ID: 9037
Tech
Q. What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a computer?
A. A lot of Bytes!!!
ID: 18174
Tech
Boy: Will you marry me?
Girl: Are you kidding? You're a geek while I need a man with a big bank account and a nice house!
Boy: I have 1000 GBs in the cloud.
Girl: Come on, that won't even buy us a cabin in Texas!
Boy: You don't know sh*t, my EC2 account can buy a farm in New York if you wish!
ID: 16116
Tech
In a joint press conference in St. Peter's Square this morning, MICROSOFT Corp. and the Vatican announced that the Redmond software giant will acquire the Roman Catholic Church in exchange for an unspecified number of shares of MICROSOFT common stock. If the deal goes through, it will be the first time a computer software company has acquired a major world religion. With the acquisition, Pope John Paul II will become the senior vice-president of the combined company's new Religious Software Division, while MICROSOFT senior vice-presidents Michael Maples and Steven Ballmer will be invested in the College of Cardinals, said MICROSOFT Chairman Bill Gates.
"We expect a lot of growth in the religious market in the next five to ten years," said Gates. "The combined resources of MICROSOFT and the Catholic Church will allow us to make religion easier and more fun for a broader range of people."
Through the MICROSOFT Network, the company's new on-line service, "we will make the sacraments available on-line for the first time" and revive the popular pre-Counter-Reformation practice of selling indulgences, said Gates. "You can get Communion, confess your sins, receive absolution - even reduce your time in Purgatory - all without leaving your home."
A new software application, MICROSOFT Church, will include a macro language which you can program to download heavenly graces automatically while you are away from your computer.
An estimated 17,000 people attended the announcement in St Peter's Square, watching on a 60-foot screen as comedian Don Novello - in character as Father Guido Sarducci - hosted the event, which was broadcast by satellite to 700 sites worldwide.
Pope John Paul II said little during the announcement. When Novello chided Gates, "Now I guess you get to wear one of these pointy hats," the crowd roared, but the pontiff's smile seemed strained.
The deal grants MICROSOFT exclusive electronic rights to the Bible and the Vatican's prized art collection, which includes works by such masters as Michelangelo and Da Vinci, but critics say MICROSOFT will face stiff challenges if it attempts to limit competitors' access to these key intellectual properties.
"The Jewish people invented the look and feel of the holy scriptures," said Rabbi David Gottschalk of Philadelphia. "You take the parting of the Red Sea - we had that thousands of years before the Catholics came on the scene."
But others argue that the Catholic and Jewish faiths both draw on a common Abrahamic heritage. "The Catholic Church has just been more successful in marketing it to a larger market. Over the last 2,000 years, the Catholic Church's market share has increased dramatically, while Judaism, which was the first to offer many of the concepts now touted by Christianity, lags behind.
Historically, the Church has a reputation as an aggressive competitor, leading crusades to pressure people to upgrade to Catholicism, and entering into exclusive licensing arrangements in various kingdoms whereby all subjects were installed with Catholicism, whether or not they planned to use it. Today Christianity is available from several denominations, but the Catholic version is still the most widely used. The Church's mission is to reach "the four corners of the earth," echoing MICROSOFT's vision of "a computer on every desktop and in every home".
Gates described MICROSOFT's long-term strategy to develop a scalable religious architecture that will support all religions through emulation. A single core religion will be offered with a choice of interfaces according to the religion desired - "One religion, a couple of different implementations," said Gates.
The MICROSOFT move could spark a wave of mergers and acquisitions, according to Herb Peters, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Baptist Conference, as other churches scramble to strengthen their position in the increasingly competitive religious market.
ID: 354
Tech
How do you know if a dummy has been sending e-mail?
You see a bunch of envelopes stuffed into the disk drive.
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: 179
Tech
1. Honest and hard-working policemen are traditionally gunned down three days before their retirement.
2. All beds have special L-shaped sheets that reach the armpit level of a woman, but only the waist level of the man lying beside her.
3. At least one of a pair of identical twins is born evil.
4. All grocery bags contain at least one stick of French bread.
5. Rather than wasting bullets, megalomaniacs prefer to kill their arch enemies using complicated machinery involving fuses, pulley systems, deadly gasses, lasers, and man-eating sharks, which will allow their captives at least a half-hour to escape.
