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I guess the pages for Microsoft's visual programming stuff will smell like bad spaghetti.
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If you don't understand what we are talking about, you are missing a lot in life. Click here to get a life

Amazing prescience from Userfriendly--
Userfriendly Jan 15, 2000.

"...Borg gear will look good on you, Steve..."

Maybe the MPAA lawyers should take a look at this UF strip.

I don't know if a Linux-jobs-only setting is the way to go.

It would certainly give us an environment where we don't start fresh every week explaining why Linux would be a better choice for this project or that. It would also be nice to have an environment where it is possible to collaborate with people working on other systems without the threat of being assimilated. And for once it would just be nice to use the words Slashdot, User Friendly, Strenua Interia, and Freshmeat without getting blank looks. ;-)

Or, he scammed it from UserFriendly, which parodied those damn ads.

Reminds me of that romantic storyline starting here.

After all, every geek on earth has installed /usr/games/rot13 by now, since this Ufie.

With this cartoon.

We nerds can get chicks........it's all about self confidence. You could be ugly, broke, and bleeding from a massive headwound, as long as you've got balls you can get the girl. Self confidence shines brighter thatn any light saber, just don't confuse it for being brash.

Alpha Centauri is a "time warp" game. You start a game at 10:00pm play a little, look at your watch and find out its 3:00am and you still play a little more.

Sid Meier, Jeff Briggs, and Brian Reynolds, the original creators of Civ I and Civ II are actually working on Civilization III and prequel called Dinosaurs! both of which will be interelated with each other and Alpha Centauri. And of course, All of them will be availible for Linux at some point...

And for official geek approval see what Userfriendly has to say about Alpha Centauri here.

You missed one. Their mentor/superior that gives them their missions, gear, provides emotional support, teaches them valuable lessions about life, and generally kicks butt in Quake: Dust Puppy! And, conveniently, he's already available in a stuffed version. Check out the UF Cartoon Homepage for more info! :-D

Also available: Dust Puppy's arch-nemesis, the crowning star in the Evil M$ Legal Team: Crud Puppy!

Anyone else notice the striking similarity between these action figures and the Microsoft Black Ops featured in this User-Friendly cartoon!!

Nipok Nek

Tech Rep: "Ma'am, do you still have the box your computer came in?"

Customer: "Why, yes I do, I keep all my unopened manuals in there."

Tech Rep: "What you need to do, ma'am, is get that box, put your computer back in, and ship it back to the company with a note saying that you are too stupid to use a computer."

On the true end of things, I have taken all of the funny UFie Tech Support Cartoons (and some personal favorites) and hung them on my cubicle walls. I have become a mecca to some of my co-workers who need a good laugh.

ie.

June 13, 1998

June 14, 1998


But, I can see why some would not find it funny, but to attack it as this article did, was uncalled for. Humor comes in many levels, and personally, this is what gets me through my day.
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

Tech Rep: "Ma'am, do you still have the box your computer came in?"

Customer: "Why, yes I do, I keep all my unopened manuals in there."

Tech Rep: "What you need to do, ma'am, is get that box, put your computer back in, and ship it back to the company with a note saying that you are too stupid to use a computer."

On the true end of things, I have taken all of the funny UFie Tech Support Cartoons (and some personal favorites) and hung them on my cubicle walls. I have become a mecca to some of my co-workers who need a good laugh.

ie.

June 13, 1998

June 14, 1998


But, I can see why some would not find it funny, but to attack it as this article did, was uncalled for. Humor comes in many levels, and personally, this is what gets me through my day.
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

Click Here. It's about a web admin who can't figure out how not to make broken links.

...On this one, I can't agree with him. Come on, good humor is an art form, and just like you wouldn't hear one artist (publicly) criticizing another's work, if he was a professional, you shouldn't hear this sort of crap.

I have worked two sales jobs, tech support, and systems administration at a small ISP that I set up from scratch, and currently, at a medium-sized ISP that hired me back (used to do tech support there). This has led me to deal with people on many levels, and it isn't really the cluelessness of the people that is funny. It is the NATURE of people that is funny, and that is what the real root of the joke is in User Friendly, or any other site that pokes fun of the tech's situation. Help Desk Funnies come to mind.

I'd also like to point out that the strip "Help Desk" linked to by Kurtz as an example of what's really funny is not above exploiting this type of humor as well. See this link for an example.

