On Sunday 28 January 2018 10:55:30 Peter J. Holzer wrote: > On 2018-01-28 15:04:26 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > > I'm seeing this annoying practice more and more often. Even for > > trivial pieces of text, a few lines, people post screenshots instead > > of copying the code. > > > > Where has this meme come from? > > Twitter? You can't send more than 140 characters[1], but you can send > an image, so just put your text in an image to get around pesky size > restrictions. > > But no, our users have done that for much longer than twitter exists. > The typical mail to support doesn't contain an error message in plain > text, not even a screenshot, it contains a word (or excel) file with a > screenshot of the error message (typically scaled down so that the > error message isn't readable any more). > > It reminds me about the old joke about the mathematician making > coffee: He finds an empty cup in the sink, rinses it, puts some ground > coffee and water into the coffee maker, waits for the water to run > through and pours the coffee into the cup. > The next day he wants some coffee again. But there is no cup in the > sink. Instead there is a cup in the cupboard. So he takes the cup from > the cupboard and puts it into the sink. Now he has reduced the problem > to a previously solved problem and proceeds as before. > > Similarly the user sending a wort attachment instead of a plain text > message knows how to take a screenshot, knows how to paste that into > word and knows how to attach a word file to an email. So they combine > those steps. They may or may not know how to copy some text into the > email (to be fair, Windows error messages often cannot be copied), but > it simply doesn't occur to them. > > I used to think that programmers (or techies in general) ought to be > able to write emails in a fashion that makes it easy to extract the > necessary information. I have since been disabused of the notion. > Programmers are just as thoughtless and unable to put themselves into > the recipient's shoes as the general population. > > Oh, and finally there is tools: I switched to Outlook for in-company > mails a year ago (because my boss wants me to top-post and I simply > can't do that if I have a decent editor, but with a crappy program > like Outlook I can) and it is just amazing how time consuming it is to > format a mail containing code examples to be readable. Taking a > screenshot and pasting it into the mail is faster (even though > Outlooks inline image handling is also atrocious). > > > (The day a programmer posts a WAV file of themselves reading their > > code out aloud, is the day I turn my modem off and leave the > > internet forever.) > > When the first MIME RFCs came out, a co-worker predicted that we would > soon get audio-clips as signatures. Thank god he was wrong about that. > > hp > > [1] 280 now.
But by mentioning it, somebody will now do it. The problem will be what the hell do you play it with... -- Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
