Clippy designer was too embarrassed to include him in his portfolio Theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer mused words from the Bhagavad Gita following the first detonation of an atomic bomb: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." The creator of Clippy, on the other hand, felt some embarrassment when he found that Microsoft had shipped the character with Office 97 on Windows. …
For those desperate for a Cippy fix
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/clippy-gets-smarter-with-raspberry-pi-and-chatgpt/
The ending of that R'Pi article just begs for an update:
> David is hoping to upgrade it by introducing a machine learning vision model so Whiskers can look at a handful of different ingredients and give you ideas for dishes you can make using what you have.
"Beat the eggs until stiff then slowly add three tablespoons of Marmite. Fold in 4 ounces of baking powder and one level teaspoon of flour[1]. Layer over the chopped beetroot[2], top with toast and leave to set in the fridge. Serve with custard. Feeds 4."
[1] the words are stochastically related and hence "all the right words", but as a wise man once said, "not necessarily in the right order, I'll grant you that."
[2] however, the beetroot was just an hallucination by the LLM; probably a blessing in disguise.
Clippy is the poster child for Microsoft's preoccupation with helpful hints that...aren't.
e.g.: their current fascination with popup green or blue boxes touting some obscure feature that you just *have* to try...or dismiss the box by clicking "got it", before you can continue with what you were trying to do before the damn box popped up.
"Clippy is the poster child for Microsoft's preoccupation with helpful hints that...aren't."
Not only that apparently...
"People are very receptive to it and now, you know, nobody hates Clippy now."
Really? Nobody? So let's reflect on what that says about "the intelligence levels of the young generation"?
(It looks like your reaching for some medication helping you to prevent a stroke. Do you need some help with that?)
With most things it was registry hacks back then maybe some gpo if you had workstation. I think I was able to use tools to modify settings on 98 as well I think perhaps sysinternals was around in the mid-late 90s. I don't know that was many moons ago I may be remembering incorrectly.
Did I use Clippy on my desktop? No. The users however were quite happy given they had moved from old mac breadboxes with very little functionality (it was during a period of apple stagnation). I would change the character represented based on the user PC I was building... dog, cat, wizard, etc. Most of the users back then were very new to PCs and welcomed the help.
Clippy was the first Microsoft Annoyance that had me screaming "oh just FUCK OFF!" across the office because it was an extra unwanted/unrequested step I needed to dismiss whilst getting on with the work.
Windows system messages always popping up in the bottom right hand corner of the screen right where I'm trying to scroll is Clippy's legacy.
For old times' sake, then: "FUCK OFF, Clippy!"
All that has changed in all these years is the wording. "F*** off Clippy" has changed to "F*** off Microsoft", "F*** off Outlook", "F*** off Edge", and of course "F*** off Teams you misbegotten piece of arse gravy scraped from the fetid anus of Satans favourite Hell-Slug!". No, in case you hadn't guessed I am not a fan of Teams and it's pathetic attempts to be the only piece of software you will ever need. <LOL>
"The character's job was to pre-empt what the user was attempting to do and assist them."
Assist them??? Irritate, infuriate, prevent them, yes. Assist not so much.
That said, the graphics guy who designed the artwork needn't be embarrassed - it wasn't his fault that Microsoft used it to torment captive users.
I came here to say just that. The design of Clippy was very good - a bit whimsical, came across as friendly, I quite liked the *character*. Kudos to the graphics guy. However, Microsoft deciding to make him pop up and offer "help" by default was a bad move, made far worse by the "help" typically being more harmful than the user stumbling through the work themselves. The still enduring hatred of Clippy is due to what Microsoft programmed him to do, not to his appearance.
Same I mean the deign is fun and the idea is great, it was just a terrible implant and function at that time being too simple but honestly that felt like most software that had help buttons. There pretty useless.
Like how it ask if you needed help for everything and every minute
Chat powered ai clippy would work though
"And a lot of that was due to Microsoft's view that they know better than the user what the user is wanting to do."
And that attitude has never gone away. It's grown. After all, we aren't allowed to change how Windows looks any more, let alone the "helpful" pop-ups and messages we still get interrupted with all the time.
The first time Clippy showed up I was peeved and looked for the off button. If there had been one that would have been the end of it, but he kept coming back. Each time my dislike grew stronger but was largely forgotten when I became a penguin - until something far worse reared its ugly head:
KDE 4 included desktop search - indexing every file on the hard disk so you could find a file from its contents. For me this was a solved problem. By using a consistent naming scheme and a memorable directory structure I can find any file I create or decide to keep (even pictures that contain no indexable text). The first thing I did was disable desktop search entirely, exclude the disks full of videos and told it not to index video files. The next thing desktop search did was start up four indexing processes - that way some processes could make progress while the others were waiting for the head to move across the disk. As it was indexing an SSD on a single CPU system the machine effectively locked up. Switching to a text console took ages and diagnosing the problem was slow work. A few kills later and I could get back to what I was doing. The next day I found the system was slow but not horribly so because desktop search was indexing the video files on the video disks. It obviously thought it could complete the index at night while I wasn't looking. I am not sure if the option was available at the time but these days you can use madvise or posix_madvise to tell the kernel that you are reading a file once and will not be using it again so there is no point keeping a copy in memory. Of course desktop search did not do this so everything else got paged out so desktop search could use almost all the memory as cache. For years afterwards people would 'fix' the 'computer is slow first thing in the morning' problem by disabling swap. (Didn't do any good. As the kernel could not page out data to swap space it forgot about executables and shared libraries instead - it could always re-read them when needed.)
My dislike of Clippy pales in comparison to the seething hatred I remember for desktop search. I giant thank you to all the contributors to XFCE.
Note to PFYs: You may think you marvellous feature will be essential for everyone and they will love you forever when you make it default behaviour. The first thing you must always do is create an off switch (or better still an on switch). The third thing you must do is make certain the off switch works. Without those steps you could be famous for the next Clippy.
Oh Dear Flippin' $Diety ... Akonadi and Nepomuk. [Deletes explicitives.]
Everything you say about it is true. I upgraded to the new Kubuntu LTS that had it baked in by default and my Screaming Machine was sudddenly out of RAM/SWAP and I/O Bound like The Gimp over there.
Note: I too use a directory structure that is comprehensive and has served me more or less for more than two decades.
But Wait! There's More. I used Kontact which now Relied on Akonadi. So attach it to your CalDAV and it will index all those (My CallLg Calender hurts thiings, otherwise sure, why not), and Tasks, And Notes, Contacts was clever and all that worked across a ton of Apps and Widgets... but then when you Start attaching IMAP it indexes EFFING EVERYTHING! (Including but not limited to Everything...metadata in Attachments ... ALL THE THINGS!!!)
I also have a comprehensive IMAP Directory Structure. It really shouldn't be indexed. Now I'm kicking the crap out of my IMAP serrver (mine, fortunately), and chewing up All The Bandwidths (because it would cheerfully hit all your mailboxes at the same time. And if I recall, each Resource Connector had it's very own process that kind of did whatever it wanted whenever it wanted).
I broke a few Starbucks networks in those days just opening my PIM. "Sorry mates, no cat photos for the next few minutes, video is right out."
Oh! And it had it's OWN MySQL server instead of using the one In Chain (bad design decision presumably so they wouldn't actually have to keep up with M/SQLDB and savee them some updates ... first clue something is bad). [Amarok, the cool media player at the time, had the same problem, but IT you could move into a "Real" MySQL/Maria Instance ... why not just install a Real Instance in the first damned place and use it?].
Someone aove said you could kill Clippy with a RegEdit (pun unintended) and that was actually the solution. Saved much sanity and it was like a string and a boolean setting or three. Easy enough.
The HELLSCAPE that was turning off Akonadi and Nepomuk. I had to go back to Thunderbird and dump Kontact just to shed that Resource Murderer.
"sudo apt-get uninstall akonadi" seriously made KDE yell and scream that you were murdering it (hint, the opposite was happening), and the crap version of MySQL griped).
I run Linux so I Don't t have to clean out my New Build. I have to ADD stuff I want. This is The Way.
I hated Akonadi. And I hated all the bugs in Thunderbird over the years (new version works flawlessly for my needs) but persevered because the alternative was worse. Kontact isn't the default PIM anymore because KDE people said, "Uhhhhh, you turned my $4,000USD machine into an abacus, If I wanted that I'd run the latest Windows."
I already used the Gimp Icon, but here's a beer as well my friend.
Comic Sans is a perfectly cromulent typeface. Its problem is being used far, far too often when the text writer wants to give a "whimsical" feeling to something. Which is all the time. Fire drill instructions in Comic Sans, hazardous chemicals disposal instructions in Comic Sans, I once saw a funeral notice in Comic Sans.
This is not the fault of the typeface. As usual around these parts, it's user error.
Hm. I was still young enough to sort of enjoy Bob and Clippy (for about 15 minutes - then the novelty wore off). It did have potential. I'd say that the actual character was sort of lovable, teh product not so much. Unfortuantely the unhelpfulness of the help has persisted. I regularly come across some error message with a number (that one cannot look up in any MS help / documentation) and a text that is half assed (and that you cannot look up in any MS help or doc), and that is only remotely related to the actual problem (once you google the message or the number), and even then the message is so unspecific that you won't find anything helpful.
.. What's worse is when the user comes to you, the admin, with the good old "I ran into this error, here's the screen capture of it" and it's literally a picture taken on a potato grade cell phone with a dirty lens that's also not quite in focus so you can't make heads or tails out of it other than "CORRALLATION ID: [unreadable]" and are expected to pull a scotty and pull the solution out of your arse.
My response to that nonsense is "copy/paste the error into the ticket rather than a screen shot, so I can copy/paste it into a google window and maybe figure out WTF was going on to begin with".
Especially since the correlation IDs are only helpful if you have a support ticket open already and are troubleshooting things, so that the support agent can poke through the logs looking for that ID and tell you "oh yeah, it's because the user that error is being shown to doesn't have access to that page".
(I like 403 FORBIDDEN- it's short, sweet, and tells you EXACTLY what the problem is in under 10 seconds as opposed to spending three hours with a support agent and the user via multiple remote support windows for the Same. Exact. Solution.)
(sorry, I might be a little triggered by unhelpful error messages. Where'd I put my dried-frog pills?)
"The most notorious example being: "It looks like you're writing a letter? Would you like help?" This was followed by a number of options: "Get help with writing the letter"; "Just type the letter without help"; and "Don't show me this tip again"."
If Clippy was being introduced now, there's no way that last option would be there - it would be "remind me again later" or similar...
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