Computer Humor

I shamelessly clipped this from another site that I visit for offbeat humor.   My being a former computer network geek and builder I got a chuckle out of this.

Cartoon that is attached to the side of my desktop.

NEED TO KNOW: GLOSSARY OF COMPUTER TERMS

ALPHA: Software undergoes alpha testing as a first step in getting user feedback. Alpha is Latin for "doesn't work".

BETA: Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released. Beta is Latin for "still doesn't work". It is worth noting that "Release 1.0" can also be translated as "still doesn't work but rent was due".

COMPUTER: Instrument of torture. The first computer was invented by Roger "Duffy" Billingsly, a British scientist. In a plot to overthrow Adolf Hitler, Duffy disguised himself as a German ally and offered his invention as a gift to the surly dictator. The plot worked. On April 8, 1945, Adolf became so enraged at the "Incompatible File Format" error message that he shot himself. The war ended soon after Hitler's death, and Duffy began working for IBM.

CPU: Central propulsion unit. The CPU is the computer's engine. It consists of a hard drive, an interface card and a tiny spinning wheel that's powered by a running rodent - a gerbil if the machine is a old machine, a ferret if it's more recent and a ferret on speed if it's a "performance model".

DEFAULT DIRECTORY: Black hole. Default directory is where all files that you need disappear to. The default directory exists in part to ensure you lose some important files when you (or a virus) reformat your hard drive.

ERROR MESSAGE: Terse, baffling remark used by programmers to place blame on users for the program's shortcomings.

FILE: A document that has been saved with an unidentifiable name. It helps to think of a file as something stored in a file cabinet - except when you try to remove the file, the cabinet gives you an electric shock and tells you the file format is unknown.

HARDWARE: Collective term for any computer-related object that can be kicked or battered, often without breaking.

HELP: What we all need. Actually, it is the feature that assists in generating more questions. When the help feature is used correctly, users are able to navigate through a series of Help screens and end up where they started from without learning anything... but now it's their fault and they should buy more RAM.

INPUT/OUTPUT: Information is input from the keyboard as intelligible data and output to the printer as unrecognisable junk.

INTERIM RELEASE: A programmer's feeble attempt at repentance.

MEMORY: Of computer components, the most generous in terms of variety, and the skimpiest in terms of quantity.

PRINTER: A joke in poor taste. A printer consists of three main parts: the case, the jammed paper tray and the blinking red light.

PROGRAMMERS: Computer avengers. Once members of that group of high school nerds who wore tape on their glasses, played Dungeons and Dragons, and memorized Star Trek episodes; now millionaires who create "user-friendly" software to get revenge on whoever gave them noogies.

REFERENCE MANUAL: Object that raises the monitor to eye level. Also used to compensate for that short table leg.

SCHEDULED RELEASE DATE: A carefully calculated date determined by estimating the actual shipping date and subtracting six months from it.

USER-FRIENDLY: Of or pertaining to any feature, device or concept that makes perfect sense to a programmer.

USERS: Collective term for those who stare vacantly at a monitor. Users are divided into three types: novice, intermediate and expert.

*NOVICE USERS: People who are afraid that simply pressing a key might break their computer.
*INTERMEDIATE USERS: People who don't know how to fix their computer after they've just pressed a key that broke it.
*EXPERT USERS: People who break other people's computers.

Computer back online..

I used to do all my blogging in my bonus room where my main computer was, the one that used to run windows XP and I had blogged in the past about I hated Microsoft for withdrawing support for it.  Vista and Window's 7 sucked.  Well I finally went on Ebay and picked up a used computer for $60 with a fresh Window's 10 install.

     A bit of background, over a year ago, I was surfing the web following a story of the Syrian conflict and I was following a link of a link of a link of a link kinda thing and my computer started acting funny and several tabs started opening up and I quickly realized that my computer was being hacked.  I quickly pulled the antenna out of the computer, and tried to clean up the mess in "safe mode" and no matter what I tried, I couldn't stop or clean up the hack job, and it got worse.    So I to protect my self, I took the HDD to work and disassembled it and destroyed the platters. 
     I had saved a HDD from another computer a couple of years ago, and tried to install it on my computer and had mixed results.  The computer was slow and wasn't reliable so I used my laptop exclusively.  I finally decided to do something because I missed my "IBM" click keyboard and to be honest I have some some of my best blogging in my bonus room.  
    Well I got it up and running and I was pleased, I started working on a "Red Storm Rising" post. and I was happy that I got my "IBM" click back.  The problem is that I need a repeater, the WiFi signal is weaker with the "N" network that I have now when I replaced my older "G" network after the router decided that it was finished.  Oh well.

