- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
This story is a lie.
There’s no “computer icon”. Dragging the System disk to trash ejects it on a classic Mac. If you burrow down into System, you can try deleting system files… which are locked and can’t be deleted.
You can test this yourself on Infinite Mac
Well if the story is true, wouldn’t they have just fixed the software, so it would have never seen the light of day?
If they had “fixed” it, there would be a “My Computer” icon. No such thing exists, go TRY the Infinite Mac I linked above.
Unless this story is from preproduction software and they got rid of the computer icon. Or maybe that detail was misremembered and it was actually a disc icon.
i mean, this story sounds like it’s from pre-release testing, or maybe a trade show demo showing a pre-release build. it not working this way in the release version just makes sense, and doesn’t mean this is a fake story.
No such demo happened. They unveiled the 128K with that System 1.0 on stage at a special event. The Lisa has a different UI, but also can’t do what’s described.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just means that the demo wasn’t public.
Yes your uncle who works at Nintendo ^W Apple told you about it.
The story seems to be referencing the first time apple had regular people try it which may have been in a focus group or at some kind of publicity event. If this did happen I’m sure they made safeguards against it before selling it
I have to agree. The Macintosh 128k didn’t even have an internal HDD. Everything was run on 3.5" floppies. Heck they may have invented the 3.5" floppy, idk. As you said, dragging the system dick icon to the trash on a 128k was literally the easiest way to eject the disk.
My father still owns on, that may actually work. He also got 2 extra external floppy drives for the thing. He also has an Apple ]|[
well id expect the computer to crash if i threw it in the trash can
no you’re getting it confused with the crash can
I can imagine thinking it’s be funny in the early stages where things wouldn’t really be too logical they way they are now. Might even assume it wouldn’t actually do anything and I could just pull it back out.
hahahaha i was thinking of this very gif, stop reading my mind
would be even better if the pc actually teleported to his trash bin
One of my favorite examples of the difficulty in idiot-proofing things comes from a national park ranger talking about the difficulty of designing a bear-proof garbage can. He said “There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.”
Lmao, yeah… You can make a can so secured a bear definitely won’t get in; but will people go to the effort to use it then?
Definitely some overlap there.
And I think that hits on the truth, which makes this less “iamverysmart”. It’s not that the tourists are dumb, it’s that they’re new and not willing to pay much attention to things like trash can design. 1% of a normal person’s attention presents a lot like a really dumb person.
Is it 1%? Maybe when they first try to open it they’re distracted But when doesn’t open and now they’re concentrating on the problem and still fail, then we have to kinda own up to the fact that a lot of people aren’t smarter than a bear.
I think if they can score 100 on an IQ test, they can figure out any reasonable trash can eventually, assuming the moving parts are visible. Many people would rather just litter.
Yah, that’s possible too. But I can’t say I’d figure anyone that litters is much smarter than a bear either.
Ecology (or just waste management) is even more complicated and boring than a garbage can.
It’s apathy all the way down.
Stupidity is a moral flaw after all.
100 is the average, implying half the population is lower than that, but otherwise, sure
100 is the average, implying half the population is lower than that
At the risk of pedantry, if 100 is the average (the mean), we’re saying “most people are at 100”. If it were the median, then we’re implying “half are lower than 100”. A subtle, but important difference.
Yup. The ranger did say “stupidest”, I guess, but I feel like at 70 or something you still know to pull on stuff in a few set ways until it moves.
And bears around 130 probably know that too.
i’m not really sure what IQ has to do with this. it was originally designed to measure people’s proficiency in school. it was not designed to be a general measure of intelligence. that was something that was co opted by eugenicists.
here’s a quote from Simon Bidet, the original creator of the IQ test, about his thoughts on the eugenicists using his test:
Finally, when Binet did become aware of the “foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument” he condemned those who with ‘brutal pessimism’ and ‘deplorable verdicts’ were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct.
you can read more about this stuff on his wikipedia page. (the quote is from wikipedia)
even to this day, there is quite a bit of doubt as to how accurately IQ measures “general intelligence”
I know. It’s a shorthand quantitative measure everyone’s familiar with, though, so it’s useful for communicating. Thanks for adding a disclaimer for me.
