Software Stupidities…
Well, since I covered a few computer stupidities, I guess I should give equal space to software stupidities…
- Microsoft Word (somewhere around 1999) - “Word cannot edit the unknown.”
- If you typed in ‘God’ at the prompt on an ICL mainframe running the VME operating system, and assuming an appropriately named program was not installed, you’d receive an error message that read “God does not exist.”
- A sign of a bad programmer: “Error: The operation completed successfully.”
- Remember MS-DOS v6.0 with DoubleSpace? Did you ever get the “Disk full error reading from drive C” error? Reading. Yes, reading, not writing.
- A great one is from back when Netcom had their own client software to get on the net. When browsing the web through their browser you could sometimes be presented with the “Oops. You’re screwed” dialog box, containing just an “OK” button. Clicking “OK” killed the client, your connection, and usually the computer.
- Aren’t circular references great? Cornerstone penned the “Your relationships are fraught with circularity” error.
- Hopefully you won’t have any technical problems with RealPlayer for Windows v6.0.0128. “Unable to contact Technical Support for further information. More information is available at RealNetworks Technical Support website.
- In typical Microsoft fashion, the help file for Microsoft Access instructs developers to create a “Wrong button! That button does not work. Try another.” message alert.
- Microsoft Developer Studio: “The project may have been modified on disk by the preceding operation. However, you may have also made changes to this project that have not been saved. If you reload the project you will lose your current changes, but if you don’t, you risk overwriting the new changes on disk, which is usually much worse. Do you want to reload it now?” I haven’t a clue! Where’s that annoying paperclip when you need it most?!
- Lotus joins the pack with its cc:Mail software: “Fatal Error: Mail Engine: No Error.” Clicking OK, the only choice, exits cc:Mail. Then again, maybe using cc:Mail was the error, in which case exiting the program just corrects the error with the result of there being no error.
- In Eye Candy 3.01, attempting to delete a user-defined filter brought up an “Are you sure you want to delete this?” prompt. Would have been more useful if the only option wasn’t just “OK”.
- Microsoft (yet again) uses the descriptive “Unexpected Error. Please investigate” error in its Data Link product. Something bad happened. We don’t know what it was or what caused it.
- Microsoft Visual Basic v5.0 shows “System Error &H80004005 (-2147467259). Unspecified Error.” with OK and Help buttons. Clicking Help returns “Visual Basic encountered an error that was generated by the system or an external component and no other useful information was returned. The specified error number is returned by the system or external component and is displayed in hexadecimal and decimal format.” Something bad happened. We don’t know what it was or what caused it. All we do know is that the hexadecimal number you see is a hexadecimal number, but the number itself is meaningless. Reboot.
- The Microsoft Developer’s Network website only requires your fax number when you explicitly select the “no faxes” option.
- Is there no end to Microsoft stupidity? SQL Windows responds with a “This item doesn’t belong here.” message. Yes, No, and Cancel are its options.
- “Opt Out Confirmed. You should no longer receive email from our company. A confirmation email will be sent to your email address.” *sigh*
- Diff Merge from Rational Software asks “The objects being compared are identical. Do you want to continue with the comparison?”
- Microsoft’s Notepad: “You have not entered any text to be saved. Type some text, and then try again.” Evidently, my work habits need some improvement and Microsoft has taken the responsibility upon itself to tell me.
- A Windows 95 (yet another Microsoft product) error message reads “Cannot delete file. There is not enough free disk space. Delete one or more files to free disk space, and then try again.”
