ID: 2166
Tech
The following are new Windows messages that are under
consideration for the planned Windows 2000:
1. Smash forehead on keyboard to continue.
2. Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue.
3. Press any key to continue or any other key to quit.
4. Press any key except... no, No, NO, NOT THAT ONE!
5. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del now for IQ test.
6. Close your eyes and press escape three times.
7. Bad command or file name! Go stand in the corner.
8. This will end your Windows session. Do you want to play another game?
9. Windows message: "Error saving file! Format drive now? (Y/Y)"
10. This is a message from God Gates: "Rebooting the world. Please log off."
11. To "shut down" your system, type "WIN."
12. BREAKFAST.SYS halted... Cereal port not responding.
13. COFFEE.SYS missing... Insert cup in cup holder and press any key.
14. CONGRESS.SYS corrupted... Re-boot Washington D.C? (Y/N)
15. File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N)
16. Bad or missing mouse. Spank the cat? (Y/N)
17. Runtime Error 6D at 417A:32CF: Incompetent User.
18. Error reading FAT record: Try the SKINNY one? (Y/N)
19. WinErr 16547: LPT1 not found. Use backup. (PENCIL & PAPER.SYS)
20. User Error: Replace user.
21. Windows VirusScan 1.0 - "Windows found: Remove it? (Y/N)"
22. Welcome to Microsoft's World - Your Mortgage is Past Due...
23. If you are an artist, you should know that Bill Gates owns you and
all your future creations. Doesn't it feel nice to have security?
24. Your hard drive has been scanned and all stolen software titles
have been deleted. The police are on the way.
ID: 15962
Tech
You might remember Zeno's paradox, but in case you don't here it is again. Zeno argued that motion is an illusion. Now, by motion he meant movement, and not the rude kind that involves bowels but the Newtonian kind. He did this by the Achilles (A) and the Tortoise (T) parable. For argument's sake, say A runs 10 times faster than T can crawl. Then let T be placed 10 meters ahead of A at the start of a race. When A has moved 10 meters, T has moved 1 meter, so T is now still 1 meter ahead of A. Then when A has covered that 1 meter, T has gone 1/10 meter ahead. Etc. So, A will never ever pass T. Poor Zeno, it was reported that he found this logic so persuasive that he did not bother to move again, a kind of ontological constipation perhaps?
But the naughty version of it is a bit sexist (feminists, please reverse male and female roles in this story!). It goes like this. A psychologist wanted to test the difference in logical thinking between engineering and mathematics majors, and for this purpose he set up an experiment in which the subjects were respectively a male Mathematics and a randy male Engineering undergraduate. He showed them into the lab. At the far end of the long, narrow room was a luscious semi-clad bimbo. His instructions were like so: "Fellas, I have in my hands a buzzer that I will sound every minute. Every time I do that, you can walk half the distance that remains between yourself and the lady. Should you ever reach her, you will find her most accommodating. Do you wish to participate in the experimemt?"
Math major: "You don't fool me. This is the equivalent of the Zeno Paradox, so I am not wasting my time. I am going home, 'Bye." [Exeunt]
Engineering major: "Hee, hee! I am staying. I estimate that in 10 minutes, I will be close enough for all practical purposes."
ID: 10735
Tech
Oh, the network outside is frightful,
But on campus, it's so delightful,
Our packets have nowhere to go,
Net is slow, net is slow, net is slow.
It doesn't show signs of stopping,
All our packets, our hosts are dropping;
Bandwidth is turned way down low,
Net is slow, net is slow, net is slow.
When we finally connect to a site,
It's time to go back to the dorm;
But if I could stay here all night,
I could submit their Web form.
The network is slowly dying,
And, I fear, we're still denying,
But as long as Sprint is the way to go,
Net is slow, net is slow, net is slow.
ID: 2767
Tech
My computer is like Britney Spears; cheap, white, and plastic.
ID: 1339
Tech
When a guy's printer type began to grow faint, he called a local repair shop where a friendly man informed him that the printer probably needed only to be cleaned. Because the store charged $50 for such cleanings, he told him he might be better off reading the printer's manual and trying the job himself.
Pleasantly surprised by his candor, he asked, "Does your boss know that you discourage business?"
"Actually, it is my boss's idea," the employee replied sheepishly. "We usually make more money on repairs if we let people try to fix things themselves first."
ID: 7669
Tech
Perhaps the Most Truthful: on Microsoft marketing:
"There won't be anything we won't say to people to try and convince them that our way is the way to go."
Not on his mind while developing Win9X..circa 1981...
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
On the solid code base of Win9X... thanks WPW!
"If you can't make it good, at least make it look good."
from "OS/2 Programmer's Guide" (forward by Bill Gates):
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs."
Bill Gates, Free Market and the LA Times Thanks GC!
