[olug] [Fwd: (OT) - Microsoft Pie

John Kennedy jkennedy at orent.com
Thu Sep 21 13:32:11 UTC 2000


 Microsoft Pie - To the tune of "American Pie" by Don Mclean
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
  Rev. History
  V1.0 - 05/2000 - Written by "Cujo The Wonder Puppy"
  (cujo at psychokitty.com)
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
 
  A long, long time ago...
  I can still remember
  How my system used to run for months
  And I knew when I went home at night
  The enterprise would be alright
  And, the users, they'd be happy for a while.
 
  But February made me shiver
  With every paper I'd deliver.
  Bad news on the doorstep;
  I couldn't take one more step.
 
  I can't remember if I cried
  When I read about Win NT "5", (1)
  But management made me take the ride
  The day the servers died.
 
  Say bye-bye to your system uptime
  Installed NT on the servers,
  Now the servers are fried
  And them IT(2) guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
  Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
  Gonna buy a new house with mine...
 
  Did you read the HCL(3)
  And do you have faith in Gates above...
  If press releases tell you so?
  Do you believe in beta code,
  Can patches save your mortal soul,
  And can you afford to spend two hours on hold?
 
  Well, I know the boss loves Microsoft
  Cause he's buying up a pile of stock
  But you know you'd love to say
  just Where Bill should go today.
 
  I was a former Unix Sys Admin
  With an MCSE(4) and an NT pin
  I had no clue how deep I was in
  The day the servers died.
 
  I started singin',
  Say bye-bye to your system uptime
  Installed NT on the servers,
  Now the servers are fried
  And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
  Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
  Gonna buy a new house with mine...
 
  Now for ten years we've been on our own
  The desktop's bloated, the command line gone
  But that's not how it used to be.
  The box was fast and the OS(5) lean
  No 3d saver on the console screen
  Response times in the millisecond range
 
  Oh, but while IT was looking down,
  The VP(6) took their techie crown.
  FT(7) went away
  And PC's stole the day
  What bosses read in PC Week(8)
  Became the gospel for IT
  and Windows was the strategy
  the day the servers died
 
  We were singing,
  Say bye-bye to your system uptime
  Installed NT on the servers,
  Now the servers are fried
  And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
  Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
  Gonna buy a new house with mine...
 
  Helter Skelter in the summer swelter.
  NORAD(9) put NT in the fallout shelters
  Eight miles high and falling fast.
  A BSOD(10) dumped a silo's core
  Sent fifty missiles through China's door
  And launched another world war
  When one more server died
 
  The courts(11) were after Bill and crew
  and Unix, once again, was cool
  We all got up to dance,
  Oh, but we never got the chance!
  `Cause Linux tried to take the field;
  But Microsoft refused to yield.
  Do you recall what was revealed
  The day the servers died?
 
  We started singing,
  "bye-bye" to our system uptime
  Installed NT on the servers,
  Now the servers are fried
  And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
  Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
  Gonna buy a new house with mine...
 
  Oh, and there we were all in one hall,
  Following 2000's siren call
  With no time left to start again.
  So come on: Bill be vague and Bill be Slick!
  Come show us what makes 2K tick
  Cause NT4 is crashing as you speak.
 
  Oh, and as I watched Bill on the stage
  My hands were clenched in fists of rage.
  No angel born in hell
  Could break that Satan's spell.
  They applauded four ohs uptime week(12)
  and cheered at 2k's 3 month peak
  "My Sun's (13) been up since '93"
  but no one heard me cry
 
  As the profits climbed high into the night
  The Redmond campus grew beyond sight
  I saw Bill laughing with delight
  The day the Servers died
 
  He was singing,
  Say bye-bye to your system uptime
  Installed NT on the servers,
  Now the servers are fried
  And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
  Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
  Gonna buy a new house with mine...
 
  (14)
  I met a girl who wrote for Bill
  And I asked if she had had her fill,
  But she just smiled and turned away.
  'cause Windows bought her house, you see
  The code's unstable(15), but it's not free
  It's IT job security
  Whenever servers die
 
  And in the streets the users screamed,
  The admins cried, and managers dreamed.
  But not a word was spoken;
  The systems all were broken.
  And the three men who had heard the call
  Raymond, Stallman and Torvalds(16)
  They'd tried to save us from the fall
  The day the servers died.
 
  But did we listen?
 
  Say bye-bye to your system uptime
  Installed NT on the servers,
  Now the servers are fried
  And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
  Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
  Gonna buy a new house with mine...
 