I’d be pretty distracted by the bear waiting behind me for his go.
I can’t believe this comment chain is this long and no one has pointed out that drunk and stoned humans are terrible at figuring stuff like this out.
You’re not planning for the dumbest human trying in earnest. You’re planning for humans who are tired, distracted and/or chemically altered. A 80 IQ person can figure out a weird trash can eventually if they are trying.
These comments (not just yours) feel misanthropic. I haven’t been to a campsite in ages so I don’t know what sort of trash can puzzlebox we’re talking about, but I work somewhere with alcohol so I can guess what the true issue is.
A bear has time and motivation to keep trying over and over again to get into the garbage. People are generally much less determined to figure it out.
I used to see people charitably, much like you do, until very recently. After witnessing for myself people staring into the sun and injuring themselves after being repeatedly warned, I now realize there are a substantial number of people who simply have rocks clattering around inside their skulls instead of brains
What do you mean? Sun is blocked = no sun rays = not blinded when staring directly. The logic is sound! Just like in programming.
Nobody lives forever. Seeing the eclipse with your own naked eyes, even for one second, is something you’ll never be able to do again before you’re dead and there’s no chances left. Think of it as a spiritual experience. People run across hot coals for spirituality and you aren’t here scolding them. Nobody posting screenshots of google trends for “why do my feet hurt?”*
Warn people not to look directly at an eclipse, yes. But when they do it anyway, at least give them credit for having a reason why.
[*] I will admit, if you look directly at an eclipse and then don’t know why your eyes hurt, you’re pretty dumb.
There’s a pretty big difference between temporary pain and permanent damage though.
Unless you royally fuck up walking on coals you get some pain, fuck up a little and you just get some blisters.
Glancing at the eclipse while it’s in totality is not going to give you permanent damage. Now if you stare at it until totality is over and the sun is on full blast again…
playing russian roulette is not going to give you permanent damage every 5/6 times
Or if you’re not in the path of totality…. The risk just isn’t worth it.
Let’s just not look up at the bright thing in the sky that can cause permanent damage at any given time.
…and ignore one of the coolest things there is to see on the sky
The partial eclipse is nothing special. Any given location gets one every few years or so.
Totality is the really neat and special thing, and it isn’t damaging to your eyes. (assuming you don’t pre-empt or overshoot the timing)
If I had someone run through hot coals I would scold them, sure. Much like for being angry about others not believing in zombie carpenters or letting quacks give their kids overpriced sugar pills. But that’s jot the context right now, is it?
This reminds me of that poster in my highschool chem lab:
Same with shooting without eye/ear pro. I dunno about other folks but I use my eyes and ears a lot, and I’d hate to miss out on music and color the rest of my life because I thought I would have a transcendent experience blowing them out for a minute. 😬
Being able to see properly is also something they’ll never be able to do again, so, I hope that one second was “spiritual” enough for them lol
You know that you can look directly at an eclipse and not immediately go blind, right? That’s also true of the naked sun in the sky, btw. I’d hate to think you were here to scold people without even understanding what the danger actually is.
Being able to see properly
immediately go blind
You’re immediately taking the argument to the extreme. You won’t immediately go blind, but it will damage your retina in ways you sometimes don’t notice because the brain compensates for it. It happened to my uncle when he was a welder, he had a second blind spot where he couldn’t see sharply, but it didn’t really affect his quality of life.
Eclipses happen every year like clockwork (it basically is clockwork, but on a huge scale). Eclipse seasons are spring and fall, around the equinoxes. You could very easily fly to see a total eclipse every couple years if you want to, because we know when they are going to happen and where will have totality - it’s very routine stuff. There’s literally nothing special at all about the one that just happened, except that a lot of people haven’t seen one before because it hasn’t happened -at that location- in a time.
So no, absolutely not something you’ll never get a chance to see again, tho you won’t be able if you go blind like a fucking moron.
Total eclipses aren’t rare, but them being in an accessible location and not just over some random place in the ocean is. I looked this up the other day, and any one particular location on Earth will see a total eclipse once every 350 years or so.
