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Admin
A different, but related experience.
A certain team within our purview had created a document containing a series of instructions that one had to perform in order to configure one's computer to be able to run their flagship app in Dev mode. Hence the instructions were dev-programmer appropriate, and therefore fairly involved.
One page consisted of: "Add these lines to your blahblah file." Those lines were about 10 lines of fairly long property elements which consisted by and large of long java class paths. No worries, I thought, I'll just copypaste them, it's a word document after all. No such luck. The writer of the document had entered these lines as a screen-shot. So in order to add those properties to the configuration file, one had to copy them by hand, painstakingly.
Of course, the possibility of entering typos is non-zero. Couple this with the fact that the screenshot was of insufficiently high resolution as to make the difference between e.g. colons and semicolons unclear, and yep, recipe for WTF.
When I complained, I got a jeering voice back: "What, are you too stupid even to copy a simple set of instructions? I think your boss needs to get wind of just how useless you really are."
Admin
Just reply with the screenshot and your boss in cc and ask politely how to copy those commands from the screenshot.
Admin
Mac OS 9 and earlier probably (going by your tale) did things differently, but I suspect @Blakeyrat is more qualified to explain about that than I am.
I can remember my father going out to buy a new hard drive, probably sometime in the very early ’90s, and coming home to announce: “Take a guess at the size of the drive I bought.” I went for the outrageous size of 100 MB (our computer at the time had a 20 MB and a 40 MB drive in it), and got it pretty far wrong — it turned out to be an unbelievably huge 169 MB.Admin
Yeah, this was the "boat-anchor" iMacs.
Admin
I think the video was about OSX though, possibly the first version. It mentioned the icon for whatever software jumping up and down in the corner of the screen, which wasn't there before OSX.
Admin
The first model? I’ve got one of those in my hobby room, but running OS X 10.3.
Admin
Yeah, this baby:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/IMac_Bondi_Blue.jpg/800px-IMac_Bondi_Blue.jpg
Admin
Yeah, that’s the one I mean. It even seems to be the same colour as mine. I use it to look up things I’m working on and can’t be bothered to go to my “real” computer — luckily I don’t have to use it (much) to access modern web sites, though :)
And this thread being about people who should know better reminds me of an anecdote I was told once by someone who used to work at the help desk of an ISP, where they had one of these iMacs so that the staff could
betteralso help Mac users (everything else there being Windows machines, I suppose). At one point they needed to do just that, so one of the help desk staff was told to go get that iMac. He came back complaining that he couldn’t find the computer, only the monitor.Admin
Explain what? Yami got the behavior exactly right.
Admin
Well, that :)
Admin
Somehow I highly doubt this. Nobody calls that "the monitor"!
Filed under: To be fair, I mostly hate Mr. Nobody...
Admin
Pretty common term here (.nl).
Admin
Admin
Doesn't Discourse do this already? It even has toasters!
Also, some hardware manufacturers have the IQ of a toaster too: http://superuser.com/q/792607/219815
I think we're covered toast-wise.
My first computer also had 32MB of RAM, but I was born in the nineties and it also had 32GB HDD...was there really such a long period of 32MB RAM computers!?
Admin
My first computer was a frankenputer. it started life as a 486 and was a PentiumPro by the time i got it.
i think the case was the only original part left...
Admin
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. One will never go broke, betting on users being stupid. Your average computer user thinks of it as a magical box through which they can see cat videos and "free" TV and movies on youtube, and/or a way to obsess even more about sports than they already do with the "tee vee."
That is why the device manufacturers are having so much success moving everyone to mobile, even though mobile is inherently designed to consume content, rather than create it. Most people are content consumers not creators, and not only do they have no interest in the tools used to create said content (and want it all for free), but when they have to use those tools for whatever reason, their sloping brows furrow and they get cranky and violent.
Hell, that is one of the reasons Apple products are so popular, they have done a good job of hiding the details of things, and lowering the complexity of them to enable a much broader audience to access things that their technology skills would otherwise prevent.
I am not sure there is a dollar figure high enough that would get me to make a career out of doing any sort of user support and having to deal day to day (all day) with the stupidity of the unwashed masses. I could probably be forced/bribed to do it for a day or so, but after that it would head-for-the-hills time :frowning:
Admin
@accalia, what Anime is that from? I don't recognize it, and my google-fu has failed me :(
Admin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bludgeoning_Angel_Dokuro-Chan
Admin
That sounds both terrifying and interesting. [image]
Admin
Does anyone want any toast? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec
Admin
it's surprisingly fun. i'd recommend it.
Admin
Maybe I'm misremembering the model numbers, or something, but I don't care enough to check. I remember having two PS/2s in my cube; my memory tells me that the lower-end of the two (whatever model number it was) was a one-piece variety, and the other (whatever model it was) was the lowest-end of the regular desktop form-factor models.
