN internet
4. mobile internet

and the pun
5. fish in-teh-net

Daniel Beardsmore:

Forgive my confusion. Is a disabled, checked checkbox, checked or not? As I understand it, a checkbox that is disabled is in fact ignored, and as such, the program will use a default value instead of what the checkbox is set to. Since that checkbox is disabled, it's impossible to either check or uncheck it, so it will likely behave, in this instance, as if it were nonetheless unchecked.

It is entirely up to the application how a situation like this is handled. Some may set the checkbox to at least indicate what it is going to do, but in confusing cases like this there are no guarantees.

Daniel Beardsmore:

To me, personally, this has been a sticking point in standard GUIs, a subtle ambiguity.

Which leads me to something that really, really, REALLY annoys me in modern GUI design: why not just put text on the damn buttons that tells me what is going to happen? I passionately hate those dialog boxes that have the standard "abort, retry, cancel" set and then add a description like

"...to reset your printer, click abort. If you want to check the colors but without resetting the printer, click retry. To eject paper, but not check the colors, click cancel."

Honestly! This would have been SO MUCH MORE clearer if there had been three buttons labelled "Reset printer", "Check colors", and "Eject paper"!

And the same is true here. The confusion exists because there are too many buttons, and they are labelled incorrectly. Compare if you put the following description: "To complete the installation you must reboot. You can reboot now, or you can temporarily halt the installation and continue later by rebooting manually." Then below that stick two buttons, labelled "halt for now" and "reboot". Isn't that much clearer?

Daniel Beardsmore:

Forgive my confusion. Is a disabled, checked checkbox, checked or not?

Ah, that's because you've forgotten that checkboxes have in fact THREE states:

CHECKED, UNCHECKED, and FILE_NOT_FOUND

CAPTCHA: bling

The Acrobat one actually made me go 'Aww..' like it was a kid that was trying but couldn't.

Then I remembered that I hate it.

The whole point of the disabled flag is that the user can't use it, it makes no assumption about what the checkbox should do. It's a bit ambiguous because it's badly worded (it should be checked to restart really, not the other way round), but if you see a disabled (ie greyed out) checkbox you should assume that it does what it says on the tin, disabled is purely for determining how the user can interact with the control, not for determining the state. The real WTF is that Windows isn't rebooting itself after an update, and moreso that it doesn't allow you to. Hopefully, however, in classical Windows style, it reboots anyway.

Bonzo:

Which Internet?

The one with the porn.

jread:

Good god... if I had a dime for every time the non-technical people I know ask me which internet I use, or are convinced that their "internet" is whatever their homepage is set to. "I use the Yahoo internet... I don't have Google." Or things like, "Call up (site) on the internet." WTF does "Call Up" mean in the context of the internet? I don't know why but that phrase irritates the hell out of me.

http://www.answers.com/topic/call-up
See 4. That's WTF it means.

What gets me is the general use of "log on to our website" to see whatever, when they just mean visit. You don't have to register, so what exactly are you logging on to?

Hans:

Honestly! This would have been SO MUCH MORE clearer if there had been three buttons labelled "Reset printer", "Check colors", and "Eject paper"!

The Mac OS X UI design guidelines say that buttons have to be action labels like this. One of the subtle but effective ways Apple tries to make the OS easy to work with.

Iain:

The whole point of the disabled flag is that the user can't use it, it makes no assumption about what the checkbox should do. It's a bit ambiguous because it's badly worded (it should be checked to restart really, not the other way round), but if you see a disabled (ie greyed out) checkbox you should assume that it does what it says on the tin, disabled is purely for determining how the user can interact with the control, not for determining the state.

Except on HTML forms - a disabled checkbox appears the same to the script that processes it as an unchecked one.

Daniel Beardsmore:

Forgive my confusion. Is a disabled, checked checkbox, checked or not? As I understand it, a checkbox that is disabled is in fact ignored, and as such, the program will use a default value instead of what the checkbox is set to. Since that checkbox is disabled, it's impossible to either check or uncheck it, so it will likely behave, in this instance, as if it were nonetheless unchecked.

At least, that is the impression that I've gleaned from the past.

To me, personally, this has been a sticking point in standard GUIs, a subtle ambiguity.

You are talking about the behaviour of checkboxes in an Internet browser. When the browser POST the data unchecked checkboxes are not POSTed back. A pain in the ass.
The window of the installer is not running in a browser and, therefore, the checkbox IS checked but not accessible for the user.

The comments about HTML forms are a bit off. Disabled form elements are not posted at all. Normally you can read a checkbox to see if it's on or off even if you haven't assigned a value to the checkbox. That breaks for disabled checkboxes. If you iterate through the posted form elements you will not find any disabled form elements in that list - a subtle difference from it posting the same as an unchecked checkbox, and a cause of annoying bugs when people treat 'disabled' as just styling.

Mitz? Is that you?

"Internet? What Internet?"

poochner:

What gets me is the general use of "log on to our website" to see whatever, when they just mean visit. You don't have to register, so what exactly are you logging on to?

Though it's typically transparent to the end user, every interaction with a web server involves an authentication process. In the case of IIS, when your browser connects to a website served by IIS and you access a site 'anonymously', IIS is actually granting you access via a generic system account (typically IUSR_[Machine Name], though you can set it to anything). That system account gives you a specific set of privileges on the server (to be served pages, download/access files, etc.). So though you're not explicitly providing credentials, the server is in fact providing them on your behalf and logging you on through those means.

That said, I don't really think that's what you were complaining about but at the end of the day, do you really expect non-technical people to care what verbiage they use related to a server interaction? They just want to know that they can get on the tubes to see their transexual-midget-fisting-watersports-porn just the way they want it :þ

Having checkboxes labeled with a negative form is a pet peeve of mine.

Why not "[x] Don't not restart later" if you're going for maximum confusion?

008:

If we look at some (hypothetical) code from the installer:

//checkbox.checked==true;
//checkbox.enabled==false;

//within Finish button code

onClick(){
if(checkbox.checked){
exit(0);
}
if(!checkbox.checked){
//This is a guess, don't quote me on this...
restart();
}
}

You've been quoted.