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On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 12:40:06PM -0500, Phil!Gregory wrote: > Dialog boxes are pretty simple creatures. They have some text and some > buttons. Sometimes the text asks you to make a decision, and press > different buttons based on your decision. Sometimes the labels on the > buttons bear *no* resemblance to the actions they perform. > > I'm not talking about buttons that outright lie; fortunately, they're > pretty rare. But in Windows, it's very easy to create dialog boxes with > "standard" buttons, like "Yes", "No", "OK", and "Cancel". This leads to > error messages like "The program has died unexpectedly. Press OK to quit > and Cancel to debug." Oh, yes, "Cancel" is so much like "debug" in > meaning. Thanks, Microsoft. (Yes, this was a Windows 2000 error.) Two complete asides here. Spaceward Ho! has an Armageddon option to destroy half the universe during a game. In older versions the dialog was something like this: ------------------------------ | Are you sure you want to | | destroy the universe? | | | | [Unsure] [Not Unsure] | ------------------------------ Unfortunately, they changed the armageddon rules in the latest versions so that dialog is gone. :( The other is something MJD was telling me about after YAPC in St. Louis. It was a solution for the problem of user confusion where they hit [No] but they meant to hit [Yes]. --------------------------------------------------------- | Would you like to delete your hard drive? | | | | [Yes] [No] [Yes but I mean No] [No but I mean Yes] | --------------------------------------------------------- -- Michael G Schwern schwern@xxxxx.xxx http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ If it's stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid.
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