Five bad advertising techniques:
One word or two word sentences
AppWorx: Automate. Integrate. Accelerate.
Macromedia: Different people. Different needs. One solution.
Apple DVD Studio Pro 4: Encode. Author. Burn. Deliver.
A period defines the end of a sentence. A sentence needs a noun and a verb. If you don't have both, it's not a sentence, and therefore, does not need a period. In fact, a period at the end of a single word makes you look stupid.
Where is the verb? Where is the noun?
Definitions
def ? i ? ni ? tion n.
1. Statement conveying fundamental character.
2. Statement of the meaning of a word, phrase, or term, as in a dictionary entry
It is most likely better to assume your customers know what words mean and that if they didn't, they could go look them up on their own. Assuming they don't know them and then putting these ugly definitions on your website or product literature is like saying ?Hey stupid! You're stupid!? You probably shouldn't insult your potential customers.
The only thing that doesn't look silly on is a dictionary.
Introducing
I agree it sounds good on the seller's side. But on the buyer's side its clich? and boring. Since your not selling the product to yourself, maybe you should not introduce your product.
Hiding information
Don't put your information behind a registration system. That's like putting a lock on the door in front of your store. People are just going to walk away. When I have to register, I will either
A. Close the browser tab
B. Use phony contact information.
Both of which will not help you sell your product.
Stock art
Websites that have pictures of people that are smiling, having fun, and laughing are just silly.
How about a screenshot of your application instead? Thanks.
Bea
BEA, the company that sells crazy expensive software for serving web applications, says on their website that their JRockit application is ?Compatible with J2SE 1.4.1? and that it is ?Certified with the latest Java standards?. J2SE 1.4.1 is THREE years old. I emailed them and said that they should correct their web page. They responded:
Hello Charlie, Thank you for contacting BEA Systems. Per the BEA JRockit product manager; JRockit 5.0 tracks the latest release of J2SE 5.0 very, very closely. More updated info: http://dev2dev.bea.com/wljrockit/
Apparently the information on their software that is less than 3 years old is on a secret hidden page.
Windows Certification
These panels are from a Microsoft Certification example exam from their website.
If it's not a plug and play monitor, your going to need to install the driver.
I may be wrong, but if the disk drive, video camera, or printer were self powered, they should work in a bus-powered hub.
What is this question even asking? Which file should you sign? Which file should you edit to point to a signature? Which file should you look at to see which file is not signed? And if it is the later, no one outside Microsoft should be doing this in the first place.
A program that's idle could be using 200 threads, while a single application could be overwhelming the system with a single thread. You would most likely want to know if its more than one thread that's using the CPU, in that case, you will probably want to check the rate of context switches. Microsoft thinks otherwise.
Other miscellaneous pictures and such
Here we see a save dialogue box for MSPaint. As you can clearly see, I am trying to save to ?2.bmp?. Why is it asking if I want to replace ?3.bmp?? I think it is because I clicked on ?3.bmp? in the file list. BUG!
Here is a good error from Computer Associates AllFusion Harvest Change Manager (my, that's a mouth full). Those log files are located on the desktop, not the current working directory or the application directory or the root of the disk. The templog.txt file is empty. The Harvest Session Log (which looks to be like the title of that window behind the error) has some cryptic worthless information. The content of the window with the same title is empty. I called CA and they told me that Visual C++ 6 with the embedded compiler isn't supported. Screw you CA.
Here we see a Sun Microsystem's website. Apparently, if you click download, then cancel the download window or hit back or something, it will prevent you from downloading it again. Their FAQ says this is a security problem. As it stands now, it's a HUGE usability problem. Additionally, they should put the file name before ?was? to make that a complete sentence.