Have you ever found something really badly designed? Something which obscurity of its functions makes it hard to understand its use? Something almost unusable to a point it would drive you mad using it too often? Perhaps, a fool's design? Then you have come to the right place. Post your findings here and help making the world a saner place.
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2013-07-31 03:39 »

Windows 8 explained with one picture.

MADE BY FOOLS!
:lol: :lol: :lol:

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CharlotteTheHarlot

2013-08-04 02:55 »

Yes, Kill it with fire and then nuke it from orbit!
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CharlotteTheHarlot

2013-08-04 11:28 »

... It's the only way to be sure!

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2013-08-21 10:37 »

Speaking of Windows 8 "Start screen". Saw a very interesting and true comment on Slashdot. The Start screen creates a "Doorway amnesia" every time you click on it.

The problem here is that while you're typing, the context of the currently open applications' windows disappears. It's like the effect of amnesia while going through a doorway [scientificamerican.com]. It'd be fine if the Start Screen were semi-transparent, but because it's opaque and full-screen, it forces a subconscious context switch. And that's why I still install Classic Shell, so that the search-by-name box doesn't distract me by covering everything.

The following is a very interesting read which the clueless fools at Microsoft most probably did never read:

Why walking through a doorway makes you forget

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The French poet Paul Valéry once said, "The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best." In that spirit, consider a situation many of us will find we know too well: You're sitting at your desk in your office at home. Digging for something under a stack of papers, you find a dirty coffee mug that's been there so long it's eligible for carbon dating. Better wash it. You pick up the mug, walk out the door of your office, and head toward the kitchen. By the time you get to the kitchen, though, you've forgotten why you stood up in the first place, and you wander back to your office, feeling a little confused-until you look down and see the cup.

So there's the thing we know best: The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do. We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn't pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn't important enough. But a "completely different" idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame. The first part of their paper's title sums it up: "Walking through doorways causes forgetting."

Gabriel Radvansky, Sabine Krawietz and Andrea Tamplin seated participants in front of a computer screen running a video game in which they could move around using the arrow keys. In the game, they would walk up to a table with a colored geometric solid sitting on it. Their task was to pick up the object and take it to another table, where they would put the object down and pick up a new one. Whichever object they were currently carrying was invisible to them, as if it were in a virtual backpack.

Sometimes, to get to the next object the participant simply walked across the room. Other times, they had to walk the same distance, but through a door into a new room. From time to time, the researchers gave them a pop quiz, asking which object was currently in their backpack. The quiz was timed so that when they walked through a doorway, they were tested right afterwards. As the title said, walking through doorways caused forgetting: Their responses were both slower and less accurate when they'd walked through a doorway into a new room than when they'd walked the same distance within the same room.

This "doorway effect" appears to be quite general. It doesn't seem to matter, for instance, whether the virtual environments are displayed on a 66" flat screen or a 17" CRT. In one study, Radvansky and his colleagues tested the doorway effect in real rooms in their lab. Participants traversed a real-world environment, carrying physical objects and setting them down on actual tables. The objects were carried in shoeboxes to keep participants from peeking during the quizzes, but otherwise the procedure was more or less the same as in virtual reality. Sure enough, the doorway effect revealed itself: Memory was worse after passing through a doorway than after walking the same distance within a single room.

Is it walking through the doorway that causes the forgetting, or is it that remembering is easier in the room in which you originally took in the information? Psychologists have known for a while that memory works best when the context during testing matches the context during learning; this is an example of what is called the encoding specificity principle. But the third experiment of the Notre Dame study shows that it's not just the mismatching context driving the doorway effect. In this experiment (run in VR), participants sometimes picked up an object, walked through a door, and then walked through a second door that brought them either to a new room or back to the first room. If matching the context is what counts, then walking back to the old room should boost recall. It did not.

The doorway effect suggests that there's more to the remembering than just what you paid attention to, when it happened, and how hard you tried. Instead, some forms of memory seem to be optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff. Radvansky and colleagues call this sort of memory representation an "event model," and propose that walking through a doorway is a good time to purge your event models because whatever happened in the old room is likely to become less relevant now that you have changed venues. That thing in the box? Oh, that's from what I was doing before I got here; we can forget all about that. Other changes may induce a purge as well: A friend knocks on the door, you finish the task you were working on, or your computer battery runs down and you have to plug in to recharge.

Why would we have a memory system set up to forget things as soon as we finish one thing and move on to another? Because we can't keep everything ready-to-hand, and most of the time the system functions beautifully. It's the failures of the system-and data from the lab-that give us a completely new idea of how the system works.

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2013-08-21 20:55 »

...and more:

Users keep reporting blurry text in Windows 8 and 8.1.

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Of course, the morons at for example Channel 9 kept denying all this when I used to bitch about it. This blurry text started in WPF ( Windows Presentation Foundation ) applications and that's the reason I never touched WPF. As soon as I realized this is the kind of text I would be exposing my users' eyes to, WPF went off the table as a development platform.

I almost returned my new computer to Dell. With a 24 in. monitor, the fuzzy font problem is very noticible. Dell tech support updated my video card driver no avail. Then their tech fellow came to my house and changed the video card, again to no avail. He did notice the problem and told me I should switch to an Apple computer. The Dell tech people said they are going to report the problem to Microsoft, but I'm not optimistic. The press has reported that the sales of Dell computers are down significantly because of Win 8. I suspect that the fuzzy font problem is being kept quiet so as not to hurt sales further. So Microsoft has managed to delived (sic) low-def graphics in a high def world. Management has become profoundly unreponsive (sic) and will continue to pay the price.

I've had this problem since Windows 8 beta and I figured the 8.1 preview would finally fix this issue! I was wrong. Still looks awful, even with the nvidia 8.1 beta drivers, tweaking cleartype, etc - it all looks horrible. I can't believe this is still not fixed, it's literally awful, especially in IE 10/11.

Bottom line is, the motherfucking idiot at Microsoft who approved all this AND kept it from WPF into Windows 8 and now Windows 8 is of course, a complete fool.

Perhaps some employees at Microsoft are paid by Google or others to destroy Microsoft one little piece at a time? :lol: :P :lol:

The most absurd part is how people DEFEND this blurry text and claim that it is in fact NOT blurry! LOL!

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