I believe that there is/was a clause (somewhere) whereby if a book had been continuously out of print for a certain number of years, (some of?) the rights lapse.
I don't know if the clause still exists. I guess that part of the problem with enforcing it was that although publication dates of individual printings are easily established, there's no corresponding "official" date for unavailability. If a book hasn't been printed for fifty years, but the publisher still has one copy on a shelf somewhere that they're willing to sell under duress, then technically its probably still "in print".
What's happening now is that large publishers are increasingly scanning their own reference-book back-catalogues, so that any further short-run printing can be done using "print on demand" technology.
Most (if not all) of the university presses have been converting their catalogues to POD for years. So if you want to order an obscure technical work on satellite electronics or sewer maintenance, and the book had a limited print run (say, just enough to sell a copy to every educational institution that'd need a copy), then what you'll tend to find when you order a copy from Amazon is that the book that they send you will have been printed off specially in response to your order, on a great big industrial laser printer.
If you order a book from Amazon.com and track your order status online, and you find that it's being sent to you from somewhere in Tennessee, then chances are it's not actually coming from a warehouse... it's being printed off specially by a company called Lightning Source. They have a big plant in Tennessee that's hooked into Amazon's ordering system, and when you order a book that's on their database, they print one off and put it into an "Amazon" box, with an Amazon receipt, and post it to you on Amazon's behalf.
Uh, dude, we already have access to "all these out of print books". Archival copies are stored in special buildings called "libraries".
If you live in Europe or North America, your local library can probably get you almost anything that exists in the Western library system, for free or for a nominal charge, Europe and the US have an interlibrary loan scheme for just this purpose.
Where do you think that Google are getting their hands on these "out of print" books to scan?
LibraryThing lets you auto-catalogue your book collection by typing in ISBN numbers or using a CueCat to scan the books, and there are a bunch of other sites that let you do similar things with CDs, DVDs or anything else that has a barcode.
The specific "music videos" search engine link on allmusic.com is a bit screwy. If you click "Music Videos", use "Madonna" as a search term, and then click on the provided "Madonna" artist link, allmusic.com only calls up two videos, "Die Another Day", and "Human Nature".
OTH, if you don't click the videos link, and you just do a general artist search, the provided "Madonna" link calls up thirty Madonna videos rather than two (and eighteen Britney videos rather than three).
It's me. I have a talent for going straight to the one link on a site or the one function on a program that that doesn't work properly.:)
As an exercise, I've just gone back and tried about twenty or thirty major MTV-friendly videos from major MTV-type artists and current chart singles (US and UK), and I haven't gotten a single one to play.
Zero success rate. They all have the "US-only" copyright notice.
This is bad. It has National Security implications. How are we supposed to convince the Aggrieved Iranian Youth to drop hardcore Islamic values and embrace the West, if we don't let them see the purty videos with wimmin-in-bikinis jumping up and down? They're just going to be even more aggrieved, and the people who win are going to be the repressive local governments who wanted to block all this material anyway.
MTV is supposed to be the international shopfront for The American Dream. It's sometimes partly credited for the destruction fo the Berlin Wall (glum East-Berliners had illegal MTV cable wired under the Wall, and thought the West was all conspicuous consumption and pink cadillacs).
How're you gonna export US aspirational fantasies to other cultures if you set up an info-wall that stops outsiders from being able to see in?
"Hearts and Minds", people! Ya can't corrupt the youth of North Korea and Afghanistan with Decadent Western Values if you don't show them the goodies! Leave a vacuum, and, gawd, they're just gonna develop their own cultural material.
The US has lost so much influence around the world in the last eight years in so many areas, popular entertainment is perhaps is last major niche where it can claim world dominance. Of those, TV and movies and music are the three "broadcastables". Pull the plug on world access to MTV, and you're losing a major component of the infowars where the US has technical superiority -- music tends to be cheap to produce, music videos tend to be expensive.
Maybe their policy is that everyone outside the US ought to be getting their pop videos off BitTorrent.
