At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the

computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating, “If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they painted new lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull ove r to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.

For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought “CarNT,” but then you would have to buy more seats.

6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive — but it would only run on five percent of the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “general protect ion fault” warning light.

8. The airbag system would ask, “Are you sure?” before deploying.

9. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the antenna.

10. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally Road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50 percent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.

11. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

12. You’d have to press the “start” button to turn the engine off.

1. Download a piece of Web authoring software – 20 minutes.

2. Think about what you want to write on your Web page – 6 weeks.

3. Download the same piece of Web authoring software, because they have released 3 new versions since the first time you downloaded it – 20 minutes.

4. Decide to just steal some images and awards to put on your site – 1 minute.

5. Visit sites to find images and awards, find 5 of them that you like – 4 days.

6. Run setup of your Web authoring software. After it fails, download it again – 25 minutes.

7. Run setup again, boot the software, click all toolbar buttons to see what they do – 15 minutes.

8. View the source of others’ pages, steal some, change a few words here and there – 4 hours.

9. Preview your Web page using the Web Authoring software – 1 minute.

10. Try to horizontally line up two related images – 6 hours.

11. Remove one of the images – 10 seconds.

12. Set the text’s font color to the same color as your background, wonder why all your text is gone – 4 hours.

13. Download a counter from your ISP – 4 minutes.

14. Try to figure out why your counter reads “You are visitor number -16.3 E10″ – 3 hours.

15. Put 4 blank lines between two lines of text – 8 hours.

16. Fine-tune the text, then prepare to load your Web page on your ISP – 40 minutes.

17. Accidentally delete your complete web page – 1 second.

18. Recreate your web page – 2 days.

19. Try to figure out how to load your Web page onto your ISP’s server – 3 weeks.

20. Call a patient friend to find out about FTP – 30 minutes.

21. Download FTP software – 10 minutes.

22. Call your friend again – 15 minutes.

23. Upload your web page to your ISP’s server – 10 minutes.

24. Connect to your site on the web – 1 minute.

25. Repeat any and all of the previous steps – eternity.

In the beginning, God created the bit. And the bit was a zero; nothing.

On the first day, He toggled the 0 to 1, and the Universe was. (In those days, bootstrap loaders were simple, and “active low” signals didn’t yet exist.)

On the second day, God’s boss wanted a demo, and tried to read the bit. This being volatile memory, the bit reverted to a 0. And the universe wasn’t. God learned the importance of backups and memory refresh, and spent the rest of the day ( and his first all-nighter ) reconstructing the universe.

On the third day, the bit cried “Oh, Lord! If you exist, give me a sign!” And God created rev 2.0 of the bit, even better than the original prototype. Those in Universe Marketing immediately realized the the “new and improved” wouldn’t do justice to such a grand and glorious creation. And so it was dubbed the Most Significant Bit, or the Sign bit. Many bits followed, but only one was so honored.

On the fourth day, God created a simple ALU with ‘add’ and ‘logical shift’ instructions. And the original bit discovered that by performing a single shift instruction, it could become the Most Significant Bit. And God realized the importance of computer security.

On the fifth day, God created the first mid-life kicker, rev 2.0 of the ALU, with wonderful features, and said “Screw that add and shift stuff. Go forth and multiply.” And God saw that it was good.

On the sixth day, God got a bit overconfident, and invented pipelines, register hazards, optimizing compilers, crosstalk, restartable instructions, microinterrupts, race conditions, and propagation delays. Historians have used this to convincingly argue that the sixth day must have been a Monday.

On the seventh day, an engineering change introduced Windows into the Universe, and it hasn’t worked right since.

(sung to the tune of ‘Help!’ with apologies to Lennon/McCartney)

When I was younger and quite desperate for pay, I worked the help desk for eight hours every day. End users called me up to tell me what was wrong, And now I find, it fried my mind, I worked “the desk” too long.

“Help me if you can, my system’s down! And a reboot didn’t bring it back ’round! Should it make that awful grinding sound? Help desk pleeeeeease, please help me!”

And now my work has changed in oh so many ways, I wrangle data; I’m an MCDBA. But now and then the help desk sneaks into my dreams, I’m taking calls, I’m up the walls, I wake up with a scream.

“Help me if you can my system’s down! I read virus-laden e-mails by the pound! All my data’s one big steaming mound! Help desk PLEEEEASE, PLEASE HELP ME!”

When I was younger and quite desperate for pay, I worked the help desk for eight hours every day. But now I wish that I could travel back in time, I wouldn’t cry, if only I could leave that desk behind.

“Help me if you can my system’s down! Spilled my coffee, now my hard drive’s full of grounds! Lost my pictures filled with women bound! HELP DESK PLEEEEEEASE, PLEASE HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP ME! Oooooooo….”

It’s wise to remember how easily email — this wonderful technology — can be misused, sometimes unintentionally, with serious consequences.

Consider the case of the Illinois man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick email.

Unfortunately, when typing her address, he missed one letter, and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher’s wife whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her email, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint.

At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:

“Dearest Wife, Just got checked in. Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow. P.S. Sure is hot down here.”

In a surprise announcement today, Microsoft President Steve Ballmer revealed that the Redmond-based company will allow computer resellers and end-users to customize the appearance of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), the screen that displays when the Windows operating system crashes.

