Encyclopedia of Humor

DOS Beer — Requires you to use your own can opener, and requires you to read the directions carefully before opening the can. Originally only came in an 8-oz. can, but now comes in a 16-oz. can. However, the can is divided into 8 compartments of 2 oz. each, which have to be accessed separately. Soon to be discontinued, although a lot of people are going to keep drinking it after it’s no longer available.

Mac Beer — At first, came only a 16-oz. can, but now comes in a 32-oz. can. Considered by many to be a “light” beer. All the cans look identical. When you take one from the fridge, it opens itself. The ingredients list is not on the can. If you call to ask about the ingredients, you are told that “you don’t need to know.” A notice on the side reminds you to drag your empties to the trashcan.

Windows 3.1 Beer — The world’s most popular. Comes in a 16-oz. can that looks a lot like Mac Beer’s. Requires that you already own a DOS Beer. Claims that it allows you to drink several DOS Beers simultaneously, but in reality you can only drink a few of them, very slowly, especially slowly if you are drinking the Windows Beer at the same time. Sometimes, for apparently no reason, a can of Windows Beer will explode when you open it.

OS/2 Beer — Comes in a 32-oz can. Does allow you to drink several DOS Beers simultaneously. Allows you to drink Windows 3.1 Beer simultaneously too, but somewhat slower. Advertises that its cans won’t explode when you open them, even if you shake them up. You never really see anyone drinking OS/2 Beer, but the manufacturer (International Beer Manufacturing) claims that 9 million six-packs have been sold.

Windows 95 Beer — You can’t buy it yet, but a lot of people have taste-tested it and claim it’s wonderful. The can looks a lot like Mac Beer’s can, but tastes more like Windows 3.1 Beer. It comes in 32-oz. cans, but when you look inside, the cans only have 16 oz. of beer in them. Most people will probably keep drinking Windows 3.1 Beer until their friends try Windows 95 Beer and say they like it. The ingredients list, when you look at the small print, has some of the same ingredients that come in DOS beer, even though the manufacturer claims that this is an entirely new brew.

Windows NT Beer — Comes in 32-oz. cans, but you can only buy it by the truckload. This causes most people to have to go out and buy bigger refrigerators. The can looks just like Windows 3.1 Beer’s, but the company promises to change the can to look just like Windows 95 Beer’s – after Windows 95 beer starts shipping. Touted as an “industrial strength” beer, and suggested only for use in bars.

Unix Beer — Comes in several different brands, in cans ranging from 8 oz. to 64 oz. Drinkers of Unix Beer display fierce brand loyalty, even though they claim that all the different brands taste almost identical. Sometimes the pop-tops break off when you try to open them, so you have to have your own can opener around for those occasions, in which case you either need a complete set of instructions, or a friend who has been drinking Unix Beer for several years.

AmigaDOS Beer — The company has gone out of business, but their recipe has been picked up by some weird German company, so now this beer will be an import. This beer never really sold very well because the original manufacturer didn’t understand marketing. Like Unix Beer, AmigaDOS Beer fans are an extremely loyal and loud group. It originally came in a 16-oz. can, but now comes in 32-oz. cans too. When this can was originally introduced, it appeared flashy and colorful, but the design hasn’t changed much over the years, so it appears dated now. Critics of this beer claim that it is only meant for watching TV anyway.

VMS Beer — Requires minimal user interaction, except for popping the top and sipping. However cans have been known on occasion to explode, or contain extremely un-beer-like contents.

You kiss your girlfriend’s home page.

A VRML virtual walk through a park is your idea of a good date.

Your bookmark takes 15 minutes to scroll from top to bottom.

Your eyeglasses have a web site burned in on them.

All your daydreaming is preoccupied with getting a faster connection to the net: 28.8…ISDN…cable modem…T1…T3.

And even your night dreams are in HTML.

You turn off your modem and get this awful empty feeling, like you just pulled the plug on a loved one.

You refer to going to the bathroom as downloading.

You start introducing yourself as “Jim at I-I-Net dot net dot au

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.

You step out of your room and realize that your parents have moved and you don’t have a clue when it happened.

You turn on your intercom when leaving the room so you can hear if new e-mail arrives.

Your wife drapes a blond wig over your monitor to remind you of what she looks like.

All of your friends have an @ in their names.

When looking at a pageful of someone else’s links, you notice all of them are already highlighted in purple.

Your dog has its own home page.

Your dog’s homepage is actually good.

You can’t call your mother…she doesn’t have a modem.

You check your mail. It says “no new messages.” So you check it again.

Your phone bill comes to your doorstep in a box.

You code your homework in HTML and give your instructor the URL.

You don’t know the sex of three of your closest friends, because they have neutral nicknames and you never bothered to ask.

Your husband tells you he’s had the beard for 2 months.

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.

You tell the kids they can’t use the computer because “Daddy’s got work to do” and you don’t even have a job.