Except they aren’t just visible from a single location, so almost every time they are over an accessible place on land. Not for the whole thing, sure, but visible all the same.
This might be helpful for reference. It’s maps of where the next 50 years worth of total eclipses fall. The first one that isn’t really visible by people is 2039 in Antarctica. There’s a few like that. Other than that, there’s at least an island you could go to for it, and see one every few years. Eclipses being totally unavailable to view is actually far more rare than seeing one :)
There was a solar eclipse when I was in grade six. One of my classmates was riding his bike home, and was stupidly looking at the eclipse, and got hit by a car. The irony.
So you’re somewhere between 18 and 58 than
Ladies and gentlemen, we gottem.
Omg that’s so messed up but so incredible haha, was he okay after?
It was pretty bad. He missed a lot of school. I think he ended up repeating grade six. I never saw him much after that, but I did hear that he got married to another person I went to school with eventually, so presumably his life wasn’t ruined or anything.
I’m curious if he was okay before.
Holy shit this. And not even “educated” people. Where I work is about half degree holding engineers… many of these engineers were seen outside staring at the partial eclipse Monday.
Sounds like your typical engineer. I passed fluid dynamics, I deserve to look at the big ball of plasma.
My eyes haven’t hurt this bad since studying for differential equations theory… Have I told you I’m an engineer?
“Pfff I have a master’s degree I know what I’m doing”
Congratulations! You’ve leveled up in the game of life.
I genuinely had someone stop and ask me why you can’t see the moon during an eclipse because “it’s got light in it right”.
They’re soon to replace our HR manager.
A solar or lunar eclipse?
The solar eclipse from Monday.
There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.
They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.
I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.
It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.
Answer: Light travels in straight lines* and the moon is roughly an opaque sphere. Maybe you could see it with earthshine, but I get the impression the corona is still much brighter.
I’ve heard dumber.
I’ve seen people carelessly throw away their garbage right next to garbage bins, because they couldn’t be bothered to get a little closer or aim.
The bear has more determination, because it has an incentive to get to the tasty, high calorie food that doesn’t require the energy expenditure of chasing it down and tearing it apart. Throwing away garbage into a designated container on the other hand is a chore that some people believe they can skip, because they are the sole protagonists in their own stupid little world.
Can you put your computer in a bear proof garbage can?
You could, but who is worried a bear will use their computer?
The QA engineer obviously.
I once deleted system32…That’s when I began calling the shots.
The closest I ever got to this story was working help desk in 1996. A user called up saying they had deleted the Internet.
Took me a while to understand he dragged “the Internet” to the recycle bin on the desktop.
There was actually a german ad about this quite some time ago: a grandma did this, then called her grandson “i think i just deleted the internet”.
How the ad continued? No clue.
What it was advertising? No clue.
Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.
Yes! I remember this happening a lot, and I could never really truly understand the thought process behind it! But the thing is, this is still happening today, just in different context, and it’s still equally as baffling!
It just means that they called their browser “the internet” right? Or am I missing something here?
I have a vague memory of the browser icon having the name “Internet” back in the day. Or maybe it was the dial-up icon. Might be that?
The original “Internet Explorer” icon was a globe and magnifying glass, with the text “The Internet,” underneath
It was an actual icon:
(found the image here https://mastodon.social/@benjedwards/11031604817437112)
I don’t remember what it did though. I think it wasn’t the browser, and I have a vague memory it wasn’t for dial up either, but my memory’s shit so I personally wouldn’t trust me on that
It was Internet Explorer. But, what was probably confusing about it was that anything that required Internet access would start up the program that dialed the modem and connected to the Internet. So, clicking on the icon would eventually launch the browser, but first it would launch the dial-up program, which would take about 30s to connect.
As an aside, it really grates to see how Microsoft called their browser “The Internet”. And that’s the least dastardly thing they did that let them use their monopoly on operating systems to destroy Netscape.
If they crashed the computer irrecoverably did they have to throw away the computer after?
Yes I believe they dragged it to the wastebasket
Thanks for the clarification - it makes sense now.
I’m probably missing a joke here, but irrecoverably as in they most likely needed another computer to fix it: In this case, create a new startup floppy disk - there was no hard drive, after all.
