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http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20060807

Sorry, can only can offer a cartoon about it.

Starts here User Friendly. Ooh, and more here HollywoodOS

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20090109

I know I had seen this before.... http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20100131

Obligatory UserFriendly

I'd like to point out that long before xkcd there was userfriendly, and that in my circle we still like to and this sort of joke by saying "magnets" and giggle.

The best part of that comic is the Amiga calendar on the wall behind them. :)

I'd like to point out that long before xkcd there was userfriendly, and that in my circle we still like to and this sort of joke by saying "magnets" and giggle. The "Edward Lorenz, the butterfly and the chaos theory" punchline seems a bit forced (unless you go for the 'M-x butterfly' twist to make the emacs guy get the attention ;) )

XKCD is occasionally amusing, UF never was.

Also, inodes? They're talking about DOS... sheesh!

I'd like to point out that long before xkcd there was userfriendly, and that in my circle we still like to and this sort of joke by saying "magnets" and giggle. The "Edward Lorenz, the butterfly and the chaos theory" punchline seems a bit forced (unless you go for the 'M-x butterfly' twist to make the emacs guy get the attention ;) )

that was my thought exactly - we had -31 a couple of days ago. probably somebody from... souther europe submitted this :)

anyway, that seems awfully suspicious, so i suspect "average of -30" might mean that for some periods of time it actually drops way, way below that.

of course, obligatory userfriendly reference (this and next comics) : http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040827

Even that isn't guaranteed to work.

Read the Movie OS arc at userfriendly.org, starting here: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010111

WGA enables other updates to be installed, it pretty much is a security update.

Yeah, sure. It "enables" other updates to be installed, just like DRM protection "enables" movies to be watched.

In much the same manner that lubrication "enables" a colonoscopy. (Credit to Illiad Frazier on that one.)

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070313

ET For the Atari 2600?

And it seriously damaged Atari (and the whole game industry). I think we've got a winner.

Though not in the context of the article, which was only discussing failures from 2000 to 2009 (I hate that damn word "noughties", and I swear I never remember hearing it used before the recent end-of-decade navel gazing...)

I knew I had heard it...

Jan 01, 1998

I know you're joking, but NetHack is IMO on the 'pure fantasy' extreme of the reality spectrum. You enjoy the game because there's no sight/sound/physical action limiting your imagination.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070622

It sounds like they took the idea right out of the User Friendly comic. Next thing we'll hear, they'll rename the computer Erwin and have Dust Puppy sightings. http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010611

Dude,

read Dilbert to get more insight into the Industry then you ever wanted.
Also you may want do have a look at Userfriendly, Hackles and early Reallifecomics.

Maybe all this wisdom can help you picture, where you are going.

For your Internship, be ready to be the *** of the Company.

Do not stop looking for more internship opportunities.

Plus which, it doesn't help that Ballmer is a flaming sociopath who should be on medication not running a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Just thought this was appropriate...

UF cartoon for 17 June 2007

Ok, excellent art and dialog. But with that rack I wouldn't call her "low charisma" at all. I'll be following this one. Beats the hell out of the same lame Dilbert comics. Thanks for the tip.

And in case you haven't seen this one: http://www.userfriendly.org/

Does not apply if your name is Stef Murky

obl.

"I knew a guy who camped once, he died"

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20000612

Hold a joint party - officially it's a Win7 party; install Win7 on the 15-20 laptops (to satisfy the commitment), then install your favorite Linux Distro over it; and hand out Linux to everyone coming. Then, sell your copy of Win7 on ebay, or Slotheby's Auction.

Hold a joint party - officially it's a Win7 party; install Win7 on the 15-20 laptops (to satisfy the commitment), then install your favorite Linux Distro over it; and hand out Linux to everyone coming. Then, sell your copy of Win7 on ebay, or Slotheby's Auction.

You joke (and re-post) but really, I believe that imitation is a great way to learn programming. By trying to re-create all the computer screens from TV and movies, I pushed myself to learn new programming techniques. Sure, it was all AppleBASIC, but at least I came out of it knowing a lot about programming concepts that could be applied elsewhere.

You need to have a motivation to write a program. If that motivation is "just to learn stuff", it's not very strong to keep you working at it when you hit a sticky point.

My first AppleBASIC programs were simple things like "make a program that counts down from 9 to 0 using GR characters that fill the screen." Just like I saw all the time in shows like Dr Who. That's easy ... if you don't consider the GR stuff. I created a bitmap of the numbers 0-9, and draw that on screen as I counted down. From there, I modified the bitmap, made them narrower, so I could count from numbers as high as 99. I think I also modded the program to use green for 99-10, and red for 9-0.

Once I did that, I moved on to other programs.