I did get my "Windows" cartoon on the side of the computer.

    On a slightly different note, I collected 7 stitches at work, Apparently portable Air conditioner cart ducts are sharp and when you are clumsy and trip and fall against it isn't one of my smarter moves, lol

   

Blast from the Past...Techie stuff

   I used computers when I was in the service, but to call it a computer was interesting, if I recall, it was a 100 KB disc suspended in a nitrogen filled canister, to program it, we used hexadecimals numbers on what they call a MOTTS panel which was back-lighted.  When I got out of the service, I bought a computer, it was an XT, with a 286 processor.  I paid a lot of money for it...I remember going to a electronics store on the northside of Atlanta to pickup a keyboard which used the DIN connector.  I paid if  I remembered correctly about $140 for the keyboard.  It had the "IBM" click that I like.  Well time has passed, it has been 23 years since I bought that computer and all of it has been consigned to the scrap heap of history...except that keyboard.....I still use it.

    I found a PS/2 adapter in the late 90's and used it on the ATX form factor case, I tend to upgrade computers so this computer with my reliable XP in it has my same keyboard that I used back in 1991.  I love that keyboard, it is built like a tank.

                This is a recreation of the Microsoft webpage back in 1994, in celebration of 20 years of the website's existence Microsoft made a recreation to put on its regular website.

In 1994, there was no World Series because of a strike by the Major League Baseball Players Association. Nelson Mandela made world news — and history — by becoming president of South Africa. TV shows like “Seinfeld,” “ER” and “Murder, She Wrote” peppered evening viewing fare in the U.S.
“Speed” was one of the more popular movies that year. But speed was not a reality for a very young World Wide Web in 1994, with pokey dial-up modems the norm for getting onto the Web. There were only a few thousand websites then – compared to nearly 1 billion now – and Microsoft was among them. In the 20 years since it has been on the Web, Microsoft.com has remained in the top 10 most-visited websites worldwide.
Twenty years ago, there was no Facebook, of course, no eBay, no Amazon, no Wikipedia. It was Web less-than-1.0.
In 1994, among the reasons Microsoft started a website was to put its growing Knowledge Base online. At the time, the company managed support forums for customers on CompuServe, one of the earliest major Internet dial-up service providers.
“We had started to build up a community there; people would answer questions for each other,” recalls Mark Ingalls, a Microsoft engineer in 1994 who would become Microsoft.com’s first administrator. He was also the only website employee at that time, other than his boss. But the staff doubled early on, when Steve Heaney was hired to offer vacation relief, Ingalls says.
In terms of “Web design,” the notion, much less the phrase, didn’t really exist.
“There wasn’t much for authoring tools,” Ingalls says. “There was this thing called HTML that almost nobody knew.” Information that was submitted for the new Microsoft.com website often came to Ingalls via 3-1/2-inch floppy disks.

“Steve Heaney and I put together PERL scripts that handled a lot of these daily publishing duties for us,” he says. “For a while, we ran the site like a newspaper, where we published content twice a day. And if you missed the cutoff for the publishing deadline, you didn’t get it published until the next running of the presses, or however you want to term it.”
Today, there are a number of individuals who work on Microsoft.com. Chris Balt, Microsoft.com product manager, says the home page has to “support consumer users and enterprise users, home users and developers, teachers, students … If you think about the huge range of audience that comes to our website, it’s a unique challenge.” Plus there are the “stakeholders,” the business groups within Microsoft.
“They all want their spot on the home page that gets 20 million to 30 million visits a month. But my job exists to serve the user and to serve our customers – so first and foremost, the job of the home page is telling people what Microsoft is about; it’s helping them accomplish a task. That could mean fixing a problem. That could be learning about new products. Or that could be learning about old products.”
Microsoft.com was also one of the first corporate sites in the world to be built using modern, “responsive” design, meaning its design adapts to and renders appropriately for any device, Balt says.
“Responsive means it can be accessed on a phone, it can be accessed on a tablet, you can look at it on your Xbox – and it completely adjusts to suit the unique properties of the device that you’re using.”
Trent Walton, Dave Rupert and Reagan Ray of Paravel Inc., in Austin, Texas, did the most recent redesign of Microsoft’s home page, its 17^th in 20 years. It is the home page that visitors now see.
To help celebrate the 20^th anniversary, Walton and Rupert re-created the 1994 page from scratch, describing it as “sort of like an archaeological dig, digging through dinosaur bones, to find out how they did this then,” says Rupert.
“It seems really simple, but we had to kind of peel back the years and go down to 1994 technology – where your browser doesn’t support images, for example,” he says. “In 1994, it was more of a triumph to have a Web page in and of itself, whether or not an image was attached.”
Walton says Microsoft.com’s responsive design is how more websites will be in the future.
“The idea is that we need to build things more simply so that they work in more places, as well as on more kinds of devices,” he says. “These days it’s not just computers and phones that can access the Internet, but things like cars, glasses, watches. Web design is about building a really solid website that be accessed by as many different types of devices as possible. No one wants to be told where and how to access the site – they want to do it on their terms. If they’re on a phone, they want to do it that way; if they’re on a desktop with a 27-inch monitor, they want to do it that way. So, it’s up to us provide the experiences they want.”

