h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

i had a guy come up to me (i'm using a computer at school), just now. he asked if i "knew how to set up a hotmail account" i told him to go to hotmail and click on join, then fill out all the fields. he still had to ask for more help (eg "what do i put here?" "hmmmmm, well, lets see, it says name, so i'll go out on a limb and say your name, dumbass). it's true, the more user friendly, the dumber the users get. i'll bet that way back in the day, there were people whining, "why won't this program in basic run right?" and another person saying "dammit, how many times to i have to tell you to number your lines." see, it's a big fat downward spiral.

I once deconstructed Umberto's Volvo 800sl and when i explained to him he needed a rebore and a lube job he punched me in the face, so it just goes to show... not everyone is going to think your intelligent if you sit on public buses reading faucaults pudendum and alan turring apparently was unable to find intelligence in his machines, even his toaster! I'm as perplexed as the next person at some of the error messages this lappers throws at me so i edited the registry so whenever there is a dialog box it say's something to the effect of "sod me tarquin stuff this for a game of soldiers!"
i've found this helps my frustration enormously and endares me no end to the people at the torshiba help desk.
If all else fails give them the advice i use "re-partition your HD and install the operating system from the commadore 16."
alternately "get a cat."

p.s if you cut don delilo's Libra into little pieces and reconstruct it with gabriel garcia marquez's 100 years of solitude you get a damn good emulation of drug induced pyschosis.

Kia Kaha Va|

Just thought I'd pass this on..
In 'Backbytes' the other day (back page of "Computing") there was a story about a user who phoned up to say "My dog is sitting on my Bold Button". It turned out that the office assistant window was obscuring the MS Word toolbar. When told to right-click on the office assistant in order to close it, the user replied: "I can't - I'm left-handed."
I can't quite make myself believe this is true..

I can and do belive how stupid some people are when it comes to point and click. I help a friend setup his windozes machine the other night, at one point it said to "press any key to continue" and he spend five minutes looking for the anykey. Personaly, I think that everyone should switch to a Linux flavor as their first choice of an OS. It would take a lot of people offline for a while, but atleast they would learn how a computer works and how to do things that should be second nature.

My personal opinion

I would love to switch to a non-Microsoft operating system. However, I have invested a lot of money over the years in a variety of software that, as far as I am aware, will not run on Linux. I appreciate that you can now get word processors, etc., that have been written for Linux, but what about all my games?

It's an unfortunate fact that when something comes easily to someone they think everybody else should be forced to use it, on the assumption that if they just bother to try it will come easily to them too. Sadly, this is generally not the case. I'd far rather that if *anybody* was being forced to do *anything*, that Mictosoft were forced to make all their software open-source, bug-free, efficient, compatible and affordable. That would better serve the interests of the computing community

Mictosoft? Microsoft! And I previewed that, too!

I once got handed a Pentium 200 to fix for a friend because he had never had anything but trouble with it from the start, it always crashed, when I oppened the case I discovered an ISA graphics card that had been removed from another older machine so after days of fidling I had a look at the motherboard to try and work out wether any of the jumpers were out of place, when a row of 15 pins marked VGA caught my eye. it turned out that the machine had always worked fine until he had the bright idea to replace the graphics card with a model inferior to the built in one and didn't now how to correctly disable the onboard graphics card. after much faffing around and waiting for 3 days before he found the back-plate required to mount the vga-out plug. the problem was solved. and what was the problem yup you gessed it the over confident underskilled user. still I got a USB web cam out of the deal so i'm not complaining.

Why not run Linux and Win32 intwo partitions on a single disk, I currently have five boot disks for the following operating systems,
Windows 98 (no disk), windows 2000 (no disk), BeOS, Linux, and freedos all on one hard disk.

I would recommend getting your hands on a copy of mandrake 7.0 or 7.1 (if you can find it). You can obtain the mandrake 7.0 single disk edition, wich is all most moderately skilled to expert users will need, from http://www.aquila-vision.co.uk for around £3.50 this distrobution also contains a fairly good version af wine which remaps widnows and emulates windows APIs, i've managed to get word 6.0,95 and 97 to run this way unfortunately Micro$oft have made the office 2000, wether intentionaly or not, unwineable.

i'll put some guide lines on my home page in the future.

When I switched to Linux I had know idea what I was doing. All I knew that M$ was causing me nothing but headachs, crashing all the time, and losing .dll's. I would never force anyone to switch OS's. I do believe that anyone of moderate intelligence could read about Linux or the Mac OS, and learn to operate it rather quickly. If you would rather stick to M$ than that is your choice.

As for programs and games running under Linux, there are tons of office apps, and thousands of games. There is also a program called "wine" that allows you to run ?most? windows applications. Also because Linux is open source and under the GNU General Public Licence(GPL) you can write your own programs if there is something you want that isn't availble. Plus you could then sell it to make a bit of extra cash.

'Ya all should try Tim Leary THEN try to use the 'puter. That will really make you feel stupid. Actually I'm no William Burroughs but I
am a very stupid user. Can't even figure out how to fix my home page.
Ask Amy the Ant; she will tell you how thick I am. Anyway, I gather that h2g2 is supposed to be for fun so I hope I don't get chewed out
like I did on the Mac help page. h2g2 better be for fun 'cause if I get my ass chewed out again for being a dumb newbie well, I'm gonna turn into a black hole and suck 'ya all in!!! ha ha ha (don't panic
indeed!)

To get through and the subjects are so diversified it's time someone did some weeding or a pied piper came and led you all by the hand to a new thread. I'm going to ignore it in future.

I totally agree!

About 8 months ago a 'Stupid Users II' forum was started. How about 'Stupid Users III' for stuff on stupid users, or 'Nowt as strange as folks' for general oddities about people. Then there could be 'Upgrading to Linux' for any one that wants to know.

yes I agree this would be a good idea to split into several threads and try to stick to subject, maybe when new subjects arise then start a new one and place a link in the forum where the idea originated.

A tip for you picked up elsewhere (on the feedback forum) at the end of the URL place &latest=1 and bing you go to the end of the forum. One of those new features. It would be nice to have a M, so we could RTFM

CH

Check out http://rinkworks.com/stupid/

Thank you for posting that. I've just had twenty minutes fun. My coffee's cold, but it's worth it.

My pleasure - I was on for an hour before I *had* to get other stuff done

Well there goes the weekend, I've even contributed something myself.

But until (if) it appears;

A guy at work set a e-mail rule the other day.

He made a mistake.

Instead of sending the "I'm away" message to the sender he sent it to a "All users" group.

That would be bad enough but would only activate on new messages.

His next error was to hit the "Run" button (BTW We run GroupWise 4.something), this went thru his
in box and applied the rul to every single message.

He did off course get many auto replies as well which added to the problem.

for some reason he delyed this and it started at midnight.

At 2:30ish and 1.4 million messages later the server fell over.

To add to the problem he had somehow set it so his answers were auto-deleted from his out box. 
You may not know, but GroupWise allows the user to delete messages from other peoples in-boxes
as long as they remain un-opened.  But this wasn't an option as they were not in his outbox.

Your spelling correction is incorrect it should be 'MictUsoft' from 'to micturate'. They've been taking the p*ss for years!