ID: 118
Tech
A programmer was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess." He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week."
The programmer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you and do anything you want." Again the programmer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.
Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess that I'll stay with you for a week and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?" The programmer said, "Look, I'm a programmer. I don't have time for a girlfriend -- but a talking frog, now that's cool."
ID: 8781
Tech
A guy walks into the Microsoft Shop.
Guy: I'd like a cheesecake, please.
Receptionist: Sure.
The receptionist hands him a block of cheese.
Guy: Umm... This is just the cheese. Where's the cake?
Rec: You have to purchase that seperately.
Guy: What the ----? What kind of product are you trying to sell me? Oh well.
Rec: Good. I knew you'd understand.
The Rec hands him the cake.
Guy: So... What do I do with the cheese and the cake?
Rec: You blend it.
Guy: With what?
The Rec hands him a blender.
The guy puts the cheese and the cake into the blender and blends it.
Guy: Now I have a bunch of liquid. What do I do with it?
Rec: Oh ---- you retard, you're supposed to exchange the cake for the batter first.
Guy: For the sake of Pete, what the ----? Fine. Let's start over. So I get the cheese and I get the cake. Then I exchange the cake for the batter, right?
Rec: Yep.
The guy blends it.
Guy: Right... I'm still stuck with a load of liquid.
Rec: You're supposed to cook it.
Guy: With what?
Rec: With this full-sized oven.
Guy: What the ----?
Rec: Yep.
The guy cooks the cheesecake.
Guy: Hey Rec! My cake is hot! Aren't cheesecakes supposed to be frozen?
Rec: Yeah, you need to put it in that freezer behind you for 24 hours. Since you're not an employee, it costs $1 a minute to use it.
Guy: You mean I'm supposed to pay $1440 to freeze my cake?
Rec: Wow! You're good at math! And, yes.
The guy puts his cheesecake in the freezer, pays his over-inflated bill, and leaves.
The next day, he comes back and finds the cake gone.
Guy: What happened to my cheesecake?
Rec: Well, you see, at lunch about an hour ago, there was this guy who was still hungry and saw the cheesecake and ate it.
On a completely unrelated note, the guy's brother bought a computer from Microsoft.
GB: How do I type my work?
Rec: Install Office.
GB: Sure.
GB: Umm... how do I install it?
Rec: You use a CD.
GB: Oh. Whoops, I jammed my cubicle into my case instead. Let's start over. So, I buy the computer and I install Office using a CD. Umm... I don't get how to do it.
Rec: You put the CD in the drive and let it Autorun.
GB: What the ---- is a drive?
Rec: Why don't you leave your computer here and let us do it for you?
GB: Sure.
The guy's brother leaves the computer and goes home.
The next day, he comes back.
GB: Yeah, I left my computer here yesterday?
Rec: No, there's no record of that. There was an extra computer here yesterday, so the shipping people shipped it off to CraCom.
GB: CraCom? As in CrappyCompany? It went bankrupt 2 hours ago!
Rec: Oh, I'm sorry. Would you care to buy a notebook?
GB: I already have one in my pocket, thanks.
ID: 10710
Tech
An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are trying to set up a fenced-in area for some sheep, but they have a limited amount of building material. The engineer gets up first and makes a square fence with the material, reasoning that it's a pretty good working solution.
"No no," says the physicist, "there's a better way." He takes the fence and makes a circular pen, showing how it encompasses the maximum possible space with the given material.
Then the mathematician speaks up: "No, no, there's an even better way." To the others' amusement he proceeds to construct a little tiny fence around himself, then declares:
"I define myself to be on the outside."
ID: 16131
Tech
Beyond the Hype (Guardian, August 25, 1995)
Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, argues Windows 95 does not cross any frontiers.
What on Earth is going on? Have we found intelligent life on other planets? Abolished war and famine? Found Elvis? Have we even devised a new and better way of using computers? No. All that's happened is that Microsoft has remodelled its operating system so that it's now more like the Macintosh.
