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RTFM = Read the Funny Manual?
coronaride writes: "This article over on Wired discusses the issue near and dear to every sysadmin and support tech's heart. I, myself, never read any manuals that accompany the products I buy (but when does cheese-whiz really need instructions anyways?) unless something majorly goes wrong! The article talks about how some countries, including Japan, try to spice up their product manuals in order to entice the users to read them. Is this just too much work for our lazy American manufacturers to do?"
My O'Reilly books, mainly the perl ones have sime good humor and some really bad humor.. They are some of the best book around tho.
-- Jason...
The difference between a Manager and an Engineer; The Manager reads the introduction, the Engineer scans the useful bits. -GiH
Apple have been inserting funny stuff in their manuals for ages. And they are the only manuals I've read and enjoyed :)
This page intentionally left blank.
maybe they just need some "manual babes," ala. E3 style.
http://www.engrish.com
I can certainly related to the funny japanese manuals! Our fridge freezer includes instructions recommending that you "Turn your knob sharply to remove cubes" (The ice machine), and that the fridge will help keep food because it has "An alarming function built in" (The door buzzer).
Hours of fun...
At least in my experience it works.
Whenever I have to do documentation at work I usually fill it with stupid gags and puns, this makes it more enjoyable for me to write, and it also means that people read it instead of calling me up with questions that have already been answered.
Granted, if I had to write something that would be used company wide (I work for a very big company) rather than just colleagues who mostly know me I'd probably have to write the dry drivel that no-one would read.
,Tez
Oh, god no! I hope they don't start doing anything like that here. The best manuals are concise and very clear. I don't want to read alot, I want to find the answer I'm looking for and absorb it in the shortest possible amount of time.
Adding jokes, dilbert cartoons, puns would, in my opinion take away from that. I have comics taped to my monitor because they are funny, I have manuals on my shelf because they give me information. Don't make me put manual pages on my monitor or comics on my shelf.
-Sean
Linux has solved the problem of manual translation....
it doesn't have one!
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
The Japanese don't have to try to make their manuals funny when they are selling them in english speaking countries, they just have to hire a bad translater. :)
Maybe if companies spent a little more on their manuals, and making them easier to read or more entertaining, then they wouldn't have to spend so much money on tech support.
Game manuals are often funny or entertaining. The Arcanum manual was incredibly well done, with lots of 1800's style science, fonts and pictures. I'd read that one again just for fun...
Heh, there's a feature in Lightwave where you can make a model of a hand, then apply bones to it so you can manipulate the fingers. In the illustration, they showed how you could take all the bones in the fingers (except the forefinger) and rotate them simultaneously, causing the hand to point.
There was a tiny caption under it that said "this isn't the finger that was raised when they showed this to me."
"Derp de derp."
They are the "for Dummies" series of books. Well written by experts in the particular field, and a bit of humor tossed in occasionally. If OEM manuals were like this, the Dummies series would never have existed.
I really feel that the problem with manuals now is that companies don't spend enough time trying to answer simple problems in them. For example, recently I was using the spreadsheet in Star Office, and I wanted to multiply an entire column of numbers by a scalar, and replace that column with the new values. I spent over 2 hours sifting through the help menus, and I still don't know how to do it. I realize that this is a simple thing to do, but how do new people figure this out without having to ask someone who has done it before?
Remember the old DOS manuals? Those books were great. Everything I ever needed to know about the OS was in that manual.
From the article:
:)
Touching Italians is fine, but you must never, ever tell them how to use a product.
I tried this with the local Italian, and believe me, I'd be much better off if I'd just told him how the microwave works.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
it could also be: read the fine manual read the ******* manual Really Trying to Find Myself Rats, They Fired Me Really Tough Female Manager Really Tired of Feeling Miserable Real Time Fouled-up Management Real Time For the Masses Ready To Fly, Man Rest Time For Milt Really Tough Financial Management Reaching Towards Friendly Manipulation and many many more!
is to put the jokes in the source.
"You are not expected to understand this".
"[...] in this manual, I will refer to myself as 'we', so that it will at least look like 'we' are learning [...]"
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
"I, myself, never read any manuals that accompany the products I buy (but when does cheese-whiz really need instructions anyways?)"
Never.
-Cheesewhiz
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
So I'm not supposed to stare into the depths of the dozens of holographic "authenticity" stickers that Microsoft puts in their manuals? ...
D***.
Man oh Man oh man.
Get it?
-GiH
Randal Schwartz's first O'Reilly Programming in Perl was also fun, for the humor placed in it, which keeps the student amused rather than dry, clinical and boring, which IMHO the 2nd edition was.
Some people view humor as a distraction in documents, perhaps so, if the humor gets in the way of getting the information across. I try to put some humor into sample data and documents, but usually it takes someone with special knowledge to notice (i.e. an address for J. T. Kirk, 1701 Enterprise Place) or silly things to fill in space in an example form, like creating combinations of funny words randomly to fill out the space in a new P.O. form. (BTW, programming in PCL sucks!)
It also seems to make the job of writing documentation a bit easier.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, in the software development world we have a corrolary to that:
...oh come one, you know I'm right.
Seriously, writing documentation is the worst part of programming, at least for the one writting the software. Most places can't afford a on-staff tech writer and so the people writing it are just developers on their coffee breaks. They want to get it done as quickly as possible.
Though, to be fair, an old IBM manual (from a system 390, if you care) iI have read, on teh very Last page "This page intentionally not left blank". I guess that was a laid back as IBM got in the 1980's..
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Who here still has a copy of the Wizardry manual, with the cartoon depicting the casting of Tiltowait, and the ensuing "gesundheit"?
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
In my use of RTFM, its usually a last ditch effort to get the person off my back. I have no problem answering the same question several times, if it seems the person asking was sincerely lost.
But to RTFM them, that sort of implies that they have been hounding you with problems that are easily addressable otherwise. A good example from my life in school were simple standard library stuff; I mean, how many times should one be expected to explain something that can easily be read from a man page?
I don't think the article really adressed that part of the saying, the desperation that causes one to lash out.
-- I am become sig, destroyer of posts.
I remember one copy of another of Corel Paint that included a little mini-book like thing that was basically a complete description of the entire printing industry that went all the way from base color theory (all of them, yah!) to how to take care of half-tone printing press problems.
::shivers:: one of the few programs that is darn nearly physically painful to use. . . .
I still use the thing as an occasional reference, very nice pack-in.
Now that particular version of Corel Paint on the other hand. . . . sucked. Big time. Apparently it has gotten better since then (heh) but I am not going to spend more $$$ finding out. . . . ickies. Awful nasty program
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Most of the time stuff you buy has a manual that doesn't tell you common problems, but merely stuff you should be able to figure out on your own. I'm not dissing Unix manpages here, but manuals generally are not even helpful. Of course, many companies might decide to revise their manuals, and provide some information too, I doubt it though.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Mackie, makers of great audio mixers, have lots of entertaining content in their manuals. Little things like the setup diagrams for a driving a PA system has pictures of little stick people dancing... and a description of when NOT to use the 75Hz bass cut includes "recording earthquakes".
It's just kind of a distraction since you have to feed it and play with it every so often or it will get sick. ;-)
When living in Europe Japanese-versions of the manuals were more or less always included and I enjoyed looking at the funny pics ;)
The localized manuals were also very funny (for different reasons) they were usually so badly translated to be comical, some (honest, I didn't make these up) examples are:
'joystick' translated as 'rod of command'
'drivers' (as in printer drivers) sometimes translated with 'car pilots'
'server' (as in network server) sometimes translated with 'whom who serves'
and so on and on... it's funny though when you read stuff like 'plug the rod of command in and don't forget to install the car pilot in your computer'
-- the cake is a lie
In the US, if you put humour in your manuals, you risk getting your pants sued off. Humourous documentation is considered "unprofessional", and therefore open to lawsuits.
Imagine if a manual said something in jest ("If you're having real problems, just flip the breaker in the computer room. No one will notice.") and a nitwit read it. He'd think it was serious, do it, cause all sorts of havoc, and then say, "But the manual said I should!"
Nah, the cynic in me thinks humour won't make it to manuals anytime soon. Too many nitwits.
Do you really think that companies are lazy or incapable of producing quality manuals? Me think not.
All the lousy manuals we have today is the result of "product strategy" or "business model strategy", whatever the big cheese calls these days. Manuals are created as confusing as possible, so that customers will pay for product training and consulting.
