Nonsense page 6
Computers. The technological wonder of flawless precision and logic, honed by computer scientists over the decades. And just as capable of spouting complete nonsense as the best of us.
I bought my Psion Revo Plus in February 2002, yet according to this dialog box, I have been using MBMView for over six years without paying:
I think the cause was the battery going flat, which wiped the memory and put its clock back to 2000. Then I had to re-install MBMView. Before realising the clock should be set back to 2006. I was still taken by complete surprise by the error until I realised what was going on.
Besides, you can’t use it that long without paying; like with many other dialog boxes on the Psion, the Continue
button doesn’t. It quits.
Apparently Microsoft Office won’t launch if you’re only running your Mac in a mud hut:
This would seem to be a reasonable message (if a touch arcane) except that the real cause, explains contributor Mackie, was a zero byte file (which says exactly nothing about any architecture, Gothic or otherwise).
This is a classic, but my last screenshot of it got lost before I got to post it, so here is another:
To this I can only say, Balloon help turn off!
Progress bars, one of the great delights of computing. The one that appears while Mac OS X boots is faked. In 9, the start-up progress bar only gets to just over half-way and then completes. CorelDRAW! 5 has that other strange idea about 100%, where it gets to 100% and just sits there:
I installed an Epson (is it all capitals or not?) Perfection 1250 scanner at work, and receive this dialog if I press the Web button on the front of the scanner:
I don’t have a whole lot of choice do I? Probably a Mafia hood from Adobe paid Epson a call. I also want to know who described Photoshop as Photoshop
, since it’s a touch pointless.
Apparently, info windows are in short supply these days and I had run out of them again:
The next one is my fault for not reading the manual, but I am still unclear as to why frameworks love insisting your numbers be displayed in exponential notation.
It’s not even a particularly big number.
Note the address of the file in the following picture:
I need some freaky, paranoid music, since Internet Explorer has suddenly become afraid of being attacked by a picture.
Sadly, there is a good explanation. In a sense, anyway. QuickTime has been set up to handle PNG images, perhaps to provide support for alpha channels at long last (I have not tried). And Internet Explorer gets spooked that a local file wants to have anything to do with ActiveX, although this still makes no sense for two reasons. Firstly, there is no active content
inside the image; it’s inside a browser plugin from a world-famous vendor. Secondly, if it gets so scared of what browser plugins can do, why is this? They created the system, in defiance of the Netscape standard used by all other Windows and Macintosh browsers. If it is so awful that opening an image in a browser plugin is that dangerous, is it not time to fix the system instead of scaring users with FUD?
The final one is a case for the Doctor: will repeated visits of Bibo’s Web cam damage the fabric of spacetime?