The stuff from War Games was harder, and I learned a lot from working on it. For "Global Thermonuclear War", I drew an outline of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in HGR mode, using x,y pairs stored in a DATA statement. Cities that you could attack were listed in an array. Drawing the missile tracks was more difficult, but mainly because I didn't know trig (I was in like, 4th grade) so drew a "triangle" track instead, with square explosions.

Trying to create what I guessed "Biological Warware" (also from War Games) might have been like ... way harder! I settled on doing it in GR mode, drawing a map of the U.S. in white. A bio attack "site" (square of green pixels) was chosen at random within that. The attack propagated using a simple algorithm: which I learned was like Conway's Life ... except that a GR spot could "die" (red pixel) after being infected for so-many "turns", and no longer took part in the algorithm. Wow, I learned a lot from that.

All that because I was trying to emulate what I saw in movies and on TV.

Somewhere after that, I just experimented. I wrote a text-based adventure game, with 1-letter commands (N, S, E, W, ... A(ttack), R(un away!), etc.) One thing I played with, but didn't realize it's significance until college, was a simple HGR program that drew a dot in the middle of the screen, at the very left edge. I then walked across the screen, moving the line up if RND(1)<0.3, down if RND(1)>0.6, and stayed level otherwise. I called it a "stock market ticker". Imagine my surprise at university when I realized I'd discovered/written a "random walk" simulator when I was a kid!

See the UserFriendly archive. http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070313

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990307&mode=classic

I feel like such a nerd for posting such a web comic from 10 years ago....

I think xkcd suffers from the reverse syndrome - namely, far too many people pretending to like it for the sake of trying to be cool.

Sorry, I've tried to like it but xkcd ***JUST ISN'T FUNNY***.

Give me this any day for a daily chuckle.

You might like to come live in the current world. Like everything else in entertainment (movies, games, comics whatever), music is entertainment and professionally made. It requires time, effort and money

Your argument fails. While feature-length movies are generally the domain of professionals (requires a ton more time), there are entertaining other shorter movies such as Homestar Runner which doesn't even have ads on their site yet has hundreds of videos. Games? There are loads of games that the game itself is free while they use other ways of making a profit. Heck, I can download the WoW client for free ( http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/downloads/wowclient-download.html ) yet I wouldn't say it was unprofitable in the least. Comics? Lets see here, off of the top of my head there are, Megatokyo ( http://www.megatokyo.com/ ), User Friendly ( http://www.userfriendly.org/ ) and XKCD ( http://xkcd.com/ ) And XKCD lets you use their comic so long as you attribute to them.

And me of some Userfriendly

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19980705

ObUserFriendly

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010322

Even if they're nerds.

You don't even mess with pissed off nerds.

The first thing I thought after seeing the headline was "Good! Another 20 years and they'll go Nethack" :-)
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20060522&mode=classic

This Nethack comic on User Friendly is the first one I thought of.

While we're on the topic of Nethack comics, Dudley's Dungeon ran for about 5 years.

I now feel compelled to post this.

how about a reality blink tag?
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20020401

In related news, incidences of epileptic seizures drop sharply following death of Geocities.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080812

And now for the obligatory UserFriendly link: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19971206

And now for the obligatory UserFriendly link: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19971206

S&M -- Sales and Marketing. Unfortunately.

As stated here, a rose by any other name, Stef.

It is amazing, sometimes, how we can (collectively) forget information.

It's not just military stuff. It's any "institutional knowledge", including legislative. Want to know just why a particular nonsensical law got passed? Bet you can't find out: the legislators involved may well be gone, and even when they were around, they may have had reasons to lie about it.

Someone becomes an expert, then retires/gets fired/is hit by a truck, and 3 years later, something breaks. Suddenly, you have a system that nobody left knows the passwords to, and sometimes, one that nobody knows what does.

I'm not sure about GeNToo, but you're killing kittens with Debian. ;)

So this cthulhu walks into a bar, right, and... Hey, anyone remember how this one goes?

Maybe something like this: http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/09mar/xuf012518.gif

:)

I think this comic from user friendly sums it up:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010703
Any developer who's given enough freedom to write undocumented code has the potential to become a "genius" by designing something only he/she can comprehend.

Even if they truly do produce valuable product, is it worth it? What say you if we have a developer that writes code so fast we could finish multi-billion dollar projects in only weeks instead of years? Only catch is he's a psychopath and we need to secretly provide him with victims and then cover it up. Yes, I'm way over the line, but only to prove the line exists. Where is your company's line?

This UserFriendly.org cartoon comes to mind when reading your post.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20090222&mode=classic

(SenseiLeNoir posting AC, to avoid loosing moderation)

lets not forget gratuitous amounts of links to random comics, like this

Oblig.

Send them a four.

Obligatory Userfriendly: http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/99oct/uf001156.gif