• Anonymoose (unregistered)

    How about making the pictures a bit bigger so we can fucking read them?

  • freelancer (unregistered)

    What resolution are you using? I'm on 1680x1050, and I can read them just fine. I'm sure I'd be able to read them at 1900xwhatever too.

  • (cs)

    I got a great one on facebook the other day. The status text box obviously retrieved my old empty status and defaulted my status to 'null'. Since I was on facebook, it seemed appropriate.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Anonymoose
    Anonymoose:
    How about making the pictures a bit bigger so we can fucking read them?
    If you insist on using a 17-inch monitor on 1920x1080, that's your problem, not Alex's.
  • Jonathan (unregistered) in reply to Anonymoose

    If you're talking about the first one, you don't need to read the entire article to understand :P

  • James (unregistered)

    I think that last one is quite helpful -- the button clearly says below it "drag this to your bookmarks", and if you're dumb enough to ignore the instructions, they basically smack you on the nose and say, "Hey retard, we said DRAG THIS TO YOUR BOOKMARKS". Seems appropriate, to me.

  • Your Mother (unregistered) in reply to James
    James:
    I think that last one is quite helpful -- the button clearly says below it "drag this to your bookmarks", and if you're dumb enough to ignore the instructions, they basically smack you on the nose and say, "Hey retard, we said *DRAG THIS TO YOUR BOOKMARKS*". Seems appropriate, to me.

    Dragging the "OK" button had no effect. Now what?

  • Cloak (unregistered)

    Well the second is really great. Getting error messages which actually tell you what went wrong AND how you can correct the error are way better than for example MSAccess's "Catastrophic Failure". The third one looks to me like somebody didn't drag correctly and that may want to repeat. The question is more if they mean that you should drag the OK button or if there was something under the pop-up message that should have been dragged.

  • (cs) in reply to Cloak
    Cloak:
    Well the second is really great. Getting error messages which actually tell you what went wrong AND how you can correct the error are way better than for example MSAccess's "Catastrophic Failure". The third one looks to me like somebody didn't drag correctly and that may want to repeat. The question is more if they mean that you should drag the OK button or if there was something under the pop-up message that should have been dragged.

    From what I can tell the problem is that the mouse over text and help text said click here for more help, which brought up a dialog box that said the exact same thing as the previous two sources of help.

  • Jonny (unregistered)

    I have a feeling that the second one probably comes from a company's internal tool or something. Hence why it came in anonymously. It's conceivable that it's targeted at other technical users albeit a tad bit ridiculous.

    CAPTCHA: atari - CUSTER'S REVENGE!!!!

  • Stefan W. (unregistered)

    You don't expect us to do some calculations for DT, T and N - don't you?

    captcha: friday

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymoose
    Anonymoose:
    How about making the pictures a bit bigger so we can fucking read them?
    The dialog boxes are life-size, and the headline text (only relevant text in the webpage screenshot) is the same height as the text in the dialogs.
  • (cs) in reply to Random832
    Random832:
    Anonymoose:
    How about making the pictures a bit bigger so we can fucking read them?
    The dialog boxes are life-size, and the headline text (only relevant text in the webpage screenshot) is the same height as the text in the dialogs.

    [Follow the big red arrows. Click here for help.] click

    Follow the big red arrows.

  • jkupski (unregistered)

    Looking at the ING screenshot, allow me to be the first to say:

    OMGWTFBBQ!

  • (cs) in reply to Cyrus
    Cyrus:
    Cloak:
    Well the second is really great. Getting error messages which actually tell you what went wrong AND how you can correct the error are way better than for example MSAccess's "Catastrophic Failure". The third one looks to me like somebody didn't drag correctly and that may want to repeat. The question is more if they mean that you should drag the OK button or if there was something under the pop-up message that should have been dragged.

    From what I can tell the problem is that the mouse over text and help text said click here for more help, which brought up a dialog box that said the exact same thing as the previous two sources of help.

    "Doctor, it hurts when I do this, this or this."

    "Well, stop doing that, that or that, then."

    Why would you need to resort to mouse-over help when the damn dialog tells you everything you want to know?

    (And, incidentally, MSAccess's "Catastrophic Failure," if indeed it exists, is a wonderfully apposite warning. As the doctor says, "Stop doing that ... then.")

    There are only two possible WTFs that I can see concerning the second dialog box. The "+/-" looks, on casual inspection, to be just plain stupid. And the warning that "at least half a second" has to be reserved to store the image to disk is, um, probably idiotic, unless the environment is seriously transactional. First of all, it's a total guess, and secondly, that's what threads/pipes to disk storage processes are for, no?

