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Is Your
Computer Masculine or Feminine?
Submitted by: Todd Url
A language instructor was explaining to her class that French nouns, unlike their English counterparts, are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine. Things like 'chalk' or 'pencil,' she described, would have a gender association although in English these words were neutral.
Puzzled, one student raised his hand and asked, "What gender is a computer?" The teacher wasn't certain which it was, and so divided the class into two groups and asked them to decide if a computer should be masculine or feminine. One group was composed of the women in the class, and the other, of men. Both groups were asked to give four reasons for their recommendation.
The group of women concluded that computers should be referred to in the masculine gender because:
1. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.
2. They have a lot of data but are still clueless.
3. They are supposed to help you solve your problems, but half the time they ARE the problem.
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that, if you had waited a little longer, you could have had a better model.
The men, on the other hand, decided that computers should definitely be referred to in the feminine gender 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 your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.
Computer
Acronyms
Submitted by: Todd Url
PCMCIA - People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
ISDN - It Still Does Nothing
APPLE - Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity
SCSI - System Can't See It
DOS - Defunct Operating System
BASIC - Bill's Attempt to Seize Industry Control
IBM - I Blame Microsoft
DEC - Do Expect Cuts
CD-ROM - Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months
OS/2 - Obsolete Soon, Too.
WWW - World Wide Wait
MACINTOSH - Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs
Talking
Frog
Submitted by: Carl & Gary
A boy was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess."
He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful Princess, I will stay with you for one week."
The boy took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a Princess, I'll stay with you and do *anything* you want."
Again the boy took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket. Finally the frog asked, "What is it? I've told you I'm a beautiful Princess, that I'll stay with you for a week and do *anything* you want. Why won't you kiss me?"
The boy said, "Look, I'm a computer programmer. I don't have time for girlfriends, but a talking frog is really cool."
Tech
Support
Submitted by: Jim
Compaq is considering changing the command "Press Any Key" to "Press Return Key" because of the flood of calls asking where the "Any" key is.
AST technical support had a caller complaining that her mouse was hard to control with the dust cover on. The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.
Another Compaq technician received a call from a man complaining that the system wouldn't read word processing files from his old diskettes. After trouble- shooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the problem, it was found that the customer labeled the diskettes then rolled them into the typewriter to type the labels.
Another AST customer was asked to send a copy of her defective diskettes. A few days later a letter arrived from the customer along with Xeroxed copies of the floppies.
Predictions from the Past
Submitted by: Bruce
The following is from the business section of The Kansas City Star, Jan 17, 1995:
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
- Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943" I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957"But what ... is it good for?"
- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968 commenting on the microchip."There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
Computers
vs Cars
Submitted by: Lee Anthony
At Comdex, a recent computer expo, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 mi/gal."
Recently General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the statements:
* "Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?"
* Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.
* Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
* Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail and you would have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you would accept this too.
* You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT". But, then you would have to buy more seats.
* Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads.
* The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars, which would make their cars run much slower.
* The oil, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "general car default" warning light.
* New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
* The airbag system would say "are you sure?" before going off.
* If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.
True story from a Novell NetWire SysOp:
Caller: "Hello, is this Tech Support?"
Tech: "Yes, it is. How may I help you?"
Caller: "The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty period. How do I go about getting that fixed?"
Tech: "I'm sorry, but did you say a cup holder?"
Caller: "Yes, it's attached to the front of my computer."
Tech: "Please excuse me if I seem a bit stumped, It's because I am. Did you receive this as part of a promotional, at a trade show? How did you get this cup holder? Does it have any trademark on it?"
Caller: "It came with my computer, I don't know anything about a promotional. It just has '4X' on it."At this point the Tech Rep had to mute the caller, because he couldn't stand it. The caller had been using the load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder, and snapped it off the drive!
Last year, I upgraded my Girlfriend 5.0 to Girlfriend 5.1, which interestingly installed itself as Fiancée 1.0. Then I upgraded Fiancée 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and find that it's a real memory hog. It has taken up all my time and space, and Wife 1.0 must be running before I can do ANYTHING.Wife 1.0 also spawns child processes that further consume system resources. And, for some reason as yet unidentified, specific applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5 and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all. And the icing on the cake - although claimed an enhancement - is that Wife 1.0 automatically installed additional plug-ins such as Mother-In-Law 55.8. There is no uninstall feature available for these plug-ins.
No mention of these behaviors was discussed in the brochures or documentation, although other users have reported similar problems.
Because of this, some users have decided to avoid the headaches associated with these upgrades, and simply move from Girlfriend 5.0 to Girlfriend 2000. Unfortunately, this is not without considerable difficulties as well. For example, all traces of Girlfriend 5.0 must be removed from the system before even attempting the installation of 2000. And even then, once installed, Girlfriend 2000 repeatedly runs system checks (usually in the background, and often late at night when the system is asleep) in an attempt to find evidence of previous versions. To cap it off, Girlfriend 2000 has a nag feature to remind the user about the great advantages of upgrading to a version of Wife. However I do like some of the features that are planned for the upcoming Girlfriend 2000 Service Pack 2 release:
* A "don't remind me again" button * Minimize button * Shutdown feature * An install shield feature so that Girlfriend 2000 can be completely uninstalled if necessary (so you don't lose cache and other objects).
Unfortunately, since I've already upgraded to Wife 1.0, I don't think I will be able to take advantage of any of these new features, unless they have become new enhancements in the next Mistress release. But, of course, there is a whole different raft of problems associated with the use of Mistress and Wife 1.0 on the same system, most notably system conflicts and continual disk thrashing which starts shortly after Wife 1.0 detects the Mistress installation. Interestingly enough, all versions of Personal Lawyer still work fine.
Users should also be aware that Wife 1.0 apparently deletes all MS Money files before uninstalling itself. Should that occur, Mistress will refuse to run claiming insufficient resources.
I personally find all these new tools and conflicts to be too confusing and time consuming, so I'm sticking with Dog 3.2. While it slobbers and chews up the paper, all in all these bugs are tolerable. It is so simple to operate and we get along fine.