The move comes as the result of numerous focus groups and customer surveys done by Microsoft. Thousands of Microsoft customers were asked, “What do you spend the most time doing on your computer?”

A surprising number of respondents said, “Staring at a Blue Screen of Death.” At 54 percent, it was the top answer, beating the second place answer “Downloading XXXScans” by an easy 12 points.

“We immediately recognized this as a great opportunity for ourselves, our channel partners, and especially our customers,” explained the excited Ballmer to a room full of reporters.

Immense video displays were used to show images of the new customizable BSOD screen side-by-side with the older static version. Users can select from a collection of “BSOD Themes,” allowing them to instead have a Mauve Screen of Death or even a Paisley Screen of Death. Graphics and multimedia content can now be incorporated into the screen, making the BSOD the perfect conduit for delivering product information and entertainment to Windows users.

The BSOD is by far the most recognized feature of the Windows operating system, and as a result, Microsoft has historically insisted on total control over its look and feel. This recent departure from that policy reflects Microsoft’s recognition of the Windows desktop itself as the “ultimate information portal.” By default, the new BSOD will be configured to show a random selection of Microsoft product information whenever the system crashes. Microsoft channel partners can negotiate with Microsoft for the right to customize the BSOD on systems they ship.

Major computer resellers such as Compaq, Gateway, and Dell are already lining up for premier placement on the new and improved BSOD. Ballmer concluded by getting a dig in against the Open Source community. “This just goes to show that Microsoft continues to innovate at a much faster pace than open source. I have yet to see any evidence that Linux even has a BSOD, let alone a customizable one.”

A language teacher was explaining to her class that in French, nouns unlike their English counterparts, are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine.

“House” in French, is feminine -”la maison,” “Pencil” in French, is masculine “le crayon.”

One puzzled student asked, “What gender is computer?” The teacher did not know, and the word was not in her French dictionary.

So for fun she split the class into two groups appropriately enough, by gender and asked them to decide whether “computer” should be a masculine or a feminine noun.

Both groups were required to give four reasons for their recommendation.

The men’s group decided that computer should definitely be of the feminine gender (“la computer”), because

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later review
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheque on accessories for it.

The women’s group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine “le computer”) because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on.
2. They have a lot of data but still can’t think for themselves
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realise that if you had waited a little longer you could have gotten a better model.

QUESTION: Where do the characters go when I use my backspace or delete them on my PC?

ANSWER: The characters go to different places, depending on whom you ask:

• The Catholic Church’s approach to characters: The nice characters go to Heaven, where they are bathed in the light of happiness. The naughty characters are punished for their sins. Naughty characters are those involved in the creation of naughty words, such as “breast,” “sex” and “contraception.”
• The Buddhist explanation: If a character has lived rightly, and its karma is good, then after it has been deleted it will be reincarnated as a different, higher character. Those funny characters above the numbers on your keyboard will become numbers, numbers will become letters, and lower-case letters will become upper-case.
• The 20th-century bitter cynical nihilist explanation: Who cares? It doesn’t really matter if they’re on the page, deleted, undeleted, underlined, etc. It’s all the same.
• The Mac user’s explanation: All the characters written on a PC and then deleted go to straight to PC hell. If you’re using a PC, you can probably see the deleted characters, because you’re in PC hell also.
• Stephen King’s explanation: Every time you hit the (Del) key you unleash a tiny monster inside the cursor, who tears the poor unsuspecting characters to shreds, drinks their blood, then eats them, bones and all. Hah, hah, hah!
• Dave Barry’s explanation: The deleted characters are shipped to Battle Creek, Michigan, where they’re made into Pop-Tart filling; this explains why Pop-Tarts are so flammable, while cheap imitations are not flammable. I’m not making this up.
• IBM’s explanation: The characters are not real. They exist only on the screen when they are needed, as concepts, so to delete them is merely to de-conceptualize them. Get a life.
• PETA’s (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) explanation: You’ve been DELETING them??? Can’t you hear them SCREAMING??? Why don’t you go CLUB some BABY SEALS while wearing a MINK, you pig!!!!

Twas the night before implementation
And all through the house
Not a program was working,
Not even a browse.

The engineers hung by their tubes in despair,
With hopes that a miracle soon would be there.
The customers were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of progress danced in their heads.

When out of the COPE [unk acronym] there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter.
And what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a super programmer (with a six pack of beer).

His resume glowed with experience so rare,
He turned out great code with a bit pusher’s flair.
More rapid than eagles, his routines they came,
And he whistled and shouted and called them by name:

On Update! On Add! On Inquire! On Delete!
On Batch Jobs! On Closing! On Functions Complete!

His eyes were glazed over, fingers nimble and lean,
From weekends and nights spent in front of a screen.
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know, I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
Turning specs into code, then turned with a jerk;
And laying his finger upon the “enter” key,
The system came up and worked perfectly.

The updates updated; the deletes, they deleted;
The inquiries inquired and closings completed.
He tested each whistle, and tested each bell,
With nary and APPEND, thus all had gone well.

The job was finished, the test were concluded,
The engineer’s last changes were even included.
“Heh!”, the customer exclaimed with a snarl and a taunt,
“It’s just what I asked for, but not what I want!”