A typical stupid message in Microsoft Outlook 2000:
How many months in a year have < 29 days? In the mind of a Microsoft developer "several months".....
When installing Office 2000 recently, I discovered that Microsoft's developers still haven't learned how to write a meaningful error message:
The message is entirely unhelpful, giving no indication of what the error is, what to do to solve it, or even the location of an error log if one existed. Welcome to Office2000!
This is a bizarre message from Microsoft's Outlook Express 5.0:
I was using Microsoft Outlook Express 5 and I went into the Deleted Items. To my surprise I found a message stating that there were no items in the Deleted Items folder and do I want OE to delete something. What sort of a message is that?!? Why would I want OE to delete a randomly-selected piece of mail? I didn't try and find out what it would delete, I just pressed No immediately!
An anonymous visitor sent in this image from Milltronics' Dolphin Plus, a configuration package for industrial level and flow sensors:
So find the right tab....
This image of a particularly meaningful message from Netzip. This seems to be very unexpectected... What to do now? I don't know, do you?
I found out that this message appears when you download a file with te same name that already exist and is already open..... In the mind of an developer is this message too difficult to explain.
This image of a particularly meaningful message from Microsoft's Access. Hmmm...what would you do?
I have long held the belief that poorly designed development tools and training are among the primary contributors of poorly designed user interfaces. The help file for Microsoft's Access provides such an example. In the discussion of formatted message boxes, Microsoft suggests that the developer "enter the following in the message argument: Wrong button!@That button does not work.@Try another." The direct result is as follows:
The indirect result is that would-be developers are taught that tossing such messages at the user is an appropriate design strategy. It is not.
This useless error message came across in Microsoft's Data Link application.
The following message was discovered while using Microsoft's Visual Fox Pro 3.0
I suppose there is something messed up in the environment to generate the error, which occurred when I tried to display my OLE Controls library in Visual FoxPro 3.0. Anyhow, one might wonder how we are expected to close the drive door on a partition.
We came across this informative error message in Microsoft's Visual Basic 5.0 recently. Since the message provides no indication as to the problem nor its cause, we decided to accept Microsoft's offer for assistance. After pressing the Help button, we were rewarded with the following insight:
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 (usually from an Application Interface call) and is displayed in hexadecimal and decimal format.
In other words:
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.
What the help file left out was the solution: reboot windows, again.
Microsoft's Notepad, even after some ... oh, about 7 years of development and re-release, still has a problem with handling files greater than 32,000 bytes. In this particular example, Notepad allowed the user to open the file for editing, but upon the first editing operation, promptly displayed the message shown above.
The message is patently false. The problem is not that the computer does not have enough available memory; you could quit (and remove for that matter) every application on your computer and Notepad would still say you don't have enough memory. The problem is that Notepad itself cannot deal with files that are above an arbitrary size, due to an elementary and insufficient programming model, and Microsoft's reluctance to update this very popular tool.
This is an image of a message generated by Microsoft Excel. We not sure which is more shameful, the confusing options, or the fact that Microsoft's technical support claimed it was due to an "improper installation."
We came across this confidence-inspiring message in several areas of Microsoft's Visual Basic 5.0. The first time it appeared, we took a chance and hit the OK button, which only had the effect of displaying the same message again. Clicking the Cancel button cleared the message and the program proceeded apparently as it should.
This message is generated by the SQL Windows development environment. It arises when the developer has typed an incorrect statement while writing a program. The available responses are meaningless: what does 'Yes' do - retain the incorrect statement?
The really unfortunate aspect of these error messages is that programmers learn primarily through example. When the programming environment itself generates poor messages, and the sample programs contain poor messages, is it any wonder that the programmers will tend to write poor messages in their future applications?
This message in a logging is very meaningfull: There is an error. And what kind of error? This program helps: It is an Unspecified error - number 2147220403. It arises when the developer has typed an incorrect fieldname while writing a query program. Or is it a problem with unexpected data or key-field? We will never know: The available information is completely meaningless. So it helps when you have a logging, then you know exactly what went wrong.....
This message seems to be a message of Microsoft Internet Explorer, but it is a "joke" from a website developer. This message appears when someone wants to "cut and paste" the content of an Dutch html-page with his right mouse button.... In fact it is a javascript that gives an alert.