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

Which words were those?

Talking of Microsofts mutual incompatiblity, we've just started upgrading to SQL Server 7 only to find all the error codes are different from 6.5. So now we're faced with re-writing all out error handling routines, or putting in some fancy mapping so our apps recognise the old error codes and report the correct error messages when a new error code occurs.
Thanks Bill.

*Sigh* ... Yeah.. don't ya just love him?

Personally I would never use -any- M$ "OS" for a server-type environment. NT may be designed for it, but it still sux.

There's a neat little utility for win95/98 users called- surprisingly-"character map", it opens a little window with most special characters ready to "cut and paste"

It's actually been around since Win 3.0, but in those days it was called "Key Caps"

All I have to offer as a frame of reference is that it was character map in 3.11 (WFW) which was the first flavour of Windows or M$ in general that I had the misfortune of having installed.

I've got Windows 2.0 runtime, which comes on a couple of 720K floppies, and it's not on there. Then again, neither is Program Manager... I got it with Excel 1.0 - it's single-tasking, only runs the program you specify on the opening command line, and Win95 upgrade edition doesn't recognise it when it asks for your original Windows system disks

(btw, you CAN run Win 2.0 as a 16-bit task under NT4...!)

The W95 upgrade package pretty much suxed all around. It's really annoying to have to install a version you don't want and have no plans of using every time you have (or want) to do a format C:\

What?


Where's the tea?


(simulated stupid user)

I suppose we should be grateful that they've not had a go at "Germinal" or "Camille Claudel" that I know of. Now that I think about it, the quality of the picture that they make from a foreign original most aptly demonstrates the contempt the studios must have for an intelligent audience.

That, or they figure that there are enough stupid people out there to gobble this stuff up that the money made from the picture is worth it.

Fruitbat
(for Virtual Mayor of London)

Unfortunately I can't disagree there. It seems that for the most part, if you add enough blood and gore, you've got an automatic 'hit' on your hands... whether or not you have any content.

I have heard of a user who used their CD Rom as a coffee cup holder.

My favourite one is one of Jay Leno's questions posed to a few random people in the streets of Los Angeles: "July 4 is Indepence Day - Independence from what or whom?" Needless to say, not a single Yank had a clue. Having said that, I do have some quotes from my own family in England even, which display an equivalent lack of basic knowledge of European simple facts, so I don't only bash Yanks

One of my favourite examples demonstrating 'lack of "basic" knowledge goes like this. Some nurses were doing a general knowledge quiz. One of the nurses was asked, 'In one hand the Statue of Liberty holds a tablet. What does she hold in the other hand?' The nurse thought for a while and then said, 'A glass of water?' (The answer's a torch, if anyone else out there doesn't know.) Oh, and the nurse was English, by the way.

true story:
i sell cell (those two words together make me laugh) phones, and i get a lot of dumb questions. this however is the dumbest.

This woman walks in, and starts insisting she has to press "9" after she hits send on her phone. i tell her that she doesn't. she says that everyone tells her that, but they're wrong. she then dails the store number, hits send and presses 9. it, of course, rings through. i ask if i could try, not pressing 9. she lets me assuring me that it won't work. it, of course, does. so i ask her, "what led you to beleive that you needed to press 9?" she said that the phone told her to (that is honestly what she said, i began thinking she needed anti-psychotics). i asked whether it was an audible voice or somthing on the display. she said watch, and dailed a number. this is where i must insert in the story some info: she was using an older motorola dpc 650 (for those of you in europe, you'll probably have never seen one of these, as you've had a digital system covering the continent since, like, the late eighties). the display on this phone is like a vcr clock (which i can program), and therefor, any words displayed look weird. back to the story. after hitting send, the display shows the word "dialing". this would be fine, except a lower case g in vcr clock display looks like a nine, so she announced, "there you go, it says dail 9" so i said, "no, it's says dailing. that is a "g", if it were a nine, it would say "dailin' 9" and cell phones don't speak slang." needless to say, she stopped pressing nine after send.

ROFL!

Doesn't that prove that they fry your brain?

I should talk - I've just spent 2 hours following this thread expecting that it would have something to do with new skins and provide clues on my problems; but what the hell - Anne McC. T. Lehrer, F & S, what more could one ask?

Our Help Desk has a policy which makes the Official Secrets Act look like an episode of the Teletubbies, but they are fairly prompt in visiting. One, a lad of about 7 years old, was detailed to instal and commission our new 2 server, 12 user network: Lotus Notes which was unknown to everyone. By the time the wrangling was finished over who was going to pay the £2000 for the training course he had about a week to do a month's work. We had been talking and I reminisced about tinkering at my old BBC machines and he suggested I might like to join him. He was / is brilliant. Over a couple of days and a bank holiday weekend we got the thing running. (Yes I kept the original packing) A couple of weeks later he left for another job paying twice as much plus company car plus all paid mobile phone.
Now we're back to square 1: I can't even get my hands on a wretched printer driver.

My wife is no techno by any stretch of the imagination.

I recently bought her a new VCR after our old, solid, no bells or whistles top-loading VCR finally died.

After much training in how to use the remote I thought she had finally got the hang of it until one day she said the VCR was going funny. Every time she pressed the fast forward the video rewound and every time she tried to rewind it went on fast forward.

It hadn't occurred to her that she was holding the remote upside down!!

I haven't bothered to show her how to pre-program it!!

D'you wanna borrow a teenager?
Downside: she's not very good at tidying, washing up, feeding pets, ironing or finding anything smaller than an aircraft carrier.

Well, Ginger, I have to say that you are so correct. I'm just happy to hear that America isn't the only place where psuedo-intellectuals pride themselves on their backasswards ways. It is disappointing that dispite the more "user-friendly" technology becomes, the less likely the user will attempt to learn how (as if they really need to truely learn in some cases) use it. Most of the time, an untrained chimp is more proficient and more prolithic.