  They were singing,
  bye-bye to your system uptime
  Installed NT on the servers,
  Now the servers are fried
  And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
  Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
  Gonna buy a new house with mine...
 
 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Microsoft Pie - Copyright (C) 2000 "Cujo The Wonder Puppy"
  (#http://www.psychokitty.com/~cujo#)
  This parody is free; you may redistribute it and/or modify it as long
  as this copyright notice remains intact and you agree to abide by the
  terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
  Software Foundation. (#http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#);
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
>  (1) Before it was called Windows 2000, the media referred to the next
>  release as Windows NT 5.0
> 
>  (2) Information Technology
> 
>  (3) Hardware Compatibility List - A list of hardware that doesn't
>  instantly burst into flames when used with Microsoft products. Based on
>  comments and presentation materials from the Windows 2000 launch, this
>  means that if you're lucky, it'll run for a week without hanging up or
>  requiring a reboot under NT 4.0 or 3 months in a "clean room" scenario
>  under Win2K.
> 
>  (4) Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer - A designation that certifies
>  that you either know your way around Microsoft products or that you
>  bought a set of Exam Cram guides and you're good at memory work.
>  Neither of which actually has anything to do with engineering.
> 
>  (5) Operating system - In the "good old days", the core software which
>  provided a set of tools and interfaces to the hardware. The OS would
>  consume a fraction of the system resources and provide the bare
>  necessities required for the applications to have a common interface to
>  the hardware. Now it refers to a huge pile of unrelated applications
>  tied together seemingly at random to consume the greatest possible
>  percentage of memory and CPU while still providing the false hope of
>  usability.
> 
>  (6) Vice President. ie: any senior manager that shouldn't be making
>  technology decisions, but feels empowered to do so.
> 
>  (7) Fault Tolerant (system). A term that no longer has any meaning
>  outside of mainframes and some clustered environments. A system with
>  sufficient redundancy and fail-over capabilities that it can continue
>  running uninterrupted even when a major component fails. There is no
>  such thing as a FT system running Windows. There are "High
>  availability" (HA) Windows configurations, but this just means that if
>  one node dies, you lose your session and pick up again on another node.
>  (ie: Who cares if one of the twins dies? We've got a backup.) In an FT
>  environment, you wouldn't even notice the failure.
> 
>  (8) "PC Week" is meant to encompass the entire gamut of publications
>  that managers somehow get their hands on during long business trips.
>  (search for "Management by In-Flight Magazine") PC Week is not, in and
>  of itself, a bad thing. It's just that these magazines dumb down the
>  technology far enough that managers believe themselves to be computer
>  literate and subsequently start making technology decisions without
>  understanding (or even caring about) the implications.
> 
>  (9) North AmeRican Air Defence. NORAD isn't actually stupid enough to
>  trust Windows with anything beyond a game of Minesweeper or Solitaire.
>  This verse is just poetic license
> 
>  (10) Blue Screen Of Death - The blue screen that indicates that Windows
>  has crashed. I've actually seen monitors on servers with the page fault
>  message burned into them (since the screen saver cuts in during normal
>  operations, but a Page Fault stays on-screen until reboot.)
> 
>  (11) The US Department Of Justice declared Microsoft a Monopoly (no
>  kidding, Sherlock....you could have asked anyone in IT and you would
>  have found that out in a matter of minutes)
> 
>  (12) This is not an exaggeration. At the Windows 2000 launch in Feb
>  2000, the audience actually applauded when Gates indicated the Windows
>  NT 4.0 ran (on average) for a week without a reboot. If IBM told
>  companies that they'd have to reboot their 370's every week, there'd be
>  hell to pay.
> 
>  (13) It was actually a Pyramid, but Sun fit the cadence better. I've
>  had NCRs SUNs and AT&T 3B2 systems that have run literally for years
>  without ever *requiring* a reboot (excluding administrative reboots for
>  kernel tuning or to install new hardware)
> 
>  (14) Yeah...I know it doesn't jive with the original song, but I wrote
>  it, liked it and then realized that it was the wrong verse. Tough. If
>  you don't like it, you're entitled to double your money back.
> 
>  (15) See #12.
> 
>  (16) I originally had Kernigan, Ritchie and Torvalds. But since the
>  Open Source movement and not Unix per se, is really the nail in
>  Microsoft's casket, I thought that I'd update it.

-- 
John Kennedy
UNIX System Administrator
Orent Graphics
402-733-6400 Ext 266

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