Computers

His complex in China turns out iPhones and PCs, powering the biggest exporter you've never heard of

The story starts (I'm shortcutting here) with a kid insulting everyone on the #stopHipHop IRC channel. Most people there believed it was rather funny, but it got even more funny.

A candid conversation with the sultan of software about outsmarting his rivals

Playboy, 1994

Taking a peek inside Wal-Mart's internet-dwarfing attack-hardened customer-tracking data bunker.

By Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems

12. Specifications are for the weak and timid!

11. This machine is a piece of gagh! I need dual processors if I am to do battle with this code!

10. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.

In 1980, Apple Computer asked a group of guys fresh from Stanford's product design program to take a $400 device and make it mass-producible, reliable and cheap.

Jack Tramiel has always whipped through the personal-computer market at microchip speed. Following his January exit from Commodore International, a company he had helped found, he lined up a low-cost computer-assembly line in the Far East and raised $75 million in capital. Last week Tramiel was right back on center stage, taking over the hemorrhaging Atari home-computer operation from Warner Communications.

Before it crashed and burned, Atari created a fertile incubator for some of the sharpest scientists and programmers in the business. Their ripples continue to change the face of personal computing.

Are you using a PC? You probably have spyware. The McAfee site claims a whopping 91 percent of PCs are infected. As every Windows user knows, PCs are ever waging a losing battle with a stunningly vicious array of malware and worms and viruses, all aimed at exploiting one of about ten thousand security flaws and holes in Microsoft Windows.

Here, then, is my big obvious question: Why the hell do people put up with this?

Microsoft's crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API  is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet.

Or, How to Make a Zillion Dollars and Not Lose Your Soul

By Wil Shipley, CEO, Delicious Monster Software

Follow my advice and I promise that you will be successful, happy, fulfilled, and drive a hot car.

An entirely unsubstantiated stereotype has spread throughout the computer industry and inspired way too much smugness within the Mac community. What is this unfounded generalization which has been echoed by industry insiders and even such celebrities as Roger Ebert? "Mac users are more creative than PC users."

Bollocks. Folderol. Absolute nonsense.

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!

IF YOU RECEIVE A GIFT IN THE SHAPE OF A LARGE WOODEN HORSE DO NOT DOWNLOAD IT!!!! It is EXTREMELY DESTRUCTIVE and will overwrite your ENTIRE CITY!

OK, after semi-exhaustive searching around your site, I have to ask this nagging question. How the heck do computers work? I know, this sounds like a simple question. But I find it hard to fathom millions upon millions of 1's and 0's floating around my processor every second that it's turned on. How can a bunch of electrical currents run a highly complex game such as Quake2? I can't comprehend it. Please, make me understand!

The following was written shortly after my arrest...

1. ...you worship Bill Gates.
2. ...you've owned Microsoft stock since it was first issued in 1986.
3. ...when a Microsoft program crashes for the millionth time, you say "Oh, well!" and reboot without any negative thoughts.

This dropped into my mailbox one day; I don't know who the characters are, but it's supposed to be authentic, and is just too funny not to share.

(or, how to kill a software company)

by Orson Scott Card

It seems that the Marine Corps is using a modified version of id Software's Doom II, the addictive and hyperviolent PC-based videogame, for training purposes.