Posted by Michael Tsai’s Weblog:
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There Was a Fire
Rainer Brockerhoff: Anyway, I also remembered a humor piece I wrote 5 years ago for MacKiDo. There are some dated references, so I think it’s time to update it.
Recent news about the threats to Comdex have reminded me of similar tales from the last years of Comdex’s precursor – the NCC (National Computer Conference), in the late 1980’s. I have fond memories of the May ’84 NCC, when I bought the first 128K Macintosh – complete with second 400K floppy and ImageWriter printer. It cost $2495 for the system, plus $495 each for the printer and floppy.
Anyway, I also remembered a humor piece I wrote 5 years ago for MacKiDo. There are some dated references, so I think it’s time to update it. Any references to real persons, institutions or phenomena are strictly satirical and do not necessarily represent my real-life opinion; also, my disclaimer of course applies. And if I inadvertently spared anybody, please tell me 
…
There was a fire at <some huge computer conference>…
When it reached the main exhibition hall:
– The Windows 95 users asked the door guard to close all windows and restart the exhibition.
– The Windows 98 users loaded their installation CDROMs to look for a Windows Extinguisher Wizard™.
– The Windows NT users said the fire would probably be fixed in the next service pack.
– The Windows XP users were asked to reactivate their installation “due to hardware changes”.
– The Mac OS 9 users clicked on everything in sight to see if that would affect the fire somehow.
– The Mac OS X users were awed at the cool transparency effects displayed by the fire.
– The OS/2 users reminisced about the much more full-featured fire that burned down the OS/2 User’s Conference in 1994.
– The mainframe users pulled the “emergency stop” handle and waited for the field engineer to arrive.
– The former BeOS users commented on how their own fires had been much faster and more efficient.
– The Unix users tried connecting all the stands together with pipes to build a fire engine.
– The SCO users sniffed that the exhibition hall obviously wasn’t POSIX compliant.
– The Linux users searched the Internet looking for the hall’s source code so they could find out why it caught fire.
– The Amiga users decided there was no fire and went on doing whatever they were doing.
When the fire reached the developer’s hall:
– The C programmers started looking for a NULL pointer.
– The Delphi programmers sneered that this would never happen at a Delphi developer’s conference.
– The C++ programmers argued about which design pattern a Fire Engine template should follow, and whether the hall’s construction was fully ANSI-compliant or not.
– The Objective-C programmers tried to change the fire’s behavior, but fought on whether categories or poseAsClass: would be the best way.
– The Assembly Language programmers started to write a very detailed and optimised treatise about firefighting techniques.
– The ADA programmers alleged that the fire was not in their original specifications.
– The FORTRAN programmers began muttering about “COMMON something”.
– The COBOL programmers started prowling the hall and looking for Y2K bugs.
– The Visual Basic programmers asked the C programmers to write a “fire” module for them.
– The .NET programmers commented favorably on the fire’s fully-distributed architecture-independent implementation.
– The Java programmers attributed the fire to a faulty VM implementation.
– The Python programmers promptly set fire to another hall in a much more elegant way, with fewer lines of code.
– The Perl programmers blamed everything on a subtle fault in the implementation of regular expressions.
– The PHP programmers hacked the fire’s code to do syntax highlighting.
When the fire reached the press room:
– The ComputerWorld reporter wrote “Microsoft Fire(tm) takes the conference by storm”.
– The PC Magazine reporter wrote “Blazing 3-D effects herald a new era in computing”.
– John Dvorak wrote “Duh. Deadly dull conference, second-rate fire. Who do they think they’re kidding?”
– The Business Week reporter wrote “Apple’s market share is further reduced by conference fire”.
– The Wall Street Journal reporter wrote “High-tech stocks may burn in the near term”.
– The Washington Post reporter wrote “Fire may be a cyber-terrorist act”.
– The MacAddict reporter wrote “Bill Gates should have been here when the Main Hall collapsed”.
– The MacWorld reporter wrote “Steve Jobs takes the stage with unheard-of pyrotechnics”.
Continua a história do Zé Megabyte e seu fiel Jaca Plus, agora ocupado por um software de inteligência artificial. Será que Itaipú está mesmo na Internet? E porque “em tese”?
Alguns comentários:
Anonymous wrote:
You should take a look at the google patent, and learn about distributed trust networks. There are plenty of papers on this topic. Google figured out that the web is actually one gigantic database, and that a distributed trust network could be used to decide which parts are important and which parts are not.
Thank you – I’m familiar with some of the literature on distributed trust networks, and have checked out some of the first implementations. None of those could be considered to be a success in the sense that Google succeeded with their search service.
Anonymous wrote:
I am not convinced that they’ll have much more information about blogging by actually owning the service, compared to just spidering it.
There could be a slight edge in having direct access to stored data (instead of having to follow links), and there’ll be of course a speed advantage for the parts they’ll be hosting. I think the main advantage that Google will have here is their brand and reputation, as well as enough hardware and know-how to correlate all that information in some useful way.
The Guardian’s take on this is worth reading, too.
Posted by Guest:
You should take a look at the google patent, and learn about distributed trust networks. There are plenty of papers on this topic. Google figured out that the web is actually one gigantic database, and that a distributed trust network could be used to decide which parts are important and which parts are not.
This same formula applies to google news, and obviously blogging. I am not convinced that they’ll have much more information about blogging by actually owning the service, compared to just spidering it.
Aaron Swartz‘ Google Weblog points at Bradford Delong‘s coverage of a talk that Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, gave recently.
Whew. Never typed so many URLs in a single sentence 
. Anyway, here’s the important part:
It wasn’t that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web – build a system so that after you’d viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative.
Well, buying Blogger – and accepting update pings from other weblogging software – means they’ll now have a ready-made annotation system, with millions of people ready (and some even paying) to annotate the web for them. So that’s what they had in mind all along…
Update: Aaron updated his post to link back here… and Boing Boing also picked this up. Thanks, guys! Must be something to it…
Scripting News has some amusing quotes from Bob Frankston about Boston driving:
…And requiring all cars to stop at stop signs – what a waste.
…Just remember that green means proceed with caution, yellow means accelerate and red means look both ways for cops.
Sounds just like what I remember from my last visit to Rio de Janeiro .
Here are details on some more changes to the phpBB code.
You’ll notice page generation timing info at the bottom of forum pages and pre-sized inline images, both in browsers and RSS aggregators. For instance, my logo here:
should already come with the correct height and width values during page loading.
Next should come blogrolling, post threading and some more utility functions to help me do trackback pings to other weblogs…
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