Sigh. They go out of their way to make sure that a great swathe of potential law-abiding customers can't get their product by any legitimate means - they basically slam the door in these customers faces and say, we're refusing to sell to you -- and then they act surprised when some of those unsuccessful customers slink off and find alternative, less legal ways of getting hold of the content.
I just had a peek at allmusic.com, and they don't seem to be so good at "popular" pop.
Their search engine seems to be able to find precisely two videos by Madonna, and three by the "Britney" person. Nothing by Michael Jackson.
Maybe that's how their users like it, but they don't exactly seem to be aiming for MTV's market.
COPYRIGHTS RESTRICT US
FROM PLAYING THIS VIDEO
OUTSIDE THE U.S.
So this site will shortly be eliminating pretty much all the competing sources of music videos on the web, but nobody outside the US is going to be able to watch it?
Geographical firewalls on websites are a really bad idea. They're anti-www, anti free trade, and they Piss People Off. They make large chunks of the world population feel discriminated against, and resentful against the company or industry or country that's stopping them from being able to watch or read what other people can watch and read.
They also make it more difficult to complain about other country-specific blocks, like China blocking its own population from being able to access certain external political sites. The more companies do this, the more frustrating the web will become.
Just think of the fun you could have with this if they really did start using it for live broadcasts, and you substituted the list of "naughty" words and their replacements so that it worked backwards.
Like news. Or election debates.
"Americans are hungry! Hungry for [pie]! Hungry for [pie] they can believe in!"
Was Ayer's intent to cause actual fear, or just annoyance?
Blowing things up that don't belong to you may be antisocial, but doesn't automatically make someone a terrorist. Same goes for graffiti, public demonstrations, shoplifting and civil disobedience.
Terrorism is about leveraging disproportionate fear to achieve political ends, often with a deliberate randomisation factor to spread fear more widely (sort of like the the inverse of the lottery's "It could be you" slogan).
Similarly, you don't have to blow things up or destroy property or create immediate physical harm to be a terrorist. One can "terrorise" with dummy bombs or fake bomb threats, or threats relating to third parties ("boogeymen").
In fact, technically, what the Bush administration did when they used unrealistic warnings about an Iraqi WMD programme to insist that the US population supported their invasion, could be argued as being terrorism.
"Do exactly what we say or the terrorists will get you" could be argued as being a form of terrorism if the threat is unrealistic, as could "Let us do what we want or the terrorists win".
So, given Condi's infamous warning about mushroom clouds, the attempt to push through draconian legislation in the wake of 9-11, the insistence on the need to invade Iraq and the characterisation of dissidents as being on the side of the terrorists (and then the use of the resulting ongoing war to help them get their second election win)... I guess we could classify this administration as reasonably successful terrorists.
"Importing" is easier than implementing read/write, because "importing" doesn't have to be 100% accurate.
Ooo is often VERY good at importing MS files, sometimes it's better at it than than MS apps, because the Ooo guys know that their code has to respond elegantly to unexpected departures from the strict file specs due to undocumented MS wrinkles. So if you use MSWord, you should probably have a copy of Ooo installed too, for emergency file-recovery purposes: if you ever get a corrupted Word file that Word refuses to read, there's a fair chance that Ooo will still be able to import it (and resave it in a format that Word can read).
I agree, MS's implementation of Automatic Updates is Evil.
I find that when AU has something bubbling away in the background it can make the whole system unstable. Most of my crashes this year seem to have happened when AU had something on its list that it wanted me to download. Right now I have a "problem" with it in that it keep insisting on trying to install the latest version of IE. I don't usually use IE, and the only use I do have for IE right now just happens to require the old version. But AU kept plugging away and trying to trip me up and install it. And every time it noticed the latest version of IE it flagged it again for possible download, and sent my system unstable again, even though I keep specifically ticking the box for "do not remind me about this update again".
So I've currently got AU switched off.