How far can they go in enticing users to read manuals? Will we eventually hear "I only read my manuals for the information." from certain users?
.sdrawkcab si gis siht
"We have noticed that if a manual said, 'Do not ever do this,' we would then get many calls from people who had broken their machines by doing just that," Esposito said. "They read the documentation and took offense to its tone so they had an argument with the product."
I found this to be an amusing story. However, the best way to deal with the whole manual issue is to design your product better. You know how you're not supposed to remove a game cartridge while you're playing? If you look at the SNES and the GameBoy, you are physically prevented from removing the cartridge because the power switch moves a piece that blocks the exit of the cartridge.
I realize this won't work in every situation, but the solution of 'we need to get people to read the manuals!' isn't going to go very far.
Getting back to the SNES example, I read the manual before playing the machine. Heck, I'm an expert on it! I used to sell them! Despite my detailed knowledge of how the machine works and the consequences of pulling the cartridge out while it's on, I'm still aware of the power switch blocking exit of the cartridge. Why? One day, a friend of mine came over with a new game I had been waiting for for ages. In a rush to pop this game in, I gave the cartridge in the machine a pretty good tug. Fortunately, it didn't give though. The safety feature of the SNES prevented me from making a 'wandering mind' mistake.
In cases like that, you could know the product inside out and still make bone-headed mistakes like that. Fortunately for me, Nintendo was smart enough to anticipate that I might make a mistake like that and design it so it's not easy to do.
"Derp de derp."
I think that the software developer has succeeded from a usability POV if the enduser does not have to read the manual in order to operate the software. Most software, however, requires documentation in order to operate as it isn't very standard or is complex. Most people who have used computers now can operate a web-browser for example w/o reading the manual. Photoshop, on the other hand, needs documentation for the advanced features, and most of the basic features for new users unless there is some kind of guru that user could talk to, in order to learn the software.
I think the article is correct though that manuals just seem to be very boring in general. Third-party books tend to be much better and more enjoyable to read. Honestly, I like manuals the way that they are, which is basically pure information and no "fun stuff". I would buy a book on the software package if I wanted something that was fun to read. Most of the time, however, I use manuals for reference, and not reading material..
i had this drumset hardware instrucution sheet that provided "in case of an earthquake, do not stand near
cymbal stands"
Many years ago (1986) I worked on a project that required us to create "Flow Charts" of our software design. In times past, I'd used the time-honored "flow chart template" (a piece of plastic with specialized shapes cut out of it) and while I didn't actually like it, it got the job done.
On this project, however, we were provided with a piece of software (Easyflow) to accomplish the same goal, but without the need to put pencil to paper. Instead, we used the software so we could fiddle endlessly with the design before committing a single pin to paper (yes, children, this was in the days when the dot-matrix printer ruled, before laser printers came free in your breakfast cereal).
Easyflow's Bloodthirsty License Agreement was the first hint that the user manual would be an interesting read.
IIRC, there were also 2 entry points to the manual proper, worded somthing like this:
Ah, the good old days.
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
Look--pretty much every job is going to overseas anyway. If you're still working in five years, you'll call the help line, dialing +91 first (the country code for India), instead of reading a manual.
"I, myself, never read any manuals that accompany the products I buy unless something majorly goes wrong!"
"Is this just too much work for our lazy American manufacturers to do?"
This blurb was doubtless written in jest/haste, but it sure sounds hypocritical to me. If you are too lazy to ReadTFM, where do you get off calling vendors lazy for how they WroteTFM? Either way is fine by me, as it's your life, just apply the same rule in both cases.
Manuals are very decent restroom litterature.
"For best results, hand wash in warm water and drip-dry.
For not so good results, drag through puddles behind car and blow-dry on roof rack."
Japlish is usually funny anyway...
However, I like the informal tone for a different reason altogher. It leads to "unique" quotes, which can be used in Robust Hyperlinks (re: the recent Google programming contest).
Here are some examples, from O'Reilly's "Programming Perl".
Besides being useful in the longer run, hopefully these also get around the precedent set by the 2600 ruling, that links can be illegal.
For a more complete set of examples, see this page.
Fight Spammers!
By far the best manuals, in my not so humble opinion, are Unix man pages. They tell you EVERYTHING you need to know without fluff. The first time I started using unix, I was given the System V Rel 3 programmers, user, and Administrators guide and reference manuals. I read them all and the rest is history. If i want to be entertained, I will read fiction. If I want info, then don't sugar coat it, just give it.
The exeption to this rule has been some of the Nutshell books that are both informative and entertaining. But if you try to add too much humor, the message gets diluted.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
Anyone remember the manuals for the old Maxis games? Those were great. I seem to remember Simlife and Simcity 2000 being particularly good, and the Simearth manual was more education than I got in all four years of middle school science.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Not really a manual - but I kept it because it was so damn funny: The box that the Snappy (video digitizer) was sold in.
If any of you have read the little jokes, etc all over the box (inside, outside, under flaps, etc) - you know what I mean - truely a great piece of packaging (and not a really bad product for the time).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Dr. Bronner's Soap is a label of funny. There are quotes, facts and instructions.
From the label:
"Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Who else but God gave man Love that can spark mere dust to life..."
"DON"T DRINK SOAP! DILUTE! DILUTE! OK!"
Buy a bottle and read the label. Its funny.
I remember a few years back (ok 5 or 6) I skimed the manual for a piece of internal software my company had created and found a note that basicly read, if you've gotten to this point fax in this form and we will send you a copy of Myst. Ever since I've at least skimmed them.
Never could pass up the opertunity for free stuff.
But once they start putting examples (this is where my dander usually gets up, for the lack of) a little inside humor isn't necessarily a bad thing. Yes, putting cartoons, particularly those in some of the older computer books I've read, fall flat, because the humor is lame or dated, and waste space. But there's nothing wrong with using 'foo' 'bar' or 'fnord' in examples. Unless the reader is so dense they take it literally, then you have to question why they have the book in their hands and rip it out of them before they do something really dangerous.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I guess since the authors didn't.
I might as well give the generic Think Geek plug.
Good software shouldn't need a manual. The manual should be inside in the help pages, in context-sensitive help, and simply in the overall intuitiveness of the user interfaces.
Any on-line links to that mini-book? I would really like to read it!)
(Corel Photo paint is actually quite good these days. I use it everyday.)
Is this just too much work for our lazy American manufacturers to do?
It's too much work to do for lazy American conusmers who won't (or can't) read the manual anyway. Putting Hello Kitty in the instructions isn't going to reduce the number of tech support calls in this country.
It's all Hood
No offense to Japanese people or any foreigner (I am a foreign student in US) Got this from http://www.engrish.com they have picture too Submitted 9/24/99 ADAM SMITH WRITES: I spent a summer in Japan two years ago. Among my fonder memories: From a can of Blendy, an iced coffee drink: "Casual, yet rich in substance. That's how you are, and so is Blendy." From a can of Coffee Time, one of Blendy's competitors: "Well-mellowed flavor and aroma make surely you will have a refreshing drink." From a breakfast pastry package: "Through years of experience, Doutor Danish is produced from the finest materials to create a happy time on tables." From a box of ChocoBouchees, chocolate dessert cakes with vanilla icing (similar to Ding Dongs): "Confidence of creating deliciousness. This tastiness can not be carried even by both hands." From a cheap paper photo album distributed free with photo processing: "The scene still comes to mind now and then. Cake was baking in the oven and mother was making tea for us. We were veild in good old smell." [sic] Finally, the office in which I was working had a set of English instructions for the phone system that had been typed up by one of the Japanese in the office. At one point, the instructions were meant to include the sentence "Hook the phone," meaning (I assume) "hang up the phone." The author of the instructions apparently didn't know how to spell "hook", so I suppose he tried to sound it out. There is no "hoo" sound in Japanese. The closest is something like "foo", which generally gets transliterated as "fu". As for the "k" sound, the author apparently decided that in this case "ck" was more likely to be correct than just "k". So the end result of all this was that the instructions contained the sentence "Fuck the phone." For the Americans in the office, it was good for about ten minutes of barely-contained laughter. Submitted 9/24/99 ELTON BYINGTON WRITES: Perhaps the best job I ever had with this company was many years ago when I "translated" Japanese technical manuals from Engrish into English. Here's an example, from the manual for a Toho Denki (Matsushita) facsimile transmitter for Wirephotos, which has stuck with me for almost 30 years: "Care must be exorcised when handring Opiticar System as it is apts to be sticked by dusts and hand-fat." Translation: "Keep your fingers off the lens." These technical manuals were for highly specialized and sophisticated electromechanical equipment, and the Japanese-to-Engrish translators had obviously struggled mightily to convey their meaning. Unfortunately, their descriptions were more often risible than clear. When faced with a particularly egregious block of impenetrable text, my only recourse was to take the equipment apart and analyze its operation, then write the manual from scratch. Manuals for consumer electronics have improved greatly since the days when Sony warned: "Do not attempt to open cassette case as it is exquisitely fixed," in the manual for an early portable cassette recorder. It's good to know the Japanese' penchant for addleheaded Engrish expressions hasn't disappeared!