Admin
Welcome to $MEGACORP Remember to save your documents in drive H:
(watches as user obediently presses 'H')
Admin
Hmmn, I'm not really sure myself, now that I think of it. The 30 may have been a standard desktop type.
OK, I just checked and this is what Wicked-Pedo says:
Admin
I recall having a IBM PC (on loan from an uncle who had it at loan from work but actually had a better PC) which featured a drive that could format ordinary 1.44MB diskettes to fit 2.88MB. I think it was a 40MB HD but I might be wrong. No clue on the type number or even the year though. Probably 386.
Admin
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rick Cook.
Admin
I am younger than accalia. My worldview is cracked....
Admin
Funny story about that one: I wound up breaking the case seal on the first day, because when it booted it up it said the processor was running at 90MHz instead of 150MHz. Turned out they'd jumpered the motherboard incorrectly - there were two jumpers for CPU speed and 150MHz needed both of them set, but they'd done it in the wrong orientation, i.e. = instead of ||. So it was being read as no jumpers = 90 MHz.
Admin
I think 386 seems right, me and a friend of mine started with 386 IBM with exact same specs. His computer did not work on cold boot, we had to use a hair drier to warm it up :laughing: I actually started with a commodore, but I used it mainly to type in Basic (GWBasic(?)) from magazines before I knew how to even write in English. It was interesting to see fractals and how they changed pattern with some minor tweaks to initial conditions.
Admin
damn these smiley icons are stupid, please ask a 2-year old to redo. What is this :laughing: thing supposed to be? an angry bald man with slanted eyes?
Admin
>_<+:DIMO, smilies suck and I prefer text emoticons
Admin
Oh TFA sounds so familiar. Only now we have meetings where someone less enlightened in tech support says that we should just include more detailed directions "on that page so users can see what they should do" to reduce support. Then comes the 30 minute explanation (usually by me) of why adding more directions won't do anything at all for those last 1% of users who won't read or just can't grasp the basics.
Admin
Huh, you're only three months younger than me.
It was in the instructions (well, the link to the download page was, anyway):
The users ignored it in favor of clicking on the pretty picture.
How about videos?
Admin
The mysql_real_correct_solution is to wrap a customized non-open-source build of Wine around your Windows exe.
Admin
That's why I now make sure that my screenshots are always noticeably scaled up (bonus points for doing a consistent zoom factor) to make sure they optically mismatch the other window where the user is trying it out, or worse even, the editing controls of the CMS that you are documenting the CMS in. Yup, learned that the hard way, too.
Admin
The opposite of that would be Signature Guy on Community Server, where several people managed to add the HTML for an entire post to their signature.
Admin
Or you could just quietly make the pictures they do click on link to the exact same targets as the link text you expected them to click on.
The approach described in the article is a little too LMGTFY for my taste. [image]
Admin
Admin
You suspect correctly.
Admin
Is this a contest? I am younger than @accalia too, by 15 months, give or take a week.
Admin
Your dad denounced you for marrying someone he didn't approve? :trolleybus:
My first system was 500MHz Celeron, 64MB RAM, 10 GB HDD, which I replaced eventually with 20GB after that one died. Amazingly I never had free space problems on that machine. Even 10GB was plenty when the only internet access was in programming school after I've successfully completed the tasks for the day until the end of the lesson. Even if I managed to fill both of my floppies with some additions to my picture collection (IYKWIM) every time I had access to internet, it would still take years to fill up any noticeable portion of the hard drive.
Admin
I think if somebody said that to me, they would barely outlive the end of that sentence.
This is much more sensible. You have much more self-control than I do.
Admin
My first computer had 48k and the cool name Zx Spectrum 48k!
Admin
Is this a shitty-first-computer contest?
Mine had 2KiB RAM, 25 keys as input device, and 6 7-segment displays as output device. CBA to build a housing for it.
Admin
Typo or is this intentional?
Admin
The excitement when I got a disc drive for my BBC-B back in the mid-1980's. Before then I had been using a tape drive (that's a 1970's-technology machine for playing cassette tapes, a system of storing programs that was as slow as it was unreliable). And then I remember the added excitement when I learned that there was a setting that allowed you to store 80 tracks of data rather than the usual 40 tracks, effectively doubling the size of my storage capacity -- and then my utter frustration to learn that I needed a completely different upgraded brand of floppy to be able to use it ...
... and then PCs came out with (gasp!) two disc drives! WOW!
Admin
One more reason why the command line is superior to GUI. Pasting a command can't go wrong - except if the one who is trying to do it has never done it before. But at least kids seem to learn the command line easier than the address bar in a browser. "Go to this address. NO, don't google it!"
Admin
Except that mobile devices have made creating some content much easier. Mainly videos and pictures. Not that they end up being "professional quality" or anything, but it's super easy to make them and share them online. But yes, obviously, anything that requires much other work (typing, editing, etc) pretty much requires something in addition to a mobile platform.
Admin
Admin
There is under the window menu, and there's a paste option in the right click menu.