Thursday, January 24, 2008

or "why I love my Mac!"


John K sent me this. For those of us who are Mac users it says it all.

Instructions for Microsoft’s New TV Dinner Product

You must first remove the plastic cover. By doing so, you agree to accept and honor Microsoft rights to all TV dinners. You may not give anyone else a bite of your dinner (which would constitute an infringement of Microsoft’s rights).

You may, however, let others smell and look at your dinner, and are encouraged to tell them how good it is.

If you have a PC microwave oven, insert the dinner into the oven.

Set the oven using these keystrokes:

mstv.dinn.//08.5min@50%heat//

Then enter: ms//start.cook_dindin/yummy\|/yum~yum:-)gohot#cookme

If you have a Mac oven, insert the dinner and press start. The oven will set itself and cook the dinner.

If you have a Unix oven, insert the dinner, enter the ingredients of the dinner (found on the package label), the weight of the dinner, and the desired level of cooking, and press start. The oven will calculate the time and heat, and cook the dinner exactly to your specification.

Be forewarned that Microsoft dinners may crash, in which case your oven must be restarted. This is a simple procedure. Remove the dinner from the oven and enter

ms.nodamn.good/tryagain\again/again.crap.

This process may have to be repeated. Try unplugging the microwave and then doing a cold reboot. If this doesn’t work, contact your hardware vendor.

Many users have reported that the dinner tray is far too big, larger than the dinner itself, having many useless compartments, most of which are empty.

These are for future menu items. If the tray is too large to fit in your oven, you will need to upgrade your equipment.

Dinners are only available from registered outlets, and only the chicken variety is currently produced. If you want another variety, call MicrosoftHelp, and they will explain that you really don’t want another variety. Microsoft Chicken is all you really need.

Microsoft has disclosed plans to discontinue all smaller versions of their chicken dinners. Future releases will only be in the larger family size.

Excess chicken may be stored for future use, but must be saved only in Microsoft approved packaging.

Microsoft promises a dessert with every dinner after ‘98. However, that version has yet to be released. Users have permission to get thrilled in advance.

Microsoft dinners may be incompatible with other dinners in the freezer, causing your freezer to self-defrost. This is a feature, not a bug.

Your freezer probably should have been defrosted anyway.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Microsoft Chicken is all you really need." Well...not quite. My college roomate's (Avrahum's) mother said, "It isn't real chicken soup if you don't throw in the feet."
She's right.

Anonymous said...

I must start by publicly stating that I have always admired Apple's hardware and their software. The excellence of their designs is obvious to all, and for that they are to be applauded. But their corporate attitude, and the extension of that attitude to their loyal customers, is incredibly irritating.

Microsoft does not build the hardware platforms on which their operating system operates. And those platforms, especially if you count all the add on boards and other hardware that, upon their insertion, become an integral part of the hardware platform that must be supported, are designed and built by a huge number of different companies. This is both a strength and a weakness for the PC community. It is a strength because it allows features and products to get to market faster. (Compare that, for example,to how long it took for Apple to admit that somebody might have a valid reason to add a hard drive to their Mac, and invalidating the warranty of those who took the steps necessary to add one.) But it is a weakness because the hardware platform on which the OS must run is never completely defined.

As a result, Microsoft's operating system must be compatible with all those systems and all those additions, many of which MS may not even know about. And when the OS crashes due to some error or undocumented feature in one of these pieces of harware, who gets the blame. Why Bill Gates and his behemoth, Microsoft, the devil spawn of the PC world. They clearly must have created an inferior product. (In all fairness, they sometimes do create and release a bad product. Windows ME was an incredible example of a worse than poor operating system. And it performed poorly on some very basic, unmodified platforms built and sold by mainstream PC builders.)

Of course, Apple takes the opposite approach. They don't even try to support non-official add ons. They even make operating system upgrades to ensure that those add ons will not operate. Now, if viewed with an open mind, that could be seen as an operating system crash. And it was intentional, not accidental, which makes it even worse.

And if you read the Apple discussion forums, anyone who points out this fact is vilified, and cast as a Gates lover. The theory being that if you say something often enough and loud enough ("Microsoft is evil! Microsoft is imcompetent!") it becomes true. And the blinders are totally on when it comes to the actions of the "good" company. When they do something stupid, like forgeting to include the "add" button for the contacts and calendar widgets on the ipod touch, and only get around to adding them back on with an OS upgrade months later, that is just hunky dorkey.

And if Microsoft had done some of the shenanigans that Apple has done, they would have been embroiled in more class action lawsuits than the courts could handle.

So the TV dinner allegory is not totally valid. To start, Apple has just as many disclaimers and legal requirements as MS. And perhaps, the comment about not giving a bite to someone else may imply more to the Apple situation than to MS. And if you were to put the MS dinner into an Apple oven, you would insert it and push start as noted, and then the over would not set itself and cook the dinner, but rather would refuse to cook the dinner because it wasn't authenticated and signed as being compatible with the Apple corporate requirements.