1 May 2007

Vista drops another one

Adolfo's continuing voyage into the land of Windows Vista produces the usual endless frozen windows and similar boring frustrations, but every now and then it comes up with something truly inscrutable. Today it squeezed out another little gem:
"What am I supposed to do about this?" Adolfo asked. "What does it mean? Do you understand this?" "Well, yes, I think so, but I'm a developer," I replied. "Well, I'm not a developer! How am I supposed to understand this?" I smiled. "I told you so," I said helpfully.

There are two things that amuse me about the phrasing. First, the accusatory tone of the dialog box is great: "OK, mister wise guy, now you did it, you tried to copy a file without its properties. Let's see you get out of this mess." The second is the window title: "Property Loss". Is he already screwed? Does that mean he can take a deduction on his taxes next year? [I could argue that buying a Vista PC should qualify him as a disaster victim.]

What I suspect was happening was that he was trying to copy files to a network attached storage device that won't let him preserve ownership. Well, so what? It's a computer, it should figure out what to do. Twenty years have gone by, and Microsoft is still using "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" Granted, they have at least swapped out some words, but it's the same error message. And yes, the dialog box is prettier under Vista. I look at this dialog and say "this is what the Mac would look like if it were designed by chimps."

2 comments:

Adolfo said...

Just for your enjoyment, my computer is becoming slower for some reason. I was not aware of the whole "rewritten" of the operation system, the selling it as new. This is unacceptable. I thought you were being a bit too radical about Microsoft, but now I think you are dead on! so right! There are more things with my Vista experience-- Even though I told my computer to use my Mozilla as my primary internet browser, most of the time it puts me Explorer. Explorer is terrible remembering passwords that is why I do not like it. When I have a couple of Mozilla windows open, from time to time it appears a window that says something like "A terrible thing has happened with your Explorer windows, they will have to be closed"- the funny thing is that I have none windows explorer opened!-- I get that a lot. Windows Media does not want to record some of my music to CD's. It doesn't take songs easily either. Another issue... I was just cropping a picture, and I kept going looking at the other pictures. I wanted to go back to see the pic I had cropped, and It wasn't able to open it. It said "a program is editing your the picture you selected" I closed it, waited and tried to open it, and I got the same message again. The funny thing is that I used Microsoft regular window to view/edit your pics, I was not using another editing program(which I do not have). It is awful the whole rewrite of the operating system, putting crab over already bad crap. I mentioned that my computer freezes more often. I try to do the whole ctrl, alt, del to stop a program,and now it takes a LOT longer for new OPTIONS for actions you might want to do about it. At the very end of the options it will show you the control program that you used to quickly get/execute in XP. Another issue.. When I put device (a cam, card reader, USB stuff), and I try to disconnect it, I get now 3 windows asking me questions. This is just to remove "safely" the device. If this were for a software such as Linux that is free, I might swallow it, but from a software you are being FORCED to pay and repay, over and over, It is not nice. Sorry for my beautiful writing :-)

Scott said...

Yes, but don't the glassy borders on that error dialog box look SWELL!?