- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
Nothing is moron-proof.
Admin
Zounds! I should add a script like this!
Admin
I've always found it slightly confusing when a screenshot perfectly matches my system's theming and my mind suddenly reacts to a dialog box in the screenshot as if it is actually on my system. I know it's a screenshot, but that doesn't stop years of pattern-recognition from trying to click the buttons...
Admin
Filed under: Every UAC Prompt expected by a Promise gets approved. Anything else: Trash
Admin
Yup, I'll definitely be taking this into consideration, too, whenever I'm making instructions. It didn't even occur to me that people might do this.
Admin
I dunno. How else can we make it absolutely obvious that they're not looking at the actual program? I mean, do people consistently deal with programs that appear cut-off or incomplete?
Filed under: Actually, no, don't answer that...
Admin
Why didn't he just add hyperlinks to the images?
Admin
Because that would still let them keep Doing It Wrong(tm) and chances are good that a significant portion of the screenshots were of the installers themselves rather than a web page, anyway.
Admin
Because you can't link to a button in an external application!
Better solution might have been to write a better installer! That does everything from a single (double) click.
Admin
like https://chocolatey.org?
Admin
Why the detour of telling them "doingitwrong"? Why not just link the images to where they they should be going?
Mac users are trained to just drag application folders over to their system. So when they see something like an ap folder they want to interact with it.
Admin
Looks like Paula was just following instructions too....
[image]Admin
I'm calling Cameron TRWTF. Yes the customers were idiots but he should of just made the images clickable links instead of instructions to click on another link. Also why not just package the dependencies?
Admin
Package Dependencies?
on Mac?
[image]Funny Human!
Admin
This.
I once sent somebody some HTML code with javascript/CSS files included in a zip. I gave them the instructions: download the zip, extract the files, open index.html in a browser.
"It doesn't work," he says. Classic.
Turns out he's just extracted index.html.
It wasn't the dumbest shit I saw in that place.
Admin
I've been a Web Developer for almost 20 years before finding my job as Network Administrator..
One thing that i've learned is that when you build a website navigation for end-users, you have to drop your IQ to the level of a toaster.
Litteraly.
If a plant can navigate in your website, you're good. And it never happened to me so if anyone achieved that, please send me a screenshot so i can click on them furiously like an idiot.
Admin
Admin
insert obligatory but insensitive Nuremberg Defense joke here
Admin
This actually used to be a big problem even with people who knew what they were doing when Microsoft first integrated (basic) zip support in Explorer. It would open just like another folder, but when opening any file that used external assets within the zip (e.g. HTML files) it wouldn't display correctly.
I have seen people in the past as well dragging shortcuts to files (shortcuts were on their desktop, and they didn't know the difference between a shortcut and the actual file) onto floppy disks and wonder why they couldn't then access that file from another computer. For some reason, they didn't seem to question why their floppy disk could suddenly store all of their huge massive files when they dragged them over.
Admin
Oh, I would have expected him to just open the .html from inside the zip. At least he extracted something.
Edit: :hanzo:
Admin
nor why the copy was so quick...
I remember a former CTO at my first tech job getting canned for that. He'd backup ex employees hard drives to floppy before shredding them, which he did by creating a link to
C:\on the floppy...backing up multiple TB disks to a single floppy..... yeah that didn't work out so well when i called him out on it.
How exactly did you get to be CTO again?
Admin
As popularized in the famous Mac Rant video, Macs used to (still do?) make a shortcut when you drag things off a removable drive to your local desktop -- a shortcut that vanishes when you eject the drive. That used to trip me up every time I had to borrow my mom's mac.
Admin
Apparently you're younger than I thought. We all know I'm old as dirt, but my first job after uni was designing HDD controllers, and I still remember the amazingness of attaching an almost unimaginably huge 500MB disk to a low-end desktop. :belt_onion:
Admin
1986-06-02
my first computer had 100MB HDD and 32MB of RAM
but that was long before i entered the IT workforce.
Admin
I expect people to not be experts with computers. I know "smart" people - why are dynamo's in their fields: Vets, Doctors, Lawyers, etc - that shouldn't be trusted with anything but an iPad (and one that's wrapped in Styrofoam.
If honest-to-god smart people can't do it right... be afraid of the other 75% of the population - and be glad that they have iPad/Android Tablets that are almost "appliances" that almost can't be broken through "normal" use.
After years (nay... decades) of scandals, people still are willing to vote for Hillary Clinton... that's all the proof you need that you can't fix stupid.
