Encyclopedia of Humor

The Life Cycle of Software

1. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
2. Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
3. Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren’t really bugs.
4. Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn’t work and discovers 15 new bugs.
5. See 3.
6. See 4.
7. See 5.
8. See 6.
9. See 7.
10. See 8.
11. Due to marketing pressure and an extremely pre-mature product announcement based on over-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.
12. Users find 137 new bugs.
13. Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere to be found.
14. Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.
15. Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.
16. Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.
17. New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires programmer to redo program from scratch.
18. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
19. See step 2

You’ve been in graphics too long if…
by Chris Thornborrow

Most of your friends can pronounce Gouraud first time.
When you fist heard that some people used 16 million colours you wondered whatever for and continued to write colour-map tables for correct highlights on objects.
You remember comp.graphics when there weren’t enough articles for you to read, none of them included the word PC and nobody ever asked the difference between raytracing and rendering.
You insist that DOOM does not use raycasting. (Technically, as it was first introduced, and anyway, who plays games at your age?)
Your partner knows the difference between scientific visualisation and photorealistic rendering, even though they wouldn’t know a polygon from a camel.
You think an SGI Indy is OK for a quick hack but not a real graphics machine.
You remember discussing how one day there would be graphics hardware to support rendering in desktop machines and people laughed.
You watched the Last Starfighter in an empty theatre and marvelled thinking it was even better than TRON.
You remember thinking that parallel computers would solve your graphics problems.
You remember when you thought X was a high level graphics language.
You get drunk and suddenly get really excited examining the light reflected through the whisky.
You get despondent while walking in the woods and think “I’ll never be able to render this in real time.”
You once sat up all night watching your home computer calculate the mandlebrot set with 16 colours and a resolution of 200×200.
You sat up the next night with colleagues watching your home computer calculate the mandlebrot set with 16 colours and a resolution of 200×200.
Your address book has email entries for Benoit, James F, and Prof David R and Eric.
You think being a computer geek is only half way there.
You wonder how nature processes all those photons so quickly.
When people mention the word graphics you really insist they are more accurate in their terminology.
You get irritated by people who say, “Oh, graphics, that’s a solved problem” (even if they then go on to be precise about what they mean by the term “graphics”).
You own one or more of the following: a glass sphere, a prism, more then two copies of Foley and Van Dam, a computer which cost more than your car, a computer which cost more than your house, a pet named Phong, a graphics board from a defunct supercomputer (properly framed) or a Rubics Cube (original).
You get 75% or more of these jokes.

The Net is Slow

Oh, the network outside is frightful,
But on campus, it’s so delightful,
Our packets have nowhere to go,
Net is slow, net is slow, net is slow.

It doesn’t show signs of stopping,
All our packets, our hosts are dropping;
Bandwidth is turned way down low,
Net is slow, net is slow, net is slow.

When we finally connect to a site,
It’s time to go back to the dorm;
But if I could stay here all night,
I could submit their Web form.

The network is slowly dying,
And, I fear, we’re still denying,
But as long as Sprint is the way to go,
Net is slow, net is slow, net is slow.

You know you have been on the computer too long when…

When you are counting objects, you go “0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D…”.

When asked about a bus schedule, you wonder if it is 16 or 32 bits.

When your wife says “If you don’t turn off that darn machine and come to bed, then I am going to divorce you!”, and you chastise her for for omitting the else clause.

When you are reading a book and look for the space bar to get to the next page.

When you look for your car keys using: “grep keys /dev/pockets”

When you look for your homework using: “grep homework /dev/backpack”

When after fooling around all day with routers etc, you pick up the phone and start dialing an IP number.

When you get in the elevator and double-press the button for the floor you want.

When not only do you check your email more often than your paper mail, but you remember your {network address} faster than your postal one.

When you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you’re doing the math in octal.

When you dream in 256 pallettes of 256 colors.

…You’re writing a homework assignment, and get the end of the line in the middle of a sentence, tack on a ‘\’, and continue writing on the next line.

While trying to diagnose a problem over the phone I told the user to type out his autoexec.bat file.

He said it said “File not found”.

I told him to do a dir.

I asked him if he saw autoexec.bat listed.

He said, “Well it says autoexec, then there’s some spaces, but no dot, and then it says bat.”

I said type this in “type autoexec.bat”.

Again he got “File not found”.

I asked him to tell me exactly what he typed.

He said, “I typed just what you told me: `type autoexecdotbat’.