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This is the first in a series of Linux-related humor which will be published whenever I have material. If you know a Linux joke you'd like to contribute for this column, e-mail it to gazette@ssc.com.
Contents:
[ If Operating Systems Ran The Airlines ]
[ Linus Torvalds entry in Encyclopedia
Galactica ]
Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on ...
All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.
The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.
Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the Seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plan leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"
Torvalds, Linus- ... historians generally agree was an actual person and completed a large portion of the programming used to develop the positronic brain sometime before the earliest recorded history. A number of programs have been copied from active positronic memory and have been proven to be based on the galactic standard programming language VM (vit-min) C. The memory patterns include references to the genetic programmer Linus (la-news) Pauling and have revealed where Torvalds named the earliest cores of the positronic brain for the VM C language. Torvalds is universally regarded by historians as the greatest linguist of the core development project. Torvalds was known to have mastered all of the known languages of the time while working in an advanced development laboratory called the Swiss (s-weex) Patent Office of Pari (par-ee) and selected the VM C core in preference to the previous Finn language from predecessors Norway (Turbo-C) and Sweden (ANSI-C). Torvald's mastery of the language in the VM C core is regarded galaxy wide as the reason for the estimated 100,000 year uptime for the original positronic brains. The X Law of Robotics burned into all positronic brains has been found still undecoded in currently functioning examples of the oldest portion of the memory used by the LinuX kerning (coy-nah). Historians are unanimous in identifying Torvalds as the most ingenious programmer in galactic history.
1 Allusion to Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series.