Computers are stupid.

So if you're thinking about implementing some auto-correcting functionality in your new shiny feature-packed word processor… don't. Computers are stupid. I am smart. Compared to a computer, I am infinitely smart. That means computers can't automatically correct me. At least, not properly. Automatic corrections will be wrong in 90% of the cases.What you can do though, is hint at me that I've made a booboo, which I can then correct myself! Or I can tell the computer: "Right, I keep making that mistake! You can correct it for me from now on without asking me"

WordPress: Don't automatically change single or double ASCII quotes to Unicode characters unless I ask for it. Especially don't do it when I'm applying the 'literal' style to a piece of text. "Literal" literally means literal. Chances are that I want things I type to appear, well, literally. Programming code might make a good example. I don't think many languages yet understand unicode quotes yet.
Word/Open Office: Don't automatically convert everything I type into something else. If I type "1.", don't assume I want to make a list. I'm not a fucking retard. If I want a list, I'll select my text and bash the 'List' button in the toolbar. Don't automatically upper-case the letter of a new sentence for me. It's a computer, and computers are notoriously bad at lexical analysis or human languages. You see, in Dutch it is required to end an abbreviation with a period. So "i.e." is not the end of a sentence. Don't automatically convert anything for me, please. Please!

Software engineers, at the very least make sure that when I undo one of your automatic conversions, and start typing again not to apply the same automatic correction again! Some simple user-experience testing should have picked up on that.

Honestly, I think mankind was more productive when it was still carving shit on rock faces in caves then it is today with computers. Cavemen inventing fire and wheels and whatnot. People with computers, what do they invent? Shit to solve problems that wouldn't have existed without computers in the first place, that's what. But hey, at least we're leveraging business synergy, right?

<?php

if ($variable != 0) {
  print('aa');
} else {
  print('bb');
}

?>

Let's apply the rules of logic here. $variable is unset, so it is not '0'. Therefor it should print 'aa'.

Wrong.

Let's apply the rules of PHP here. PHP will BLACK BOX MAGIC VOODOO and from that it naturally follows that PHP will print 'bb':

[todsah@host]~$ php ./magic_voodoo.php

Notice: Undefined variable: variable in /home/todsah/magic_voodoo.php on line 3
bb

And that, dear PHP developers, is why warnings and notices in PHP should be removed in favour of errors. At. All. Times. I hate PHP.

Let's see what to do? Ah! Pinball Fantasies! It must have been ages since last I played that. Let's just start by playing the first table. Off we go!

Oh #(*&$% gonna lose my ball, gonna lose it.. gonna…

Thank you Microsoft! After almost 24 years of Windows you still seem to think that we all want to enable 'Sticky Keys' if we press 'shift' 5 times. Thank god they never removed the option to disable this pain in the ass feature!

Rhythmbox: No stop button.

Totem: No stop button.

Qouaouid Libesomeshit: No stop button.

Listen Music Player: No stop button.

FAIL! Lesson: a pause button pauses playback. A stop button stops playback. The difference being that you CAN'T PAUSE A WEB STREAM. Nothing annoys me more than starting playback of an audio stream and having it start with whatever was left in the buffer only to stop after five seconds because it needs to connect to the actual web stream. Fuck. That. Also, I want to be able to start playing a song from the start; a need which the stop and start button nicely took care of. But since a stop button is apparently unnecessary, we now have backwards buttons that don't actually go backwards to the previous song, but restart playing the current song. What the @(#&!? Some media players don't even get that right, and the only way to restart a song is by dragging the progressbar back to the left. Genius!

Stop being such stubborn bastards and just put a stop button in the interface, please!

Why? Probably some crap about being able to avoid input sanitation for rm commands called from shell scripts as root. Wait? Does that make sense? No! Then why? Probably because someone some day might yell "Holy shit! I almost accidentally the whole root! Thank a deity I remembered to add the –preserve-root option instead of the –no-preserve-root option!". We can only hope the monkey next to him will have reproduced the works of Shakespeare by that time.

Anyway, this one day I was doing some work, and I was expecting an important email. So I switch over to Evolution in order to retrieve it. I hit F9… nothing. "What the…? Whatever, I'll just click the Send/Receive button."

Evolution Send/Recieve disabled

To my surprise, the Send/Receive button was disabled. Initially I thought it was because I had some modal dialog box open or something. No such luck. "Maybe", I thought "the send/receive operation failed somehow and now hangs". So I closed Evolution and restarted it. Same thing: Send/Receive button still disabled. This was getting annoying; I really needed that email. I tried closing Evolution again and this time checked the process list to see if Evolution was leaving behind some child process for the Send/Receive function. Nothing.

"Fuck it, I'll reboot my machine, I don't have time for this". Man, I gotta tell ya, it felt like the good old windows days all over again! Rebooting to fix a problem — pathetic. The machine comes back up, I start Evolution, and STILL the button is disabled!

Finally I give up trying to figure it out on my own, and decide to Google for the answer: Google: evolution+send+receive+greyed+out. It even turned up as a "Google Suggests" suggestion in the drop-down.

Results 1 - 10 of about 115,000 for evolution send receive greyed out.

Hundred and fifteen-thousand results. Guess I'm not the only one having this problem.
Can you guess what the problem was? Here's a little hint:

What a useful feature!

Really Evolution? Really?? I'm working in Offline mode?!

Here's a tip. If you're gonna add a useless feature to your software that does absolutely NOTHING (and it really does nothing) other than annoy users, at least:

• make sure you show the user a message that (s)he's now working in offline mode.
• tell the user what the consequences of working offline are.
• test it before shipping it (My wireless connection had already come back online hours before).
• kill yourself.

Offline mode has to be, without a doubt, the most useless annoying feature I've ever seen in a program. There is no need for it at all. It does nothing, except for annoying me.

Update: Cris spotted something in the File menu in the picture above: the 'Download Messages for Offline Usage' isn't greyed out. How am I gonna download a message for offline usage if I'm not even online? Plus, all these messages are already offline, since I've only got Local storage mail accounts (I retrieve my email with fetchmail, after which I have to hit the Send/Receive to fetch the mail from /var/spool/mail/fboender). Consistancy motherfucker, do you speak it?