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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?"
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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."
Here's one:
Technical Note 31 (Clarus the Dogcow)
Can anyone find a link to the bogus Technical Note which was attributed to Scott Knaster, or the even crazier one he wrote in Macintosh Programming Secrets in response to it? Among other things, it attempted to describe how a program should deal with users upgrading their CPU while the program is running, and the API to a new compression routine called "PackMan" which could compress anything to exactly 4 bytes....
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
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.
Ah, the old dogcow tech note. Source of what I consider to be the funniest quote ever:
Like any talented dog, it can do flips. Like any talented cow, it can do precision bitmap alignment.
For some reason, hardly anybody else cracks up at this the same way I do. I like to think that this is because everybody else is crazy.
Example:
:-)
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.)
Once, just to see if anybody noticed, I included this notice on the last page of some internal-only documentation:
"This page inadvertently left blank."
I don't think anybody caught it.