BackupPC - a brief rant

[Ian Malone]

On 23 June 2014 19:43, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23 June 2014 20:33, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>> Tim:
>>>> Why the hell couldn't the computer just have said to set the clock
>>>> manually, since it couldn't manage to do it itself, instead of some
>>>> moronic number code?
>>
>>
>> Liam Proven:
>>> I know this was a rhetorical question, but:
>>>
>>> These days software is expected to be localised into hundreds of
>>> different languages. Until that is done, the programmer does not know
>>> and must not assume what script/alphabet/language/character set an
>>> error might appear in, let alone what words it will contain.
>>
>> That's all well and true, but you'd expect an American english program
>> to have error messages in that language, at least.  Sure, by all means
>> put an easy to copy and paste error code for uses to search for more
>> info it needs it, as well, but put a written message along with it.
>>
>> It's just the sort of moronic thing that we'd come to expect with
>> Winblows.  What could have been an easily user-fixable thing (reset the
>> clock), becomes a service call for average users who don't know how to
>> get past error number x0e4343243 which gives no clue, nor any way to
>> find out what it might mean if you can't do a google search.
>
> Your quoting is... odd.
>
> But no, not really. If you don't leave space for text, you just raise
> a numbered error and another program catches that and replaces the
> number with a message. It's a lot easier to Google a message.
>
> But it's good practice to /avoid/ presenting text errors at the lowest level.
>
> Let's say you have no cut and paste available to you. Could you Google
> this on another computer?
>
> ファイルプログラム読み込み数のモジュールのデコードでエラーを見つけていない。
>
> Now let's assume we were both Japanese. Could we record and search
> accurately for a written sentence in English?
>
> Probably not.
>
> But we could write down 795237975 and search for it...
>

The example is slightly misleading. English is the most widely spoken
language and latin is the most widely used alphabet. You can't copy
kanji or Chinese characters without familiarity with that writing
system. You might be able to copy kana, or other phonetic/syllabic
systems, if you can recognise them as such, but most people outside
Japan are not going to spot that.

It's perfectly feasible in the above example to have returned a number
and a localised interpretation.

Though I'll bet the error doesn't actually mean that the clock is not
set correctly. The usual experience is it'll be something else going
wrong for which the underlying cause is the clock set incorrectly and
anonymous error is being reported that no-one ever expected to get to.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk