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2008 2012 Winter Olympics

Separated at birth?

Here are the top ten similarities between two of today's popular motion picture icons. The similarities are clear; they must be related.

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Millennium Predictions

• Lists like this one will still be around, long after the millennium is tired, old news.
• Jokes like "Hey, let's meet here every millennium" get old fast.
• Clean air standards are amended to keep cities within acceptable levels. Smog is officially reclassified as a vegetable.
• College admission requirements are lowered, as high school graduates are reclassified as vegetables.
• Microsoft releases Windows 2002 way-ahead of schedule. The Intentional Programming Initiative makes it possible to develop the product without a beta test, using a development team consisting only of color stylists and lawyers. Incremental service releases are available daily on the Internet. Major corrections are available in real-time, customized for those who agree to continuous Internet connections and keystroke monitoring.
• Congress debates allocating 18 billion to put warning labels on the sun. The subcommittee compromises by requiring warnings on the back of all doors.
• The Coca Cola Company announces that they have secretly been selling us New Coke since 1985--they never really did go back to the old recipe. Pepisco admits that they, too, have been selling New Coke, and that all other soft drinks are derived from Safeway's Diet Skipper.
• Newly combined Dreamworks-Eisner-Fox (DEF) releases the "278th Disney Masterpiece," a full-length animated feature created completely without human intervention. The story-line, based on randomized public domain material, is not immediately apparent. ABC's week of specials celebrating the event is cut-short by the release of Disney's 279th Masterpiece. Steve Jobs, hard at work on Toy Story 2.1, declines comment, citing the Justice Department investigation of Microsoft's attempted purchase of 21 percent of DEF (MSNBCDEF).
• Ted Turner invests in technology to seamlessly convert existing programs to fit high-definition, wide-screen televisions. Friends re-runs now look as if cast members have eaten this week. The first feature film converted is The Maltese Falcon; unexpectedly, Humphrey Bogart looks like Sidney Greenstreet, and Sidney Greenstreet looks like the entire cast of Friends.
• The Supreme Court declares the Bill of Rights to be unconstitutional, conflicting with the Interstate Commerce Clause.
• Peter Jennings takes a leave of absence from ABC News to research the correct usage of a participial phrase, verb conjugation, and how to pronounce the word "About" in English.
• Just as everybody settles-down and finds that the power company and bank won't shut-down on January 1, along comes leap year day on February 29th, and stops every industry in its tracks.
• MASMpalooza concert celebrates the release of Macro Assembler 7.0 with backward compatibility and Merced support. (Just kidding, this will never happen.)
• The Department of Defense commissions Kenny ("Sweet Spirit") Kingston to hold constant seances attempting to contact Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper to direct the continuing date roll-over software upgrades.
• Another day older and deeper in debt.

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Overheard

Just a reminder: Our brains are 60% fat.

" Can't do it in life? Do it on the Web."
- Intel advertisement, played continuously (incessantly) in computer stores.

" The original idea of making money from a free operating system was dubious from the start," said a former Red Hat executive who asked not to be identified. " To make it work, if it could work at all, would have required highly skilled management. But with the price of the stock going from 151 to about 6 today, it's clear that the business model is impossible, or that Red Hat's management isn't up to the task, or both. Either way, it doesn't bode well for Red Hat."
- On Wired (Let's see, you give-away the product then you charge for... what was that again you charged for?)

" We've tried very hard not to portray the Japanese in a very bad light. They are a huge market and accounted for 20 percent of profits for Titanic ... The film barely refers to the Germans, but we have cut the speech for them, too ... It won't make a big difference, most people know who won the war."
- Disney markerteers on why they removed a pro-American speech from their version of how the story of Pearl Harbor should be remembered (Who was it who won the war, again? Oh yeah, the Baldwin brothers. Now who was the bad guy?)

" I'm out striking to help all those SAG [Screen Actor's Guild] members who are only making fifty-thousand dollars a year."
- Jason Alexander on The Tonight Show (And to try to keep it afloat, I am forced to increase the price of FileExt from $4 to $5.)

" There are 10 kinds of people: those who can count in binary, and those who can't."
- Anonymous

" Chipmaker introduces Pentium 4 processor at speeds of 1.5 gigahertz
Intel Corp. introduced on Wednesday its new high-end Pentium 4 computer chip, formerly code-named Willamette, running at an advertised 1.5 billion bits of information per second for faster graphics and game play."
- Associated Press (1.5GHz is the clock frequency used for instruction timing. Well, it's funny to the pocket protector crowd.)

" WINDOWS 98 SECOND EDITION
The Microsoft operating system for homer users. ... showed up in Smart Computing magazine's list of 25 of the Year's Smartest Products."
- Microsoft in Insider Update for Preferred Customers (Homer... Smart... D'oh; sometimes it's just too easy. Are there any other kinds of customers than Preferred?)

