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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?"
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 :)
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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...
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
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.
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.
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.
I think this has alot to do with Larry Wall's influence in the Perl world. His writing is absolutely hilarious to me at points... and I really enjoy reading anything he writes. Granted, most of the humor would fly right over a non-tech's head.
It's a great idea really... at least I think so. I tend to pay more attention to writing when I'm occasionally hit with a bit of humor. I try and do the same with comments in code and rather mundane updates I may email out to a team I'm working with.
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."
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.
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!
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".
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
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.
"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..
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
"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."
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
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
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.)
I like to call it "Engrush"
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
At least Microsoft is always translated the same :)
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
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.
Maxis made some wonderful manuals for the Sim games - also the About boxes were full of laughs. Haven't bought one lately, so I don't know if EA killed that, but I hope not.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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."
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?
hmmm... that could be taken to be extremely offensive, i suppose. i hope i'm only poking gentle fun. east asian-americans speak far better english than i speak korean, japanese, mandarin etc. i know and work with a lot of them, they are by and large wonderful nice people, who sometime pronounce english words in amusing ways. that's all. really. *ducks*
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
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.
If only man pages were like this
There are a huge bunch more right here
- [grunby]
Nope, no sig
American manuals are funny.
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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
"Of course Nintendo doesn't document everything correctly."
:)
Speaking of not documenting stuff correctly, the SNES manual says one must 'flip off the power switch' in order to turn off the SNES. Seems a bit rude, doesn't it?
About the Rumble Pak: Unfortunately, it was probably concieved after the release of the N64. Notably, the screen will tell you exactly when you can remove the mem card. It's giving you special case permission to do so.
"Derp de derp."
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
The dolphin Office Assistant is downloadable. For some reason, I find it much less annoying than Clippy (when I have it enabled). Do a search for the word "Kairu" on http://office.microsoft.com
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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
I wonder what the ZeroWing manual looked like...
In A.D. 1989, game was beginning...
Player 1: What Happen?
Player 2: Somebody set us up the game!
Nah... I'm sure that didn't happen.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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 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. ;)
"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."
Probably because the product should work easily to begin with, the manual should only be for advanced features. I know how to use Lightwave very well, for example, but occasionally I run across a feature I need specific info on. I started using LW before reading the manual, but that doesn't mean I never pick it up.
I believe the focus of the article above was in getting people to read the manual before they use the product. People simply won't do that. But if there's some secret feature that they've partially uncovered, most people have no problem reading about that.
"Derp de derp."
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."
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.
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.
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..."
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.
Unfortunately, game manuals are going to fall in quality because of the new little boxes...
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
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.
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!
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.)
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
Is that supposed to be like "I only read Playboy for the articles?"
(pulls out the manual to an unused copy of windows) Whoa, I thought this was a printed copy of the EULA and mabey an install guide, but there's actualy insctruction for a few included programs! Amazing....
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.
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
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."
Outthink them. Make the humor so good that they don't even notice that it's there. No, I mean it. Then you win.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
would have cover like that
:)
WOooO I wanna read it!
"Hope they mention "DO NOT EAT" in regards to the silica packets ;)"
Don't do that in the Italian version.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
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.
Rabbits can't talk! That's CRAZY!
- Brian Fellows
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Responses
That
Further
Microsoft
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
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?
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
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
Regrettably, the latest version of Datrieve does not feature WOMBATS as a sense of humor is no longer permitted.
Where you you have a 25 page print out with just 4 pages of intructions that one can actually read
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
Duh, people, manuals are so 1980s. Everybody knows that the creation of Clippy made all documentation obsolete!
Oh, darn, I've already posted my commentary on silica gel instructions.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
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."
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.
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