And because of that, I currently have a "red shield" security warning constantly in the corner of my screen, and intermittently get popup warnings that "my system might be at risk" for having AU turned off.
And of course, the danger of this is that if something really goes wrong with the security settings on my machine, I might miss it because the "red shield" warning that should alert me to something seriously wrong is constantly there anyway.
Most of them have good memories and that gets them through... school and past the boards. Very few of them actually have critical thinking skills and are people I would actually let touch my animal. Put them in front of a case that isn't in the text book and they have no clue what to do, even on simple stuff.
But doesn't that also describe a certain amount of our own "computing" intake?
I mean, to some extent, IT these days has become more like law or medicine or dentistry. There are some people who are truly talented, and there are a lot of people who go into it because they have the necessary entry-level skills (perhaps a good memory for memorising arcane terminology and arbitrary procedures), they know that the pay is decent and the employment prospects are good, and they can't think of anything else that they can do.
I mean, I'm sure we can all pick examples from major software companies (or major industry projects) where you look at part of a product and think, dear god, what idiot was responsible for that? There are major projects out there being slung together by people who have no idea about usability issues.
It is a very interesting problem, I think the solution is to make the buttons themselves say what they do, rather than clicking Ok or Cancel, have the button say "Exit crashed program", or "Install new program" or what have you. Always being OK or Cancel conditions people to just blindly click.
Hmm, nice point. How about implementing "hover text" for the main dialog box buttons?
Yaay, lets reinvent this GUI, and do it properly this time!
I've noticed that some programs now implement a "help" button in some of their alert boxes... but on the programs where I've seen it, the button usually doesn't seem to work (!). The programmer has either forgotten to attach something to it, or hasn't debugged the GUI properly, or has run out of development time.
Users are conditioned to expect odd behaviour in dialog boxes, because this stuff often just isn't properly debugged.
Well, there's computer literacy and computer literacy.
People who read or write books don't necessarily know how to operate a binding press and people who make tv programmes for a living don't necessarily know how to wire up a trinitron tube. It doesn't mean that they're not generally literate (or that they're stupid), it just means that they don't necessarily know the nuts and bolts of things that it's someone else's job to know.
The flip-side is that a lot of computer people aren't people-literate, or may not have much of an idea about the basic principles of the business that employs them. I've seen management people in total despair at the apparent inability of their IT staff to understand the basics of the business that it's their job to support.
So sometimes after a fruitless telephone exchange between IT guy and non-IT guy, where our IT hero turns to his colleague and says, "Geez, that guy didn't have a ****ing clue!", what they don't realise is that at the other end of the line, the other person is turning to their colleague and saying exactly the same thing.
If a popup clicks up with 10 lines of text and you click on it with say 1 second of it appearing, meaning that you've no possible chance of having read it in that period of time (well most people wouldn't be able to), then your PC shuts down and refuses to work for a day. Each time you continue to do it, it doubles the amount of time it stops working.
Wow! There are lots of people with tedious office jobs who'd love this idea!
They could go to their boss and say, I'm sorry, my computer's refusing to work again, and the IT department can't fix it today. They say the problem is that we keep using it too quickly (funny how that keep happening!) So I'm afraid I can't spend today doing boring database entry after all. Yes, that's now three days in a row. I'll just have to spend today looking out of the window, or perhaps watering the plants. Again. Does anyone want me to go down the shops?
And then the angry boss starts billing the IT department for the lost days and lost contracts, and tells the MD that IT can't supply systems that are fit for purpose, and the head of IT gets fired.
The reason for this is that computers don't work properly, by definition.
Think about it. As soon as a piece of technology attains the degree of perfection that almost anyone can use it, the users stop referring to it as a "computer". Palm Pilots work, so people don't refer to them as computers (even though they are). Ditto smart phones, e-books, Blackberries, linux-based media centres, pocket calculators, cash registers, ATM machines, and so on.