I was really disappointed to see an artist so publicly berating another, arguably more successful (Kurtz has a comic book deal, but Illiad has a book published by O'Reilly!) artist like this. Perhaps Scott should send e-mail to all the nice people in the biz who seem to disagree with him.

you insult the person who thinks their password is 'asterisk asterisk asterisk',

Actually that strip didn't really have the user stupid, but rather clever.

When I make dumb mistakes, I laugh at myself. It's good to do so. I almost became a Darwin Award, by changing the Power Supply without unplugging the power cord (I was in a hurry). I look back and laugh. Noone got hurt, but it took a notch out of my pliers.

Funny too, is that when I call tech support, I usually find out that the person I'm talking to doesn't know any more than me. And thus tells me to do the things that I have already done, and does not believe me when I tell them "I did that already". I usually have to repeat the steps and give my diagnostics about the problem to get them to pass me on to someone who really knows what they are talking about. At work, I almost refuse to call tech support, because they usually frustrate me. And at the end, I have to figure every thing out myself.

I recently had my cable modem go down, and when I called tech support, I had to go through all the steps with the support guy, checking for conflicts with interrupts and such (which I did in the first place) before he would believe me that the modem was bad. Finally I got someone that knew what they were doing to bring me a new cable modem, and everything worked fine.

So relax, and if you don't think it's funny, then go off and read Family Circus!

Steven Rostedt

Noone is going to tell me what I should think about any comic, whether I like the comic or not. To me, Userfriendly, Dilbert, the Bastard Operator From Hell stories and the Computer Stupidities section of Rinkworks are sources of relief for those of us, who, from time to time, get severly frustrated by the apparent inability or unwillingness of users to understand even the most simple of instructions or concepts. I think they'd rather have that than us going postal. I did, back when I was a newbie, ages ago, though I fancy myself never having been a luser.

Okay, I'm biased. But what other tool so obviously solves the problem of decoding a rot13'ed comic strip. M-x toggle-rot13-mode.

Yes.

Did anyone else notice the copyright date? My only complaint about the rot13 is that there is no tool I know from automatically decrypting a comic strip. I had to type it into Emacs and M-x toggle-rot13-mode. Please, nobody make any nasty comments about the fact that I obviously have no aversion to typing.

heh, did you notice that if you hit the "previous" link to get yesterdays comic you arrive at this invalid url:

http://www.userfr iendly.org/cartoons/archives/00jan/19991231.html

looks like the strip the characters arent the only ones having problems :) of course, s/jan00/dec99/ will fix that...

--Siva

Keyboard not found.

UF

Seesh, what's the world coming to? -rot13 is one of the options to figlet. Failing that, 10 lines of C will give you a rot13ing program.

BTW, check out the "previous" button on

http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/00ja n/20000101.html

Intentional?

On today's cartoon if you press "Previous" you get a non-existing page :-) Oops...
Buon Anno!

UF's first strip for this new Millennium (i feel cheap just for saying that...) seems to be encrypted is some way, or just plain mixed up...(also check the copyright year-left side of middle frame, pretty subtle...)
Here's what i can figure out so far (pretty difficult since Pitr is known to have, well, "unaurthodoex" grammer: Encrypted=Decrypted
L=Y
X=K
(i assume he's saying Y2K...)
N=A,I
V=I,A

if G=S -> B=E
if G=T -> B=O

F=S (?)
QVQ is said twice...


Any thoughts?

Those of you too lazy to figure it out (I had a friend to the work for me):

Well, it looks like the Y2K bug didn't rear it's ugly head.
Yep, the doomsayers have been proven wrong yet again.
DId you see that too?
Houston. We have a problem.

Copyright (c) 1900 Iliad
http://www.userfriendly.org/

Not only that, but the link to the previous comic seems to be broken, sending you to 00jan/19991231.html instead of 99dec/19991231.html. Coincidence? I think not.

Best wishes for xx00

tom

but but but.....
it must be true, it was on User Friendly

just read today's userfriendly: Daily Static
as we all know, K stands for 1024 so Y2K doesn't start until 2048! what a relief. now i can put off fixing those russian missile computers for a few more decades...

I have to admit that I laughed pretty hard when I saw this. :->

"A browser should not silently render a broken page."

And anyone, ANYONE , who makes web sites for a living should be fscking smart enough to remember to add ending tags (Although, for the record, all of the table-related tags are there. The javascript is uuuuuuuugly, though!).

