Humor Page: electronics

This guy calls in to complain that he gets an "Access Denied" message every time he logs in. It turned out he was typing his user name and password in capital letters.

Tech Support: "OK, let's try once more, but use lower case letters."

Customer: "Uh, I only have capital letters on my keyboard."

An old man was sitting in a park reading a book "Linux for Dummy's".

A passer-by saw him and asked "You are such an old man, why do you bother to learn Linux?"

"I have heard that all PC's in heaven installed with Linux. When I get there, I can use the computer at once." the old man replied.

"Unless you have received Christ, how can you be sure that you won't end up in hell?" he asked.

"Well, aren't we all using Windows now ..."

Software Features You Wish Real Life Had!

• Five minutes ago you were travelling to work at 70 mph. in your brand new car. Now you are travelling to the hospital at double the speed in an ambulance....
  You wish there was an undo in life!
• You just get a salary raise...
  You wish there was redo in life!
• You are already late, and your key is missing...
  You wish there was a find tool in life!
• You are ticketed for speeding...
  You wish there was delete file in life!
• The room is so crowded that you cannot get anywhere near that nice girl at the other end...
  You wish there was zoom & 'view full screen' in life!
• After marriage you realize that there is bound to be a mismatch...
  You wish there was an evaluation period or at least a sample down load or a demo version!
• One day you realize that your are turning bald...
  You wish there was cut and paste in life!

The AOL Car

• The AOL car would have a TOP speed of 40 MPH yet have a 200 MPH speedometer.
• The car would often refuse to start and owners would just expect this and try again later.
• The windshield would have an extra dark tint to protect the driver from seeing better cars.
• AOL would sell the same model car year after year and claim it's the NEW model.
• Every now and then the brakes on the AOL car would just "lock-up" for no apparent reason.
• Anyone dissatisfied could return the car but must continue to make payments for 6 months.
• AOL car mechanics would have no experience in car repair.
• It would not be possible to upgrade your AOL car stereo.
• AOL cars would be forced to use AOL gas that cost 20% more and gave worse mileage.
• Once in a while, AOL cars stop and say, "you've got Nails".
• Every time you close the door on the AOL car it would say, "Good-Bye."

Outback Computer Terms

• Log on - Make the stove hotter
• Log off - Don't add any more wood
• Monitor - Keep an-eye on that stove
• Download - Getting the firewood off the stove
• Screen - What to shut during the mosquito season
• Byte - What the mosquitos do
• Bit - What the mosquitos did
• Mega Byte - What the Townsville mosquitos do
• Chip - A bar snack
• Micro Chip - What's left in the bag after you eat the chips
• Laptop - Where the cat sleeps
• Software - The plastic knives and forks they give you at the Red Rooster
• Hardware - The real stainless steel cutlery
• Mouse - What eats the grain in the shed
• Mainframe - What holds the shed up
• Web - What a spider makes
• Web site - The shed or under the verandah
• Upgrade - Steep hill
• Server - The person at the hotel who brings the counter lunch
• Mail Server - The bloke at the hotel who brings the counter lunch
• Sound Card - The one that wins the hand of 500
• User - The neighbour who keeps borrowing stuff
• Network - When you have to repair your fishing net
• Internet - Complicated fish net repair method
• Netscape - When a fish manoeuvres out of reach
• Online - When you get the laundry hung out on the washing line
• Off line - When the clothes pegs let go and the washing falls on the ground

If you rearrange the letters in the phrase,

" Year Two Thousand "

you can get

" A year to shut down "

The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much.

An obviously clueless lady called in to a talk radio show and asked, "Do I need, um, a computer to use Windows 95?"

The host responded, "You'll have less trouble with Windows 95 without a computer than with one."

I had ordered 5 CDs from Columbia House. They only shipped 4, however, demanding payment before sending the fifth.

On the invoice, it stated:
"We must limit the amount of open charges. We are, therefore, holding the SPICE GIRLS until your balance has been paid... "

I quickly submitted the "ransom"...

Viruses you NEVER want your computer to get:

OPRAH WINFREY VIRUS: Your 500MB hard drive DESKTOP suddenly shrinks to Notebook computer size, then slowly begins expanding back to a desktop unit.

MCI VIRUS: Every four minutes it autodials all your friends and relatives and pesters them to switch, and gives them YOUR name, as reference.

PRO CHOICE VIRUS: Overwrites all files, in every State but remains personally opposed to it's own behaviour. Destroys all files from 1 day to 9 months even if the only reason is sector selection. It won't encourage you to consult your mother (board), and demands more and more funding.

ROSS PEROT VIRUS: Draws attention to itself by showing high resolution graphics on the monitor, then quits, restarts and self destructs.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER VIRUS: The so-called terminator virus will come and go, leaving the message that "it will be back". Only defense against this virus is through it's female adapter, but then you run the risk of the dreaded Kennedy Viruses.

CLINTON VIRUS: Makes your system do the opposite of what it prompts. Can only be removed when you hold it under white-water. Tries to remove itself by turning your printer into a shredder. If it prompts you for the Clinton-defense-virus, DON'T BELIEVE IT.

