Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Difficult to use, especially for an untrained user.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From user + hostile, influenced by user-friendly

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Examples

  • The files are very small in their proprietary format, but that format is otherwise user-hostile, so I convert the files to MP3's, which tend to be 3 or 4 times larger.

    mp3's and lectures, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • That's what I mean by being a user-hostile format.

    mp3's and lectures, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • I'm making a distinction between say, the level of Harper Collins publishers, and their "bosses" at News Corp. The bosses are the ones issuing the fiats, not the publishing professionals--with the possible exception, in my experience, of Random House who have gotten increasingly difficult about DRM and wanted ebooks with any of their content, even if it's a tiny percentage, to be locked down with ridiculous user-hostile and support-hostile DRM.

    Making Light: The "agency model" as I understand it 2010

  • A pox upon whomever it was at Microsucksdonkeyballs Microsoft that decided to release Vista in the horribly under-functional, user-hostile state in which it was not only brought to market, but forced upon those of us who needed to purchase a cheap as opposed to expensive enough to either be a Mac or else come with "downgrade to XP" rights new computer about a year and a half ago.

    Making Light: Open thread 137 2010

  • You may have seen the dreaded user-hostile Google error if your posts were too long.

    Blogger can't seem to handle long comments 2010

  • Lisa Spangenberg, #193: "Random House who have gotten increasingly difficult about DRM and wanted ebooks with any of their content, even if it's a tiny percentage, to be locked down with ridiculous user-hostile and support-hostile DRM"

    Making Light: The "agency model" as I understand it 2010

  • "Referring to versions of OS X by cat names ... seems astoundingly user-hostile."

    Smug Ugly - Anil Dash 2007

  • It's that the names are opaque to the user -- in other words, user-hostile.

    Smug Ugly - Anil Dash 2007

  • (Thanks to Joerg for the image.) [1] Referring to versions of OS X by cat names, when those names appear nowhere in the operating system itself, seems astoundingly user-hostile.

    Smug Ugly - Anil Dash 2007

  • And then there were things that were not errors, but simply the sorts of annoying user-hostile phenomena that are all too familiar: endless dialogue boxes, loud unwanted music, annoying rebooting, cluttered menus, even tough-to-open shrink-wrapped software boxes.

    A Window On Their World 2008

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