A Conversation for Talking Point: Technology that's Supposed to be Helpful... but Isn't
OK!!
Magician Started conversation Aug 9, 2001
Dialog box message -
"Your machine has suffered an unrecoverable failure"
Only button to click -
"Ok"
OK, OK!?!? You mean it is offering me the choice? Yes of course it is ok to crash, feel free, pleased dont let me stop you! I notice there is never a "Not Ok" button available.
And my thought for the day -
The greatest proof the artifical intelligence DOES exist is that computers are clever enough to hide this fact from us.
PS guess what OS Im using
OK!!
It wasn't me Posted Aug 9, 2001
The unjust use of the OK-button. In most cases 'OK' should be 'Just face it bugger!, for example when the systems is anouncing it is about to crash or doing something else that's about to destroy your last hours of work.
Another nice one is Abort, Retry and Ignore. How can you ignore something you just fell over, it's not that the application didn't spot it, it just did.
A well known one is at a keyboard error: 'Press F1 to retry or F2 to abort.' To abort what? Something that isn't working at the moment?
And lotus notes has a whole range of like messages:
- 'unexpected network error' as if the designers took it for granted that thier product would run into errors on a very regular basis (it does)
- 'subscript out of range' or 'incompatible types' which are compiler warnings, that's quite bad for a released application, they could at least try to mask them, from the prevous message one could assume they know exactly when to expect the next error.
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