If you got into a business where they have well-set up PC's that actually perform the jobs that their intended to do with a minumum of fuss, you'll tend to find that the users refer to them as "wordprocessors", or "terminals", or "dealing stations" or "workstations", or some other functionally-descriptive word.
If the system then starts acting up (say, network problems), you'll notice that people stop referring to their PCs as "terminals" and start going back to calling them "computers" again. "Computer" is a word that signifies compexity and unreliability.
So, if you work in an IT department, it can be educational to find out what your users call the things sitting on their desks. If they think that they're using "computers", then chances are, you have unhappy customers.
If your company's hardware runs//really// smoothly, people stop referring to the hardware at all, and instead start using more abstract terms to refer to, say, the software package.
So: the ultimate aim of IT departments should be to to try to abolish "computers" from company offices. If you still have "computers" in your company's general offices, then that's a sign of IT failure.
Why should a user expect to have to keep a pencil and paper alongside their wordprocessor, to write down messages manually?
I mean, that's insane isn't it? Computers were supposed to get rid of all that stuff!
See, the end-user doesn't understand how badly-designed operating systems really are. They don't appreciate that there's still system-level stuff that's never really been properly thought through.
So it's natural for them to think, well if the system throws up a standard dialog box with an exclamation mark and a piece of error text, then obviously, whenever one of those boxes is displayed, the system will log the date and time and make a record of the text and save to to disc. That would be the logical thing for it to do.
All it'd take would take would be a defined protocol, a standard file location, maybe a little cleanup program with a system setting to limit the number of messages or their maximum age, and a line of code added to the system dialog box that optionally activates every time it's launched with the "question mark" flag set, so that the request to open the dialogue box with a piece of text automatically logs the time and the associated text.
So the user gets an error message telling them that here's a problem, and they ring up the helpline. They expect the helpline guy to know how to retrieve the error message, or to tell them how to retrieve it and read it out over the phone (maybe something like, "click the Start button, select run, type in hlpmsglg.exe, press enter, and tell me the last error message on the list").
What they don't expect is to be told that they should have been keeping a handwritten log of everything they did on the computer because Microsoft were too thick to think of stuff like this. Perhaps they think that the computer surely must log this stuff, and perhaps their helpdesk engineer is simply too ignorant to know how to call up the messages, and is trying to put the blame back onto them.
Either way, they're not going to apologise to some snooty helpdesk guy, because they figure that the one person who hasn't done anything wrong is them, the end-user. Either the system's badly designed, or the helpdesk people don't know how to access it properly... from the user's point of view, they don't particularly care which set of computer people screwed up, their best way to stay calm and happy and not to get wound up by all the computer crap is to maintain a cheeful air of complete disinterest in what the actual underlying reason is for their problem, and let the helpdesk guys and the software designer guys sort it out between them.
Heck, if they're on a company network, they probably reckon that the system ought to automatically respond to updates of the "alert message" logfile by sending the details over the network to update the central sysadmin database, so that when they ring up, the helpdesk guy should already know what their problem is.
In fact, perhaps if the problem really requires fixing, perhaps they figure that it should be their company's helpdesk guy ringing them.
The additional problem with MSWord is that it's notorious for throwing up error messages that are actually wrong.
The classic one used to be "Out of Memory" errors. When computers had smaller hard drives, almost everybody seemed to get these with Word from time to time, and lots of people would try to fix the problem by going out and buying memory upgrades, only to find that Word still wouldn't load their documents, declaring "Out of Memory".
Normally it was an "Insufficient free disc space on drive c: to create temporary file"
problem, but it always seemed to be reported to the user as a memory problem.
An additional wrinkle was that a clogged c: drive would generate this (wrong!) error message even if Windows had been set up to write temp files to a different drive, because some MS programmers seemed to ignore the Windows conventions and just set their apps to assume that c: was the default.
I think that a lot of people have been conditioned to expect the content of error messages to be worthless crap. Think how many times a poor user gets told that something is wrong and presented with a wodge of hexadecimal that they have no chance at all of doing anything with. Is a wordprocessor user seriously expected to recognise hexadecimal memory addresses, or faithfully write down the stream of hex and dictate it over the phone to the helpdesk engineer? Of course not.
