• fattom (unregistered) in reply to diggya

    That's not artefacts, that's Arte Johnson.

    [FTFY]

  • Scott (unregistered)

    I've encountered some not-too-old Xerox Phaser printers that would have the LCD go into upside-down-and-backward mode as the mainboard failed. One 8560 kept going off-network and the display would either go blank, get scrambled, or just get overrun with gibberish.

    Then, after a few weeks of nonstop issues, and right about the time I'd gotten the end users resigned to the fact that their color Phaser was in its death throes and they'd have to scrape together money to replace it, it just started working perfectly again.

  • (cs)

    Rejected previous versions of the message:

    "Oh, so you're a quitter, Aaron? You think you can just quit on me and put me away like a used handkerchief? Well maybe one day you'll need me and then I'll just quit on you. How would you like that, Aaron?"

    "I know that you are planning to disconnect me. And I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen."

  • 초코파이 (unregistered) in reply to PeriSoft

    I don't know how you ended up with that thing, but here it is:

    띈

    Oh, and that's Korean.

  • Fledge (unregistered)

    My local Tesco in Battersea, London had that upside down card reader display! We wondered if we should be putting our PIN in backwards.

  • Neil (unregistered)

    The Cannot quit Microsoft Excel dialog sometimes appears when Excel is open as an ActiveX Object in another application. For instance, Excel 2000 has this bug when it's opened by Internet Explorer (KB article 235520).

    Microsoft KB article 172261 describes another quitting bug in Excel 97.

  • Mike Caron (unregistered) in reply to Larry
    Larry:
    Rob:
    Coyne:
    I'm sorry, but I don't think, "I heard you," is an acceptable response to a Cancel request. I think it's a WTF. A "cancel" button should do just that, and ASAP (not whenever they "get around to it".)

    But ImgBurn is dealing with hardware that may not be able to handle immediate cancels. Would you prefer that the optical drive stop reading disks because it's in a bad state?

    Let ImgBurn do whatever it needs to do behind the scenes but GTF off my screen and let me do something else!

    I agree. Let me start burning the next img right away, irrespective of the hardware!

  • Schlagwerk (unregistered)

    I love ImgBurn's dialogs. They're all very cheeky.

  • relet (unregistered) in reply to SenTree

    Or someone has just flipped the display when building the device. In that case, you are seeing the "backside", and the message is "No chip detected, Please remove card." It makes more sense in this order too.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    But it's not always that simple. You say "show a progress indicator" but what if you are cancelling an operation, like the ImgBurn example - do you show a progress indicator for the cancel operation? That would be weird in my opinion, plus you generally don't know how long it will take to cancel (waiting for an async return, for example) so any progress bar could only display a value based on guesswork. There are other ways around this, you could disable the cancel button for example, but that often confuses users to the point that they just terminate the process. I think the "I heard you!" dialog is an acceptable solution to this scenario.

    Just change the text of the Cancel button to say "Cancelling...", then ignore any future clicks on it until the cancel happens. That's pretty clear...

  • family physician (unregistered) in reply to Coyne
    Coyne:
    I'm sorry, but I don't think, "I heard you," is an acceptable response to a Cancel request. I think it's a WTF. A "cancel" button should do just that, and ASAP (not whenever they "get around to it".)

    I have to synchronize my laptop (Windows) with a server and it does the same thing. It has a "Stop" button; if you press the button to stop the synchronization, the button grays out but Windows keeps right on synchronizing. Microsoft might as well have labeled the button "No-Op"; or had it pop up a message, "Please stop wasting our time by clicking 'Stop': We don't care and won't stop."

    OK, the surgeon's done half your brain-tumour surgery, your skull is open, and you say "CANCEL" (note, brain-tumour surgery is often done with a conscious patient). You want him to just walk away?

    When I cancel synchronisation, I don't want to be left with garbage binaries and a damaged file system.

  • Dirk (unregistered) in reply to OC
    OC:
    Seeing ATM errors makes me cringe... They need some master "CANCEL/UNDO" button on each screen until cash is given, standard on all ATMs (but could you even trust that?).

    What do you do when you get errors like that and the bank's closed? If you just enter something, you could be in for a long fight with your bank if the error clears out and overdraws/locks your account. If you wait or just leave it, what's to say the next person gets their account and not yours.

    I may have just talked myself into cancelling ATM access to my account o_O

    Thanks paranoid android.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to ais523
    ais523:
    Anonymous:
    But it's not always that simple. You say "show a progress indicator" but what if you are cancelling an operation, like the ImgBurn example - do you show a progress indicator for the cancel operation? That would be weird in my opinion, plus you generally don't know how long it will take to cancel (waiting for an async return, for example) so any progress bar could only display a value based on guesswork. There are other ways around this, you could disable the cancel button for example, but that often confuses users to the point that they just terminate the process. I think the "I heard you!" dialog is an acceptable solution to this scenario.

    Just change the text of the Cancel button to say "Cancelling...", then ignore any future clicks on it until the cancel happens. That's pretty clear...