Admin
On the topic of helping idiots... This time the year is 1987. I am working in a summer job, actually writing code at a real software house. The big new thing is the IBM Personal System/2, from which we get the nomenclature of "PS/2" in the context of keyboards and mice. Also new on PCs (only invented six years earlier, Wikipedia tells me, and in use on Macs for a few years already) is the 3.5" floppy disk, and non-Mac people (including me, as we shall see) don't yet have all the specifics down cold.
In particular, there are two types of sticky paper label for them. One sort is smaller, and sticks entirely on the front. The other sort is larger, and is meant to wrap around onto the back.
The software I am writing is for producing graphical displays and hardcopy from report files produced by the real software, which runs on various flavours of real computer: VAXen, IBM mainframes, Wang thingies, etc. A saleswoman comes to see me to get herself a demo version of my software. She even remembered to (a) bring a 3.5" floppy and (b) put a label on it. In a mild diversion into politically incorrect speech, I shall describe her as "decorative" and leave the rest up to you. (Yes, I'm aware this is in fact grossly unfair, but please continue reading.)
Anyway, your correspondent takes the floppy and puts it into the floppy drive. Or, rather, he tries. Several times. It is mechanically unable to go into the drive more than about 3/4 of the way, on three different drives.
Closer inspection (remember, I don't have this 3.5" floppy thing down cold either) eventually reveals that she has indeed stuck the label on the front. Um. The large label. That is meant to wrap around onto the back.
So that day I learned that if you stick a large label entirely on the front of a 3.5" floppy, it overlaps the shutter and consequently sticks it shut. The disk then is mechanically incapable (without damaging levels of force) of being inserted more than about 3/4 of the way into a drive.
Admin
I'm more than old enough to be your father (although my kids are actually about 8 – 10 years younger than you, born in my mid-30s). I've been using computers since more than a decade before you were born, although I didn't personally own one until you were 2 – 3-ish — 80286, 8MHz(?), 1MB RAM, I don't remember the HDD size.
Admin
Hard Drives? Ram? Why I remember a time when this was a top of the line "compute" device: http://www.ikea.com/PIAimages/21167_PE106157_S5.JPG
GET OFF MY LAWN! SHAKES CANE
Admin
I don't know what the interface was, but the first PC with a hard disk I ever used was in the graphics lab at uni, about '85 or so, either 5 or 10MB. Only one of the four special graphics computers (with special No. 9 hardware that could do an amazing 256 colors) was upgraded with an HDD; unless you were the first one into the lab, you were stuck with your 5.25 floppy.
I suppose the first HDD I ever used was on a VAX, during an internship in '83–'84. I have no idea how big the actual disk was, but individual users had a 10MB quota, as I discovered a day or so before my internship was done, when a program I needed to debug threw so many errors that I couldn't debug it because the log file was too big to view in the editor.
The "low end desktop" with the really big HDD that I mentioned above was a PS/2 Model 25. I reverse-engineered the Model 30's disk interface chip based on its public data sheet and banging on the chip's registers. The result was also compatible with the model 25, which IIRC didn't originally come with an HDD.Admin
Oh, yeah, the 25 and the 30 were the same basic model, a one piece unit kind of deal, just with two 3.5" floppies on the 25 instead of floppy and an HDD on the 30. They both had this deliberately borked monochrome variant of VGA (which was new with the PS/2 line) called MCGA, which meant that they were pretty much the new PC Jr. for 1987.
The first computer I'd used was a Prime mini timeshare that was running both the school computer labs and the town hall, and was already an antique in 1981. Ah, the good old days of typing in BASIC programs out of the Dave Ahl book (the 'microcomputer edition' with the yellow cover) only to find that the Prime dialect was different from the one in the text and we'd need to spend days figuring out how to a make two-page 'Star Trek' game work.
My father had a Kaypro luggable around the same time, but I only got to use it once, to play an early version of Flight Simulator. Oh, and we got an Intellivision then, too, on the premise that it was supposed to eventually get an add-on made for it to give it a floppy drive and a keyboard (never happened, and even if it had it would have probably been worse than the Coleco Adam), which meant my parents didn't have to shell out for an actual computer for us yet (apparently, they weren't aware that a Commie 64 was cheaper than that Mattel POS was). Still, it was fun, and we did get the voice synth for it later when that came out, so it worked out I guess.
It wasn't until 1985 that I got a used Apple ][+ that I shared with my younger bother (yes, the missing 'r' is deliberate), and in the same year my Dad got a used 1st gen. IBM PC with two half-height 5.25" floppy drives. I eventually installed a used 10MB MFM HDD in it, but by then it was 1990 and the damn thing was so old that we actually laughed about it when someone stole it out of his office later that year.
