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Sat 24 Feb, 2007 08:03 am
For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way
computers have enhanced our lives, read on.
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the
computer industry with the auto industry and stated,
"If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we
would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release
stating:
If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving
cars with the following characteristics (and I just love this part):
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash........
Twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy
a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would
have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the
car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some
reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your
car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to
reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable,
five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five
percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be
replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning
light.
I love the next one!!!
7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and
refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned
the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how
to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the
same manner as the old car.
10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.
Please share this with your friends who love - but sometimes hate - their
computer!
well-known urban myth
As interesting and ironically funny as that is, that's about a 10-yr-old
urban myth:
http://www.snopes.com/humor/jokes/autos.asp
Myth? It is not a myth just a little humor mixed with the realities that anyone using a computer runs into on ocassion.Ten years or ten minutes, so what??
What's really stupid though is how slow the auto manufacturers have been to adopt the standards of the computer industry. While technology was leapfrogging all else, the auto industry laid down and took pictures of the spectacle.
How long have iPods been on the market? How many cars have a simple MIC jack to plug them in? How easy is it to charge multiple devices (cell phone, iPod, laptop) in your car?
And that's just the consumer part of it. Work in auto repair, and you have to have all these specialized computing devices to check codes, run diagnostics, etc. Did anybody in the auto industry stop to think maybe they could do it with a PC and a serial port? Apparently not.
chill
au1929 wrote:Myth? It is not a myth just a little humor mixed with the realities that anyone using a computer runs into on ocassion.Ten years or ten minutes, so what??
Chill out, dude! I apppreciate the humor and irony of it, as I wrote earlier. My point was that you offered this info as though it actually occured. It isn't true. I was just clearing the record that this didn't really happen.
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