Use your virus scanner & don't let any of these Viruses happen to your PC!

My wife is a CS assistant professor, and since she is new she teaches lower-level courses. One of her classes is in "Computer Literacy", which is a course to explain computers to non-majors.

Sadly, some of these people don't pay a lot of attention in class and try to guess answers to test questions; this week's midterm earned one of the most original guesses ever:

Question: Name one advantage of tape as compared to a hard disk for storing data.

Answer: Can listen to it.

President Clinton, as part of his goal to increase technical awareness and interest in the sciences, asked the various major computer companies to cooperate in a large Multimedia publishing project. The general theme was "Elephants".

The piece from Apple was titled: "User Friendly Elephants and Their Friend, the Mouse".

IBM's: "How to Sell an Elephant to Someone Who Wants a Racehorse".

Novell's: "Connecting Elephants".

Borland's: "All Elephants Should Cost $99".

NeXT's: "Painting an Elephant Black".

Microsoft's: "Why You Should Buy Microsoft Windows".

Netscape's: "Old Elephant never dies."

Intel's: "Elephant Inside"

When I was doing software support for a bunch of 11/70's...
Computer Operator as she is lifting an RP06 disk pack from the drive: "Gee, how much does one of these weigh?"
Me: "It depends on how much data is on the disk...."
The operator believed it.

A lady walks in a computer store one day with a box of 5 1/2 inch disks, says "I bought these disks and they seem to be defective."

"So", says the salesman, "what type of computer do you have?"

"An Apple," says she.

So fine, he says, and takes her over to a IIe...

"Oh, not this one," she said, "I own one of those!" And points to a Mac.

(at this point the salesman, as you do, saw where this was going, and refused to believe it.)

"Well," says the salesman "these are 5 1/2 inch disks, they won't won't fit in one of those..."

"Oh, I made them fit." Says the woman.

Needless to say, she had taken a pair of scissors...

When I worked for a company that had a contract with 3M, 3M had asked me to write them a memo describing why we were having problems with diskette failures.
I said in the memo that the disks were failing due to head crashes.
"If the customers would just clean their heads periodically, we wouldn't have these problems," I said in the memo.
One customer responded with "What kind of shampoo do you recommend?"

Heard this on a cable home shopping network:

' Don't be fooled folks ... with this PC compatible machine you geta full 5.25" disk drive, not one of the smaller 3.5" drives you'll see elsewhere. '

Unclear on the concept:

The Weather Office is now using fax machines to give local authorities early warning of severe weather. The Houston emergency planning office said:

"Rather than having to rely on telephones, for instance, where lines are at risk in bad weather, we are encouraging the wider use of fax machines."

The IRS reported today that thousands of Macintosh owners were filing Form 4868 (Application for Automatic Extension of Time To File U.S. Individual Income Tax Return).

It seems that they all used MacInTax, and Form 4868 was the only form that printed out correctly.

There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, when ...

Once I spent all day training a group of managers how to do advanced dbase programming then had to ask the secretary for help because I couldn't figure out how to use her phone to call my office.

People who use a mouse for the first time are very puzzled : it's moving too quickly, not acurately enough and there is never enough space on the desk to reach the end of the screen. I even saw once a secretary (yes : Yet Another Woman Narration) having not enough space on her desk continuing dragging the mouse on the *wall*!

There is a story that a few months after the British government decreed that all schools should have a BBC micro, an engineer was called out to one school that had just got a disk drive. They arrived to find a tape cassette jammed in the drive and an eight-year-old standing there saying "I told her not to do it" (of the teacher).

About a year ago I sent a fax letter to another part of campus. Later in the day came a telephone call from a staff member in the department. "You know," she said, "you sent this to the wrong address. I'm sending it back to you." Which she did.

This is a true story as it happened to my mother a few (maybe 20) years ago while she worked for a Sears in western Pa.

An elderly man phoned into the service department where my mother worked to complain that the new TV that he just bought was broken. When my mother asked for a description of the problem, the man said, "It quits."

A repairman was sent to the home where he found the TV was working just fine. He ran the usual diagnostics on it, and it tested fine, so the serviceman left, telling the man to call back in if it happens again.

The very next day the man called in saying that the TV just quits, and it isn't fixed soon he will return it. This time the Service Manager (ta-dah)was sent out to see if he could locate the problem.

After testing the TV and finding it in perfect working order, the service manager began asking the man a few questions. "Does it blow any fuses? Do you own a Ham radio? Does this happen at any particular time?"

To that last question the man replied, "Yes. Around two o'clock each morning - it plays the national anthem and quits!"

A Japanese rancher told reporters in Tokyo in July that he herds cattle by outfitting them with pocket pagers (beepers), which he calls from his portable phone. After a week of training, the cows associate the beeping with eating and hustle up for grub.