Why can’t you just take the hard drive out of the garbage and reinstall?
The computer is inaccessible, and if you did that, the best way to fix it, while also avoiding any other potential issues stemming from that, is just to reinstall the thing.
The beepy thing, the brrr-brr thing or the flashy thing?
The box what goes bang if you poke it wrong.
They then used an even larger mouse to drag the actual computer to the garbage bin.
The garbage bin then caught fire.
This is the origin of the dumpster fire meme.
A capybara or was it a smaller mouse then that?
I’m a good enough software engineer that this isn’t true. I bet I get paid a lot more than you. 😎
(The above statement is not a truthful statement.)
I would be absolutely amazing at this job, I do this naturally, I am inescapably an agent of chaos.
The problem there is that you have to know exactly what you’ve done to mess it up in order to fix the bug, and when I fuck up my system, I usually have no idea what I did.
You could just blame the devs for incomplete logging.
It can be a good job if you go for a lead position. Then you’re designing tests basically.
I work in QA, my colleague is exactly this guy. Breaks everything without even trying. Doesn’t even have much of an IT background, but man he’s good at breaking things.
If you ever think “an actual human couldn’t possibly click that fast”, you are wrong. Debounce your critical actions.
It doesn’t matter if a human can’t, some idiot is going to open an autoclicker at 1000cps and break it
I promise you I have done exactly that, i had an auto clicker bound to my space bar and was to lazy to click and would just hold the space bar down when I knew that I was going to click a bunch of gui buttons.(which I though wouldnt be problem) Quickly learned some programs don’t like it at all. Lol
What would you do when you needed to type a space?
Love the extra work you went through in order to not have to click the mouse button. :p
Humans are wild.
I didn’t have to work on it for just to not click through ui menus, I just had my autoclicker enabled from some reason(likely game) and just randomly thought, “I’ll use the autoclick, lol” and had some interesting stuff happen. It was entertaining and nothing about being practical.
I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).
The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.
What the fuck was going on?
In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.
This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.
My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.
The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn’t have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn’t need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they’d just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.
The trouble was that the pilots couldn’t estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.
That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.
Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that “pulling back” is slightly pulling towards the pilot’s body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.
Id hardly call that a user fucking things up, that’s not even good on paper. Those are a retarded pair of things to have next to one another regardless of any coloring on them. Especially with the same handles
I’m not a fighter pilot, but when I think “ejection”, can’t imagine anything but a high-stress situation where the pilot doesn’t have time to figure out which is the ejection lever. Imagine a real emergency where the pilot grabs the wrong lever, gently slides back with the seat, and then fucking dies on impact.
“Gently slides back” 😂
I’m so glad you can automate QA jobs
Automated tests are cool, but they definitely aren’t a panacea in place of humans
As a QA, ha! Good luck.
Why
don’t need an extra guy
You sound like an asshole to work with.
Extra guys have brains that automation scripts don’t though
what about the guy you need to maintain your test scripts.
the average developers doesn’t have enough of a test head to do a full end to end test suite
I hadn’t heard the Mac story before. I wonder if it’s legit, as I don’t think the Mac, or the Lisa before it, ever had the equivalent of a My Computer icon. Disks appear directly on the desktop; dragging a disk to the trash can ejects it if its removable media, and the only type of disk the original Mac had was a 400KB single-sided 3.5” floppy drive.
When I started working in the late 90s early 00s, every company had their own It-department. These days it’s just some consultant or subscription to another company offering their consultants to do specific tasks.
This thread reminds me of why having an IT department makes good sense financially - today.
You can add up all the salaries, equipment and training costs and it’ll still be cheaper than wasting time and money in meetings with consultants trying to either explain the task or moan about pricing.
Shit doesn’t work, because they aren’t paid to make shit work.
I can make code that works for me and I can make code that works for you. The price is different, but you also need to know what you actually want it to do, and I don’t know how much money you are willing to sacrifice for us both fumbling around in that equation.
“Look how much
money we can saveproductivity we can eliminate by outsourcing IT!”One could, indeed, argue that consulting firms make their bread and butter by not having things work but fixed temporarily.