I'm sorry, but I do all of my development (web or otherwise) in a plain jane text editor (EditPad, to be precise) . I despise anything that changes what I wrote. Anyone making 40k+ a year ought to be smart enough to close out tags.

Remimds me of UserFriendly.

Thoroughly, off topic, why does Google have all of those `2's around the Google logo?

Jedi Hacker (Apprentice) and Code Poet

..Yawn. As far as things go, and it's been shown, Millenium Bugs (what a bad name for it) can really start kicking in anytime. I hardly think every computer does every calculation based on Here&Now. Calculations for the future are done, and theoretically, should have already encountered some zeros in the date.

So who cares? Whether it starts NOW, at midnight localtime [12:30 in Newfoundland (;] or at 00:00 UTC, it doesn't mean fsck all. If it happens, it happens. And all I've seen point to it not really happening.

And for a smile, see the newest UFIE here as they poke fun of the Y2K paranoid.

Ordered some brain teasers from hotbox back on the 20th of Nov. Received an email saying we'd receive them within 2 weeks. Waited, nothing appeared. Emailed them again, they "guaranteed" that the package would be here by christmas. Needless to say, nothing at all. They apologized, said no one was working there during the holidays, and we should contact them again about it in early Jan. Won't ever be buying anything from them again, to be sure.

Ordered quake 3/linux from Loki when it was announced (early dec?). Due to a CC failure, was postponed. Provided them with correct info again 3 weeks ago. No news from them, no package. I thought they were receiving the gold master from ID before the 27th, but somehow that can't be right, as I would've had it by now.

Ordered a Dust Puppy doll and a Pitr coffee mug from userfriendly. Was made aware that it wouldn't be here for christmas. As they said, it's not, but it's for myself, so it's all good. At least they notified people that packages wouldn't likely be received before christmas prior to any orders. My best experience with online shopping to date ;)

CIO job?

To rehash a certain Userfriendly. .

Customer Dialup connection: 20$

T1 for server: 200$

VA Linux server w/ Apache, PHP, and SQL: 2,500$

The look on the kids faces when the presents don't arrive: priceless

Shopping online e-commerce. Ruined by stupid businesses everywhere.

Of course, I doubt they used a T1 or a VA Linux server. They probably spent more on a T3 and an NT solution, which was less reliable or just not flexible enough to say "Sorry -- this item out of stock." It's not just the CIO who should be fired....
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I just saw a good application the other day.

Well, the scientific establishment is occasionally totally wrong, but usually they tend to have more of a clue about it than somebody who:

Mills says that with this new understanding he's produced clean and limitless energy and an entirely new class of materials and plasma that will reshape every industry in the coming decade. Mills also claims breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, cosmology, medicine, and perhaps even a form of gravitational jujitsu.

It looks like the sort of thing that people trying to set up a religious cult claim, rather than serious scientists who actually try to show some evidence. If his theory is that great and simple, why doesn't he have any working examples?

Though the topics he broaches could be coming from a B-movie mad scientist, Mills's cadences are more often like those of a motivational speaker.

Ahh, now this is sounding more like it. I think it's time for a gratitous link to today's userfriendly. Clearly the buzzword complience of his claims make him out to be in the marketing rather than technology end of the business.

Despite howls from the scientific establishment that Mills is a relic of the "cold fusion" trend quashed a decade ago, BlackLight Power Inc. has raised more than $25 million from about 150 investors.

Wow, ladies and gentlement, I believe we have a winner for the competition of where foolish investors will part with their money after the internet stocks die down.

http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/99 dec/19991222.html

"That must be the Daystar. I've heard talk about it." :)

I knew the finals week was in the way for the big chunk of people who would've gone to the Bazaar, but it's better this way because I didn't have to be trampled by them. I think the LinuxWorld Expo would require more space in the Javits Convention Center for college folks to move around. I wish I could buy a Slashdot t-shirt from Copyleft

From now on, we shall call Jeff Bates "Cute Little Hemos!"

I can't wait for LWE!
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Sunday's User Friendly

prophetic in last Sunday's comic?

Boojum

click here

We have a patented one-click technology too.

A recent UserFriendly Sunday strip that tackles amazon.com's Bezos:

http://www.userfr iendly.org/cartoons/archives/99oct/19991024.html

Like this?

Take a look at the November 28th User Friendly. It's hilarious...obviously the creator reads /.