The thing isn’t broken, the design is

[tanngrisnir]

I thought this report was interesting: half of all “malfunctioning” products are in full working order, it’s just that the poor bloody customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices. Even worse for them, companies frequently dismiss them as ‘nuisance calls.’ It was a nice touch that the study being reported involved giving managers products

Comments

[wibbble]

I think that aviation and the military, at least, are relatively immune from this sort of nonsense: if it's not easily understandable at a glance, neither the aviation industry nor the military are going to touch it.

I can just picture someone on a field trial of some new planning/communication device deciding to just drop it in a pool of mud and go back to using a map and a radio rather than figure out the icons.

[tanngrisnir]

You would hope so; however, I do recall reports that some US aircraft carriers were going to be running on a version of Windows.

[wibbble]

Well, it depends on what it's being used for. I imagine there's a lot of paperwork involved in running an aircraft carrier - it would be mean to make them use Linux and OpenOffice.

As for other systems, AFAIK there's no real-time version of Windows, so you couldn't use it for more essential systems.

[tanngrisnir]

I’d rather use OpenOffice than Word any day. And Linux is a far superior operating system than Windows. (To pick just one little thing: you tell Linux to shut down, and it shuts down; you cannot always say the same for Windows.)

What was being talked about for the carriers was explicitly not office use, it was to run the ship.

Scary thought.

[highstone]

At last! This is what I moan continually about, and thought I was in a very small minority. When switching from an all text (Unix-based) library system to Windoze, I was continually putting out sarcastic remarks about crappy ambiguous icons, and why the frak could they not just put the command word there instead...

[tanngrisnir]

Quite. The problem is, I think, that people have thought that text always has to be translated for different languages, but a picture paints a thousand words ’ which is rubbish for about 90% of icons. (I may be being too generous in the number it isn’t.) I remember when I first saw the Web, I couldn’t understand why all these pages had little pictures of houses. It took quite a while for the penny to drop that this meant “home page”, the problem being that when I see a little house, I think “little house”, not “home” (a word which I associate with other images entirely). And that is a relatively transparent example.

There are still some things I would rather do from a command line rather than use a graphical interface, it is easier and more efficient.

Digi vidi :)

[jezreell1]

Next time you come down, you can work out why my new DVD Video Recorder only records from the freeview box in B&W while evrything else is fine...

Jez - not normally beaten by technology...

Re: Digi vidi :)

[tanngrisnir]

The interaction between digital boxes and recorders (DVD or VHS) is very problematic. One of the Caer Clud people was astonished when I mentioned I had taped something off BBC3, because she just can’t get her box and her VCR to talk to each other. My parents’ box is peculiar. You can tape from the digital box, but not watch it at the same time. Unless the taping is being done on the VCR’s timer. Our setup works remarkably well.

I assume you have done the obvious, like checking connections, making sure the cables are actually all right, things like that?

Re: Digi vidi :)

[jezreell1]

Aye. It tapes everything else ok, just not the digibox stuff.

But I have a fiendishly complex set-up, with a digibox, a portable tv (only one scart socket) and two VCRs (one of which is the new DVD/VCR) in series.

I can tape from the digi onto the older VCR, but the other one turns its nose up. I think I just have too many things going on at once.

--

Jez

Re: Digi vidi :)

[tanngrisnir]

That might be true. Try taking the old VCR out of the setup and see how you get on.