    Other than that, I wish all dialog boxes tried to be as informative as the second example. I got caught yesterday when my client connection to a Windows 2003 Server froze up with a dialog box saying: "Warning: This program ..."

    Literally. Word (and punctuation) for word (and punctuation). Now I can't get back in to the server because we've run out of client licences.

    Thank you and good night, Visual Studio 2005.

  • (cs) in reply to Jonathan
    Jonathan:
    If you're talking about the first one, you don't need to read the entire article to understand :P

    Haha, wow that is awesome...

    woman... check. baby... check. man with 3 torches... check. headline that reads "man sets woman and 3 children on file?...we're go for launch

    (people continuously bitching for no reason tdwtf... check.)

  • (cs) in reply to James
    James:
    I think that last one is quite helpful -- the button clearly says below it "drag this to your bookmarks", and if you're dumb enough to ignore the instructions, they basically smack you on the nose and say, "Hey retard, we said *DRAG THIS TO YOUR BOOKMARKS*". Seems appropriate, to me.
    However, while that Modal dialog is displayed I can't drag anything. Now, I am a frustrated user.
  • (cs) in reply to seymore15074
    seymore15074:
    Random832:
    Anonymoose:
    How about making the pictures a bit bigger so we can fucking read them?
    The dialog boxes are life-size, and the headline text (only relevant text in the webpage screenshot) is the same height as the text in the dialogs.

    [Follow the big red arrows. Click here for help.] click

    Follow the big red arrows.

    I propose that we all simply ignore any of these posts containing vulgarity. They are apparent FLAMES and from someone demonstrating a very limited vocabulary.

  • Christophe (unregistered)

    About the second one, though we lack a lot of context -- it seems like the requirements of the function that raised the dialog are rather specific. Might there be a better way for the app to come up with some of the parameters? Better vetting of input data, perhaps?

  • barfman (unregistered)

    that's just.... horribly wrong.. :D

    and waaaaaaaaaaaay too funny

  • (cs) in reply to Christophe
    Christophe:
    About the second one, though we lack a lot of context -- it seems like the requirements of the function that raised the dialog are rather specific. Might there be a better way for the app to come up with some of the parameters? Better vetting of input data, perhaps?

    How could you validate the data better? You can enter any number into any of the boxes, but they are conditional on each other. Hopefully it only validates the data when you are all done instead of popping up error messages every time you change a value (which it could also very well be doing).

  • (cs)

    re: the 2nd one... I hate DTs. Two DTs would be worse...

  • (cs) in reply to James
    James:
    I think that last one is quite helpful -- the button clearly says below it "drag this to your bookmarks", and if you're dumb enough to ignore the instructions, they basically smack you on the nose and say, "Hey retard, we said *DRAG THIS TO YOUR BOOKMARKS*". Seems appropriate, to me.
    I think you missed the part of the tooltip that says "Click to learn more.", which implies that you will actually learn more if you click.
  • deathkrush (unregistered) in reply to Anonymoose
  • (cs) in reply to LiquidFire

    You did learn more though. You learned that "DRAG THIS TO YOUR BOOKMARKS" is the only possible advice or instruction that can be provided.

  • (cs) in reply to deathkrush
    deathkrush:

    I watched, and watched, and watched, waiting for him to miss one and set them on fire. He never did. But if he did, it's a good thing he got life insurance from ing because someone would want to kill him for sure.

  • (cs) in reply to Stefan W.
    Stefan W.:
    You don't expect us to do some calculations for DT, T and N - don't you?
    But of course...isn't the phrase "it is left up to the reader to show that [insert assertion here] is true." part of your normal sense of humor? If not, you need to take another math class.
  • (cs) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    Christophe:
    About the second one, though we lack a lot of context -- it seems like the requirements of the function that raised the dialog are rather specific. Might there be a better way for the app to come up with some of the parameters? Better vetting of input data, perhaps?

    How could you validate the data better? You can enter any number into any of the boxes, but they are conditional on each other. Hopefully it only validates the data when you are all done instead of popping up error messages every time you change a value (which it could also very well be doing).

    Well, yes, quite. Some of us out here are actually working on real software, rather than nibbly little things that move GIFs around a screen.

    IMHO, a message that tries to explain that you've failed on the constraints for "kX >= k'Y + k''Z" is worth far more than a message that says "We're trying to validate each and every numeric input via Javascript, and we're incompetent cretins. You lose!"

