Evil eye
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| mvermeer Sep 01, 2005 3:35 AM EDT |
I think Tom hits the nail right on the head. As for his experience in being able to download pay-for movies under XP, I was reminded of a recent experience on a Qantas flight. It had an "entertainment center" on board, providing every passenger with a personal video, music and games screen in the back of the seat in front of him. Nice... until I tried to push those controller buttons a little bit too fast. Called the cabin crew, who re-booted my display unit from the server... I could see the WinCE bootup messages scrolling by. (Normally you don't see those as a passenger, and I think I know why. Here's to hoping they don't use that technology in their avionics ;-/ ) I am notorious with my colleagues for being able to crash Windows boxes just by walking past and giving them the evil eye. Did that a couple of times during meetings with powerpoint machines just about to be used... Once more confirmed. :-) |
| dinotrac Sep 01, 2005 5:25 AM EDT |
Quoting:I am notorious with my colleagues for being able to crash Windows boxes just by walking past and giving them the evil eye. Martin - I have never doubted the evil of your eye. Seriously, though, I think there is a factual basis for a Windows evil eye. One thing I have noticed is that end-users often collect an internal database of software oddities that they work around, and thus avoid crashes simply by not doing things that they darned well should be able to do. This became painfully clear to me one year when I moved into a technical writing capacity and worked with people who made heavy use of things like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I was continually having problems that resulted in answers like, Yeah. That happens. You need to reboot. or That doesn't work. Try this instead. or Do you really need to do that? |
| phsolide Sep 01, 2005 8:39 AM EDT |
I have the Windows evil eye, too. I can get Windows (98, NT 4.0, XP) and WIndows programs to totally hose up, in ways that no one has seen before, without too much effort. One of my co-workers has noticed. Of course, back in the day, I could get programs running under CDC's NOS and NOS/VE operating systems (lamer than you can imagine, lamer than VMS) to hose up in ways that no one had ever seen before, either. At least if I have source code, I can figure out what I do wrong. Under VMS, NOS, NOS/VE and WIndows flavors, I get a lot of blank looks and "what do you want to do that for?" and "you just can't do that" and "it is NOT buggy" responses. |
| mvermeer Sep 01, 2005 12:14 PM EDT |
> Yeah. That happens. You need to reboot. > or > That doesn't work. Try this instead. > or > Do you really need to do that? > Yeah. "You don't need to see his identification. These are not the droids you're looking for." Trust the Force... |
| dinotrac Sep 01, 2005 12:31 PM EDT |
> Yeah. "You don't need to see his identification. These are not the droids you're looking for."
> Trust the Force... Egg-zactly!!! ;0) |
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