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Post by specialk on Jan 18, 2006 15:35:08 GMT
I have been told that there have been times that I reduce people to valium when trying to explain something technical. But I don't think it is all me (erm) well not ALL. Things just sometimes are not that clear and I am sure my pc does things other peoples doesn't. Maybe I have a better model! I do wish techies would be more exlicit - when I was told to compress my hard disc - how was I supposed to know  |
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Post by specialk on Jan 18, 2006 16:43:53 GMT
see it's not only me - I would just have to kill him
The toaster
One upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots on the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?"
The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. I'll come back next week, and show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes."
"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message "Booting Windoze v. 8.3" appears on the screen. Windoze 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to market. Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80486 with 12MB of memory, a 130MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!"
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
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Post by specialk on Jan 20, 2006 9:37:30 GMT
If you are a techie and feeling sterotyped erm ssssssssssssooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeee
A techie finally decided to take a long overdue vacation. He booked a Caribbean cruise and was having the time of his life... until the boat sank! He found himself swept onto a desert island. Six lonely months later, he is lying on the beach when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to him.
"Where did you come from?" he asks.
"I rowed from the other side of the island. I landed here when my ship sank" she says.
"Amazing". "You were really lucky to have a row-boat wash up with you".
"Oh this?" replies the woman. "I made the boat out of raw material that I found on the island; the oars were whittled from gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm branches; and the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree".
"But that's impossible," stutters the man, "You had no tools. How did you manage?"
"Oh, no problem", replies the woman. "On the other side of the island there is a very unusual strata of alluvial rock. I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. I used that for tools." The guy is stunned.
"Lets row over to my place." She says. She docks the boat at a small wharf. As the man looks onto shore, he nearly falls out of the boat. Before him is a stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow.
"It's not much but I call it home," she says. "Would you like another drink?"
"No thank you," he says still dazed. "Can't take any more of that coconut juice"
"It's not coconut juice," the woman replies. "I have my own still. How about a Pina Colada while I slip into something more comfortable." She returns wearing nothing but vines and a strategically placed shell necklace.
"Tell me," she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, "we've been out here a long time. You've been lonely. I've been lonely. There's something I'm sure you really feel like doing right about now, something you've been longing for all these months," her hands sliding over his legs.
He can't believe what he's hearing. His heart begins to pound. He's truly in luck! "You mean." he gasps, "I can actually check my e-mail from here?"
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Post by CmonYouSpurs on Jan 20, 2006 16:17:42 GMT
#roflmao# #roflmao#
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Post by CmonYouSpurs on Jan 20, 2006 16:18:02 GMT
The Programmer and the Frog
A young man was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess". He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket.
The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week." The young man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket.
The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you and do ANYTHING you want." Again the young man took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.
Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess, that I'll stay with you for a week and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?"
The young man said, "Look, I'm a software engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog is cool."
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Post by specialk on Jan 20, 2006 16:22:09 GMT
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Post by CmonYouSpurs on Jan 20, 2006 19:27:51 GMT
A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications equipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to fly to the airport.
The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters.
People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign read:
"YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER."
The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.
After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position.
The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the MICROSOFT building because they gave me a technically correct, but completely useless answer."
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Post by specialk on Jan 21, 2006 14:41:54 GMT
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Post by CmonYouSpurs on Jan 21, 2006 19:18:55 GMT
A tourist walked into a pet shop and was looking at the animals on display.
While he was there another customer walked in and said to the shopkeeper "I'll have a C monkey please".
The shopkeeper nodded, went over to a cage at the side of the shop, and took out a monkey. He fit a collar and leash and handed it to the customer, saying, "That'll be $5000."
The customer paid and walked out with his monkey. Startled, the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and said, "That was a very expensive monkey most of them are only a few hundred dollars. Why did it cost so much?"
The shopkeeper answered, "Ah, that monkey can program in C - very fast, tight code, no bugs, well worth the money."
The tourist looked at the monkey in another cage. "That one's even more expensive - $10,000! What does it do?" "Oh, that one's a C++ monkey; it can manage object-oriented programming, Visual C++, even some Java. All the really useful stuff," said the shopkeeper.
The tourist looked around for a little longer and saw a third monkey in a cage of its own. The price tag around its neck read $50,000.
He gasped to the shopkeeper, "That one costs more than all the others put together! What on earth does it do?"
The shopkeeper replied, "Well, I haven't actually seen it do anything, but it says it's a consultant."
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Post by specialk on Jan 22, 2006 2:11:33 GMT
hahahahahahahah
definiton of a consultant: someone who borrows your watch in order to tell you the time and then charges you for it
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Post by CmonYouSpurs on Jan 22, 2006 18:36:34 GMT
#laugh# #laugh# does he charge by the second  hey Kev you would make a good consultant you have a question for everything hahahaha  |
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Post by specialk on Jan 22, 2006 19:15:36 GMT
then of course there is the consultant who asks to borrow your pencil breaks in in half - informs you that the problem is your pencil is broken then orders you a new one and charges you for it -
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