I make a point of flipping through most Japanese manuals just to get a chuckle out of the Engrish.
The Soyo P4I Fire Dragon motherboard manual was some funny $*@#, and I don't think they really meant it to be.
-Xian
How about making products that are intuitive to configure and use? Instead we have things like sendmail. Oh well.
At least Microsoft is always translated the same :)
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
I highly recommend Mackie manuals. In fact, I've read some from products I don't even use. :)
Like most people here in slashdot, I have the seemingly superhuman ability to understand how machines and devices (s/w and h/w) actually work by just looking at them. I'm sure this happens to a lot of people. It takes an incredibly complex or poorly designed user interface (and I'm not just talking computers here) to confuse people with this ability.
Now, I don't want to sound pedantic. I'm sure there's a whole lot of "gifts" other people have that I don't.
The problem for us is that it's pretty hard to relate to people that can't get their VCR's to stop blinking or adjust the brightness on their TV sets. Take my father for example. He once asked me what a computer program was (about two years ago). For a while there, I just looked at him, wondering if he was joking. How can someone _not_ know what a computer program is? then I thought and thought about it and realized that without our special ability, it MUST be pretty hard to figure these sort of thing out.
Enter the manuals. Manuals are supposed to take people from not understanding how something works, to understanding, at least in general terms, how the device/machine/programs work. Unfortunately, most manuals I've read don't do this. Instead, they take people from not knowing how something works to still not knowing how it works but at least being able to use it. I believe this is a Bad Thing.
See, we humans have the ability to understand a whole lot of things, but we've grown lazy as hell. We want to be able to drive a car without first understanding what internal combustion even means. We want to use VCR's and watch TV without first understanding what "video" is. And so on and so forth. Because of this, human knowledge is not growing at the same rate a human capacity, because most people just don't care. We want to have all the goodies, but not earn the right that knowledge gives us to use it. Instead we hack at them and struggle with them, and break them, and demand a growing tech support industry that helps us when soemthing doesn't work "as expected".
The funny thing is, we've become soooo good at creating products that shield the user from their internal workings that we've become accustomed to it. We demadn it this way. We even approve laws against actually telling people how it really works. And then we complain when our customers don't read the manuals.
I say, in a perfect world, all products should have basic documentation about usage and how the product actually works, and a lot of references to papers and materials that you can go to if you want to learn more. This is not what I get when I buy something nowadays. This is why I don't RTFM. And I'm pretty sure this is why a lot of people do love linux.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Periodically we will put a message toward the back of a manual to call a specific extension at our office and leave a message to get a prize (usually consisting of a stuffed toy mascot). Since the manuals are study-specific (we do drug study software) we usually only print them in a run of about 100 at a time, which makes it easy to control how many of the little beasties we are giving out.
I'm afraid to put any actual jokes in our documentation, we have left the occasional joke in our software (i.e. re-entering your password with significantly fewer characters than the first entry gives a smart remark) and gotten some very upset sites calling us ("My, you have some sassy software, I should report this to the sponsor"). By the time the sites actually get around to reading the documentation, they're usually pretty frustrated with whatever they can't figure out and might see jokes as snide comments directed at them (respiratory therapists are a paranoid bunch).
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Abour ten years ago, there actually was a "Dummies Guide to the Apple Macintosh". Ironically**, it was bigger than the actual Mac manual.
** You may have to be old enough to remember the Mac vs. IBM ad campaigns from the 80's to fully appreciate this!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I have a Prime manual from the early 1980s that has a long running joke in it.
It is a manual for a version of "runoff", which is used for formatting documents. The examples given in the book are for a restraunt chain that servers "frog burgers". There are a whole bunch of Cthulhu references throughout.
I need to scan some of them and post them to the net. Pretty funny.
Another example is in the error return values in GLIBC. Included are EIEIO and EGREGIOUS and other bogus errors.
Unfortunatly all traces of humor are removed from manuals, not due to burn out or other causes, but because Corporate America sees them as "Not Profesional".
Funny documentation and Easter Eggs are both a causualty of the War on Fun.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
ip uw mulle
Sorry, it was a pack in. ^_^
.)
I have seen many simular guides, but never one with all of the information in one place and so well written.
(well hell, I have taken COURSES in the topic that didn't communicate information as well as the guide did, LOL! Though granted having taken those courses is probebly what helped allow me to understand all of the guide. . .
Hmm, on a related note, did Blizzard Entertainment Notepads (steno-book sized, you know, just flip paper pads) ship with Warcraft 2? Because if not, I seriously wonder where I got this one from, LOL!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Personally, I don't even bother looking at a manual for troubleshooting anymore because a lot of them (not all) tend to have the answers to questions that should come before anyone even needs to say RTFM (i.e. Q:Why won't my motherboard boot? A: There isn't a CPU in the socket). They rarely contain the things that actually go wrong (at least for me). It seems to me that a lot of companies have gotten used to leaning on the shoulders of the internet, allowing newsgroups and websites to answer all of their support questions for them, thus making the need for extensive documentation obsolete.
However, I think this leaves Joe-Blow-Who-Doesn't-Think-To-Search-Google in the dark. Not *everyone* thinks to do that before they assume that something's broken and make a support call. Hell, half the people at my work would sooner log a call with Compaq before searching for an error code.
So should companies even bother writing extensive information on their product if most people are going to either be too lazy to look it up, don't know to look it up, or find their own answers without the company's help?
The main reason I read less manuals than I used to is that so often the "manual" is on a CD. Two problems with this:
1. I jealously guard the free space on my (small) hard drive.
2. I am very efficient (lazy) and I begrudge that extra 20 seconds it takes to pop in the CD and find the answer I want.
If I really find a manual useful, I will print out part or all of it.
Wait, I can tell you that it was with Corel Paint 8, was the complete suite of Draw + Paint.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
(Edited)
No offense to Japanese people or any foreigner
(I am a foreign student in US)
Got this from http://www.engrish.com
they have picture too
Submitted 9/24/99
ELTON BYINGTON WRITES:
Perhaps the best job I ever had with this company was many years ago when I
"translated" Japanese technical manuals from Engrish into English. Here's an
example, from the manual for a Toho Denki (Matsushita) facsimile transmitter for
Wirephotos, which has stuck with me for almost 30 years:
"Care must be exorcised when handring Opiticar System as it is apts to be
sticked by dusts and hand-fat."
Translation: "Keep your fingers off the lens."
These technical manuals were for highly specialized and sophisticated
electromechanical equipment, and the Japanese-to-Engrish translators had
obviously struggled mightily to convey their meaning. Unfortunately, their
descriptions were more often risible than clear. When faced with a particularly
egregious block of impenetrable text, my only recourse was to take the equipment
apart and analyze its operation, then write the manual from scratch.
Manuals for consumer electronics have improved greatly since the days when Sony
warned: "Do not attempt to open cassette case as it is exquisitely fixed," in
the manual for an early portable cassette recorder. It's good to know the
Japanese' penchant for addleheaded Engrish expressions hasn't disappeared!
Submitted 9/24/99
ADAM SMITH WRITES:
I spent a summer in Japan two years ago. Among my fonder memories:
From a can of Blendy, an iced coffee drink:
"Casual, yet rich in substance. That's how you are, and so is Blendy."
From a can of Coffee Time, one of Blendy's competitors:
"Well-mellowed flavor and aroma make surely you will have a refreshing
drink."
From a breakfast pastry package:
"Through years of experience, Doutor Danish is produced from the finest
materials to create a happy time on tables."
From a box of ChocoBouchees, chocolate dessert cakes with vanilla icing
(similar to Ding Dongs):
"Confidence of creating deliciousness. This tastiness can not be carried
even by both hands."
