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This kind of mistake is common. When I was in business school, one of the great instances of this that was cited in our textbook was a rather unfortunate product launch related to the character woody woodpecker. There are many versions of the story on the net. Here for example:

http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/1959. html

Apple's internal code name switched from Carl Sagan to BHA after he sued. He sued again because he thought BHA stood for "but-head astronomer." Get your stories strait!

http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/582.h tml

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/23/222925 5&tid=141&tid=126
http://www.shazam.com/uk/do/home
http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/5393. html

It's a spoof based on the (true) story about Microsoft and the Korn shell: ... when Microsoft reality collides with everybody elses...

Somehow this also reminds me of when, while threatened by Mr. Carl (Karl?) with a lawsuit over using "Sagan" as a code name for one of their products, Apple promptly changed the code name to BHa. (butt-head astronomer)

At which point, the humorless Mr. Sagan sued over that...
***
http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/582.h tml
CUPERTINO, Calif. (Reuter) - Apple Computer Inc. said Wednesday it settled a lawsuit brought by astronomer Carl Sagan, who had objected to the company's use of his name.

Sagan's complaint stemmed from the use of his name at Apple as a code word for the development of its Power Macintosh 7100 computer,according to court documents.

After lawyers for Sagan complained, the company switched to a new name for the project.

But that did not satisfy Sagan, who sued Apple after news reports said that product managers had relabeled the project BHA, which supposedly stood for ``Butt-head Astronomer,'' the court documents stated.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to say what the initials stood for. ``It was an internal thing as all our codes are and was never meant for external consumption,'' she said.
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So what'll we get here...SAD? (stupid a** distributor?)

How about saying, of a piece of software, that it has "surprising equipment" -- just like that character in the crying game? Now you're talkin' bad analogies.

I also love it when I hear "out of the box." Because, you know, just using the dang analogy is a completely trite thing by now -- it's the hackneyed way of thinking inside the dang box, and has been since sometime in the 1980s when Deming really caught on in MBA jargon. The analogy that means exactly the opposite thing, yeah? That's got to rank.

Every fiendish trick he tries blows up in his face and/or leaves him momentarily levitating over thousands of feet of empty air (followed by an amazing impact at speeds faster than that of sound in the rock he hit).

Wile E is particularly apt because he leaves everyone guessing about who is funding his unending stream of Acme contraptions, and because the bird is always too fast for him.

Link to Hitchcock's elevator story. Classic...

Back in the day, they say the Internet was built to withstand a nuclear assault.

DARPA was running a research project to build a networking system capable of intelligent self re-routing in the case of points of failure, so that a single network outage couldn't prevent traffic from flowing through. The extended concept for ARPANet was that if a major segment of the network vanished it might still be possible for data to be routed, hence the `it can get nuked and still survive` quotes people toss around.

Most unfortunately the internet itself is not always as robust; if certain routers are knocked out, large segments of the networks behind them stay unreachable for long periods of time, mainly because of serious network mismanagement on the part of the people who really ought to know better.

One can also never understimate the power and prevalence of Backhoe Fade.

I keep a bunch of "classic" bookmarks around. Some are undisputed gems, others are, well, to my taste. Bytes being cheap here's a batch.

• Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource
• AmbySoft Inc. White Papers: Scott Ambler's Online Writings
• windows.oreilly.com -- Deep Inside C#: An Interview with Microsoft Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg
• TQ
• The Rise of ``Worse is Better''
  
• A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux
  
• Theist Hall of Shame
• Internetworking Technology Overview
  
• Software Technology Review
  Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics
• P.S.: More Than Just Words
• Welcome to the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
• John McCarthy
  
• Slashdot | Net Translations of Dead-Tree IT Classics
  
• advICE
  
• 0xdeadbeef archives
  

I could view 2 winners and 2 runner ups before the site was slashdotted, but they did not in the least approach the funniness of this brilliant piece. It dates from 1995 or so (yes, spam already existed by that time). I do not know the original source; the linked mail dates from Jul 15 1995, maybe it is even older.

I know this is a little off topic, but I think the correct term is "Backhoe Fade". A quick search turned up an "official" government project .

BTW, the word "fade" is a throwback to the time when most longhaul communications was done using troposcatter microwave systems. Small atmospheric changes such as rain, volcanic dust, solar flares and sunspots would cause the Recieve Signal Level to drop. Ok, Ok, who am I kidding; those bastards would fade at dawn, dusk, mid-day, mid-night, summer and winter solstace, equinox, and any time someone stood too close to the radio. A guy I knew actually shot a radio once for excessive fade. He claimed it was an accident, but the investigator was clued in by the fact that there were 3 holes in the radio...

See this documentary for your answer:

"Midnight: Your Blood Turns to Coca-Cola"
http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/127.h tml

Not the first time such a thing has happened. See Apple, Carl Sagan settle suit over names.