C# 411
April Fool’s Day is tomorrow, April 1st. It’s an annual “holiday” when humor reigns, and pranks and practical jokes are expected and allowed.
Computers are a great medium for April Fool’s jokers because most users have no clue what goes on behind those blinking computer lights. So when a hapless user is hit with a computer prank, they immediately suspect a malfunction, virus or worse.
Here’s a fun article from last year. If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!
When you clicked an icon to launch your web browser to read this article, you can thank Charles Thacker (among others).
In 1973, Thacker and a group of scientists at the famed Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) built the Alto, the world’s first desktop computer. The Alto featured many innovations that we take for granted today in our personal computers: a television-like screen, graphical user interface, windows, icons, and a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor.
The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded Charles Thacker with the Turing Award, which is considered to be the “Nobel Prize in Computing.” The award includes a $250,000 check, with financial support by Intel and Google. Since 1966 the Turing Award has honored computer scientists and engineers who “created the systems and underlying theoretical foundations that have propelled the information technology industry.”
An old joke floating around the Internet lately…
If a man cuts his finger off while slicing salami at work, he blames the restaurant.
If your father smokes three packs of cigarettes a day for 40 years and dies of lung cancer, your family blames the tobacco company.
If your neighbor crashes into a tree while driving home drunk, he blames the bartender.
If your grandchildren are brats without manners, you blame television.
If your friend is shot by a deranged madman, you blame the gun manufacturer.
And if a crazed person breaks into a jet cockpit and tries to kill the pilot at 35,000 feet, but the passengers kill him instead, the mother of the crazed deceased blames the airline.
I must have lived too long to understand the world as it is anymore.
So, if I die while my old wrinkled ass is parked in front of this computer, I want all of you to blame Bill Gates!
Apple Inc. has filed a federal lawsuit against “the world” for violating its U.S. Patent 3,141,5926 “Removing a Booger by Performing Gestures with a Finger.” Apple is demanding licensing royalties from all world citizens who pick their nose, and a cease & desist order against Kleenex tissues for providing citizens with an alternate method to jailbreak boogers and avoid Apple’s patent.
This new legal action follows a similar lawsuit that Apple filed against rival phone maker HTC for allegedly violating 20 of Apple’s mobile phone patents. The Apple patents include “novel” inventions such as U.S. Patent 7,657,849 for unlocking a phone with a finger swipe.
This is part 14 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.
Nimrod is a general purpose, statically-typed, imperative programming language that supports procedural, object-oriented, functional and generic programming styles while remaining simple and efficient. Nimrod runs on Windows, Linux, BSD and MacOS X.
