Is there no limit to Microsoft's ambitions for world domination?
Apparently they have filed to copyright the use of the colour white
as a background for web pages. Fortunately there are those who
are prepared to fight back - one angry party is claiming to have
secured the rights to the concept "complete and utter tosser"
on the basis that Bill Gates is certain to have infringed them.
A few months back Microsoft staged TechEd, a huge
event to promote the Prime Nerd's latest and forthcoming
net-related products such as Nashville, Jakarta and ActiveX. On
the Thursday night they threw a party at which the 3,131
delegates drank their way through no less than 16,500 litres of
alcohol. That’s an average of nearly 5.5 litres each -
remarkable enough when translated into bottles of Budweiser,
but given that the whole bash took place in Nice on the
French Côte D’Azur it’s probably more accurate to think
of it as over seven bottles of wine per person! Hopefully,
the employees remembered the ethical guidelines for corporate
functions:
Anyone accessing this site via America On-Line (AOL) will
probably not see this page. That's because I'm about to
mention a town whose very name is banned. Okay, here goes...
Scunthorpe. There, I said it.
So what's so evil about Scunthorpe? Well, nothing,
according to the inhabitants of this lively English seaside
resort. But if you look carefully, you will notice that its
name contains an expletive. AOL's text checkers noticed this,
and so did the AOL subscribers who live in "Sunny Scunny"
when their attempts to register were bounced.
And AOL's solution? They have announced that the town,
which appeared in the Domesday book
nearly 800 years before the American Declaration of Independence,
is henceforth to be known as Sconthorpe.
One member of an in-house computer support department recently received a strange call from a user who claimed that his computer’s coffee holder had broken. The bemused techie went to investigate first-hand, and discovered that the "coffee holder" was actually the CD-ROM unit’s disk tray. The user had discovered that the hole neatly accommodated his coffee cup.
Anyone who owns a computer knows about depreciation. No sooner have you taken delivery of your shiny new state-of-the-art machine than the bloke next to you has ordered one better and cheaper. Imagine how the Ministry of Defence must feel - in late 1994 they were spending over a fifth of a million pounds on flight simulation supercomputers. Within thirty months the same chipset has been incorporated into the latest Nintendo, price £250.
Few people by now will be unaware of the trouble brewing as computers around the world approach the new millennium. So where should those in the industry be as the fateful moment arrives? One specialist consultant has suggested Cuba - apparently it has the highest ratio of beaches to PCs on the planet.
Cartoon from Computer Weekly, 24th April 1997
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