" I think that the most important thing is that I’ve come to the realization that people on the Internet do not want uninvited e-mail. Period."
- Sanford Wallace, former king of Spam (Let's send him 50 million thank you notes)

" In the very near future, it will be a basic human right for the people of the world to have access to the Internet."
- John Hart, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of 3Com (What! A basic right? Sure, like "We have to fight for the right to party," you know, like that kind of right!)

Microsoft Visual Basic is to 2005, what Cobol is to 1999. Come to think of it, Cobol is to 2005 what it is to 1999, too.
- Me

" I don't believe there is anything after the Internet. It's the last big paradigm shift."
- Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp. (Apparently the timeline of history does have an end, after all)

" SPORTS COUNCIL REFUSE APPLICATION
As part of the 1999 UK PC Games Tournament, the UKPCGC have attempted to register PC Gaming as a Sport. Well why not? If rifle or pistol shooting can make it as a sport, why not the much more popular and equally demanding sport of Computer Gaming. In a rather high handed, and indeed prejudiced way the Sports Council refused even to send us an application form. Serious questions need to be asked."
-The Playing Fields (Maybe eating pie is a sport -- if done with sufficient enthusiasm. I'm not overweight, I'm in training for the Olympic Synchronized Pie Eating Competition.)

" I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
- Albert Gore Jr. (To the gratitude of Vint Cerf, Sun, Cisco and others who, in the 1960s, followed Mr. Gore to complete the task)

" San Diego police may drop home-burglary investigations
... unless there is a known suspect, a compelling lead or extensive evidence. The move comes on the heels of a study showing that of the 7,000 annual burglaries in the city, only 12 percent were solved. There were few arrests and fewer convictions. ... For six months, San Diego will divert about 18 burglary detectives to three narcotics investigation teams. If home burglaries do not substantially increase and the teams are sucessful in making more drug arrests, Bejarano could make the change permanent."
- Associated Press (Investigating crime is boring)

" TOKYO - Leading Japanese chip makers Toshiba Corp and Fujitsu Ltd on Thursday announced plans to jointly devalop and launch one-gigabit dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips by the end of March 2002."
- ZDNet, December 3, 1998 (And I have trouble planning what to do today. Let's see, March 31, 2002 is a Sunday; I may be busy that day, could you wait until Monday?)

" The days of the artist are gone. It's about marketing, shelf space, and making money. [The Learning Company] bought Broderbund for the brand, not for the people."
- R. Scott Murray, CFO of The Learning Company, maker of Reader Rabbit, Princeton Review, and educational titles, in a speech announcing that he has fired 500 unnecessary creative-types (Good to see they're teaching realistic values to our kids. And now, The Learning Company has been bought by Mattel.)

" He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts--for support rather than illumination."
- Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

" Microsoft Product Support Realigned to Focus on Customers"
- Microsoft press release (Customers! What a radical concept in this industry.)

" Year-2000 compliance pace to quicken next year, Cap Gemini finds"
- Headline in August 12, 1998 InfoWorld (And the pace should peak around 2003)

" A lot of people would die to live my life. It's just that I get to live my life sometimes."
- Iron Mike Tyson, boxer

" Face it - Bill Gates is a white Persian cat and a monocle away from being a James Bond villain."
- Dennis Miller, comedian

" LIGHTENING WITHOUT THUNDER"
- Headline at the top of a full-page, four-color advertisement first seen in September 12, 1998 PC Magazine, page 254, for A-Open CD-ROM drive (Each time they run the ad costs maybe twenty grand; I guess they were lightening the load for the proofreader. They might want to download a free copy of ASCIIcat)

" You have to stop and count the roses every now and then."
- G. Gordon Liddy on his radio show, to an overworked caller

" My mother used to be Irish, but she converted when she married my father."
- Ben Stiller on Late Late Show with Tom Snyder (When you stop being Irish, what happens to your red hair and freckles?)

" The ebb and tide of life ..."
- Julia Roberts, on Entertainment Tonight

" Engineers and scientists will never make as much money as business executives. Now a rigorous mathematical proof explains why this is true:
Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power.
Postulate 2: Time is Money.
As every engineer knows, Work / Time=Power. Since Knowledge=Power, and Time=Money, substituting, we have: Work/Money=Knowledge.
Solving for Money, we get: Work / Knowledge=Money.
Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity regardless of the Work done.
Conclusion: The less you know, the more money you make."
- Mark Allen in The San Jose Mercury News.

