ID: 12134
Tech
- You wake up at 3 am to go to the bathroom and stop to check your E-mail on the way back to bed.
- You name your children Eudora, AOL and dotcom.
- You turn off your modem and get this awful empty feeling, as if you just pulled the plug on a loved one.
- You spend half of the plane trip with your laptop on your lap and your child in the overhead compartment.
- You decide to stay in college for an additional year or two, just for the free internet access.
- You laugh at people with 14.4 band modems.
- You start using smileys in your snail mail.
- You find yourself typing "com" after every period when using a word processor.com
- You can't call your mother because she doesn't have a modem.
- You check your mail. It says "no new messages." So you check it again.
- You don't know what gender three of your closest friends are, because they have neutral screennames and you never bothered to ask.
- You move into a new house and decide to Netscape before you Landscape
- You tell the cab driver you live at http://1000.garden/house/brick.html
- You start tilting your head sideways to smile.
- After reading this, you immediately e-mail it to your friends.
ID: 16064
Tech
There was a mad scientist (a mad ...social... scientist) who kidnapped three colleagues, an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician, and locked each of them in separate cells with plenty of canned food and water - but no can opener.
A month later, returning, the mad scientist went to the engineer's cell and found it long empty. The engineer had constructed a can opener from pocket trash, used aluminum shavings and dried sugar to make an explosive, and escaped.
The physicist had worked out the angle necessary to knock the lids off the tin cans by throwing them against the wall. She was developing a good pitching arm and a new quantum theory.
The mathematician had stacked the unopened cans into a surprising solution to the kissing problem; his dessicated corpse was propped calmly against a wall, and this was inscribed on the floor in blood:
Theorem: If I can't open these cans, I'll die.
Proof: assume the opposite...
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: 395
Tech
Is your computer male of female? As you are aware, ships have long been characterized as being female (e.g., "Steady as she goes", or "She's listing to starboard, Captain!" Recently a group of computer scientists (all males) announced that computers should also be referred to as being female. Their reasons for drawing this conclusions follow:
1. No one but the creator understands their internal logic.
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
3. The message "Bad command or file name" is about as informative as "If you don't know why I'm mad at you, then I'm certainly not going to tell you."
4. Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retieval.
5. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.
However, another group of computer scientists (all female) claim that computers should be referred to as if they were male. Their reasons follow:
1. They have lots of data but are still clueless.
2. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem.
3. As soon as you commit to one you realise that, if you had waited a little longer, you could have obtained a better model.
4. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.
5. Big power surges knock them out for the rest of the night.
ID: 6882
Tech
(Linux is a server far superior to windows. It's logo is Tux the digital penguin.)
1. Your favorite movie was Kill Bill.
2. Your favorite animal is a penguin.
3. You think micro and soft describe Bill Gates.
4. You would like to "server" Gates head.
5. Your desktop picture is of tux burning the windows flag.
6. Your motto is "W1ND0W$ 1$ 7H3 root 0F @LL 3V1L"
7. You can read the above statment.
8. You think XBOX was Microsoft's first success.
9. You would rather have a computer from Hasbro than Microsoft.
10. Your computer can play solitaire.
For you Windows users #6 means "Windows is the root of all evil".
ID: 12897
Tech
You know you're a video game freak if ...
You hire a babysitter to watch your video games.
When you go swimming you put your nintendo D.S. in the glove box so no one will try to commit a felony and try to steal it.
You cry when your data gets deleted.
When you lose a disc you blame everyone you can so you can be in denial.
You have every system since the pong game.
You know who and when created all of your games.
You are eaisly entertained when you hear that the nintendo stock market raises.
You talk to your friends for two hours discussing which is better: Age of mythology or Age of Empires, only to come to the conclusion that you're eating pizza tonight to discuss it deeper.
When you get on to someone elses computer you refer to yourself as a "hacker."
You pray that to God that there's no power outage in the next 3 days because you have to do some "light" gaming.
ID: 3486
Tech
Top Ten signs your co-worker is a computer hacker
10. You ticked him off once and your next phone bill was for $20,000.
9. He's won the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes 3 years running.
8. When asked for his phone number, he gives it in hex.
7. Seems strangely calm whenever the office computer network goes down.
6. Somehow gets HBO on his PC at work.
5. Mumbled, "Oh, puh-leeez" 95 times during the movie "The Net."
4. Massive 401k contribution made in half-cent increments.
3. His video dating profile lists "public-key encryption" among hobbies.
2. When his computer starts up, you hear, "Good Morning, Mr. President."
1. You hear him murmur, "Let's see you use that Visa card now, Professor I-Don't-Give-A's-In-Computer-Science!"
ID: 3347
Tech
1. Home is where you hang your @
2. The E-mail of the species is more deadly than the mail.
3. A journey of a thousand sites begins with a single click.
4. You can't teach a new mouse old clicks.
5. Great groups from little icons grow.
6. Speak softly and carry a cellular phone.
7. C: is the root of all directories.
8. Don't put all your hypes in one home page.
9. Pentium wise - pen and paper foolish.
10. The modem is the message.
11. Too many clicks spoil the browse.
12. The geek shall inherit the earth.
13. A chat has nine lives.
14. Don't byte off more than you can view.
15. Fax is stranger than fiction.
16. What boots up must come down.
17. Windows will never cease.
18. In Gates we trust.
19. Virtual reality is its own reward.
20. Modulation in all things.
21. A user and his leisure time are soon parted.
22. There's no place like home.com.
23. Know what to expect before you connect.
24. Oh, what a tangled web site we weave when first we practice.
25. Speed thrills.
26. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks
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."
+10,000 Jokes