This is Truth

[andrewducker]

Comments

[cybik.livejournal.com]

I said to mum "go to this site and look at the main page!" and wrote down "http://www.xkcd.com" on a handy bit of paper. A minute later she was being confused because the comic didn't have any relevance to her. She'd googled xkcd rather than typing the address in the address bar..

Argh.

[zz]

some people deliberately go to google, then type a www... address into the search box. *sigh*

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

It's even worse than that. On most sites where I've done any casual analysis, one of the main sources of traffic is people doing just that. Ho hum.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

Dad does that. I have explained repeatedly that that's really, really not the way to do it, but he says he's used to it. *sigh*

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I don't think this will work for "not computer people".

It's like that famous AI koan where Tom Knight (of Lisp Machine fame) finds a novice trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by power-cycling it, and berates them, explaining that you can't fix a Lisp machine simply by turning it off and on with no understanding of what is going wrong. He then turns the machine off and on, and it works.

[andrewducker]

Done that. There have been numerous occasions when someone has called me over, said "It doesn't work. See, when I press this button it goes....oh. It's working now."

[pennski.livejournal.com]

That's called IT magic. The great thing is, we get to do it on each other too.

ROFL

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Been there....

[magenta-wings.livejournal.com]

I think you just summed up my job.