ID: 17050
Tech
Tech Support: "I need you to right-click on the Open Desktop."
Customer: "OK."
Tech Support: "Did you get a pop-up menu?"
Customer: "No."
Tech Support: "OK. Right-click again. So you see a pop-up menu?"
Customer: "No."
Tech Support: "OK, sir. Can you tell me what you have done up until this point?"
Customer: "Sure. You told me to write 'click' and I wrote 'click'."
_____________________________________________
Tech Support: "OK. In the bottom left-hand side of the screen, can you see the 'OK' button displayed?"
Customer: "Wow! How can you see my screen from there?"
ID: 17832
Tech
"One day a friend of mine called me up to tell me he was thinking of buying a computer. This guy is particularly sensitive to criticism and not exactly in the upper echelon of the IQ range, and personally I don't think he should own a programmable VCR much less a computer, but he's a good guy, so I said "good for you." The following conversation ensued:
* Him: "Well, I have a couple questions though, that I thought I should ask you, cause you know about those things, right?"
* Me: "Yeah, ok, what do you want to know?"
* Him: "Well . . . what one should I buy?"
* Me: "What do you want to do with it mostly? Play games, word processsing (blah blah blah) . . .?"
Twenty minutes later . . .
* Him: "Well, I think probably I should get a real fast one, you know, cause I want it to go fast so I don't have to wait for the Internet."
I proceed to explain, SLOWLY, about the difference between megahertz and modem speed, which takes another twenty minutes.
* Him: "So how much is this going to cost me anyway?"
* Me: "It all depends on what you want. Some stuff costs more."
(Now, let me say here that at the very beginning of all this I had stated that neither a monitor nor a printer would come with a computer itself, unless you went for a package deal. He was, at this point, saying that he wanted to spend about $500 and that everything had to be from the same manufacturer. This was when the 550 P3 had just come out, so prices were still higher than $500 for any system you could go buy in a Circuit City, which he said he HAD to do.)
* Him: "Well, you know, I just want the basic stuff, a monitor, and a printer and a scanner, and maybe a camera, plus the stuff to make cards and print photos and all that, and the stuff to take care of paying my bills, and online."
* Me: "Ok, well, you need to get a system first, then think about the extras. You really need to learn the basics first. A computer with a monitor and a printer is probably going to be a minimum of $800 to $1000, if you really want them all to be from the same company."
* Him: "REALLY?! Well, ok, but I probably will need two printers, so it'll be more then, huh?"
* Me: "What?"
* Him: "Yeah, you can do that, right, hook up two of the same printer to one computer?"
* Me: "Well . . . NO, you can't."
* Him: "But I'll need to do that!"
* Me: "No, really, you won't. Why do you think that?"
* Him: "Ok, wait, I know, what about two computers? Can you do that? Can you hook two computers together?"
* Me: "But . . . why? No."
* Him: "But I am going to NEED that! You can't do that for me?!"
* Me: "Ok, ya know what, what the hell are you talking about?!? No one ever NEEDS to do what you are talking about doing so why do you think you need to do this?"
* Him: "Well, when I go to print out that manuscript I'm going to write, it'll probably be like 800 pages or so, so how am I ever going to get one printer to print that much, and one computer probably can't even hold that much in one thing, right?"
Inside, I was going ballistic at this point, and it did boil over, especially since there is NO WAY there is 800 pages worth of anything in this guy's head, but I explained that (a) one computer can in fact "hold" that much and a whole lot more, and (b) one printer (unless it is a huge Xerox or other office type industrial machine) CAN'T hold that much paper in one shot.
I hope that none of you nice tech support people never EVER get a call from this guy, because I guarantee you it will be the worst call you ever get in your life. You guys may all have to get together and dedicate a page to him, posting only his calls, just to vent your anger. He is the cupholder guy, the NOSMOKE.EXE guy, the guy who insists he "hasn't changed anything" when he really edited his AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to include lines like "and don't say I'm bad and an invalid," and the guy who has everything plugged in but nothing where it is supposed to be plugged in. He WILL have his powerstrip plugged into itself and will insist that it is NOT. May the force be with you all; you'll need it."
ID: 16822
Tech
A woman named Denise couldn't read her book. Her daughter Kelly was clicking away on the computer, but this time she was talking in a strange voice.
Denise decided to go check on what Kelly was doing. "Kelly," she said in a stern tone, "I told you no talking on the computer when I'm trying to read!"
Her daughter looked confused. "What? It was just the man with the Apple iPhone."
The next day the Apple iPhone arrived, but Kelly was grounded from her computer for a month. Denise tried to read, but yet again Kelly was talking in that strange voice. She said the same thing to Kelly, but she simply responded, "What? It's just the man with the Wii."
The Wii arrived the next day and Kelly was now grounded from every electronic system there ever was. But Kelly was still talking in that voice! Denise was steaming now and threatened to ground Kelly for a year. "WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO?" Denise yelled.