This may well be a cause for rejoicing among Windows users but it's hardly a giant leap for mankind and doesn't warrant this sense that we're all supposed to celebrate early and avoid the millennium rush.
As part of this billion-dollar festival of smoke and mirrors, Bill Gates has apparently paid the Rolling Stones 8 million pounds for the right to use Start Me Up, the song which is better known for its catchy refrain "You make a grown man cry".
This is a phrase you may hear a lot of over the next few days as millions of people start trying to install Windows 95. Even the best designed systems can be a nightmare to upgrade, but whatever things Microsoft may be famous for - the wealth of its founder, the icy grip he exerts on what is arguably the most important industry on this planet - good systems design is not, as it happens, one of them.
Let's dispel a few myths. There's one which says that the original PC operating system was a brilliant feat of programming by boy genius Bill Gates. It wasn't brilliant and Gates didn't write it. He acquired it, "shrewdly", from the Seattle Computer Company and then immediately licensed it on to another, larger, outfit called IBM. When the IBM PC was launched into a market which had hitherto been serviced by garage companies named after bits of fruit, it carried the impimatur of a world-renowned name and sold a zillion, making Gates' operating system a world standard. IBM had failed to realise that any fool could make the boxes, but the hand that owned the software ruled the world. Big Blue had given the kid Gates a free ride into the stratosphere and then, astoundingly, found itself starting to fall away like a discarded booster rocket.
Sadly this new world software standard was actually a piece of crap.
MS-DOS, as Gates called it, had started life as QDOS-86 or the Quick & Dirty Operating System, which told you all you needed to know about it. A whole generation of people doggedly learned to run their businesses on a system that was written as a quick lash-up for hobbyists and hackers. Was there anything better around? Of course.
In the 1970's, Xerox had funded a team of the world's top computer scientists to research the man/machine interface. They devised a graphical system, using windows, icons and mice. Their key insight was that a lot of needless complications could be cut short by harnessing people's intuitive and gestural skills. Oddly, Xerox failed to follow this up, and the research was taken up and brought to the market by Apple Computer as the Macintosh. After a shaky, underpowered start, this machine matured into a well-integrated system which was not only very powerful, but a real pleasure to use. Mac users tend to have an almost fanatical devotion to their machines.
The Microsoft line on all this was that Windows was for wimps. The truth was that plain old MS-DOS couldn't actually do them. Graphics, mice, networking, and a whole lot else, had to be added to the basic core of QDOS as one afterthought after another, which is why Wintel computers are so fiendishly complicated to set up and maintain.
Gates, however, had always known which way the future lay, and for years Microsoft managed the awkward juggling act of rubbishing Apple's user interface while simultaneously trying to devise something like it that would fit on top of the bloated clutter that MS-DOS had become.
BYTE magazine said recently: "It would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer in the past decade as a massive effort to keep up with Apple." However, the Macintosh is not the last word on interface design, and if Microsoft had been the innovative company that it calls itself, it would have taken the opportunity to take a radical leap beyond the Mac, instead of producing a feeble, me-too, implementation.
An awful lot of people who try to install Windows 95 will end up having to spend so much money buying extra RAM and upgrading their peripherals to get features that Mac users have enjoyed for years, that they might as well give up and buy the real thing.
The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.
ID: 9674
Tech
Dear Bob in Tech Support,
I'm currently running the latest version of GirlFriend and I've been having some problems lately. I've been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 forever, as my primary application, and all the GirlFriend releases I've
tried have always conflicted with it.
I hear that DrinkingBuddies won't crash if GirlFriend is run in background mode and the sound is turned off, but I'm embarrassed to say I can't find the switch to turn the sound off. I just run them separately, and it works
okay. GirlFriend also seems to have a problem co-existing with my Leisure 3.1 and QuietTime programs, often trying to abort them with some sort of timing incompatibility.
I probably should have stayed with GirlFriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance from GirlFriend 2.0. After months of conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with GirlFriend 2.0. He said I probably didn't have enough cache to run GirlFriend 2.0, and eventually it would require a Token Ring to run properly. He was right - as soon as I purged my cache, it uninstalled itself.