So they become conditioned to equate
"error message"
with
"Something has a problem, maybe. Don't bother about it, the computer just does that sometimes, just click OK"
And that's what they do.
After all (reckons the end-user) the people who write error messages obviously don't expect users to read them do they? Cos if you were supposed. to read them, the programmers would have done a better job of making them actually useful. Half the time they seem to be more like glorified debugging messages aimed at the actual coders.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if the clause still exists. I guess that part of the problem with enforcing it was that although publication dates of individual printings are easily established, there's no corresponding "official" date for unavailability. If a book hasn't been printed for fifty years, but the publisher still has one copy on a shelf somewhere that they're willing to sell under duress, then technically its probably still "in print".
What's happening now is that large publishers are increasingly scanning their own reference-book back-catalogues, so that any further short-run printing can be done using "print on demand" technology.
Most (if not all) of the university presses have been converting their catalogues to POD for years. So if you want to order an obscure technical work on satellite electronics or sewer maintenance, and the book had a limited print run (say, just enough to sell a copy to every educational institution that'd need a copy), then what you'll tend to find when you order a copy from Amazon is that the book that they send you will have been printed off specially in response to your order, on a great big industrial laser printer.
If you order a book from Amazon.com and track your order status online, and you find that it's being sent to you from somewhere in Tennessee, then chances are it's not actually coming from a warehouse ... it's being printed off specially by a company called Lightning Source. They have a big plant in Tennessee that's hooked into Amazon's ordering system, and when you order a book that's on their database, they print one off and put it into an "Amazon" box, with an Amazon receipt, and post it to you on Amazon's behalf.
If you live in Europe or North America, your local library can probably get you almost anything that exists in the Western library system, for free or for a nominal charge, Europe and the US have an interlibrary loan scheme for just this purpose.
Where do you think that Google are getting their hands on these "out of print" books to scan?
They get them from libraries.
LibraryThing lets you auto-catalogue your book collection by typing in ISBN numbers or using a CueCat to scan the books, and there are a bunch of other sites that let you do similar things with CDs, DVDs or anything else that has a barcode.
The specific "music videos" search engine link on allmusic.com is a bit screwy. If you click "Music Videos", use "Madonna" as a search term, and then click on the provided "Madonna" artist link, allmusic.com only calls up two videos, "Die Another Day", and "Human Nature".
OTH, if you don't click the videos link, and you just do a general artist search, the provided "Madonna" link calls up thirty Madonna videos rather than two (and eighteen Britney videos rather than three).
It's me. I have a talent for going straight to the one link on a site or the one function on a program that that doesn't work properly. :)
As an exercise, I've just gone back and tried about twenty or thirty major MTV-friendly videos from major MTV-type artists and current chart singles (US and UK), and I haven't gotten a single one to play.
Zero success rate. They all have the "US-only" copyright notice.
This is bad. It has National Security implications. How are we supposed to convince the Aggrieved Iranian Youth to drop hardcore Islamic values and embrace the West, if we don't let them see the purty videos with wimmin-in-bikinis jumping up and down? They're just going to be even more aggrieved, and the people who win are going to be the repressive local governments who wanted to block all this material anyway.
MTV is supposed to be the international shopfront for The American Dream. It's sometimes partly credited for the destruction fo the Berlin Wall (glum East-Berliners had illegal MTV cable wired under the Wall, and thought the West was all conspicuous consumption and pink cadillacs).
How're you gonna export US aspirational fantasies to other cultures if you set up an info-wall that stops outsiders from being able to see in?
"Hearts and Minds", people! Ya can't corrupt the youth of North Korea and Afghanistan with Decadent Western Values if you don't show them the goodies! Leave a vacuum, and, gawd, they're just gonna develop their own cultural material.