From a cheap paper photo album distributed free with photo processing:
"The scene still comes to mind now and then. Cake was baking in the oven
and mother was making tea for us. We were veild in good old smell." [sic]
Finally, the office in which I was working had a set of
English instructions for the phone system that had been typed up by one of
the Japanese in the office. At one point, the instructions were meant to
include the sentence "Hook the phone," meaning (I assume) "hang up the
phone."
The author of the instructions apparently didn't know how to spell "hook",
so I suppose he tried to sound it out. There is no "hoo" sound in
Japanese. The closest is something like "foo", which generally gets
transliterated as "fu". As for the "k" sound, the author apparently
decided that in this case "ck" was more likely to be correct than just
"k".
So the end result of all this was that the instructions contained the
sentence "Fuck the phone." For the Americans in the office, it was good
for about ten minutes of barely-contained laughter.
Actually I used to read the Taiwanese motherboard manuals both for the information and for the really funny Engrish.
I don't know about software manuals, but when I was a 9 yr old kid I got my first bruised knuckle replacing a starter in a volkswagon van (also happened to be my home :). I found the manual to be very helpfull and quite entertaining, I believe it was called "How to keep your volswagen alive, a repair manual for the complete idiot". Very well written and full of highly entertaining bits. I wish more manuals were written in this style.
:)
Ahhh, nostalgia, but I would not own a VW even if it was given to me, easy to work on but you had to, all the time
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
You know how you're not supposed to remove a game cartridge while you're playing?
Not necessarily. On the Game Boy Advance, if part of a program is running entirely from RAM, it is completely safe to pull out the cartridge and put in another one while the power is on. Now that Square is a licensed GBA developer, we may begin to see RPGs that are so big that they won't fit on one 8-megabyte cartridge. (Nintendo currently won't manufacture a cartridge with more data than 8 megabytes.)
Of course Nintendo doesn't document everything correctly. The first version of the N64 manual stated that you can't even plug in or out controllers or memory cards while the power was on, until Nintendo introduced a Rumble Pak. The new manuals contained detailed instructions for how to "pak-swap" safely.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I do :)
"Look where we worship" -- Jim Morrison
...the RPG's Fallout 1 and 2 had some of the best manuals I have ever seen for a game. Interesting, witty, cool, informative. They taught you how to play the game and contributed to the immersion factor at the same time. :)
I loved the recipes for post-nuclear food in the back
If only man pages were like this
There are a huge bunch more right here
- [grunby]
Nope, no sig
....yeah, and Anime makes sense.
Follow posts will be:
"You just don't 'get it'".
"Typical American ignorance. If it isn't spelled out for them they don't understand it."
"You are dumb."
blah blah blah
American manuals are funny.
This page intentionally left blank.
Yes it's an oxymoron and its self-contradiction is funny. But having it on otherwise-blank pages of manuals is really quite important.
Without it, the people in the technical publications department (and readers of the manual) are likely to spend time trying to determine if the page is blank due to an error. Manuals are delayed and costs rise. And if there is not a policy to insert the phrase on blank pages, manuals may occasionally be published with one or more blank pages that aren't SUPPOSED to be blank.
(Of course the humor of that catchphrase has led to parodies. Example: An experimental microchip that (due to the early silicon compiler's tendency to group repetitive circuitry tightly) had some large, rectangular chunks of the chip unused. So the deisngers hand-instantiated that lettering in the blank area.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Uh? Is it too much work to just read the manual? Why should manufactures have to spruce them up?
Have a complete and well done index. It may be in the manual but I'm not going to read hundreds of pages to find it. If it isn't easy to find in the index it might as well not be in the book.
Document ALL messages. When I see an error message I head straight to the index to find the cause/solution. You took the effort to generate the message - now finish the job.
Give examples - they are worth their weight in gold.
My first stop in almost any manual is the "in case of trouble" section. There you will find all *real* cautions and the answers for most tech-support questions.
www.goatse.cx
Mackie manuals are the bomb even better then plextor manuals.
I skimmed the manual for a piece of internal software my company had created and found a note that basicly read, if you've gotten to this point fax in this form and we will send you a copy of Myst.
I read a while ago (no, I can't find a reference) that a bank sent out an update to the terms of service for their credit cards. Buried somewhere in the middle was a line telling you that all you had to do was call a number and they would credit your account $5. They wanted to see how many people actually read the change.
IIRC the response rate was under 1%. I try to tell myself[1] that they weren't doing this as a prelude to screwing their customers even harder.
[1] What I say when I don't want to think about something I have no control over that I am absolutely convinced is true.
Nope, no sig
it's a Russell Hobbs coffee grinder but the book is so funny I read it from cover to cover ... "count to five when grinding.. better to do so in your head or people will think you're a bit odd..." or something like that. bloody good.
I am a leaf on the wind
a portion of the README included in WindowMaker:
Congratulations! You have purchased an extremely fine device that would give you thousands of years of trouble-free service, except that you undoubtably will destroy it via some typical bonehead consumer maneuver. Which is why we ask you to PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE READ THIS OWNER'S MANUAL CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU UNPACK THE DEVICE. YOU ALREADY UNPACKED IT, DIDN'T YOU? YOU UNPACKED IT AND PLUGGED IT IN AND TURNED IT ON AND FIDDLED WITH THE KNOBS, AND NOW YOUR CHILD, THE SAME CHILD WHO ONCE SHOVED A POLISH SAUSAGE INTO YOUR VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDER AND SET IT ON "FAST FORWARD", THIS CHILD ALSO IS FIDDLING WITH THE KNOBS, RIGHT? AND YOU'RE JUST NOW STARTING TO READ THE INSTRUCTIONS, RIGHT??? WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST BREAK THESE DEVICES RIGHT AT THE FACTORY BEFORE WE SHIP THEM OUT, YOU KNOW THAT?
-- Dave Barry, "Read This First!"
I'm currently writing manuals for our products.
I'm trying to write them so as to not be TOTALLY
boring, say, a bit in the style of Larry Wall's
Camel book.
Biz reviews it and tells me to rewrite it because
it's unprofessional.
What's a guy to do?
I can't help but laugh at the irony of the poster calling American manufacturers lazy for not putting knock-knock jokes in their product manuals to get the lazy American CONSUMER to RTFM. ;)
-- The_Messenger
Certainly there are situations where humor in manuals, or going off topic, is quite valuable. The SimCity manuals (and most other good gaming manuals) are great examples. While they are discussing how to build roads a side note discusses Roman road construction. An Engineering manual (or some IT manuals) would be terribly thick if this happened though. An occasional play on words that makes you laugh is all that should be allowed in these cases. Who needs a 1000 page book to be 1500 pages? And lastly there are the manuals that fall somewhere in between. The key in these situations is to use non-distracting jokes that let the reader ignore them if they want. The big PUN jokes aren't fun the third time you reference the material.
which could be channelled to commercial artists to help with the manuals, which would draw commercial artists away from the fucking advertising industry and put them to work doing something useful.
(By 'something useful' I mean 'teaching people something', in case you didn't get that.)
Example:
:-)
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir (can be found or ordered at a local bookstore)
It's a repair manual so well written that I read it more than once, even before I had a VW. It taught me a lot about auto repair, and reinforced what I learned in High School auto shop.
He's funny. He has nice line drawings.
He also editorialized. He refused to explain how to fix an automatic choke because he felt that the choke was bad for the car. The choke allows you to drive the car before it's warm. His suggestion was to roll a cigarette while waiting for the car to warm up, rather than cause excessive wear by putting a load on a cold engine. The edition I read was definitely an artifact of the 1970s.
Unfortunately, most manuals cannot be written in such a literate fashion. He had the luxury of explaining auto maintenance. These are concrete, well-understood, and intuitive concepts. The example vehicle is the air-cooled VW, technology is well over fifty years old, and consequently simple.
I usually need manuals (for instance) to document a poorly designed or arbitrary interface to a product whose mechanism of action I may not ever fully understand, and will (if I am lucky) never use again. Sometimes I need manuals to provide detailed specifications for an implementation of a process that I already understand well. Neither of these is much of an opportunity for an author.
There are still plenty of opportunities for well written manuals, but since most vendors seem to regard mere accuracy as a luxury, I never expect them to be literature.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
My company developed a techonology for viewing video on the web. (No, you've never heard of it, but it was a pretty cool deal. Too bad we don't do it anymore or I'd brag about it.) Since I'm the multimedia guy, they wanted me to write the section on how to improve video quality while making the file size smaller. At one point, I was describing how sometimes you're better off lowering the resolution of a video instead of increasing the compression ratio.