Kelly was trembling, but calmly she said, "It's Dad. He's been talking right next to me every day."
ID: 16853
Tech
I want to kick the guy who invented the snooze button...then five minutes later, I'll kick him again.
Thanks Andrew!
ID: 17423
Tech
An analyst, a pure mathematician, and a statistician apply for a job. The interviewer asks each of them the question "What is 1/3 multiplied by 3?" The analyst enters it into his calculator and replies that the answer is 0.9999999. The pure mathematician replies that the answer is obviously 1. Then, the statistician asks the interviewer "What do you want it to be?"
ID: 17948
Tech
wocka is dead. no one comments anymore. no one submits jokes anymore.
Can someone fix these glitches?-
-when I write a comment and click on submit, half the time, the comment is not posted no matter how many times I try to re-post.
-Even if I select "show all" for the full comments list, the hidden comments dont show up. wtf?
I'm sorry this IS the only way I can get some attention since the forum is a ghost town.
ID: 16129
Tech
Focus Magazine Interview with Bill Gates
Microsoft Code Has No Bugs (that Microsoft cares about)
---------------------------------------------------------
In an interview for German weekly magazine Focus (nr.43, October 23, 1995, pages 206-212), Microsoft`s Mr. Bill Gates has made some tements about software quality of MS products. After lengthy inquiries about how PCs should and could be used (including some angry comments on some questions which Mr. Gates evidently did not like), the interviewer comes to storage requirements of MS products; it ends with the following dispute:
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FOCUS: Every new release of a software which has less bugs than the older one is also more complex and has more features...
Gates: No, only if that is what'll sell!
FOCUS: But...
Gates: Only if that is what'll sell! We've never done a piece of software unless we thought it would sell. That's why everything we do in software ...it's really amazing: We do it because we think that's what customers want. That's why we do what we do.
FOCUS: But on the other hand, you would say: Okay, folks, if you don't like these new features, stay with the old version, and keep the bugs?
Gates: No! We have lots and lots of competitors. The new version, it's not there to fix bugs. That's not the reason we come up with a new version.
FOCUS: But there are bugs an any version which people would really like to have fixed.
Gates: No! There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
FOCUS: Oh, my God. I always get mad at my computer if MS Word swallows the page numbers of a document which I printed a couple of times with page numbers. If I complain to anybody they say "Well, upgrade from version 5.11 to 6.0".
Gates: No! If you really think there's a bug you should report a bug. Maybe you're not using it properly. Have you ever considered that?
FOCUS: Yeah, I did...
Gates: It turns out Luddites don't know how to use software properly, so you should look into that. The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots of new things that people are asking for, and so, in no sense, is stability a reason to move to a new version. It's never a reason.
FOCUS: How come I keep being told by computer vendors, "Well, we know about this bug, wait till the next version is there, it'll be fixed"? I hear this all the time. How come? If you're telling me there are no significant bugs in software and there is no reason to do a new version?
Gates: No. I'm saying: We don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say, "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?"
You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.
FOCUS: Probably you have other contacts to your software developers. But if Mister Anybody, like me, calls up a store or a support line and says, "Hey listen, there's a bug" ... 90 percent of the time I get the answer "Oh, well, yeah, that's not too bad, wait to the next version and it'll be fixed". That's how the system works.
Gates: Guess how much we spend on phone calls every year.
FOCUS: Hm, a couple of million dollars?
Gates: 500 million dollars a year. We take every one of these phone calls and classify them. That's the input we use to do the next version. So it's like the worlds biggest feedback loop. People call in, we decide what to do on it. Do you want to know what percentage of those phonecalls relates to bugs in the software? Less than one percent.
FOCUS: So people call in to say "Hey listen, I would love to have this and that feature"?
Gates: Actually, that's about five percent. Most of them call to get advice on how to do a certain thing with the software. That's the primary thing. We could have you sit and listen to these phone calls. There are millions and millions of them. It really isn't statistically significant. Sit in and listen to Win 95 calls, sit in and listen to Word calls, and wait, just wait for weeks and weeks for someone to call in and say "Oh, I found a bug in this thing"....
FOCUS: So where does this common feeling of frustration come from that unites all the PC users? Everybody experiences it every day that these things simply don't work like they should.
Gates: Because it's cool. It's like, "Yeah, been there done that. Oh, yeah, I know that bug." I can understand that phenomenon sociologically, not technically.
---------------------------------------------------------
So:
* Bug reports are statistically, therefore actually, unimportant;
* If you want a bug fixed, you are (by definition) in the minority;
* Microsoft doesn't fix bugs because bug fixes are not a significant source of revenue;
* If you think you found a bug, you are wrong, because really it only means you're incompetent; and
* People only complain about bugs to show how cool they are, not because bugs cause any real problems.
ID: 17022
Tech
What's purple and commutes?
An Abelian grape.
ID: 17775
Tech
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
+10,000 Jokes