One of Microsoft’s finest techs was drafted and sent to boot camp. At the rifle range, he was given some instruction, a rifle and bullets. He fired several shots at the target. The report came from the target area that all attempts had completely missed the target. The tech looked at his rifle, and then at the target. He looked at the rifle again, and then at the target again. He put his finger over the end of the rifle barrel and squeezed the trigger with his other hand. The end of his finger was blown off, whereupon he yelled toward the target area: “It’s leaving here just fine, the trouble must be at your end!”

Our last post of computer terms was so successful that we felt the need to give you more. This time with a graphical representation of what the terms mean.

Bug: A cute little humorous term used to explain why the computer had your Shipping Department send 150 highly sophisticated jet-fighter servo motors, worth over $26,000 apiece, to fishermen in the Ryuku Islands, who are using them as anchors.

Graphics: The ability to make pie charts and bar graphs, which are the universal business method for making abstract concepts, such as “three,” comprehensible to morons like your boss.

Hardware: Where the people in your company’s software support section will tell you the problem is.

Software: Where the people in your company’s hardware support section will tell you the problem is.

Spreadsheet: A kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat “what if” questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.

User: The word that computer professionals use when they mean “idiot.”

Dear AS/400 Geek,

Several months ago I upgraded from GirlFriend 6.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it’s a memory hog leaving very little system resources for other applications.  I also recently noticed that Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child-Processes which are further consuming valuable resources.  No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed me that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application. Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system initialization where it can monitor all other system activity. I’m finding that some applications such as PokerNight 1.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before). At installation, Wife 1.0 automatically installs undesired Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 5.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release. As a consequence system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.  HELP! What do I need to do to straighten this mess out?
 
Answer: Just be patient.  Wife 2.0 is now in Beta and should be released soon.  Some features that will be included in the upcoming Wife 2.0:

- A “Don’t remind me again” button
- A Minimize button
- A clickable “no-sound” feature under Options
- An uninstall shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 to be installed with the option to uninstall at anytime without the loss of cache and other system resources.

I myself decided to avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with GirlFriend 2.0. Even here, however, I found many problems. Apparently you cannot install GirlFriend 2.0 on top of GirlFriend 1.0. You must uninstall GirlFriend 1.0 first.  Another annoying problem - all versions of GirlFriend continually pop up annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0.

***** BUG WARNING *****
Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before executing a self-uninstallation.