I used a picture of George Bush in mid-speech to illustrate my point. When using the lower resolution, the picture was pretty clear. But when I used a higher compression setting (at the higher res) to achieve the same data rate, his mouth became two big pixels, resembling Bender a little bit.
I drew an arrow to his mouth, drawing attention to the loss of detail, with the caption "See how the mouth loses definition?"
Too bad my manager caught that before it went out, heh.
"Derp de derp."
I'll never forget -- when I was just a kid, back in the mid-late eighties, my father had just upgraded our Macintosh to a Mac Plus. As he was reading one of the owner's manuals, he started laughing, and I asked him what was so funny.
"Oh, nothing," he said.
Still, I pressed him.
"It says here in the setup steps, 'First, eat some chocolate'".
"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked. I honestly had no idea why "Eat some chocolate" would be written in a computer manual.
"Oh, programmers are just weird," he chuckled.
Ever since then I've had a healthy respect for computer programmers.
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
Mackie, manufacturer of pro audio equiment, inserts a lot of humor in their manuals
...to pull this off.
Well, maybe that's a bit imprecise. What I'm attempting to get at is this: the author has to have an extremely good idea what's going on to be able to joke about the process without drawing a bad analogy and lowering the quality of the manual by confusing the reader. In addition to that understanding, the author also has to be funny - not Chris Rock funny, but at least have a grasp of irony to work with.
The point is, most of the technical folks who have a sense of humor and write documentation already find a way to weasel this into their work, by making this common practice, we'll end-up with a lot of formulaic Marketoid humor injected into references unnecessarily.
Just my two cents.
While this didn't really encourage one to read the manual, their animation software (RayDream and Bryce) manuals had a tiny flip book in the corner. A couple topics caught my attention while flipping through and watching the submarine float around and I read those but I rarely had to reference the manual.
Personally I want my manuals to remain straight forward and informative. I don't want cute anecdotes or useless tutorials, just information. If I want the latter I'll buy a third party book which covers the material in this manner. The other thing I don't want is HTML help systems to replace the printed manuals. HTML help manuals are so poorly designed it's more cumbersome to search through them than it is a dead tree edition.
Look, I don't know what the big deal is. If you don't want to read a manual, that's up to you.
One of the most visually interesting manuals that I've seen is NaN's "Blender 1.5" (or the later 1.8) manual. Maybe it's the Euro-rave sensibility of the creators, but I truly enjoyed reading this manual, and I have a copy of it sitting on my coffee table for others to peruse. It was actually worth the price, just for the layout and visuals alone, even if I had never intended to use Blender at all.
It isn't a memory leak. It's an object life-span issue.
A great book for learning about auto repair in general. He tells you what to do, but best of all, explains why. He even convey considerable personality.
I wish I had a copy now. I'd read it all over again. Who knows though, maybe it's not as good as I remember. I'll look it up next time I'm in a bookstore.
I posted about it below, but I guess I took too long to write that post. I'm just not quick enough on the keyboard, except on the days when I post something that's so cranky that I'm embarassed.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
next the expensive dispendio and to each heart never argues on sysadmin on the technology and the attendance _ manual uniform not l, that one acompanh product, that I compr (however, if it has whiz instruction however fromage real necessity), majorly to rather bad desapareç! The article speaks on the direction, as some countries that, understood Japan, in condimentar in relati manual ones you of the tests of the product, customers to interest, the end to read it. The work is this too much fair, in the way this our records American them supplying them of a valve
"Is this just too much work for our lazy American manufacturers to do?"
I certainly hope so. Those Hungarian manuals, on the other hand, sound like just the thing.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
on the box my kb/mouse/speakers came in:
"Please read the product instruction carefully before you use and don't use on the other purpose which instructions does not mention"
You, sir, are a fucking moron.
Reminds me a bit of a chapter in the 1991 Honda Accord's user manual, entitled "Shitting the Five Speed."
instead of "this page intentionally left blank", they should use a graphic design, such as the company logo (!) in page corner. No one's intelligence is insulted and the design does not need to localized to different languages.
cpeterso
...then the product is designed badly. As with all rules, there are exceptions, but for most consumer products and gui software I think there are very few.
"Is this just too much work for our lazy American manufacturers to do?"
Is it the lazy manufacturers' or the lazy consumers' fault that people don't read the manual?
But on another note, because of the letigious nature of this country, the manufacturer has to cover its ass with a bunch of worthless and stupid warnings. The more warnings that they put on the package/manual, the less likely the consumer will read it.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
When I saw "The Dummy's Guide to Sex", it gave me a whole new perspective on "RTFM."
Here is my suggestion for the Windows install program to make this "not reading the manual" thing go away. Before the user is allowed to log in for the first time, he would have to complete a quiz about the contents of the manual. The first question would be something like "what is the clock latency of the BSR instruction on the Pentium Pro?" Answering this question right would allow REAL users to skip the rest of the quiz. You know it's a great idea! Tell MS:
e-mail: mailto:mswish@microsoft.com
fax: (425) 936-7329
post:
Microsoft Corporation
Attn. Microsoft Wish Program
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Read some good Japanese documentation to understand what I am talking about:
The first is translated into English, the second hasn't been translated yet. The first book explains Fourier, starting with basic trig.
In the US, our educational material is very poor. Pictures are either not present when they should be, or present when they shouldn't be. Marketting tastes usually move people towards glossy pictures over iconic representations that do a much better job of abstracting the message (read Chapter 2 of Understanding Comics to understand this well). Many technical people know that the images in our books are not there to help explain things, but rather, to sell books, and thus hold pictures in contempt. "Just give me the text symbols, and leave out the nonsense cute pictures. AraRararrARarr!" is a common attitude here, and it harms us, because we are not open to diagrams when they will help us.
I have seen many other examples of Japanese documentation, but I don't own them, so I can't list them here. Go to your local Japanese communities bookstore, though, and look for Linux documentation or educational materials. (They seem to think the Penguin is kawaii.) They are quite different than ours- beyond just different types of characters.
I read every manual before installing a piece of equipment, if only for the sole reason that I do not want to be responsible for the destruction of equipment that costs more then my life.
in last weeks paper. It's online. Geared more toward consumer electronics but more interesting then wired's column.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
The article talks about how there are companies whose sole function is to take native documentation and translate it into another language. Sounds easy, but it's not. These companies deal with all sorts of native land societal, religious and fundamental PC.
Different societies have different views of their world. For example, in the U.S., documentation tends to use a lot of humor to keep things light and lively. This isn't so in Europe. Hungarians know that everything will eventually break and being the industrious do-it-their-selfers they want their manuals to read like a Chilton book. Japanese manuals often contain creative cartoons that if placed in another country's documentation, viewers may not take the company and their product serious.
Another humorous tidbit included several paragraphs describing an event where the box-art for Painter 5 contained a left opened hand palm with flames coming out of it. The article indicated that in several countries the left hand is considered unclean and showing the open palm is extremely offensive. The cake icing flesh burning wasn't smart too.
Though I found the article somewhat lacking is detail. Countries even take offense to certain fonts and colors being used. This is one of the main reasons why most companies like Macromedia, Microsoft and IBM tend to go take the safe route and from the get-to use ubiquitous type styles and colors for their corporate branding, product designs and websites.
All in all this article was is a great read.
grep >= ! == $your
Shut up faggot.
Their user guides for OmniGraffle (one of the best diagramming tools i've ever had the pleasure of using) and OmniWeb (again, a glorious Mac OS browser with popup dialog squelching, real cookie management, banner ad obliteration, and other great goodies) are extremely enjoyable to read--you can tell the writers had fun putting the documentation together.
***Foucault is watching you..***
Phase 1: Create/Manufacture Product
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Profit!!
Join the TWIT army now!
American's don't fudge around when it comes to manuals and other stuff like warning labels and other such things. Because of the abundance of stupid lawsuits. I can see it now.
Normal Instructions:
Firmly insert the 3 pronged power cable into a grounded outlet.
Funny Instructions:
I think you know what to do with the power cable...
Results: I shoved the power cable in my ass and I had a million dollars in proctologist fees. Their instructions are the reason I shoved somethign in my anus. I want money!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Majorly OT.
Hey, since you use it every day (Corel 10, right?), how do you get to see your current coordinates in Photopaint? I actually figured out by dragging lots of things onto the status bar that there is a way to display current coords, as well as selection width. However, the annoying part is that once you start selecting, the current coords don't change! they just stay at wherever you started the selection. So you have to manually add in the selection width/height to determine where you are at. So maybe you know how to make it so the REALLY current coordinates are shown?
Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.
RIP Douglas Adams.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
ok, everyone's comments are basically: "this company does it too and i love the manuals... i read them all."
so to answer the question: No, this is not too much work, the users enjoy the product and use it. therefore you'll get less tech support calls, and users who will become brand loyal just to get the next manual.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I may not remember it 100% verbatim, but that was the gist of it. Honest truth. (And it was otherwise a very dense and serious book.)
Hope they mention "DO NOT EAT" in regards to the silica packets ;)
Join the TWIT army now!
Qualcomm's phone manuals never took themselves too seriously. They presented the material you needed, but threw in humor the whole way. It got the point across quickly without being so dry.
Hard telling if they're still amusing or not after the Kyocera purchase...
As I think I said above, the best humor in documentation wouldn't be noticed by the person who would take seriously your suggestion. Instead, the real humor would convey the actual instructions in a funny, subtle manner.
Judging by what I've seen around here, it probably wouldn't be noticed by the majority of readers. That's not a troll; it's an observation.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
What programs (at least programs where the users might be more apt to need a manual - read not brilliant computer users) even have manuals anymore? Most of the time you get a CD, a couple of ads, and a silly registration card. Most novice users have no idea that hitting F1 (in most Windows apps) even brings up a help menu.
It's kind of funny most older computer users that I know and help out once in a while in my personal time are just perplexed when you tell them that Microsoft Word or whatever doesn't have a manual. Explaning that F1 is where to go for help doesn't really help because they don't know what to ask or search for. Most of them just want a sterile user's manual not even those How To Pick Your Nose for Dummies books. I just wish a lot of those extremely mainstream consumer applications would have a decent manual. Some do and that's a start. Most people just want a book to either read cover to cover or something that has a great index so they can easily help themselves. A great index to the book is something that is most important to me esp. with technical literature.
Why is it the manufacturer's responsibility to make the users read the manual? I'm not sure how their lack of catering to the lowest common denominator makes the manufacturer lazy or at fault. I'd say, in fact, that the statement above indicates that it is in fact the user who is lazy.
It's not a matter of making manuals that are more "entertaining," they're manuals for crying out loud. It's a matter of training the users to recognize they'll save time, aggravation and perhaps even money if they would just spare the ten, twenty or fifty minutes to read the manual so they know what they're doing.
A wise old BOFH once said, "A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine." Likewise, the burden should not fall to the manufacturer to make the user read the book. If the choose not to, on their head be it....
In fact, with the windows world, i also had forgotten about reading the manual.. It wasn't needed, and i thought i was a "super-knowing-user" because i was able to check some 31337 function somewhere etc
:) )
;)
then i tried linux, which forced me to read a lot to know about all the options, and that reading conducted me to read more and more, now, i even read slashdot comments!!!;) That reading also gave me a lot of good things.. Knowledge!
That's why i always read the manual, even if i do it very fast... They sometimes explain some exceptionnal conditions that may appear (installing some HP scanner-card when you have a network card requires you to uninstall the network card before to isntall the hpcard etc.. Very vicious
Or you also can learn about some functionnalities you ignored
Nah, RTFM, go for it, it can only make you smarter, or loose 10 minutes of your time
RTFM doesn't need to be funny
but funny things gives you the good mood
First I have to endure misfunctional software, then I have to endure attempts at wit? Humor derives from ambiguity, which the angry reader is not going to like. Would computer manual humor be any better than this?
One more reason as to why I use Photoshop. . . . (Ok granted not an option if you are on an alternative OS but. . . .)
:)
.
.
Actualy it is THE reason that I use Photoshop;
Kick ass interface.
Though some dildohead seems to have let somebody from the Illustrator Dev Team onto the Photoshop Dev Team and the results are showing up and more with each successive version. . . . ugh.
Illustartor is another one of those "So bad its painful" programs, even WITH the manual there to help you, it is a PAIN in the ass to use because NOTHING is obvious, crud like the two different arrow pointers, or stuff NEVER selecting how it should, ugh. All by design too. . .
:(
Photoshop 6 (I have yet to try 7, looks like crap from all the Adobe.com screenshots of it, yeesh, interface looks WAAAY to jazzed up) is actualy BETTER at doing vector modeling then Illustrator is.
I spent over TWO HOURS just _TRYING_ to do something in Illustrator (rather simple something too, VERY simple in fact) and then proceeded to give up and spend about, oh, all of TEN MINUTES doing it in Photoshop 6. . .
Ick.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
While you may be right that humor (Get your extraneous 'u' out of here, ya Brit) could cause problems, your logic is flawed.
How I read your logic:
A document is unprofessional, therefore, it is open to lawsuits.
This doesn't make a bit of sense. ANY document could cause a lawsuit. The point is simply, a document with humor may cause problems due to misinterpretation, and it is therefore less likely to be seen in the US. The level of professionalism associated with the writing is irrelevant.
-Paul
'Is this just too much work for our lazy American manufacturers to do?'
Are people too lazy to read and learn and work hard without being amused? Would you prefer soma and a connect-the-dots instruction manual?
I read manuals out of professional courtesy. No one else will.n
[From the operation manual for the CI-300 Dot Matrix Line Printer, made
in Japan]:
The excellent output machine of MODEL CI-300 as extraordinary DOT
MATRIX LINE PRINTER, built in two MICRO-PROCESSORs as well as EAROM, is
featured by permitting wonderful co-existence such as; "high quality
against low cost", "diversified functions with compact design",
"flexibility in accessibleness and durability of approx. 2000,000,00
Dot/Head", "being sophisticated in mechanism but possibly agile
operating under noises being extremely suppressed" etc.
And as a matter of course, the final goal is just simply to help
achieve "super shuttle diplomacy" between cool data, perhaps earned by
HOST COMPUTER, and warm heart of human being.
I read the internet for the articles.
The manual for the sidstation is one of the few that I've read that was informative, easy to read, and amusing. They talk about keeping the sidchip away from explosions, heat, etc. If you havn't checked it out, please do. One of the coolest synths on the market, if a little difficult to program. http://www.sidstation.com/ The machinedrum is pretty groovy too, also by elektron.
Does anyone have a list of words to avoid?
In 1994 I had a list of quite a number of words and short phrases like "WAN WAN", "kuk", "ann" etc., but I can't find it anymore on my systems, and web searches won't help. The list I had was fetched off the internet somewhere and was written backwards and ROT13'ed.
It would be good to have when starting up my next company or when I come to name my kids, just to avoid blunders. I suppose it would be good as a source for inspiration when choosing new passwords as well.
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
The Camel book does have humor, but it isn't as funny, or as engagingly written, as the "Llama", Learning Perl. That is one of the best written technical books I've ever read. (Compare this to the ultra-dry and boring Running Linux, also by O'Reilly)
Larry Wall isn't a gifted writer, and isn't a gifted teacher for that matter - Programming Perl can be too terse and obtuse at times. It is a still a good book worth the money, though.
And while we are talking Perl and O'Reilly -- stay far away from Perl In A Nutshell, first edition - it is not concise, contains no examples, and is written in a flat and boring style. The 2nd edition, coming out right now, might be better, but I'll only believe that when I see it.
~mantis
While I was working on a certain touch pad using a stylus, the SDK provided, of course, the available functions.
One of the functions was aptly named:
BOOL PenIsTouching(); Look closely.
I've had the pleasure of working with (and purchasing) several Mackie mixers over the years. I have yet to be let down by the scattered bits of humor that the writers leave in the books. Granted, there's usually a need read up on new features, but most of the time it's worth reading the whole manual to get some of the jokes. I've also read some Crown Broadcast manuals for some of their high-end amplifiers, and saw a few interesting bits as well.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
The manual was called "The New User's Guide To Editor and Runoff" published by PR1ME Computers. This is the second edition from 1980. The first edition was published in 1978.
The manual includes color cartoons, quotes from sources like Edgar Alan Poe, Douglas Adams and Gilbert and Sulivan, as well as many in-jokes and literary references.
In the section on doing mail merge letters...
"It is our pleasure to inform you, Arthur Trent
that you are a FINAL CONTESTANT in the RANIBURGER BAKE-OFF!
Raniburger is prepared to fly you, at your expense,
to our BIG BAKE-OFF, which will be broadcast live from
the Hotel Cthulhu in downtown Arkham.
