FYA - Parody: Microsoft Pie (The Day the Servers Died)
cujo...@my-deja.com
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Rev. History
V1.0 - 05/2000 - Written by "Cujo The Wonder Puppy"
(cu...@psychokitty.com)
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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...
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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.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Wingman442
original voice....
--
0101011101101001011011100110011101101101
putting 220v through cat5 can be fun... just remember
to unplug your computer from the network before you
try it...
0110000101101110001101000011010000110010
Wingman442 - win...@NOSPAMcotse.com
<cujo...@my-deja.com> wrote in message news:8nmeun$4io$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
Michael Liebmann
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Rev. History
> V1.0 - 05/2000 - Written by "Cujo The Wonder Puppy"
> (cu...@psychokitty.com)
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
I'm taking this one to the filk tonight and singing it. It's wicked!
Michael
Brash
Brash
--
0h y0rdshch!
<cujo...@my-deja.com> wrote in message news:8nmeun$4io$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
Renegade Gimp
cujo...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
<huuuuge snip>
<vbg>
You sir, have far too much time on you hands.
G
--
Glenn Hurrell - GPZ500s
UKRMMA#12, UKRMRM#3
glenn_hurrell@_306b_Avoider_gmx.net
Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you
an understanding.
- Samuel Johnson
cujo...@my-deja.com
Renegade Gimp <Postmaster@[127.0.0.1]> wrote:
>
>
> cujo...@my-deja.com wrote:
> >
> <huuuuge snip>
>
> <vbg>
>
> You sir, have far too much time on you hands.
>
I wrote it while rebuilding a crashed server :)
J T
Mike Van Pelt
>Microsoft Pie - To the tune of "American Pie" by Don McClean
Marvelous! Good stuff.
>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.
I keep trying to fend this off at work...
--
Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the moon, | Mike Van Pelt
and that's a very dubious and disappointing honor. | m...@netcom.com
It's been far too long. -- Gene Cernan | KE6BVH
Barry Gold
Hey, great! And too true. When I worked on an AIX system, it got
rebooted on every power failure. Aside from that, there were a couple
of times we added hardware inside the case, one OS upgrade, and one
count it one time I had to reboot because NFS locked up. This was
over a 3.5 year period, with power failures perhaps twice a year.
Using Suns, I find myself rebooting every couple of months because a
server had to be rebooted and I found myself with a "stale file
handle".
I do have to say a couple of words in MS's favor.
1. On a desktop, it doesn't matter if the system crashes occasionally.
You save your work occasionally, and the worst that happens is you
lose 1/2 hour of one person's time. Putting systems like that on an
e-commerce webserver or anything else you want up 24/7, though, is
insane.
2. Machines keep getting bigger and faster. You can't even buy a hard
disk smaller than about 30 gigabytes, unless you haunt used parts shops.
Moore's law applies. So bloatware isn't quite as bad as it appears.
In fact, the biggest problem with Win32's bloat (Office and Netscape
too) is that they take too long to start up.
So I run Windoze on my home machine so I can have the use of Word and
suchlike programs. But if I had my druthers, I'd run Solaris or Linux
and something like Merge (a Windoze emulator for Unix).
--
Finger bg...@nyx10.nyx.net for public key
Tony Lawrence
>
> So I run Windoze on my home machine so I can have the use of Word and
> suchlike programs. But if I had my druthers, I'd run Solaris or Linux
> and something like Merge (a Windoze emulator for Unix).
So why not have your druthers? See
http://pcunix.com/Reviews/win4lin.html
--
Tony Lawrence (to...@aplawrence.com)
Linux articles, help, book reviews, tests,
job listings and more : http://www.pcunix.com/Linux
jos...@lascaux.ca
My news server seems to have missed it.
TIA
Mike Van Pelt <m...@netcom.com> wrote in message
news:8nvsuu$7na$1...@slb1.atl.mindspring.net...
> In article <8nmeun$4io$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, <cujo...@my-deja.com> wrote:
> >Microsoft Pie - To the tune of "American Pie" by Don McClean
>
> Marvelous! Good stuff.
>
> >I can't remember if I cried
> >When I read about Win NT "5", (1)
> >But management made me take the ride
> >The day the servers died.
>
Brash
<jos...@lascaux.ca> wrote in message
news:l8ap5.15315$Z2.1...@nnrp1.uunet.ca...
> Coud someone post that again?
> My news server seems to have missed it.
>
> TIA
>
Use Deja.
Brash
--
0h y0rdshch!
>
> Mike Van Pelt <m...@netcom.com> wrote in message
> news:8nvsuu$7na$1...@slb1.atl.mindspring.net...
> > In article <8nmeun$4io$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, <cujo...@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > >Microsoft Pie - To the tune of "American Pie" by Don McClean
> >
> > Marvelous! Good stuff.
> >
> > >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.
> >
Joe Kesselman
> 1. On a desktop, it doesn't matter if the system crashes occasionally.
Sorry, but I've lost a half-hour's worth of essentially unrecoverable
creative writing just Once Too Many Times to buy that.
> Moore's law applies. So bloatware isn't quite as bad as it appears.
That's all that's made it _tolerable_. It doesn't make it desirable. I
wouldn't mind if all the bloat was buying us features, or even buying us
faster and cheaper reliable development. But see point (1) -- it ain't;
much of what it's buying them is faster _sloppy_ development.
I'm sorry, but NT is still Not There. The best that can be said for it
is that Microsoft's other offerings are worse, and that it probably
still has more device drivers written for it than for the alternatives.
--
------------------------------------------------------
Joe Kesselman, http://www.lovesong.com/people/keshlam/
The Walkabout Clearwater Coffeehouse is on summer break
but you can check out next year's schedule at
http://www.WalkaboutClearwater.org
Stephen Hui
>
> Brief rant and then I'll shut up:
>
> > 1. On a desktop, it doesn't matter if the system crashes occasionally.
>
> Sorry, but I've lost a half-hour's worth of essentially unrecoverable
> creative writing just Once Too Many Times to buy that.
I once lost 3 hours' worth of spreadsheet work at 3am (the project was
due at 9:30am that morning). How did I lose it? I clicked the Save
button in Excel98 (I was on a Mac).
Just thought I'd throw that out. :oP
Stephen.
--
Stephen Hui, ARL:UT, Austin, Texas
Computer Terms: Programmer - A red-eyed, mumbling mammal
capable of conversing with inanimate objects.
Julius Apweiler
How about:
http://www.aolwatch.org/pie.htm
--------------------
Julius Dominik Apweiler
----
Owner of Julius' Web Site: http://www.geocities.com/jule-apweiler/
----
E-Mail: apwe...@pt.lu or Julius....@gmx.net
----
'What's _that_?' said Ron, pointing at a large dish of some sort of shellfish
stew that stood beside a large steak-and-kidney pudding.
'Bouillabaisse,' said Hermione.
'Bless you,' said Ron.
'It's _French_,' said Hermione. 'I had it on holiday, summer before last, it's
very nice.'
'I'll take your word for it,' said Ron, helping himself to black pudding.
(from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)