A box of about 80 floppy disks together with one USB memory stick. The stick is capable of holding over 130 times as much data as the entire box of disks put together.

The first Microsoft.com home page, in 1994: Mark Ingalls, the first administrator of Microsoft.com, says at that time, using the slow dial-up connections of the era, this page would have taken awhile to load. “For most folks at home in that day and age, you would have been able to count to three or five before that picture showed up on your screen,” he says.

XP operating system patch from Microsoft.

Well I am still looking on upgrading my operating system, but I am still using XP, I know that Microsoft will not support it anymore, but I keep my security software updated.  I will crank up the Internet Explorer and get the update necessary to keep my XP fairly current.  I am adding this as a Public Service announcement for my fellow XP users.

SEATTLE, May 1 (UPI) — Microsoft has issued a security patch for the security hole in all versions of Internet Explorer, and has even included a patch for XP users.
The tech company had stopped issuing updates and support for XP users form April 8, and said that the issuance of this update did not mean they were restoring support for XP.
“Windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft, and we continue to encourage customers to migrate to a modern operating system, such as Windows 7 or 8.1. Additionally, customers are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer, IE 11,” Microsoft said in a blog post.
The fix will update all users who have their automatic updates turned on, the company said on its security response page. Microsoft suggests that users turn on the feature by clicking on the “Check for Updates” button on the Windows Update tab of their Control Panel.
“For those manually updating, we strongly encourage you to apply this update as quickly as possible following the directions in the released security bulletin,” said Dustin Childs from the response communications team.
Microsoft reveled earlier this week that a security flaw was allowing malicious hackers to get around security protections in the Windows operating system. The flaw was introduced when a user visited an infected site.
Many were quick to predict this as the end for Internet Explorer, which was once the most dominant browser in the market.
“I don’t expect a huge backlash on Internet Explorer’s market share,” said Gartner security analyst Lawrence Pingree. “In fact, I think this helps drive adoption of upgrades to Windows 7 from XP.”

The flaw got the Department of Homeland Security to ask its employees to stop using the browser until a fix was issued. According to Pingree, DHS issued that warning assuming that XP wouldn’t get the patch, leaving its users with no alternative but to switch browsers.

The story behind the most iconic wallpaper ever..and Ctrl-Alt-Delete

I ran across this story about the iconic desktop picture that was the default picture used in the XP operating system.  With the demise of the official support for the XP operating system I figured I would add this story-bit about the system, the picture and of course the "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" function that is a staple of everybody's experience with Microsoft products.

XP Wallpaper-Most Famous Photo Ever

The incredible story of the XP Wallpaper ‘Bliss’ image – now considered one of the most viewed photos of all time.

As the world mourns (or not) the end of the road for Windows XP—as of Tuesday, Microsoft is no longer offering support for the operating system—Microsoft Netherlands has posted this nine-minute film on its YouTube channel all about XP’s famous default wallpaper.

The backstory is told by Charles O’Rear, the photographer who snapped the iconic picture, aptly titled “Bliss,” in 1996 along a California highway north of San Francisco (reports seem to differ on whether it’s Napa or Sonoma).

This was Bill Gates explaining about the "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" feature that is used on all Microsoft based operating systems.

    
“Basically because when you turn your computer on, you’re going to see some screens and eventually type your password in, you want to have something you do with the keyboard that is signalling to a very low level of the software—actually hard-coded in the hardware—that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect,” Gates said. “Instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like your login screen and listens to your password and is able to do that.
“So we could have had a single button, but the guy that wanted to do the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button, and so we programmed at a low level… it was a mistake.” 

Here is a video explaining the story a bit more from the programmer that designed the feature.  David Bradley.

I will continue to check on viable options for upgrading my XP.  I don't want to buy a new computer...Mine runs fine for what I use it for...and the money I spend on a computer, I could use to .....Buy another gun.  Something that isn't obsolete as soon as I unpack it.