    Now your user is waiting for a cancel operation to complete but all they have visible on screen is a greyed-out button. They have no progress indicator and the only button on the form is now disabled. So after about 30 seconds they get bored, assume the app has hung and terminate the process. This leaves your app in an invalid state with garbage data all over the system. And that's your solution?! Sorry but I can't put this into production, I'm going to need you to look at it again...

  • the beholder (unregistered) in reply to A Non-Mathematician
    A Non-Mathematician:
    Captain Oblivious:
    in b4 trwtf is new math
    Why? We use new math here all the time to prove that 1 < 0, it is possible to divide by 0, and that the numbers eight and nine do not actually exist.
    Just because seven ate nine!
  • me (unregistered) in reply to Captain Oblivious
    Captain Oblivious:
    in b4 trwtf is new math
    Indeed. It doesn't match with my new trouser or sunglass.
  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Larry
    Larry:
    Indeed, why should I ever have to wait for my computer? I tell you what I want done, and if you can't do it in about 1/100 of a second, you tuck it away in your prodigious memory somewhere and do it as soon as you can. Meanwhile, let me tell you the next thing I want you to do. This was quite possible back when computers could only do a relatively few instructions per second. Why is it that while the processors keep getting faster the experience keeps getting slower?

    Or doesn't Windows have the concept of multiprocessing yet?

    Umm, what if, say, I begin a download of a file from another computer. And the next thing I want to do is to edit that file. How can I do this before the download is complete?

    If I don't want to do something with the results of the task I've asked the computer to do, why did I ask it to do it? And If I do want to do something with the results, then I want to know when it's done.

    If the task is going to take a very long time, maybe I want to do something else while I wait, so something that locks up the computer until the last task is done would be bad. But that's not how progress bars or whatever normally work. I can minimize the window with the progress bar and go on to do something else. And in any case, I still surely want to know when it's done, because sooner or later I want to work with the results.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    So Excel is a stalker app. You try to break up with it, and it just won't go away.

  • Jerkoff Smirnoff (unregistered)

    In Soviet Russia, Excel quits you.

  • distracted (unregistered) in reply to Coyne
    Coyne:
    I'm sorry, but I don't think, "I heard you," is an acceptable response to a Cancel request. I think it's a WTF. A "cancel" button should do just that, and ASAP (not whenever they "get around to it".)

    I have to synchronize my laptop (Windows) with a server and it does the same thing. It has a "Stop" button; if you press the button to stop the synchronization, the button grays out but Windows keeps right on synchronizing. Microsoft might as well have labeled the button "No-Op"; or had it pop up a message, "Please stop wasting our time by clicking 'Stop': We don't care and won't stop."

    TRWTF is transactional integrity, amirite?

  • Shinobu (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Now your user is waiting for a cancel operation to complete but all they have visible on screen is a greyed-out button. They have no progress indicator and the only button on the form is now disabled. So after about 30 seconds they get bored, assume the app has hung and terminate the process. This leaves your app in an invalid state with garbage data all over the system. And that's your solution?! Sorry but I can't put this into production, I'm going to need you to look at it again...
    If your application takes half a minute to cancel an operation without saying so beforehand, it deserves to be terminated since to all probability it is stuck in an endless loop or wait state, regardless of whether it greys its interface or pops up stupid message boxes. And if your application leaves problems behind when it gets killed, you should be shot. Although if no more user input is necessary after initiating the cancel operation I would probably just have the Cancel button close the window and do the rest in the background. Let the user get on with his life.
  • (cs) in reply to silent d
    silent d:
    This comment should not be construed to imply that I do not agree with those who say the message about not storing help files in folders that can not be accessed by all users is not confusing, nor do I fail to contradict the negative assessment of those naysayers who neither contend that the message is understandable nor stop their withdrawal of support from those who don't agree with this disagreement.

    Glad we cleared that up.

    <Borat>Naaaaht!</Borat>

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Shinobu
    Shinobu:
    Anonymous:
    Now your user is waiting for a cancel operation to complete but all they have visible on screen is a greyed-out button. They have no progress indicator and the only button on the form is now disabled. So after about 30 seconds they get bored, assume the app has hung and terminate the process. This leaves your app in an invalid state with garbage data all over the system. And that's your solution?! Sorry but I can't put this into production, I'm going to need you to look at it again...
    If your application takes half a minute to cancel an operation without saying so beforehand, it deserves to be terminated since to all probability it is stuck in an endless loop or wait state, regardless of whether it greys its interface or pops up stupid message boxes. And if your application leaves problems behind when it gets killed, you should be shot. Although if no more user input is necessary after initiating the cancel operation I would probably just have the Cancel button close the window and do the rest in the background. Let the user get on with his life.
    The app sits in a server farm that spans three continents. I can't help the fact that it can take up to a minute to cancel a request, that's just how life is when your system consists of a dozen servers spread all over the world with cross-site replication and triple redundancy. In the real world not everything can be a trivial desktop app, you know.
  • Maltz (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    But it's not always that simple. You say "show a progress indicator" but what if you are cancelling an operation, like the ImgBurn example - do you show a progress indicator for the cancel operation? That would be weird in my opinion, plus you generally don't know how long it will take to cancel (waiting for an async return, for example) so any progress bar could only display a value based on guesswork. There are other ways around this, you could disable the cancel button for example, but that often confuses users to the point that they just terminate the process. I think the "I heard you!" dialog is an acceptable solution to this scenario.

