bad design
Now here’s an example of extremely bad software design. At work, one of my jobs is to administer the web server that hosts our public website. Most of the work I do by connecting to the server using “Remote Desktop” - a tool from Microsoft that allows me to open a windows session on the remote server. So I see the normal windows desktop. It works very well until I want to log off and close my remote desktop session. To do this I must do the following:
- Click the “Start” button.
- Click “Shut Down…”
- Watch a dialog window entitled “Shut Down Windows” appear and fight off the momentary panic that I might be about to shut down our public web server(!).
- Choose “log off” from the dialog window that pops up.
- Double-check that I haven’t accidentally selected “shut down” from the drop down list of options.
- Click “OK”.
A top notch piece of software design there from Microsoft.
Andy says:
Alternatively just run logoff.exe
I must admit that the start/shutdown is always scary - especially if your mouse is playing up and hitting random things on the screen!
Andy spoke at 02:07 UTC on June 14th, 2006 link
Richard says:
You know, I was just reading Andy’s comment here when I noticed the title of this comments section. At the time, it read “There is one response to bad design” - my mind completed the sentence with, “and it involves a big gun”.
Richard spoke at 20:43 UTC on June 14th, 2006 link