Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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
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."
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".
"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
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!
"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."
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
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!
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 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."
If only man pages were like this
There are a huge bunch more right here
- [grunby]
Nope, no sig
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
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
Example:
:-)
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."
Reminds me a bit of a chapter in the 1991 Honda Accord's user manual, entitled "Shitting the Five Speed."
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 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.)
[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.