    I've been trying to deal with ILOG over the last fortnight, and although I understand its concept of normalising linear equations, it took a light-bulb going off over my head before I realised that

    expr1 <= expr2

    could be sensibly refactored as

    expr1 - expr2 <= 0

    Yeah, yeah. Call me stupid. Call me ignorant. Call me ancient and brain-dead. But, when you're staring at a coding problem, particularly involving something not day-to-day such as linear inequalities, it helps to have a sensible dialog box that, at heart, says "You've just fucked up," and in reality gives you clues as to what to do.

    (For those of you struggling with ILOG, BTW, the problem is platform-related -- I think -- and occurs somewhere between release 8 and release 10: possibly whilst moving from Solaris, with its crummy and non-compliant cc(5) --ignore Sun and use gcc, please -- to W2K. Basically, ranges inherit publicly from constraints. ILOG collections feed into models, which unsurprisingly require a collection of constraints. Lazy programmers try to feed in booleans (supposedly ranges, although I can't for the life of me imagine why operator==() is a range), and fail. There is no such operator -- outside the moron Solaris interpretation -- and no such implicit conversion. Took me two days to realise that I had to do the normalisation to "expr op-boolean numeric" myself.

    That's what Berkeley twerps are there for. If they'd got it right in the first place, we'd all be arguing with Jeff Atwood on where to place the "Fuck Off" button on a GUI.)

    But I digress.

  • elgenie (unregistered)

    The Facebook screenshot is misleading.

    You get the alert in question if you click on "Share on Facebook" bookmarklet instead of dragging it to your bookmarks ...

    The "click here" link goes to a different page (http://www.facebook.com/share_options.php), which actually explains what the bookmarklet does.

  • NancyGracesTesticles (unregistered) in reply to elgenie

    Your reality is getting in the way of my elitism.

  • Christophe (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    akatherder:
    How could you validate the data better? You can enter any number into any of the boxes, but they are conditional on each other. Hopefully it only validates the data when you are all done instead of popping up error messages every time you change a value (which it could also very well be doing).

    If you have interdependent values with reasonable bounds, it's quite possible to design an input GUI such that

    • It initializes with a usable set of default values.
    • If the user changes the value in one widget, the other widgets update to values that work
    • There is no blizzard of popups, let alone popups containing dissertations
    real_aardvark:
    Well, yes, quite. Some of us out here are actually working on real software, rather than nibbly little things that move GIFs around a screen.
    Some of us out here work on avionics software, where many people have a rather keen interest in the nibbly little GIFs moving around the screen.

    As a side project, I'm working up a "Hello Kitty" plugin for Visual Studio 2005 -- It promises to make your Visual Studio experience up to 86% cuter!

  • Christophe (unregistered)

    And some of us never really got into HTML! :/

  • (cs) in reply to elgenie
    elgenie:
    The Facebook screenshot is misleading.

    You get the alert in question if you click on "Share on Facebook" bookmarklet instead of dragging it to your bookmarks ...

    The "click here" link goes to a different page (http://www.facebook.com/share_options.php), which actually explains what the bookmarklet does.

    Yet "Click to learn more" pops up in a tooltip when you hover over the button itself. Did you not read the screenshot?

  • Jesper (unregistered)

    That first one with the add is so unlikely that I wouldn't be surprised if it is fake.

    Justin sure knows how to use Photoshop.

  • Jesper (unregistered)

    In fact, I'm SURE the ad is fake.

    Did you ever see an ad for a bank that looked like that? Why would a bank publish an ad that looks like that, with a guy juggling with fire sticks?

    The WTF is that Alex posted it here without thinking.

  • Guran (unregistered) in reply to NancyGracesTesticles
    NancyGracesTesticles:
    Your reality is getting in the way of my elitism.
    I reject your reality and substitute my own!

    (BTW the popup help text that is the same as the tooltip etc is all too common. I've seen more than one dev environment where you are supposed to fill in a description, an explanation and a context sensitive help text in the same dialog when you add a button or other widget. Of course you copy-paste, counting on "someone" to fill in proper help text later...)

  • Anonymouse (unregistered) in reply to savar
    savar:
    Jonathan:
    If you're talking about the first one, you don't need to read the entire article to understand :P

    Haha, wow that is awesome...

    woman... check. baby... check. man with 3 torches... check. headline that reads "man sets woman and 3 children on file?...we're go for launch

    (people continuously bitching for no reason tdwtf... check.)

    headline that reads "man sets woman and 3 children on file_not_found?...we're go for launch

    There, fixed that for you.

  • (cs) in reply to Jesper
    Jesper:
    In fact, I'm SURE the ad is fake.

    Did you ever see an ad for a bank that looked like that? Why would a bank publish an ad that looks like that, with a guy juggling with fire sticks?