Winners will be selected by our panel of distinguished judges, which includes Drs. Ann E. Lidda and Chuck Render of the Serpentine Health Spas, and Grima Viper of Saruman Bakeries. Prizes include a two-week vacation for two at Loch Ness, plus a year's supply of Raniburgers.
So, congradulations, Arthur Trent, and we hope to see you soon!
Sincerely,
The Raniburger Corporation
"I never ate a frog I did not like"
666 Ourboros Drive, Arkham, MA 02546
There are a couple other silly examples, including a sales brochure from "The Magrathean Manufacturing Corporation.".
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Can anyone else see the beast pulling something like this?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Just do like the guy with the case mod. Forget pictures of the products, put pictures of chicks in thongs in the manuals.
http://www.mistersampo.com
would have cover like that
:)
WOooO I wanna read it!
I will not name the country. And I will not name myself. I will not identify the location, company, etc., because those people are warlike, prone to violence and easily offended, besides I liked them and did not want to cause their heads to literally roll in their headquarters bakc home.
but, they dn't know English that well. They came up with a product and proudly presented the name,
........... ProbaScope
Every English speaker first went open-mouthed with horror and then burst out into laughter, trying to suppress it in front of these dignified foreign gentlemen.
Now you can't even find it in google. data suppression real good there. I guess they want it totaly forgotten. Sorry too good a story not to tell.
On a linux box:
/usr/src/linux -type f -exec grep -A 1 -B 1 fuck {} \;
:-)
/* Binary compatibility is good American knowhow fuckin' up. */
/* Why the fuck did they have to change this? */
/* Sun, you just can't beat me, you just can't. Stop trying,
man strfry (prnounced stirfry)
man memfrob
find
/* Only Sun can take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface
* like this. Good job guys...
* Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up
* irixioctl.c: A fucking mess...
If you don't see why, please stay the fuck away from my code.
/* These are here for sake of fucking lusercode living in the fucking believe
having to fuck around with the syscall interface themselfes. */
/* 2,191 lines of complete and utter shit coming up... */
* give up. I'm serious, I am going to kick the living shit
* out of you, game over, lights out.
Explorer Gama
Sails to the Indian Shore
Trade Expands Markets
They would do other things too, like name hard drives after the brothers Karamazov, naming folders "Applications", "carbon dioxide", "CS", "Delivery Systems", "incendiaries", "methylene chloride", "Negotiations" and "propellants". There are other examples, but you get the idea. If you have a manual for Retro, just browse through the screenshots, you're bound to find something mildly amusing.
Proof that this works:
<Overfiend> hey, check out http://master.debian.org/~branden/xsf.html for a content-free beginning. :) :) :) :) :) :-) :) :) :) .png's are tiny. :)
<Overfiend> what, nobody likes my template?
<dark> Overfiend: I'm looking at it with lynx
<Overfiend> dark: well, look at it with GRAPHICAL browser!
* Overfiend grins
<dark> Overfiend: Well I didn't know yet if it would be worth the 20-second startup time
<dark> Overfiend: If there aren't any naked girls on it then I'm not bothering!
<Overfiend> dark: probably not. But do it anyway
<Overfiend> dark: I could change that, but it might not be a popular decision
<Overfiend> Not with the market-conscious developers, anyway
<dark> Overfiend: Then they're not very market-conscious
<dark> Ah, I have a window!
<Overfiend> dark: all right, smartass, reload the page. Like that better?
<dark> Whee 115 bytes per second.
<Overfiend> be grateful the jpg's are only about 30k apiece
<Overfiend> and the
* Overfiend is wondering if anyone ELSE is loading/reloading that page
<dark> They'd better not be, there are laws in this country you know.
* netgod falls over laughing
<Overfiend> netgod: like it? 8-D
* dark wonders if this girl can walk.
Responses
That
Further
Microsoft
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
The bit about Italians said to never, ever come right out and say that they are "NOT to do something under any circumstance." Seems that if you do do that they have a tendancy to do the thing you said not to do.
So, for all you Italian Linux users out there:
/" at the Linux command line prompt.
DO NOT EVER enter the command "rm -rf
Its not so much that American companies are too lazy to redo their manuals, its that Americans are just too lazy in general to read them, no matter how spiced up they are.
If ignorance is bliss, the US is the happiest place in the world!
This is a counter-incentive for developers of open source software attempting to sell support.
If your product is so simple to use or your documentation explains things clearly, there is less requirement for paid technical support, and so no revenue for many open source projects.
Mackie (the audio equipment maker) does a really stellar job of writing interesting, funny manuals. I picked up my mixer manual to find out how the tape outs operated, and ended up spending an hour reading the whole thing...
I have quite a few Japanese kitchen utensils and many food packages that I purchased solely for the translated instructions. My favorite is my Benriner mandolin... I had no idea my food was so honourable and full of personality until I bought it. There are thirty-seven pages of illustrated instructions squeezed into a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper, along with many wonderful illustrations. I have some oriental noodles I have yet to cook because to eat them would destroy the packaging and the incredibly delightful instructions for "taking them up".
I stumbled across this webpage a while back. It has a listing of book "in-jokes" - jokes designed to be caught by the people that read the book all the way through.
For example: In the Thomas and Finny CALCULUS book (we've all seen this one - big, blue, dangerous), it says: The index includes an entry for whales, pointing to pages 365 ff. These pages include no mention of whales (they deal with applications of integrals); but there are several graphs there that look remarkably like whales.
The Java Specification book includes index entires on page 788:
Fibonacci numbers, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34,55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610
self-referential: index entries, 788
not, see Russell's paradox
sig?
You must keep in mind another aspect in making manuals more entertaining. Riding the train to and from work daily, I see many people reading software manuals. Yes, manuals. Not "Dummy Guides" or "How Tos," but the actual manuals that come with software.
It'd be kind of hard to do that in a society that commutes by car. So manuals in such societies aren't geared toward "off hours" reading.
Showing the various types of linear transformations (reflection, rotation, etc) the authors of the applied linear algebra text I used in college used a sheep figure as the manipulated object... This goes on for a bit, and then you turn the page to the last type of transformation of their discussion... the shear transform. Naturally, the caption reads "Sheared Sheep"... (an example of a shear transform is what would make text looking like "this" originally, look instead like "this".)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
How well do you think you could do?
No doubt there would be much snickering and mentions of "Henna Nihongo!!"
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Directions should be read before;
I swear it takes too long.
So, I read them afterwards instead
To see where I went wrong.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
In order to recieve $1000000, please follow the following instructions:
(Continued on page 53)
And when you start turning, you realize there were only 48 pages in the manual. It was full of stuff like that.
Anyone remember the SimEarth manual? If I were at home, I'd dig it out. But I remember the series went something like... Blank Page Another Blank Page Yet Another Blank Page This Page Intentionally Left Blank Unblank Page - with a bunch of jokes and junk ("Where in SimEarth is Carmen SimDiego?")
I usually laugh when reading manuals produced by Asian companies... Although it's more of a sad, desparation kind of laugh, as in "I can't believe this page of words in a language resembling English is my only source of help about this product. AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!" Then squash beer can on forehead and move on to the Guess & check method.
(Hey it hurts more than you think... cause I don't drink beer. The full cans make it a more meaningful experience...)
When I worked for TenFour (makers of TFS Gateway), I tried to insert a fair amount of levity in the manuals and user guides to make people remember the good advice (please enter your TFS post office in the cc:Mail settings or your e-mail will not be delivered, even if you put 40,000 volts through it) and entice them to read more of it. When the president of our US subsidiary happened to see this he went ballistic. I got a really serious talking-to from our Swedish prez and their argument was that is was 'not serious'. That I could prove that support incidents among new installs was way down since I introduced my little lame jokes didn't matter...
Money for nothing, pix for free
Here is a sample chapter from Learning Perl
I have a non-computer literate housemate who uses a piece of antivirus software to protect her computer
Now when there was a problem with a virus on the computer in question, which the software was aware of but did nothing about, she went straight to the manual.
didn't help, she got me to have a look. This didn't help either as the manual (understandable despite being written poorly) described what action the program would take, and what choices would then be available. But actually did not do as claimed.
Obvious case of Tech Support required... First Comment from them was of course RTFM... understandable... however after being told about the state of said computer and lack of response, simply said "no its not". Not helpful...