Admin
To his credit, he even opened it in the browser.
Admin
The first harddrive I used: 10M. Or was it 30M? Can't remember. Was a networked drive anyway.
Admin
There's a certain satisfying feeling when you can show messages like this to the user. "This isn't a button you stupid fuck, it's a picture on a web page. Is this your first time using a computer? Don't you understand how windows and programs work?"
Admin
Everyone who has to do any level of user-facing interface design should read this: http://www.asktog.com/columns/000maxscrns.html
It's pretty much technologically irrelevant at this point, but its observations of human psychology are timeless.
Admin
I had seen so much of this in the early 00's it ceased to be funny anymore.
:rofl:
Now THAT'S funny due to epic fail proportion!
I've seen this too. Never understood it, but I've seen it.
This is why Democracy doesn't work as well as it potentially could. When the inmates run the asylum...
Admin
Thanks for making me feel old. I hadn't had that feeling yet today.
Admin
I just wonder why is was not easier to insert the actual download link into the instruction instead of all those screenshots and explanations
Admin
How about just making a wrapper around the installer that downloads and installs the required libraries if they aren't already installed? You know, like how Java installs the Yahoo toolbar.
Admin
Heh, my father had been using computers since the CP/M era to the day he died, and never learned a damn thing about them. When I moved out to the Gay Area in 1995, he had his Windows 3.11 PC running; two years later when I came back to CT for a visit, he told me it wasn't working, so I looked at it, then just switched the monitor back on (!!!) and it was the same as it was the day I'd last seen it. He hadn't turned the PC off the entire time, he just forgot he'd turned off the CRT.
Then again, this was someone who kept buying Retard Hell refurbs throughout the 1990s, at least two of which were bricked when he took them out of the box. He never understood that he was spending more on these 'great deals' than he would have if he'd paid for a decent system in the first place.
Admin
:bow:
you're welcome. :-D
Admin
Can we put that in the header of each Discourse page?
Admin
Ok, well, Wouldn't the iRealCorrectSolution(TM) be to build your app using actual standard MacOSX rules and dev environment rather than shoehorning some bare-skeleton Unix tool into OSX? Then when you publish this nice standalone OSX-compatible distro, it'll JustWork(actual TM).
It's pretty clear from this story that the total labor involved would have been less this way.
Admin
Yeah, a kid claimed he had (magically, my words, not his) moved Microsoft Office from his computer to a flash drive. Sure, he did in fact cut-and-paste the Microsoft Office folder to the drive, but (obviously) that's not the way to do it! Luckily enough (I guess), Office's repair functions worked Okay, but I was seriously considering whacking the kid until I realized that at least he had the guts to mess with.
Too bad he wasn't deterred by the Scary Warnings: [image]
Filed under: Thanks, Google!
Admin
Alongside them, for no really good reason, we had a PC/XT with a 720K 3.5" floppy drive installed. That, in less palaeolithic times, would have caused problems - the three machines between them could format the same floppy disks to either 720K or 1.44M formats, without regard to the media select hole. This was a feature unique to IBM machines, and cross-formatted floppies were unreadable on non-IBM machines. Unlike 5.25" floppies, the coercivity of the high and low density media were actually very close together, and formatting a 720K disk to 1.44M didn't much affect its ability to stably hold data.
The most amusing problem, though, was on the Model 50. It had the buggy BIOS, and every two or three weeks, we'd come in on Monday morning to find that the machine was convinced it was some time on the previous Saturday.
Admin
TRWTF is Cameron here. He knew his audience is non-technical, why would he completely ignore that factor when he wrote the instructions?
If you ask an average user to "Click the below icon", they would do exactly that. You realize that the "below icon" is just a screenshot because you are technically inclined, your audience has better things to devote their time to. Not realizing how software works doesn't make them a moron.
Admin
This is why technical writers exist. It's quite a specialised skill to have one foot in the technical "I know how this works" world and one in the end user "just do what I want, why are computers so hard?" world. Writing for people less knowledgeable than you is really tough
Admin
You could increase that up to 32x with DriveSpace 3! [image]
Filed under: And to prove it, we're going to write 9000 Mb of blank files to show how awesome compression is!
Admin
My toaster feels offended by that remark. He is confident a lot of users are dumber than him.
Admin
Probably MFM. Later replaced by RLL
Admin
Nice! You got the color version!