Seg fault in kernel module, and your mama's so fat…

By Ryan Block

It seems that students polled at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan take error messages pretty personally.
According to the study, if the message doesn't sound like an apology or an attempt to blame the error on the computer,
users will become offended or insulted (or at least they won't appreciate the experience as much).  Jonathan Klein
(who works for iRobot, makers of the Roomba) even goes so far as to suggest text fields for the user to interact with the error messages and take out their frustration. As if computers don't already do enough, now they're expected to kiss our feet and take our punches when we can't properly configure the httpd.conf file? Instead, maybe they should just start to output "SERENITY NOW!" and some debug info in small print.

[Via TechDirt]

Recommended