    Um, gray out the Cancel button and the progress bar and say "Canceling..." Give SOME indication that clicking cancel had an effect. It ISN'T hard.

    The program seemingly ignoring the input and then chastising you for clicking again is lazy and, frankly, rude. (on the developer's part)

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Maltz
    Maltz:
    Anonymous:
    But it's not always that simple. You say "show a progress indicator" but what if you are cancelling an operation, like the ImgBurn example - do you show a progress indicator for the cancel operation? That would be weird in my opinion, plus you generally don't know how long it will take to cancel (waiting for an async return, for example) so any progress bar could only display a value based on guesswork. There are other ways around this, you could disable the cancel button for example, but that often confuses users to the point that they just terminate the process. I think the "I heard you!" dialog is an acceptable solution to this scenario.

    Um, gray out the Cancel button and the progress bar and say "Canceling..." Give SOME indication that clicking cancel had an effect. It ISN'T hard.

    The program seemingly ignoring the input and then chastising you for clicking again is lazy and, frankly, rude. (on the developer's part)

    Please see the comment immediately before yours.

  • Pete (unregistered)

    Dude, is this a Tesco on Commercial road @ Whitechapel in London?! They have the SAME problem there

  • itsmo (unregistered) in reply to A Non-Mathematician
    A Non-Mathematician:
    Captain Oblivious:
    in b4 trwtf is new math
    Why? We use new math here all the time to prove that 1 < 0, it is possible to divide by 0, and that the numbers eight and nine do not actually exist.

    yeh - because 7 8 9

  • Amerrickangirl (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    The MAZZTer:
    I've gotten that excel dialog, happens sometimes when you try to shut down the computer with excel running. You have to close excel by hand when that dialog appears.

    Of course I've seen better dialogs from Excel, including one that says in effect: "You can't open two files with the same name, even if they are in different folders". It's real, it happens, and it is VERY annoying!

    Blame VBA. Not just because it sucks, it really is VBA's fault. It can't uniquely identify files of the same name in different folders so to preserve the functioning of VBA code they carry this restriction through to the rest of the app.

    I had a big argument about this very topic with a friend who was a sales engineer for Microsoft.

    I couldn't believe that with all of Microsoft's ingenuity and technical know-how that they still couldn't find a workaround for being able to open two files from different folders. How can that be so hard to do? You just need to use the whole path name as well as the file name.

    My other peeve about Excel is its inability to hold anything in the clipboard. Joel Spolsky once wrote a long article explaining why this was so, but again, why on earth can't Microsoft manage to refactor Excel to join the 21st century? These bugs have been around since Office 95.

    It pisses me off because they managed to spend millions installing that ribbon thingie that most people hate, but they couldn't fix what really needed fixing.

    My friend claimed that it was just too big a challenge, even for Microsoft. FACEPALM!

  • (cs) in reply to Amerrickangirl
    Amerrickangirl:
    I had a big argument about this very topic with a friend who was a sales engineer for Microsoft.

    I couldn't believe that with all of Microsoft's ingenuity and technical know-how that they still couldn't find a workaround for being able to open two files from different folders. How can that be so hard to do? You just need to use the whole path name as well as the file name.

    My other peeve about Excel is its inability to hold anything in the clipboard. Joel Spolsky once wrote a long article explaining why this was so, but again, why on earth can't Microsoft manage to refactor Excel to join the 21st century? These bugs have been around since Office 95.

    It pisses me off because they managed to spend millions installing that ribbon thingie that most people hate, but they couldn't fix what really needed fixing.

    My friend claimed that it was just too big a challenge, even for Microsoft. FACEPALM!

    One of my worst annoyances in Excel is the undo history. I change file A, then I change file B. I go back to file A and "undo", but it has to undo my changes to file B before it can ever undo my changes to file A.

  • Daniel B (unregistered)
    Steve Monson wonders, "how exactly do I search for this file name?"

    Ctrl + C (Copy) and Ctrl + V (Paste) and then extract the filename out of the copied text. It also works with messageboxes.

    But hell, this is funny ;-) .

  • Jasper (unregistered)

    The ImgBurn one is not a WTF, it's just the author's sense of humor. This program contains many more "funny" / annoying messages like that.

  • (cs) in reply to Daniel B
    Daniel B:
    Steve Monson wonders, "how exactly do I search for this file name?"

    Ctrl + C (Copy) and Ctrl + V (Paste) and then extract the filename out of the copied text. It also works with messageboxes.

    But hell, this is funny ;-) .

    Not only was this comment informative, it was posted at 13:37.

  • Eric (unregistered) in reply to PeriSoft

    Clever, clever. Using the dad.

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