Can you see this?
I also use ripway.com
Posted on 12/25/2007 5:28:49 AM PST by Kaslin
When I bought one of these small, cheap, old-fashioned cathode-ray TV sets on sale to watch while on my exercise machine, I had no idea how high-tech and computerized even these obsolete sets had become.
Nor was this a blessing. I could not even turn the set on and get a channel without reading a 60-page instruction book. If the truth be known, I could not do it even after trying to make some sense out of the instructions.
The next time my computer guru came over to help me with my computer problems, I asked him to set up the TV set so that I could turn it on.
After he went through the instruction book and waded through all the high-tech options -- none of which interested me in the slightest -- he set up the TV so that I could do something as elementary as turn on the set and choose a channel to watch.
Unfortunately, this was not an unusual experience. All kinds of computerized products -- cameras, cell phones, even car radios -- have had the same problem.
There must be some blind spot that computer engineers have which prevents them from seeing that (1) most people are not computer engineers, (2) there is no point making simple things complicated, and (3) not everyone is looking for a zillion features to have to wade through to do simple things.
Let's start at square one. What is the first thing you want to do with any computerized product? Turn it on.
Why should that be a problem when people were turning things off and on for generations before there were personal computers?Yet computer engineers seem determined to avoid the very words "off" and "on."
Apparently they feel a need to coin new terms for everything, no matter how simple or well-known those things may be. For computers, the word is "start," which you have to go to for either turning the computer off or on.
With our microwave oven, the word is "power." For my car radio and cell phone, there is no word at all.
For other things, there is the same coining of new words for things people already understand by old words. Printers can be set for "landscape" or "portrait," as if people had never heard of horizontal and vertical.
When I had to have a new radio put into my old car, I told the man who installed it, "I didn't go to M.I.T" and wanted the simplest radio to use that he had.
Yet even the simplest radio he had in stock came with over 100 pages of instructions -- and nothing on the radio that said "on" or "off." In fact, none of the buttons on the front of the radio had anything to indicate what they were for.
The man who installed the radio turned it on for me. But this was an old car that I did not use very often, and I did not always want the radio on when I was driving.
Since he had not told me how to turn it off, I just turned the volume down as low as possible, rather than go into the 100 pages of instructions.
I would probably never have learned how to turn that radio off and on if the car's battery had not gone dead one day. While I was waiting on the roof of a parking garage for the Triple-A truck to get there, I had nothing to read except the radio instruction book.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I read the instruction book. You might think that telling you how to turn the radio off and on would be on page 1. But you would be wrong.
That would be too obvious, and computer engineers avoid the obvious like the plague.
Eventually, I came to the place where the instruction book said to turn the radio on by pressing the "source" button.
There was of course nothing on the radio itself that said "source." By leafing through the instructions, however, I eventually found a diagram where one of the buttons was identified as the "source" button. Eureka!
My new cell phone also has nothing to give you a clue as to how to turn it off or on, much less do anything so complicated as phone somebody. The next time the car battery goes dead, I will read the thick instruction book, so that I can call Triple A.
Sometimes you simply don't have a choice when it comes to the "bells and whistles." Have you gone shopping for a cell phone lately? I'm still using a 4 year old cell phone because I don't want all the nifty new stuff available. In fact, when it died, even though I was eligible for a new phone on my plan, I opted to use my "cell phone insurance" to get an exact replacement phone, once I was able to locate one at a Verizon store. No web access. No GPS, Text messages shut off. And as a bonus, all of my old accessories, like extra, high capacity batteries worked: I didn't have to buy new ones, saving me about $100.
Mark
My mother just got a big screen tv and home theater system. It will probably take me two years to explain to her how to work the remote control. I think she bought the thing just so she’d have an excuse to call and nag me.
It recently took seven days to get a password changed at my work. Of course, our IT is outsourced.
“every new model must have dozens of new features “...rampant featuritis. I hate it.
Have you heard of the Jitterbug phone? I’m considering getting it. They advertise that it doesn’t have all the things you don’t want, just a phone.
I’ll send you the info on it sometime later today. Too short of time right now.
***The problem isn’t computer engineers or even designers, imho... the problem is the sales & marketing people who think that every new model must have dozens of new features in order to justify the title of “new” (and to justify the inflated prices that management wants to charge!)***
And the fact that with computers they change things so fast they can’t write the instruction books, print them, and distribute them fast enough to keep up with the changes. And when’s the last time you actually got a user’s manual with a new computer?
I really miss analog on/off volume controls, myself...
Photobucket won’t work for me to use pix on FR anymore. Their instructions on correcting the problem were full of computer terms I’ve never even heard of, and I’ve had computers for 25 years and am self taught. Anybody know of another storage place for my pix?
Many times you can't get something without the bells and whistles.
BTW, you can blame the marketing department for that - They're the ones who came up with the product spec; the engineering department just implemented it.
I don't know what I'm going to do when my teenagers leave home. Sit on my porch and read books by sunlight. :)
I use imagecave.com and haven't had any problems with it.
Thomas - I just turn the gadgets over to my fourteen-year-old and she does it for me!
Actually quite proud of myself this Christmas: I got a MacBook as a Christmas present for me and managed to get on-line all by myself! But it’s weird going to the Mac world after so long on a PC....
bump
Can you see this?
I also use ripway.com
Cruelly, its piezo transducer was at exactly the pitch where there is a 6 dB notch in my hearing. (Firearms).
AMEN!!! Been there ... done that. The alarm on mine spent so much time ON, that shortly before its demise, the watch was going through a new battery a week.
A special place in the lower depths of hell await the producers of multi model manuals!
LOL! How true. I have a family member who cannot - SIMPLY CANNOT! - comprehend how to add attachments to e-mails. She has to ask a coworker to do it for her every time!
What's wrong with Photobucket?
I've always found it to be very straightforward.
The manual explains this as an "ice warning". Now, that might be desirable in California or Georgia, but I live in Buffalo. The temperature here is within 5 degrees of freezing for 6 months of the year.
I got in the habit of stuffing the damned thing under a sofa cushion for most of the Winter.
Nowhere in the instructions are you told how to turn the "feature" off. Finally, just last week, I stumbled on a tiny paragraph explaining that when the unit's set to Channel 1 (default), the ice warning will sound. Aha! You've got to set it to another channel (no simple task).
Why didn't they just tell me?
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