The US has lost so much influence around the world in the last eight years in so many areas, popular entertainment is perhaps is last major niche where it can claim world dominance. Of those, TV and movies and music are the three "broadcastables". Pull the plug on world access to MTV, and you're losing a major component of the infowars where the US has technical superiority -- music tends to be cheap to produce, music videos tend to be expensive.
Sigh. They go out of their way to make sure that a great swathe of potential law-abiding customers can't get their product by any legitimate means - they basically slam the door in these customers faces and say, we're refusing to sell to you -- and then they act surprised when some of those unsuccessful customers slink off and find alternative, less legal ways of getting hold of the content.
Their search engine seems to be able to find precisely two videos by Madonna, and three by the "Britney" person. Nothing by Michael Jackson. Maybe that's how their users like it, but they don't exactly seem to be aiming for MTV's market.
So this site will shortly be eliminating pretty much all the competing sources of music videos on the web, but nobody outside the US is going to be able to watch it?
Geographical firewalls on websites are a really bad idea. They're anti-www, anti free trade, and they Piss People Off. They make large chunks of the world population feel discriminated against, and resentful against the company or industry or country that's stopping them from being able to watch or read what other people can watch and read.
They also make it more difficult to complain about other country-specific blocks, like China blocking its own population from being able to access certain external political sites. The more companies do this, the more frustrating the web will become.
Don't know if it works for all brands of self-seal envelopes, or only some. Not aware of any exhaustive studies on envelope-adhesive types.
Like news. Or election debates.
"Americans are hungry! Hungry for [pie]! Hungry for [pie] they can believe in!"
Blowing things up that don't belong to you may be antisocial, but doesn't automatically make someone a terrorist. Same goes for graffiti, public demonstrations, shoplifting and civil disobedience.
Terrorism is about leveraging disproportionate fear to achieve political ends, often with a deliberate randomisation factor to spread fear more widely (sort of like the the inverse of the lottery's "It could be you" slogan).
Similarly, you don't have to blow things up or destroy property or create immediate physical harm to be a terrorist. One can "terrorise" with dummy bombs or fake bomb threats, or threats relating to third parties ("boogeymen").
In fact, technically, what the Bush administration did when they used unrealistic warnings about an Iraqi WMD programme to insist that the US population supported their invasion, could be argued as being terrorism. "Do exactly what we say or the terrorists will get you" could be argued as being a form of terrorism if the threat is unrealistic, as could "Let us do what we want or the terrorists win".
So, given Condi's infamous warning about mushroom clouds, the attempt to push through draconian legislation in the wake of 9-11, the insistence on the need to invade Iraq and the characterisation of dissidents as being on the side of the terrorists (and then the use of the resulting ongoing war to help them get their second election win) ... I guess we could classify this administration as reasonably successful terrorists.
Ooo is often VERY good at importing MS files, sometimes it's better at it than than MS apps, because the Ooo guys know that their code has to respond elegantly to unexpected departures from the strict file specs due to undocumented MS wrinkles. So if you use MSWord, you should probably have a copy of Ooo installed too, for emergency file-recovery purposes: if you ever get a corrupted Word file that Word refuses to read, there's a fair chance that Ooo will still be able to import it (and resave it in a format that Word can read).
(This was meant to be a cool two-character posting, but SlashDot wouldn't allow it. Grrr.)
If it's already way below sea level, couldn't we dig a little trench at one end to let the water in?
I find that when AU has something bubbling away in the background it can make the whole system unstable. Most of my crashes this year seem to have happened when AU had something on its list that it wanted me to download. Right now I have a "problem" with it in that it keep insisting on trying to install the latest version of IE. I don't usually use IE, and the only use I do have for IE right now just happens to require the old version. But AU kept plugging away and trying to trip me up and install it. And every time it noticed the latest version of IE it flagged it again for possible download, and sent my system unstable again, even though I keep specifically ticking the box for "do not remind me about this update again".
So I've currently got AU switched off.