" Keep in mind, however, that my knowledge of Office 2000 is limited to the recent Microsoft marketing hype, and because such hype is often reality-challenged, there may be a considerable margin of error in my assumptions. That's not to imply that Microsoft's marketing hype is always unreliable. Even as a longtime critic of the company, I must admit that Microsoft occasionally flirts with the truth. Well, perhaps 'flirt' is too strong a word. Let's just say Microsoft sometimes honks and waves as it drives by her house."
- Nicholas Petreley, Down to the Wire column in Infoworld.

Talking about classed society: "It's a futile society,"
"Don't you mean feudal?"
"No, not fue-tile, I meant like in England in the 1800s."
- Sophie B. Hawkins, talking to Richard Belzer on Later. (Belzer never came back with "Maybe Feudal, as in Feudal Lords?" Not to mention being off by four hundred years)

"A bowin' and a bendin' like a pig over a nut"
- Cowboy saying (it means polite behavior)

Interviewer: "Does your head or your heart rule?"
Response: "I've always been very heady."
- Sandra Bullock, celebrity, on Entertainment Tonight

"I had no idea where to drive; there was this little road around the building; the person took my order at one window, and I'm almost certain that the same person gave me my order at the next window."
- Wayne Newton, entertainer, on Late Night with Conan O'Brian, describing the foreign-ness of going to the Wendy's drive-through (A man of the people)

" The lawyers would probably say if we wanted to put in ham sandwiches we could put in ham sandwiches."
- Steve Balmer, Executive VP of Microsoft (now MS President), talking to InfoWorld about what's possible for Windows 9x. (Attention Blimpies and Subway: Be afraid, be very afraid.)

"How much difference can the right programmer's editor make? Imagine you save just 3 seconds 50 times a day. You save 2.5 hours that day. Do that every day and you save 66 days a year, just from one feature. You do the math. It's worth it!"
- Advertisement for Codewright Professional text editor. (OK, I did the math. Programmers put in a lot of overtime, but 3x50 sounds like two and a half minutes--about a day and a half per year. With today's delivery schedules, it just feels like 66 days.)

A woman visited a just-discovered tribe. When she got there, she noticed a constant drumming, day and night. She asked the tribal elder what was wrong, he answered "Everything's fine as long as drumming continues." After awhile, she got used to the drumming, eventually ignoring it. She stayed there for weeks studying the tribe. As she was about to leave, she noticed that the drumming stopped. She asked the elder what had happened. He looked startled, and answered: "Oh no! Bass solo!"
- (I don't know who wrote this.)

"It's a big industry. If I had a monopoly on operating systems, the price I would charge for my product would be at least four times what we charge for the product. ... Clearly, if we have a monopoly we don't know about it because otherwise we'd price our product very, very differently." ... "We have done innovation, but only by replacing the product. Understand, Windows 3.1 would not have an 85 percent share. DOS would not have an 85 percent share. It's only because we completely replaced that product, kept the price low, worked well with those customers that we have the position that we have today."
- Bill Gates in The San Jose Mercury News. (Aggressively-competitive pricing and constantly changing standards ensure that competitors stay in-line. But what happens when those pesky competitors are gone? Oh right, I forgot: the Office 2000 upgrade is $400.)

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Contranyms

Antonyms have a meaning opposite that of another word. A contranym sounds as if it has the opposite meaning, but it really doesn't.

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Junkyard Rules

I only watch PBS, but if I were to try cable, I'd watch Junkyard Wars™ (aka Scrapheap Challenge in the civilised world). It is, after all, educational:

Rules

• If you're up against a team of bikers or farmers, you will lose.
• If you're facing a team of teachers or other public servants, you will win.
• If your design uses hydraulics, you will lose.
• If you depend on duct tape for anything but upholstery, you will lose.
• Small, light and flimsy beats big, beefy and powerful -- on a short course.
• A nail on one end and a hand drill on the other, makes a serviceable lathe.
• If you find a perfectly good part lying on the ground, don't use it. It doesn't work -- that's why it was left there.
• The best engines are found in vehicles that have rolled-over twice.
• Measure and test, then weld. Good welding is more important than good design.
• An adapter can be made to make any two things work together. However, one of them will likely run backwards.
• It will rain during the most critical construction phase.
• A vehicle built in ten hours will run for less than ten minutes.

Note: If you haven't seen Junkyard Wars, it's like the third act of every A-Team episode, wherein Mr. T creates a tank from an old Ford and trash can lids, then crashes it into the bad guy's hideout.

Hard Drive Sales

Come on guys, program faster, the hardware folks are catching up!

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100 Greatest American Movies of All Time

Selected by the American Film Institute.

Here are the winners, counted by the decade in which they were released.

How to use their numbers against them. When was the last time you heard "Movies are better than ever"? And neither Bruce nor Arnold in any of them.

Unless I credit somebody else in here, I wrote it.

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