You buy a Captain Kirk chair with a built-in keyboard and mouse.

Your wife makes a new rule: “The computer cannot come to bed.”

You get a tatoo that says “This body best viewed with Netscape 2.01or higher.”

You never have to deal with busy signals when calling your ISP…because you never log off.

The last girl you picked up was only a jpeg.

You ask a plumber how much it would cost to replace the chair in front of your computer with a toilet.

Your wife says communication is important in a marriage…so you buy another computer and install a second phone line so the two of you can chat.

As your car crashes through the guardrail on a mountain road, your first instinct is to search for the “back” button.

Real software engineers eat quiche.

Real software engineers don’t read dumps. They never generate them, and on the rare occasions that they come across them, they are vaguely amused.

Real software engineers don’t comment their code. The identifiers are so mnemonic they don’t have to.

Real software engineers don’t write applications programs, they implement algorithms. If someone has an application that the algorithm might help with, that’s nice. Don’t ask them to write the user interface, though.

If it doesn’t have recursive function calls, real software engineers don’t program in it.

Real software engineers don’t program in assembler. They become queasy at the very thought.

Real software engineers don’t debug programs, they verify correctness. This process doesn’t necessarily involve executing anything on a computer, except perhaps a Correctness Verification Aid package.

Real software engineers like C’s structured constructs, but they are suspicious of it because they have heard that it lets you get “close to the machine.”

Real software engineers play tennis. In general, they don’t like any sport that involves getting hot and sweaty and gross when out of range of a shower. (Thus mountain climbing is Right Out.) They will occasionally wear their tennis togs to work, but only on very sunny days.

Real software engineers admire PASCAL for its discipline and Spartan purity, but they find it difficult to actually program in. They don’t tell this to their friends, because they are afraid it means that they are somehow Unworthy.

Real software engineers work from 9 to 5, because that is the way the job is described in the formal spec. Working late would feel like using an undocumented external procedure.

Real software engineers write in languages that have not actually been implemented for any machine, and for which only the formal spec (in BNF) is available. This keeps them from having to take any machine dependencies into account. Machine dependencies make real software engineers very uneasy.

Real software engineers don’t write in ADA, because the standards bodies have not quite decided on a formal spec yet.

Real software engineers like writing their own compilers, preferably in PROLOG (they also like writing them in unimplemented languages, but it turns out to be difficult to actually RUN these).

Real software engineers regret the existence of COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC. PL/I is getting there, but it is not nearly disciplined enough; far too much built in function.

Real software engineers aren’t too happy about the existence of users, either. Users always seem to have the wrong idea about what the implementation and verification of algorithms is all about.

Real software engineers don’t like the idea of some inexplicable and greasy hardware several aisles away that may stop working at any moment. They have a great distrust of hardware people, and wish that systems could be virtual at ALL levels. They would like personal computers (you know no one’s going to trip over something and kill your DFA in mid-transit), except that they need 8 megabytes to run their Correctness Verification Aid packages.

Real software engineers think better while playing WFF ‘N’ PROOF.

Here are some basic descriptions of what may happen if airplanes had different operating systems running them.

DOS: Everybody pushes it till it glides, then jumps on and lets it coast till it skids, then jumps off, pushes, jumps back on, etc.

DOS with QEMM: Same as DOS, but with more leg room for pushing.

Macintosh: All the flight attendants, captains and baggage handlers look the same, act the same and talk the same. Every time you ask a question, you are told you don’t need to know, don’t want to know and everything will be done for you without your knowing, so just shut up.

OS/2: To get on board, you have to have your ticket stamped 10 different times by standing in 10 different lines. Then you fill out a form asking how you want your seating arranged–with the look and feel of an ocean liner, a passenger train or a bus. If you get on board and off the ground, you will have a wonderful trip, except when the rudder and flaps freeze, in which case you have time to say your prayers before you crash.

Windows: Colorful airport terminal, friendly flight attendants, easy access to a plane, and an uneventful takeoff. Then, all in a sudden, boom! You blow up without any warning whatsoever.

NT: The terminal and flight attendants all look like those the Windows plane uses, but the process of checking in and going through security is a nightmare. Once aboard, those passengers with first class tickets can go anywhere they want and arrive in half the time, while the vast majority of passengers with coach tickets can’t even get aboard.

Unix: Everyone brings one piece of the plane. Then they go on the runway and piece it together, all the while arguing about what kind of plane they’re building.

CAIRO: The airplane is distributed among 47 different hangars in 13 airports scattered over 8 states, 4 Canadian provinces, and a remote mountain hideaway in Nicaragua. But you don’t need to know where the airplane is or who it belongs to in order to fly it. Actually, you don’t fly the airplane itself; you fly a simulation that behaves just like the real thing except that you don’t go anywhere. But that’s okay, because when the world is at your fingertips you never need to leave home.

MICROSOFT Bids to Acquire Catholic Church

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 on-line service, “we will make the sacraments available on-line 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.