And because of that, I currently have a "red shield" security warning constantly in the corner of my screen, and intermittently get popup warnings that "my system might be at risk" for having AU turned off.
And of course, the danger of this is that if something really goes wrong with the security settings on my machine, I might miss it because the "red shield" warning that should alert me to something seriously wrong is constantly there anyway.
Grrr.
But doesn't that also describe a certain amount of our own "computing" intake?
I mean, to some extent, IT these days has become more like law or medicine or dentistry. There are some people who are truly talented, and there are a lot of people who go into it because they have the necessary entry-level skills (perhaps a good memory for memorising arcane terminology and arbitrary procedures), they know that the pay is decent and the employment prospects are good, and they can't think of anything else that they can do.
I mean, I'm sure we can all pick examples from major software companies (or major industry projects) where you look at part of a product and think, dear god, what idiot was responsible for that? There are major projects out there being slung together by people who have no idea about usability issues.
Classic! :D
Hmm, nice point. How about implementing "hover text" for the main dialog box buttons? ... but on the programs where I've seen it, the button usually doesn't seem to work (!). The programmer has either forgotten to attach something to it, or hasn't debugged the GUI properly, or has run out of development time.
Users are conditioned to expect odd behaviour in dialog boxes, because this stuff often just isn't properly debugged.
Yaay, lets reinvent this GUI, and do it properly this time! I've noticed that some programs now implement a "help" button in some of their alert boxes
People who read or write books don't necessarily know how to operate a binding press and people who make tv programmes for a living don't necessarily know how to wire up a trinitron tube. It doesn't mean that they're not generally literate (or that they're stupid), it just means that they don't necessarily know the nuts and bolts of things that it's someone else's job to know.
The flip-side is that a lot of computer people aren't people-literate, or may not have much of an idea about the basic principles of the business that employs them. I've seen management people in total despair at the apparent inability of their IT staff to understand the basics of the business that it's their job to support.
So sometimes after a fruitless telephone exchange between IT guy and non-IT guy, where our IT hero turns to his colleague and says, "Geez, that guy didn't have a ****ing clue!", what they don't realise is that at the other end of the line, the other person is turning to their colleague and saying exactly the same thing.
If a popup clicks up with 10 lines of text and you click on it with say 1 second of it appearing, meaning that you've no possible chance of having read it in that period of time (well most people wouldn't be able to), then your PC shuts down and refuses to work for a day. Each time you continue to do it, it doubles the amount of time it stops working.
Wow! There are lots of people with tedious office jobs who'd love this idea!
They could go to their boss and say, I'm sorry, my computer's refusing to work again, and the IT department can't fix it today. They say the problem is that we keep using it too quickly (funny how that keep happening!) So I'm afraid I can't spend today doing boring database entry after all. Yes, that's now three days in a row. I'll just have to spend today looking out of the window, or perhaps watering the plants. Again. Does anyone want me to go down the shops?
And then the angry boss starts billing the IT department for the lost days and lost contracts, and tells the MD that IT can't supply systems that are fit for purpose, and the head of IT gets fired.
The reason for this is that computers don't work properly, by definition .
Think about it. As soon as a piece of technology attains the degree of perfection that almost anyone can use it, the users stop referring to it as a "computer". Palm Pilots work, so people don't refer to them as computers (even though they are). Ditto smart phones, e-books, Blackberries, linux-based media centres, pocket calculators, cash registers, ATM machines, and so on.
If you got into a business where they have well-set up PC's that actually perform the jobs that their intended to do with a minumum of fuss, you'll tend to find that the users refer to them as "wordprocessors", or "terminals", or "dealing stations" or "workstations", or some other functionally-descriptive word.
If the system then starts acting up (say, network problems), you'll notice that people stop referring to their PCs as "terminals" and start going back to calling them "computers" again. "Computer" is a word that signifies compexity and unreliability.
So, if you work in an IT department, it can be educational to find out what your users call the things sitting on their desks. If they think that they're using "computers", then chances are, you have unhappy customers.