6. You're very likely to survive any battle in any war unless you make the mistake of showing someone a picture of your sweetheart back home.
7. A man will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating, but will wince when a woman tries to clean his wounds.
8. If a large pane of glass is visible, someone will be thrown through it before long.
9. If staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noises in their most revealing underwear.
10 Even when driving down a perfectly straight road, it is necessary to turn the steering wheel vigorously from left to right every few moments.
11. All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red readouts so you know exactly when they're going to go off, but luckily you'll always blindly choose to cut the right wire.
12. When someone has a good reason for doing something, they will most likely be hated by everyone.
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: 14984
Tech
Recently the following undocumented Windows 98 error-codes were found. Microsoft forgot to explain them in the manuals, so they will be spread via the Internet:
WinErr: 001
Windows loaded - System in danger
WinErr: 002
No Error - Yet
WinErr: 003
Dynamic linking error - Your mistake is now in every file
WinErr: 004
Erroneous error - Nothing is wrong
WinErr: 005
Multitasking attempted - System confused
WinErr: 006
Malicious error - Desqview found on drive
WinErr: 007
System price error - Inadequate money spent on hardware
WinErr: 008
Broken window - Watch out for glass fragments
WinErr: 009
Horrible bug encountered - God only knows what has happened
WinErr: 00A
Promotional literature overflow - Mailbox full
WinErr: 00B
Inadequate disk space - Free at least 500MB
WinErr: 00C
Memory hog error - More Ram needed. More! More! More!
WinErr: 00D
Window closed - Do not look outside
WinErr: 00E
Window open - Do not look inside
WinErr: 00F
Unexplained error - Please tell us how this happened
WinErr: 010
Reserved for future mistakes by our developers
WinErr: 013
Unexpected error - Huh ?
WinErr: 014
Keyboard locked - Try anything you can think of.
WinErr: 018
Unrecoverable error - System has been destroyed. Buy a new one. Old Windows license is not valid anymore.
WinErr: 019
User error - Not our fault. Is Not! Is Not!
WinErr: 01A
Operating system overwritten - Please reinstall all your software... Yet again.
WinErr: 01B
Illegal error - You are not allowed to get this error. Next time you will get a penalty for that.
WinErr: 01C
Uncertainty error - Uncertainty may be inadequate.
WinErr: 01D
System crash - We are unable to figure out our own code.
WinErr: 01E
Timing error - Please wait. And wait. And wait. And wait.
WinErr: 01F
Reserved for future mistakes of our developers.
WinErr: 020
Error recording error codes - Additional errors will be lost.
WinErr: 042
Virus error - A virus has been activated in a DOS session. The virus, however, requires Windows. All tasks will automatically be closed and the virus will be activated again.
WinErr: 079
Mouse not found - A mouse driver has not been installed. Please click the left mouse button to continue.
WinErr: 103
Error buffer overflow - Too many errors encountered. Additional errors may not be displayed or recorded.
WinErr: 678
This will end your Windows session. Do you want to play another game?
WinErr: 683
Time out error - Operator fell asleep while waiting for the system to complete boot procedure.
WinErr: 815
Insufficient Memory - Only 50,312,583 bytes available.
WinErr: 844
Competing Product - Remove all competing products and install Microsoft equivalents.
WinErr: 910
Personal Data Communicate Difficulties - Could not transmit social insurance number and or tax details back to Microsoft headquarters for further analysis.
WinErr: 960
Minimal Effort - User has only reinstalled Internet Explorer four times while trying to get it operational, please reinstall again.
WinErr: 2000
You have not downloaded your daily Y2K and security glitch patch.
ID: 17934
Tech
When computing, whatever happens, behave as though you meant it to happen.
When you get to the point where you really understand your computer, it's probably obsolete.
The first place to look for information is in the section of the manual where you least expect to find it.
When the going gets tough, upgrade.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite malfunction.
He who laughs last probably made a back-up.
A complex system that does not work is invariably found to have evolved from a simpler system that worked just fine.
The number one cause of computer problems is computer solutions.
A computer program will always do what you tell it to do, but rarely what you want to do.
+10,000 Jokes