"There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft"
From the back of an old Digitalk Smalltalk/V PM manual, 1990:
"This is the right way to develop applications for OS/2 PM. OS/2 PM is a tremendously rich environment, which makes it inherently complex. Smalltalk/V PM removes that complexity and lets you concentrate on writing great programs. Smalltalk/V PM is the kind of tool that will make OS/2 the successor to MS/DOS".
from "OS/2 Notebook", Microsoft Press, (c) 1990 - an excerpt from an interview with Bill Gates and Jim Cannavino, p. 614:
Developer: Does the announcement [of the OS/2 joint development agreement between IBM and Microsoft] mean that Microsoft is curtailing any plans for future development of Windows?
Gates: Microsoft has not changed any of its plans for Windows. It is obvious that we will not include things like threads and preemptive multitasking in Windows. By the time we added that, you would have OS/2.
There's a reason they threw it away...
from "Programmers at Work" by Microsoft Press, interview with Bill (found on comp.os.os2.advocacy),
Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?
Gates: No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system.
Only the finest Microsoft marketing! (submitted by BarryB):
"If you don't know what you need Windows NT for, you don't need it."
On the Box of Windows 2.11 for 286 (submitted by GLDM)
"New interface closely resembles Presentation Manager, preparing you for the wonders of OS/2!"
On code stability, from Focus Magazine (submitted by Benedikt Heinen Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to
be user mistakes.
[...]
I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes. The reasons for updates are to present more new features.
Unconfirmed quotes:
Microsoft's GUI innovations... 1983 (thanks E.R.)
"Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name...without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art."
Even more 1984 predictions (thanks Scott Renyen)
"The next generation of interesting software will be made on a Macintosh, not an IBM PC."
ID: 6789
Tech
If Oracle made toasters... They'd claim their toaster was compatible with all brands and styles of bread, but when you got it home, you'd discover the Bagel Engine was still in development, the Croissant Extension was three years away, and that, indeed, the whole appliance was just blowing smoke.
If Hewlett-Packard made toasters... They would market the Reverse Toaster, which takes in toast and gives you regular bread.
If IBM made toasters... They would want one big toaster, where people bring bread to be submitted for overnight toasting. IBM would claim a worldwide market for five, maybe six toasters.
If Xerox made toasters... You could toast one-sided or double-sided. Successive slices would get lighter and lighter. The toaster would jam your bread for you.
If Radio Shack made toasters... The staff would sell you a toaster, but not know anything about it. Or you could buy all the parts to build your own toaster.
If Thinking Machines made toasters... You would be able to toast 64,000 pieces of bread at the same time.
If Cray made toasters... They would cost $16 million, but would be faster than any other single-slice toaster in the world.
If the Rand Corporation made toasters... It would be a large, perfectly smooth, and seamless black cube. Every morning there would be a piece of toast on top of it. Their service department would have an unlisted phone number, and the blueprints for the box would be highly classified, government documents. The X-Files would have an episode about it.
If the NSA made toasters... Your toaster would have a secret trap door that only the NSA could access in case they needed to get at your toast for reasons of national security.
If Sony made toasters... The ToastMan, which would be barely larger than the single piece of bread it is meant to toast, and it could be conveniently attached to your belt.
If Timex made toasters... They would be cheap and small quartz-crystal wrist toasters that take a licking and keep on toasting.
If Fisher Price made toasters... 'Baby's First Toaster' would have a hand-crank that you turn to toast the bread and then pops it up like a jack-in-the-box.
If Microsoft made toasters... Every time you bought a loaf of bread, you would have to buy a toaster. You wouldn't have to take the toaster, but you'd still have to pay for it, anyway. Toaster '02 would weigh 15,000 pounds (requiring a reinforced steel countertop), draw enough electricity to power a small city, take up 95% of the space in your kitchen, would claim to be the first toaster that lets you control how light or dark you want your toast to be, and would secretly interrogate your other appliances to find out who made them. Everyone would hate Microsoft toasters, but nonetheless would buy them since most of the good bread only works with their toasters.
If Apple made toasters... It would do everything the Microsoft toaster does, but five years earlier.
ID: 7765
Tech
A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer and a MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) were out driving, when their car broke down, and they couldn't get it started.
The mechanical engineer suggested that it was a failure somewhere in the drive train, but after checking it out he found that the engine and transmission were fine.
The electrical engineer thought it might be the ignition system; lifted the hood, checked for a spark, and found that everything was OK.
The MCSE was driving, and suddenly gets out of the car, slams the door, opens the hood and looks inside, slams that, gets back into the car, opens and closes all the windows and looks at his passengers and says, "There, it should start right up now..."
ID: 10730
Tech
The new Ensign was assigned to subs, where he'd dreamed of working since a young boy.
He was trying to impress the Master Chief with his expertise learned in Submarine School.
The Master Chief cut him off quickly and said, "Listen, 'sir', it's real simple. Add the number of times we dive to the number of times we surface. Divide that number by two. If the result doesn't come out even, don't open the hatch."
+10,000 Jokes