If your company's hardware runs //really// smoothly, people stop referring to the hardware at all, and instead start using more abstract terms to refer to, say, the software package.
So: the ultimate aim of IT departments should be to to try to abolish "computers" from company offices. If you still have "computers" in your company's general offices, then that's a sign of IT failure.
Why should a user expect to have to keep a pencil and paper alongside their wordprocessor, to write down messages manually?
I mean, that's insane isn't it? Computers were supposed to get rid of all that stuff!
See, the end-user doesn't understand how badly-designed operating systems really are. They don't appreciate that there's still system-level stuff that's never really been properly thought through.
So it's natural for them to think, well if the system throws up a standard dialog box with an exclamation mark and a piece of error text, then obviously, whenever one of those boxes is displayed, the system will log the date and time and make a record of the text and save to to disc. That would be the logical thing for it to do.
All it'd take would take would be a defined protocol, a standard file location, maybe a little cleanup program with a system setting to limit the number of messages or their maximum age, and a line of code added to the system dialog box that optionally activates every time it's launched with the "question mark" flag set, so that the request to open the dialogue box with a piece of text automatically logs the time and the associated text.
So the user gets an error message telling them that here's a problem, and they ring up the helpline. They expect the helpline guy to know how to retrieve the error message, or to tell them how to retrieve it and read it out over the phone (maybe something like, "click the Start button, select run, type in hlpmsglg.exe, press enter, and tell me the last error message on the list").
What they don't expect is to be told that they should have been keeping a handwritten log of everything they did on the computer because Microsoft were too thick to think of stuff like this. Perhaps they think that the computer surely must log this stuff, and perhaps their helpdesk engineer is simply too ignorant to know how to call up the messages, and is trying to put the blame back onto them.
Either way, they're not going to apologise to some snooty helpdesk guy, because they figure that the one person who hasn't done anything wrong is them, the end-user. Either the system's badly designed, or the helpdesk people don't know how to access it properly ... from the user's point of view, they don't particularly care which set of computer people screwed up, their best way to stay calm and happy and not to get wound up by all the computer crap is to maintain a cheeful air of complete disinterest in what the actual underlying reason is for their problem, and let the helpdesk guys and the software designer guys sort it out between them.
Heck, if they're on a company network, they probably reckon that the system ought to automatically respond to updates of the "alert message" logfile by sending the details over the network to update the central sysadmin database, so that when they ring up, the helpdesk guy should already know what their problem is. In fact, perhaps if the problem really requires fixing, perhaps they figure that it should be their company's helpdesk guy ringing them.
The classic one used to be "Out of Memory" errors. When computers had smaller hard drives, almost everybody seemed to get these with Word from time to time, and lots of people would try to fix the problem by going out and buying memory upgrades, only to find that Word still wouldn't load their documents, declaring "Out of Memory".
Normally it was an "Insufficient free disc space on drive c: to create temporary file" problem, but it always seemed to be reported to the user as a memory problem.
An additional wrinkle was that a clogged c: drive would generate this (wrong!) error message even if Windows had been set up to write temp files to a different drive, because some MS programmers seemed to ignore the Windows conventions and just set their apps to assume that c: was the default.
I think that a lot of people have been conditioned to expect the content of error messages to be worthless crap. Think how many times a poor user gets told that something is wrong and presented with a wodge of hexadecimal that they have no chance at all of doing anything with. Is a wordprocessor user seriously expected to recognise hexadecimal memory addresses, or faithfully write down the stream of hex and dictate it over the phone to the helpdesk engineer? Of course not.
So they become conditioned to equate
with
And that's what they do.
After all (reckons the end-user) the people who write error messages obviously don't expect users to read them do they? Cos if you were supposed. to read them, the programmers would have done a better job of making them actually useful. Half the time they seem to be more like glorified debugging messages aimed at the actual coders.
Shouldn't that be iGore, the Apple-rebranded android once known as ALGore (short for "algorithm")?