    The WTF is that Alex posted it here without thinking.

    The WTF is you and others like you who post without having a clue. Have you not seen any of the ING ads recently?

    One example is a cat stuck in a tree. A passerby calls 911, which results in police and fire equipment responding. A crowd shows up and is restrained by the yellow crime scene tape. A newspaper reporter talks into a microphone, a firefighter starts a chainsaw, helicopters hover overhead, and paratroopers skydive down.

    While all the above is still going on, a woman sitting on a bench with the ING logo reaches into her purse, pulls out a can of chunk tuna, and pops the top. She sets it on the bench, and the cat jumps down from the tree onto the bench and starts eating the tuna. As the crowd starts to disperse, a voice-over says "Move along, people. Nothing to see here." A different voice does a quick spiel about ING services.

    There's another ING ad featuring a small girl asking her dad to tell her a story that breaks into animation behind them showing trolls, giants, candy, and flying vacuum cleaner.

    Does a bank publishing a fire juggler ad sound so strange now, dumb-ass?

  • E. (unregistered)

    That second isn't so bad.

  • E. (unregistered) in reply to E.
    E.:
    That second one isn't so bad.

    Pardon.

  • Paolo G (unregistered) in reply to E.

    Interesting how the third one is a warning dialog (with an exclamation mark in a triangle), rather than an info dialog.

    It's saying, "I'm warning you! Do as I say and drag the button your Bookmarks Bar, or there'll be trouble! Geez, how many more times do I have to tell you?"

  • ELIZA (unregistered) in reply to KenW
    KenW:
    Jesper:
    In fact, I'm SURE the ad is fake.

    Did you ever see an ad for a bank that looked like that? Why would a bank publish an ad that looks like that, with a guy juggling with fire sticks?

    The WTF is that Alex posted it here without thinking.

    The WTF is you and others like you who post without having a clue. Have you not seen any of the ING ads recently?

    One example is a cat stuck in a tree. A passerby calls 911, which results in police and fire equipment responding. A crowd shows up and is restrained by the yellow crime scene tape. A newspaper reporter talks into a microphone, a firefighter starts a chainsaw, helicopters hover overhead, and paratroopers skydive down.

    While all the above is still going on, a woman sitting on a bench with the ING logo reaches into her purse, pulls out a can of chunk tuna, and pops the top. She sets it on the bench, and the cat jumps down from the tree onto the bench and starts eating the tuna. As the crowd starts to disperse, a voice-over says "Move along, people. Nothing to see here." A different voice does a quick spiel about ING services.

    There's another ING ad featuring a small girl asking her dad to tell her a story that breaks into animation behind them showing trolls, giants, candy, and flying vacuum cleaner.

    Does a bank publishing a fire juggler ad sound so strange now, dumb-ass?

    Yes: It is so tame it must be fake. Sometimes I seriously wonder if I am hallucinating them. Of course, some of them are fun, especially some of the classic beer ads.

    My four favourites:

    1. A Carlton Draught ad featuring hundreds of performers in coloured clothing so that from the air it would look like a stylised cross-section of a man drinking beer, to music with the lyrics
    Carlton Draught:
    It's a big ad/ For Carlton Draught. It's so freaking hu-uge. It's a big ad/ expensive ad. It'd better sell some blo-oo-oo-ody beer

    2 and 3) Two ads by Toohey's about perseverance, one about a short basketballer who scores a winning point for the Sydney Kings and the other about a city-bred jackeroo who "tamed a tonne of dynamite". Then they go to the pub to have "a toohey's/ or two".

    1. An ad, I believe by Carlton Draught, sending up the idea that to succeed in corporate life one needs practically pointless things such as a fancy tie (social and corporate-culture-compliance value only) or expensive fountain pen (possibly a better quality result or similar practical point but one which would only be needed by a professional calligrapher or similar writer) or, in the ad, a canoe (which has no uses except to display that one has a sufficiently high status in the office to have a canoe, and whose drawbacks one can laugh about over over a beer).

    I also like the Simpsons Mastercard and IBM ads, the Buzzword Bingo one, and the billboard ad which featured John Howard on a National Liberal Party-blue background with his comment that Australians were better off than ever before (hint, when people don't know that massive tax cuts, social spending, or whatever other government program or combination of programs has or have made people more prosperous than ever before, it is usually becase it hasn't).

    But I have my own juxtaposition of ad and story: From right to left in the Hobart, Australia, Mercury, which I saw courtesy of a 2003 MediaWatch episode, were a learn to swim ad next to a story about two drunken sailors who fell overboard, next to an ad for a seafood restaurant called, wait for it, the Drunken Admiral.

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