My husband and I were doing the spring cleaning a few weeks ago. As we were vacuuming the dust and dead insects off the windowsills so that we could put in the screens, he turned to me and said, "In all my career plans and visions of my future in computer science, this is something I never thought I would be doing --- debugging Windows!"

Q: What is the difference between hardware and software?
A: Hardware gets faster, cheaper, smaller. Software gets slower, costlier and bigger.

While back Harry was at a local book store, browsing through the computer books when he found a book on Windows 95 and the evolution of Chicago.
He moved it over to the fiction section.

My New Years Resolution is 1024 x 768, 16.7 million colors.

Question: What is the difference between hardware and software?
Answer:
Hardware gets faster, cheaper, smaller.
Software gets slower, costlier and bigger.

My father has ordered, through Microsoft, a copy of Microsoft Office for Macintosh on CD Rom. It has yet to arrive. When he called Microsoft to ask why this was taking so long, they responded that although they currently have a version on diskettes, the CD Rom version hasn't come out yet.

My father's response: "Then go to China and buy me a copy!"

Why is the company known as "Intel"?
'Cause they're only half as INTELigent as they thought they were and Pentium implies that
Practically
Everyone
Now
Thinks
It's
Useless for
Math

Q) Heard what their calling the PENTIUM replacement chip?
A) The Repentium.

The famous joke that made it to CNN:

MICROSOFT Bids to Acquire Catholic Church

By Hank Vorjes

VATICAN CITY (AP) 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 online service, "we will make the sacraments available online 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 audience," notes Notre Dame theologian Father Kenneth Madigan. 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 instilled 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.

What do you get when you dot Lee Iacocca with a vampire?

you get AUTOEXEC.BAT

This morning I had the following telephone conversation with a federal employee who shall remain nameless:

He: "Okay, so I'll fax you fifteen to twenty copies of the flyer."

Me: "Umm...why don't you just send us one and I'll make the copies?"

He: "Well, I was going to fax it to you on yellow paper...."

From the L.A. Times

Solomon Waters of Altadena, a 6-year-old first-grader, came home from his first day of school and excitedly told his mother how he had written on "a machine that looks like a computer -- but without the TV screen." She asked him if it could have been a "typewriter." "Yeah! Yeah!" he said. "That's what it was called."

A major corporation bought a Cray to use in R&D. On a tour of the department, an executive remarked that it was a lot of money for such a small machine. The engineer countered that it did calculations 100 times faster than their old machine, allowing them to things they only used to dream of before. Impressed, the executive remarked it probably calculate this huge spreadsheet of his in under a second. Sadly, the engineer informed his boss that Lotus didn't make a version of 1-2-3 for the Cray. At this, the executive remarked: "What do mean, its not PC-compatible?"

From: brad@icarus.weber.edu Brad Heaton

In the CS department here there has been a joke going around that is supposed to have come from one of Microsoft's software developers. It has reference to Ford's 'Quality is Job 1' slogan. At Microsoft: 'Quality is Job 1.1'

Anyone at Microsoft want to claim it?

SUBJ: Top Signs You're Addicted to the 'Net

1. You wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and stop and check your e-mail on the way back to bed.
2. You get a tattoo that reads "This body best viewed with Netscape Navigator 1.1 or higher."
3. You name your children Mosaic, Java and Eudora.
4. You turn off your modem and get this awful empty feeling, like you just pulled the plug on a loved one.
5. You spend half of the plane trip with your laptop on your lap ... and your child in the overhead compartment.
6. You decide to stay in college for an additional year or two, just for the free Internet access.
7. You laugh at people with 2400-baud modems.
8. You start using smileys in your snail mail.
9. The last girl you picked up was a JPEG.
10. Only communication within your household is through email.
11. You refuse to go to a vacation spot with no electricity and no phone lines.
12. All your daydreaming is preoccupied with getting a faster connection to the net: 28.8...ISDN...cable modem...T1...T3.
13. And even your night dreams are in HTML.
14. You refer to going to the bathroom as downloading.
15. Your heart races faster and beats irregularly each time you see a new WWW site address in print or on TV, even though you've never had heart problems before.
16. All of your friends have an @ in their names.
17. You refer to your age as 3.x.
18. You code your homework in HTML and give your instructor the URL.
19. You move into a new house and decide to Netscape before you landscape.
20. You keep trying to download a pizza from www.dominos.com.
21. You really did ask a plumber how much it would cost to replace the chair in front of your computer with a toilet.
22. You come back and check this list every half-hour.

A friend of mine was on the phone with a tech rep from another company. That tech rep called in to ask some questions about system setup, as the company this tech works for actually sells, installs and warranties systems. While they were on the phone, this tech rep received an incoming call, which he took after. When the caller hung up, the tech rep came back on the phone, laughing like a crazy person. This is the call he took:

Caller: "Hello, is this Tech Support?"

Tech Rep: "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 Rep: "I'm sorry, but did you say a cup holder?"

Caller: "Yes, it's attached to the front of my computer."

Tech Rep: "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.

NOTE: It happens that "4X" is also a popular brand of Aussie beer.