Shortly after that, I installed GirlFriend 3.0 beta. All the bugs were supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it, it gave me a virus anyway. I had to clean out my whole system and shut down for a while to re-check my hardware.
I very cautiously upgraded to GirlFriend 4.0. This time I used a SCSI probe first and also installed a virus protection program. It worked okay for a while, until I discovered that GirlFriend 1.0 was still in my system. I
tried running GirlFriend 1.0 again with GirlFriend 4.0 still installed, but GirlFriend 4.0 has a "feature" I didn't know about that automatically detects the presence of any other version of GirlFriend and communicates with it in the background in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both versions.
The version I have now works pretty well, but there are still some problems. Like all versions of GirlFriend, it is written in some obscure language I can't understand, much less reprogram. Frankly I think there is too much attention paid to the look and feel rather than the desired functionality. Also, to get the best connections with your hardware, you usually have to use gold-plated contacts, which is very expensive. And I've never liked how GirlFriend is totally "object-oriented", as that interface is sometimes cumbersome and even counter-intuitive.
A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of GirlFriend to GirlFriendPlus 1.1, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of GirlFriend. To his dismay, however, he discovered that GirlFriendPlus 1.1 expires within a year of the upgrade, if you don't upgrade AGAIN to Fiancee 1.0. So he did, but soon after that, he had to upgrade YET AGAIN to Wife 1.0, which he describes as a HUGE resource hog.
It has taken up all his space, so he can't load anything else. In fact, it has even automatically deleted several of his other programs to make room for itself, not the least of which was DrinkingBuddies 1.0, which used to be one of his favorite applications, as well. This is particularly disturbing to me, as we used to run DrinkingBuddies 1.0 on a network with several of our mutual friends, and now he can't even connect any more!
He told me that one of the primary reasons he decided to go with Wife 1.0 was because it came bundled with FreeSexPlus, which sounded great. Well, it turns out the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes inexplicably
prohibits access to FreeSexPlus, particularly when he starts the new Plug-Ins he wanted to try. Also, for no apparent reason, the OralSex 1.0 module that worked fine in his previous versions of GirlFriendPlus and Fiancee, stopped working the instant the upgrade to Wife 1.0 finished
installing.
On top of that, Wife 1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything with the FreeSexPlus module. This warming up process requires him to run an antiquated version of ForePlay Beta, which has an
agonizingly slow interface, and which has an unfortunate tendency to crash, requiring a cold reboot to his system. The real insult to injury however, is that even though he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came embedded with MotherInLaw 2.0, which has an irritating automatic pop-up feature he can't turn off.
I told him to try installing Mistress 1.0 (which I had heard works great in such situations), but he said he heard if you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete all of your MSMoney files before doing an uninstall of itself; then Mistress 1.0 won't install anyway because of insufficient resources.
Please help me Bob, I don't know what to do. Since the initial release, I have had nothing but problems.
I've heard that I would really like the CoolGirlFriend 1.0 Deluxe Upgrade (which is supposed to come bundled with a completely functioning version of FreeSexDeluxe), but that release is no where to be found - not even the Beta version! That release is also supposed to come with its own resource management module seamlessly layered in, so it won't conflict with any of my other programs (barring previous versions of GirlFriend, which I would happily delete!).
Please advise.
ID: 10516
Tech
Things You Learn from Video Games
There is no problem that cannot be overcome by force.
If it moves, DESTROY IT!
Piloting any vehicle is simple and requires no training.
One lone "good guy" can defeat an infinite number of "badguys."
Make sure you eat all food lying on the ground.
You can break things and get away with it.
You can push other vehicles off the road and get away with it.
If someone dies, they disappear.
If you get mad enough, you can fight even better.
You can overcome most adversaries simply by having enough quarters.
You can operate all weapons without training.
No matter how long you fight, you can always fight again.
Death is reversible (only for you!)
Ninjas are common, and frequently fight in public.
Whenever big fat mean guys are about to croak, they begin flashing red or yellow.
You never run out of ammunition, just grenades.
