ID: 2767
Tech
My computer is like Britney Spears; cheap, white, and plastic.
ID: 12168
Tech
Remember when ram meant just a male sheep
And bugs and worms were just things that creep?
When a gopher and a mouse were li'l critters
And virus were microbes that gave one the shivers?
When a web was a sticky net that housed a spider
And nets were just strings all woven together?
When surfing was just riding an ocean wave
And a slip was dodging trouble with a close shave?
When a mime was a painted-face animated mute clown
And hackers were people who slashed things down?
When menus and servers were all about eating
And addresses and homes were places for living?
When Archie and Veronica were actually people
And trolls were pests that were considered mythical?
When mud was just slime and Spam was just food
And to 'finger' someone was not considered good?
When to chat and to talk still needed a voice...?
Now being online has all but mooted that choice.
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: 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: 13344
Tech
Fire investigators on Maui have determined the cause of a blaze that destroyed a $127,000 home last month - a short in the homeowner's newly installed fire prevention alarm system. "This is even worse than last year," said the distraught homeowner, "when someone broke in and stole my new security system..."
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: 13124
Tech
This was set up by Google as a joke. Enjoy!
Please do the following:
1. Open Google.
2. Type, "french military victories".
3. Click: I'm Feeling Lucky.
4. Enjoy!
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: 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?"
+10,000 Jokes