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from the if-manuals-are-for-sissies,-who-are-automatics-for? dept.
Lancelot Braithwaite cannot get through my visit without bursting forth a mantra that once served him and thousands of consumers well: “Read the frickin’ instruction manual!” he bellows. “And don’t throw it out unless you’re pretty good at memorizing it!” Never mind that products—from iPhones to Facebook—have made manuals into curious artifacts of a distant era. That era is alive if not well in Braithwaite’s smokey, cramped one-bedroom on West 14th Street.
Before tech product reviewers were brand names, there was Braithwaite, thundering his wisdom and geekery from publications that now exist only in yellowing copies. It was a time when the best critics were so familiar with technical specifications that their knowledge rivaled the engineers who built the products. And none were as omnipresent or as savvy as Braithwaite, who even served on industry standards committees.
Manuals are for sissies.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crafoo on Tuesday November 07 2017, @05:32PM (14 children)
I disagree completely that products without manuals are desirable.
Kitchen knives should have manuals.
What type of steel is it? Should it be oiled? Dried immediately after washing? How to wash without damaging blade? How is a nick in the edge repaired? How do you properly sharpen your knife? "Common" usage techniques..that most people don't know. Wacking with the flat on garlic, using the hilt-end properly. chops, rolling cuts. Selecting the right knife for the task.
Old manuals used to be filled with awesome and useful information. The old Turbo C and Turbo Assembler manuals were pretty interesting. Many good tool manuals have invaluable information. I guess people are expected to gargle and youtube around randomly, hoping to stumble upon this stuff now.
Also, an iphone without a manual is ridiculous. There are so many undocumented features, issues, and restrictions. It's a farce, a bad joke, a failure.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday November 07 2017, @06:42PM (1 child)
God I miss the old Borland products, Turbo C, Asm, Pascal. You got a big paper box. The floppies and a pair of giant books that explained more or less everything you needed to know about the products. New products come with some little greetings card sized paper that congratulates you on spending money on their product.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 08 2017, @05:37AM
Two books? You must have bought a very early version of the product.
Turbo Pascal 6.0 came with four books, and Turbo Assembler&Tools with another four.
Some come with extensive manuals as PDF. But that's usually for hardware; software these days usually lacks proper documentation (and Open Source projects far too often think that Doxygen&Co. produce sufficient manuals).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday November 07 2017, @06:58PM (10 children)
This. It's not the job of the knife maker to teach you how to use and take care of a knife. It's not the job of the auto manufacturer to teach you how to drive. It's your job as the owner and user of the device. Manuals are an elective tool that a manufacture may choose to add. And it doesn't always make sense for them to do so.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 07 2017, @07:31PM (8 children)
An automobile manual doesn't teach you to drive, but it does have a LOT of important information. How to operate everything. And a lot of details about servicing requirements. What kind of fuel / oil / other products to use.
So last June, we rented a nice big powerful car for driving in the Colorado mountains. I won't name the guilty party. The in car infotainment system was okay for basic things. But within about an hour or so we wanted to use the navigation system to set our destination. We both took turns (switched drivers) to look through the manual, look through the system's menus, etc. Now we are both tech people, and I would propose that we are not entirely stupid about tech gadgets. We were both stunned by the fact that we couldn't figure it out.
One of the things that made it particularly bad was that it had quite a combination of both touch screen and physical knobs. So you never quite knew what you were to be looking for. Now I suppose you could first memorize the (not small number of) physical buttons and knobs. But geez, we were on vacation.
Of course, it did have gobs of power for passing and climbing mountains. We just used Google Maps on our smartphones. (A Nexus 6P and a Pixel 1) No problem with battery because we could keep phones plugged in to power continuously.
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(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday November 07 2017, @07:45PM (6 children)
For safety reasons they didn't want you spending hours goofing around the UI while the car is in motion so they disabled it until you are parked : P
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday November 07 2017, @08:23PM (1 child)
They also made the maps non-upgradeable and the 5 years old set was the only one that matched the manufacturing cost without cutting into management bonuses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Funny) by MostCynical on Tuesday November 07 2017, @11:39PM
updated maps? Certainly, sir. That will be $65,000. Yes, that is a lot of money, but we do give you a brand new car to go with it."
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 07 2017, @10:26PM (3 children)
So for safety reasons the front passenger cannot use the UI? Then it is useless. The car even has a sensor to detect if there IS a front seat passenger (or dog) present.
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(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday November 08 2017, @03:07AM (2 children)
That seat sensor is probably for the airbag. It's in everyone's best interest if infotainment wasn't tied into the airbag deployment system : )
When smartphones started becoming a lot more popular (~2010 or so?) there was constant buzz about disabling phone features if the phone thought you were driving. That died down for a while but you steal hear about it occasionally. I think it's a matter of time before some gov makes headway into forcing phone manufacturers to force everyone to comply with distracted driving laws.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday November 08 2017, @02:06PM (1 child)
While I do steal here about disabling phone features two prevent distracted driving, I don't sea wye it isn't possible for the seat sensor / airbag system to sinned an indication two other systems over the same bus used fore intra vehicle communications.
Your probably write that eventually will awl be forced to disable phone features while riding in a vehicle. And it still won't prevent distracted driving. Because there are other distractions available.
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(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday November 08 2017, @02:55PM
Yeah, you're right. They could tie the car sensors into it. I think they are afraid to though. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/ [wired.com]
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Tuesday November 07 2017, @09:23PM
There is some car commercial that starts with something like "is that a touch screen?", pointing to a dashboard entertainment system. I always complete that sentence with "that is fucking stupid!".
I wonder how many accidents or deaths have resulted from people futzing with "modern" tactile-less touch screen systems embedded in cars?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2017, @11:43PM
Lawl, your "personal responsibility" has become a hacky way to let other people suffer. You are the devil.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 07 2017, @11:56PM
Ironically, Google is your iPhone manual.
As for kitchen knives and such, I would be in favor of a micro-etched UPC/QR code that would call up documentation online...
🌻🌻 [google.com]