All women wear revealing clothes and have great bodies.
Shoot everything. If it blows up or dies, it was bad.
Don't worry if your vehicle crashes and explodes. A new vehicle will appear in its place.
A thousand-to-one odds against you is NOT a problem.
ID: 16624
Tech
The Fibonacci sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... starts with two 1's, and each term afterward is the sum of its two predecessors.
Which one of the ten digits is the last to appear in the units position of a number in the Fibonacci sequence?
Just write out their units digits, and mark the digits that appear for the first time.
(1), 1, (2), (3), (5), (8), 3, 1, (4), 5, (9), 4, 3, (7), (0), ...
Therefore, 6 is the last to appear.
ID: 114
Tech
Tech Support
Just in case you think you are TC (technologically challenged). The following is an excerpt taken from a Wall Street Journal article:
1. Compaq is considering changing the command "Press Any Key" to "Press Return Key" because of the flood of calls asking where the "Any" key is.
2. AST technical support had a caller complaining that her mouse was hard to control with the dust cover on. The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.
3. Another Compaq technician received a call from a man complaining that the system wouldn't read word processing files from his old diskettes. After trouble-shooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the problem, it was found that the customer had labeled the diskettes, then rolled them into the typewriter to type the labels.
4. Another AST customer was asked to send a copy of her defective diskettes. A few days later a letter arrived from the customer along with photocopies of the floppies.
5. A Dell technician advised his customer to put his troubled floppy back in the drive and close the door. The customer asked the tech to hold on, and was heard putting the phone down, getting up and crossing the room to close the door to his room.
6. Another Dell customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of trouble-shooting, the technician discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting the "send" key.
7. Yet another Dell customer called to complain that his keyboard no longer worked. He had cleaned it by filling up his tub with soap and water and soaking the keyboard for a day, then removing all the keys and washing them individually.
8. A Dell technician received a call from a customer who was enraged because his computer had told him he was "bad and an invalid". The tech explained that the computer's "bad command" and "invalid" responses shouldn't be taken personally.
9. A confused caller to IBM was having troubles printing documents. He told the technician that the computer had said it "couldn't find printer". The user had also tried turning the computer screen to face the printer - but that his computer still couldn't "see" the printer.
10. An exasperated caller to Dell Computer Tech Support couldn't get her new Dell Computer to turn on. After ensuring the computer was plugged in, the technician asked her what happened when she pushed the power button. Her response, "I pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens." The "foot pedal" turned out to be the computer's mouse.
11. Another customer called Compaq tech support to say her brand-new computer wouldn't work. She said she unpacked the unit, plugged it in and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what happened when she pressed the power switch, she asked "What power switch?"
12. True story from a Novell NetWire SysOp:
Caller: "Hello, is this Tech Support?"
Tech: "Yes, it is. How may I help you?"
Caller: "The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty period. How do I go about getting that fixed?"
Tech: "I'm sorry, but did you say a cup holder?"
Caller: "Yes, it's attached to the front of my computer."
Tech: "Please excuse me if I seem a bit stumped, It's because I am. Did you receive this as part of a promotional, at a trade show? How did you get this cup holder? Does it have any trademark on it?"
Caller: "It came with my computer, I don't know anything about a promotional. It just has '4X' on it." At this point the Tech Rep had to mute the caller, because he couldn't stand it. He was laughing too hard. The caller had been using the load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder, and snapped it off the drive!
13. Another IBM customer had troubles installing software and rang for support. "I put in the first disk, and that was OK. It said to put in the second disk, and had some problems with the disk. When it said to put in the third disk - I couldn't even fit it in..." The user hadn't realized that "Insert Disk 2" meant to remove Disk 1 first.
14. In a similar incident, a customer had followed the instructions for installing software. The instructions said to remove the disk from it's cover and insert into the drive. The user had physically removed the casing of the disk and wondered why there were problems.
As Ripley would say, believe it or not!
ID: 16418
Tech
How many diagonals does an N-polygon have?
N(N-3)/2.
+10,000 Jokes