So the question here is, what on earth do you do when the manual is wrong (since as may seem obvious its also wrong for tech support at the other end)??
imagination is more important than knowledge --Albert Einstein-
Didn't any of you lot play infocom games? Making the manual interesting to read, useful during gameplay, and fun enough that you'd enjoy them independent of playing the game, was part of the enjoyment!
Even the same game walkthroughs were funny and unique.
Regrettably, the latest version of Datrieve does not feature WOMBATS as a sense of humor is no longer permitted.
Check out how they rename Solo to Rude Solo on their mixers, for its annoyance quotient. (For the non-audio types, that is what you need from a solo inidicator).
The manual that came with my mixer is the best I have read, funny great layout, comprehensive, yet exellent Quick Start sections.
Where you you have a 25 page print out with just 4 pages of intructions that one can actually read
The look and feel of software shouldn't be intuitive, easy and simple ALL the time.
...), the environment, the task importance, the frequency of use, etc...
It depends on the user characteristics (Age, educational level,
Programmers can't design user-friendly software (that's why they are so good in programming). They are missing some essential brain parts, which are responsible for the action "communication". A user-interface is all about communication.
Dear Sir/Madam,
It has recently come to our attention that you have been reported by an unidentified source to have been using a joke with the beginning, "Why did the chicken cross the road?".
We are obliged to point out to you that you are in violation under the terms of the DMCA. This text was originally printed in the technical manual for MS Windows 1.0 Executive in 1988. The use of this joke and all derivatives are therefore illegal.
A team of forensic specialists will be arriving at your location shortly with warrants allowing them to interview you and your coworkers, as well as all your relatives. They will determine the extent of your knowledge of this joke and how much you have disseminated it to the community at large. The potential fine is up to 3 years in prison and $20,000 per violation.
Have a Nice Day.
-The BSA
PS: Don't try to figure out the joke, or try to concoct your own version. That's illegal too.
-Styopa
These days, I'm surprised if I get a decent manual with a software package or a piece of hardware. The usual excuse is that they are "saving the environment". Fuck the environment! The reality is that some bone-headed manager is too cheap to spend the money on good documentation. I spent $500 on Microsoft Office for Mac OS X and all they gave me was a pamphlet on how to install the software. Bastards.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I want to put a big picture of a duck on page 66 of our manual. That way when a customer calls and asks a dumb question I can say did you read the mannual? When they say yes I can ask "What page is the duck on?" When they ask me what duck I know that they never read the mannual.
Why we need user guides:
I'm a technical writer who spends a lot of time creating specs for software applications and, while I'd like to make the application so easy to use that I don't need to write instructions, it's just impossible. And the trade-off between easy-to-use and powerful applications means that there's always some function that you have to know how to use to get the full power from the application.
Duh, people, manuals are so 1980s. Everybody knows that the creation of Clippy made all documentation obsolete!
I'd highly reccommend buying one of these - it's a great geek toy anyway, but the manual's also amusing:
Power Ball - you give me one minute, and I will give you a powerful hand.
Thank you for your kind patronage
The NanoSecond Power Ball is a kind of ball with very high rotation speeds for training the wrist strength, meant to satisfy a sense of achievement in sports.
The NanoSecond Power Ball is a new model, space-saving sports tool, which can run over 12,000 revolutions per minute (R.P.M.) as long as it is manipulated to the point. It is a highly creative and newfangled drilling tool. Try Power Ball, and you'll be amazed with its miraculous power for sure.
If you're confused, the box might help explain:
Manual mode. Transmit the rotor with your palm in a downgoing twisting application of force. For transmission. Once the ball is set into transmission, spin the ball with upgraded accelleration in a forward direction of the wrist. Try repeatedly, and you will soon learn the knack, and the pleasure will be beyond description.
Fantastic!
Nick Waterman, Sr Tech Director, #include <stddisclaimer>
Two little anecdotes.
I'm not sure where I heard this first one; it concerns page breaks and wording, in a manual for some piece of agricultural machinery.
You can imagine somebody starting to open tha hatch with the machine running...
My wife has a JVC stereo (from before I met her). The manual is in about a dozen languages (hey, I live in Europe); I read the French part. In the section on cleaning the external casing, there is the hilarious:
Which translates as "do not use a slimmming aid". I am willing to bet a thousand thalers that this is a translation of the English phrase "do not use thinners".That's part of what makes O'Reilly books so cool, all those notes about practical stuff surounding the book's actual theme. I particularly like the intro to "Learning Perl" (long time ago ;-)) or some of the stuff between pages in Essential System Administation.
I recall a (Kingston Ont? based??) company called Haventree who made a flow charting utility called EasyFlow. I recall the manual featured the usual antipiracy copyright spiel, but livened up by threats to send "the Haventree Attack Shark" after you if you violated the terms. Far more entertaining (and probably not too far from a good description of lawyers) than most.
Something like some Dilbert, BOFH, or similar cartoons sprinkled around the manual, or having Dave Barry translate some of the sections would make most manuals far more interesting to read.
Mind you, explaining switches for commands can be about as interesting as pulling your own toenails out with pliers slowly... I really don't see how anyone could remedy that... but broader descriptive texts could easily be spiced up.
Of course, for every one of us that would enjoy some visual cartoon embedding, or little word plays or humorous asides in the text, someone else would complain about buying a manual and getting all this "extra crap" and then some other gene pool shallow-ender would sue... "I followed the instruction that said to reboot the computer using a size 12 hiking boot, your honour. Clearly the company provided a destructive procedure!"...
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Touching Italians is fine, but you must never, ever tell them how to use a product. You merely suggest what they might consider doing with it, according to Carmella Esposito, a former United Nations translator who now works as a freelance technical support consultant.
"We have noticed that if a manual said, 'Do not ever do this,' we would then get many calls from people who had broken their machines by doing just that," Esposito said. "They read the documentation and took offense to its tone so they had an argument with the product."
Oh man I want to sell a product in italy. that the manual states "DONT SMASH THIS WITH A HAMMER!"
are the people in italy really that stupid or over-emotional to intentionally do something that is warned against? how about "DONT USE THIS PRODUCT IN THE BATHTUB" that surely would clear out some of the more braindead people... How can I cause this response in america?
You know what's funny ? American companies do the same for other languages :)
:) (sometimes I read the spanish section to get a few good laughs :)
I'm a native spanish speaker, living in the US for the last 6 years (so I speak decent english). Some manuals come in several languages, and I usually read the english instructions because the spanish translations is so bad
And finally:
We should warn the Bush administration of the dangers of allowing exports of this powerful algorithm!
-"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle." - Arthur Dent
...after this article...any bets on which company is first to trademark the term : Read The Funky Manual?
This UID is 7651 digits too high to subjectively infer IQ from.
# ping elvis
elvis is alive
The postman hits! The postman hits! You have mail.
Is it just me, or do most of the computer products I buy not come from the US, but from mostly Asian countries?
Eh, the For Dummies series was a really great idea (and still is). But now the sitation is the same as that for the O'Reilly tech books: watch whichs ones you buy. They're not all good. Some plain suck. A few of the recent ones I've skimmed through were absolute shit. I remember reading a few of the very first For Dummies books: DOS for Dummies and HTML for Dummies. (The former was for the humour, the latter for actual information. This was a long time ago, though...)
Those two were actually quite good. But then the For Dummies publisher went ahead and starting hiring authors to write on every topic under the sun from piano playing to gardening to finances to beer. A year or two ago I saw a newer For Dummies book on Perl and skimmed through it at the bookstore. Wow did that suck. Not only was there absolutely no humour in it but the author apparently had no actual experience of the language. Programming Perl beat it by leaps and bounds, even for people who aren't into programming.
In one product manual I wrote, in the disclaimer, I prefaced an admonition with the Klingon word for (approximately) "To avoid having your skin flayed from your still-living body,"... When my manager called me on it, I said it must be datafile corruption.
My all-time favorite amusement, tho, must be the entry in "Common Lisp: The Language". The index lists "kluge", and references the entire document.
The local library lends out software and sells the outdated stuff for cheap. I got some of it just for the manual:
;)
- A reproduction of a WWI flight manual, including ads!
- An excellent flight manual with Falcon 3. The CD wasn't included, but who cares?
- Full-sized copy of the Magic The Gathering Manual. Sure beats that fontsize 6 thingy you get with a pack o' cards.
- Maps of Korea, France, etc.
And I'll be there when they dump Falcon 4 and Railroad Tycoon II.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
sign over a urinal at a Japanese airport
"Turn cock to right to stop drip"