- 640K:
The salary the average Wall Street PC analyst pulls in each year.
- Alpha:
Software undergoes alpha testing as a first step in getting user feedback. Alpha is Latin for "doesn't work."
- Beta:
Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released. Beta is Latin for "still doesn't work."
- Boot:
What your friends give you because you spend too much time bragging about your computer skills.
- Bug:
What computer magazine companies do to you after they get your name on their mailing list.
- CD-ROM:
A $100 mechanism in a $1200 cabinet that accesses vast quantities of valuable information too slowly to use.
- Chips:
The fattening, non-nutritional food computer users eat to avoid having to leave their keyboards for meals.
- Copy:
What you have to do during school tests because you spend too much time at the computer and not enough time studying.
- Cursor:
What you turn into when you can't get your computer to perform, as in "You $#% computer!"
- Debugging:
The process of uncovering glitches by packaging prerelease software as finished products, then waiting for irate customers to report problems.
- Default Directory:
The place where all files that you need disappear to.
- Error:
What you made the first time you walked into a computer showroom to "just look."
- Expansion Unit:
The new room you have to build on to your home to house your computer and all its peripherals.
- File:
What your secretary can now do to her nails six and a half hours a day, now that the computer does her day's work in 30 minutes.
- Floppy:
The condition of a constant computer user's stomach due to lack of exercise and a steady diet of junk food (see Chips").
- Hardware:
Collective term for any computer-related object that can be kicked or battered.
- Help:
The feature that assists in generating more questions. When the help feature is used correctly, users are able to navigate through a series of Help screens and end up where they started from without learning anything.
- IBM:
The kind of missile your family members and friends would like to drop on your computer so you'll pay attention to them again.
- Installation routine:
A process employed by many applications to overwrite and thereby trash the user's existing and painstakingly created AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files.
- Live links:
A clever system that lets you unknowingly corrupt data in lots of separate files at the same time.
- Low-bandwidth:
The process of talking to corporate press relations official. (Question: How many IBM PR types does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: We'll have to get back to you on that.)
- Memory:
Of computer components, the most generous in terms of variety, and the skimpiest in terms of quantity.
- Menu:
What you'll never see again after buying a computer because you'll be too poor to eat in a restaurant.
- Nanosecond:
The time it takes after your warranty expires for your hard disk to start making a noise like a monkey wrench in a blender.
- Open system:
Made up of parts from different manufacturers so that, when you crash, each vendor can blame the others.
- Optional:
It should have come free, but someone in the marketing department ran 1-2-3 and figured they'd double their profits this way.
- Parity:
A ninth memory bit that one time in nine will crash an otherwise perfectly functioning system when it detects an error in itself.
- Partition:
A wall you have to build around a noisy dot-matrix printer that makes only slightly less noise than a tree chipper.
- Power user:
Someone who's read the manual all the way through once.
- Printer:
A joke in poor taste. A printer consists of three main parts: the case, the jammed paper tray and the blinking red light.
- Programmers:
Computer avengers. Once members of that group of high school nerds who wore tape on their glasses, played Dungeons and Dragons, and memorized Star Trek episodes; now millionaires who create "user-friendly" software to get revenge on whoever gave them noogies.
- Return:
What lots of people do with their computers after only a week and a half.
- Shell:
A clumsy program that forces users to stumble through ten menus to get anything done in DOS instead of typing a simple three-letter command.
- Toll-free hotline:
An AT&T repairman's busy-signal test number.
- Toner cartridge:
A device to refill laser printers; invented by the Association of American Drycleaners.
- Tutorial:
A program that forces you to sit through lessons on every last obscure and little-used feature of an application while ignoring overall fundamental tricks that would make you far more productive.
- User-Friendly:
Of or pertaining to any feature, device or concept that makes perfect sense to a programmer.
- Users:
Collective term for those who stare vacantly at a monitor. Users are divided into three types: novice, intermediate and expert.
- Novice Users. People who are afraid that simply pressing a key might break their computer.
- Intermediate Users. People who don't know how to fix their computer after they've just pressed a key that broke it.
- Expert Users. People who break other people's computers.
- Virus:
Commonly, the belief of incompetent users that some mysterious external force is to blame for their mistakes at the keyboard.
- Window:
What you heave the computer out of after you accidentally erase a program that took you three days to set up.
- Workstation:
Any PC that sells for more than $10,000.
- XT:
All the computer that most users who just type letters or run typical spreadsheets will ever need, even though a 386 machine will reformat their text a whole tenth of a second faster.
Published in http://www.now-india.com/general/humor
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