Pretty Amazing New Stuff

Geek Warning : The following posting contains barely coherent techno-waffle. Non-techies should skip to the bottom for a joke I enjoyed.

You would think that after a few decades in IT, I'd be pretty hard to impress. The truth is that with every passing year I'm more and more blown-away by all the pretty-amazing-new-stuff (PANS) that keeps coming my way.

PANS 1 - I was able to sit at my desk in London while a world-expert in Boston took over my PC and dialled into a server in Amsterdam with which I was having problems. The technology involved ("Webex") is not new, but it was new to me. In the old days you just had to put the expert on a plane and consign him to a life of airports and hotels.

PANS 2 - Google Apps : A free Word Processing, Spreadsheet and Presentation suite of programs that allow you and a few dozen of your colleagues to share information online. The "sharing" is a bit flaky, but I can see this taking off big-time.

PANS 3 - Knoppix running under VMWare on my Windows laptop. A wonderful way to work with Linux on your laptop without having to give up Microsoft products. There's a sensationally straight-forward guide of how to set it up on http://showmedo.com/videos/video?name=linuxDevijverVMWare2&fromSeriesID=38
. The only thing I'd have added is that if you want to get data back from the Knoppix environment to Windows, you need to use Samba.

That last idea tickles me. I imagine that if my laptop is a brain, then Windows is a dream that it is dreaming. Knoppix in VMware is a dream within that dream - and the idea that within a dream-within-dream you can push stuff into the dream ... Maaaan, my mind, it is blown.

And that's just from the last month, and truthfully I was too busy doing the day-job to do all that much of my own stuff. And I never mentioned Vista - because I've tried it and ho-hum I'm not over-excited.

The speed of technology is so fast just now and I count myself fortunate to be alive at this time in history.

And now for the joke ...

Five cannibals get appointed as programmers in an IT company. During their induction course the boss says: "You're all part of our team now. You can earn good money here, and you should go to the company canteen if you need something to eat. So don't .. er .. you know ... eat the other employees".

Four weeks later the boss returns and says: "You're all working very hard, and I'm very satisfied with all of you. One of our cleaners has disappeared however. Do any of you know what happened to her?" The cannibals disavow all knowledge of the missing cleaner.

After the boss has left, the leader of the cannibals says to the others: "Which of you idiots ate the cleaner?" One of the cannibals raises his hand hesitantly, to which the leader of the cannibals says: "You FOOL! For four weeks we've been eating team leaders and project managers and no-one has noticed a thing, and now YOU have to go and eat the cleaner!"