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Bill Gates goes to heaven
(possible religious offence)

(The machines have been changed to protect the Mac :)

Bill Gates died, and much to everyone's surprise, he went to Heaven. When he got there, he had to wait in the reception area.

Heaven's reception area was the size of Massachusetts. There were literally millions of people milling about, living in tents with nothing to do all day. Food and water were being distributed from the backs of trucks, while staffers with clipboards slowly worked their way through the crowd. Booze and drugs were being passed around. Fights were commonplace. Sanitation conditions were appalling. All in all, the scene looked like Woodstock gone metastatic.

Bill lived in a tent for three weeks until, finally, one of the staffers approached him. The staffer was a young man in his late teens, face scarred with acne. He was wearing a blue T-Shirt with the words TEAM PETER emblazoned on it in large yellow lettering.

"Hello," said the staffer in a bored voice that could have been the voice of any clerk in any overgrown bureaucracy. "My name is Gabriel and I'll be your induction co-ordinator". Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, I'm not the Archangel Gabriel. I'm just a guy from Philadelphia name Gabriel who died in a car wreck at the age of 17. Now give me your name, last name first, unless you were Chinese in which case it's first name first."

"Gates, Bill." Gabriel started searching through the sheaf of papers on his clipboard, looking for Bill's Record of Earthly Works. "What's going on here?" asked Bill. "Why are all these people here? Where's Saint Peter? Where are the Pearly Gates?"

Gabriel ignored the questions until he located Bill's records. Then Gabriel looked up in surprise. "It says here that you were the president of a large software company. Is that right?"

"Yes."

"Well then, do the math chip-head! When this Saint Peter business started, it was an easy gig. Only a hundred or so people died every day, and Peter could handle it all by himself, no problem. But now there are over five billion people on Earth. Jesus, when God said to "go forth and multiply" he didn't say "like rabbits!" With that large a population, ten thousand people die every hour. Over a quarter-million people a day. Do you think Peter can meet them all personally?"

"I guess not."

"You guess right. So Peter had to franchise the operation. Now, Peter is the CEO of Team Peter Enterprises, Inc. He just sits in the corporate headquarters and sets policy. Franchisees like me handle the actual inductions." Gabriel looked through his paperwork some more, and then continued. "Your paperwork seems to be in order. And with a background like yours, you'll be getting a plumjob assignment."

"Job assignment?"

"Of course. Did you expect to spend the rest of eternity sitting on your ass and drinking ambrosia? Heaven is a big operation. You have to pull your weight around here!" Gabriel took out a triplicate form, had Bill sign at the bottom, and then tore out the middle copy and handed it to Bill. "Take this down to induction centre #23 and meet up with your occupation orientator. His name is Abraham." Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, he's *NOT* that Abraham"

Bill walked down a muddy trail for ten miles until he came to induction centre #23. He met with Abraham after a mere six hour walk.

"Heaven is centuries behind in building it's data processing infrastructure," explained Abraham. "As you've seen, we're still doing everything on paper. It takes us a week just to process new entries."

"I had to wait *three* weeks," said Bill. Abraham stared at Bill angrily, and Bill realized that he'd made a mistake. Even in Heaven, it's best not to contradict a bureaucrat. "Well," Bill offered, "maybe that Bosnia thing has you guys backed up."

Abraham's look of anger faded to mere annoyance. "Your job will be to supervise Heaven's new data processing centre. We're building the largest computing facility in creation. Half a million computers connected by a multi-segment fibre optic network, all running into a back-end server network with a thousand CPUs on a gigabit channel. Fully fault tolerant. Fully distributed processing. The works."

Bill could barely contain his excitement. "Wow! What a great job! This is really Heaven!"

"We're just finishing construction, and we'll be starting operations soon. Would you like to go see the centre now?"

"You bet!"

Abraham and Bill caught the shuttle bus and went to Heaven's new data processing centre. It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times bigger than the Astrodome. Workmen were crawling all over the place, getting the miles of fibre optic cables properly installed. But the centre was dominated by the computers. Half a million computers, arranged neatly, row by row. Half a million....

... Amigas ...

... all running Digita software! Not a PC in sight! Not a single byte of Microsoft code!

The thought of spending the rest of eternity using products that he had spent his whole life working to destroy was too much for Bill. "What about PCs???" he exclaimed. "What about Windows??? What about Excel??? What about Word????"

"You're forgetting something," said Abraham.

"What's that?" asked Bill plaintively.

"This is Heaven," explained Abraham. "We need a computer system that's heavenly to use. If you want to build a data processing centre based on PCs running Windows, then...

... GO TO HELL!!!"

Peter Price

peter@amigauni.u-net.com
Amiga Universe - http://www.amigauni.u-net.com
Member of AmiBench - http://thunderstorms.org/AmiBench

Redneck Computer Terms

BACKUP - What you do when you run across a skunk in the woods
BAR CODE - Them's the fight'n rules down at the local tavern
BUG - The reason you give for calling in sick
BYTE - What your pit bull dun to cusin Jethro
CACHE - Needed when you run out of food stamps
CHIP - Pasture muffins that you try not to step in
TERMINAL - Time to call the undertaker
CRASH - When you go to Junior's party uninvited
DIGITAL - The art of counting on your fingers
DISKETTE - Female Disco dancer
FAX - What you lie about to the IRS
HACKER - Uncle Leroy after 32 years of smoking
HARDCOPY - Picture looked at when selecting tattoos
INTERNET - Where cafeteria workers put their hair
KEYBOARD - Where you hang the keys to the John Deere
MAC - Big Bubba's favorite fast food
MEGAHERTZ - How your head feels after 17 beers
MODEM - What ya did when the grass and weeds got too tall
MOUSE PAD - Where Mickey and Minnie live
NETWORK - Scoop'n up a big fish before it breaks the line
ONLINE - Where to stay when taking the sobriety test
ROM - Where the pope lives
SCREEN - Helps keep the skeeters off the porch
SERIAL PORT - A red wine you drink with breakfast
SUPERCONDUCTOR - Amtrak's Employee of the year
SCSI - What you call your week-old underwear

Thanks go to Mark Wilson of the AmiBench team for these

ClickBOOM cause Napalm carnage

ClickBOOM had us all worried, and got a bit of free publicity, when the link to this mail 

Subject: Bad news from clickBOOM



For more info please visit:
     
       www.clickboom.com



Sofia Tsiotsikas

Public Relations
led to a notice saying that a row had broken out among the coders and that they no longer existed as a team.

Fortunately though, it was a prank (and a rather good one at that), and they were actually announcing their latest project, Napalm, which will be their very own C&C clone. A few screenshots, and the game's specs are on their website. If they can pull it off, it'll be a must have for C&C fans.

ClickBOOM News

Dear Amiga User,

We hope you liked our NAPALM war promotion :-)

Just when you thought the excitement was over, we have more:
-----------------------------------
  clickBOOM and PXL computers will be giving away
                        $1,000 !!!
-----------------------------------

We are taking preorders for NAPALM and are offering the following incentives to preorder now:

(1)  WIN $1,000:
By preordering Napalm your name will automatically be entered into a draw where one lucky Napalm player will get
          THE GRAND PRIZE OF $1,000CDN!
  (draw will be held once the game is ready)

(2)  HALF-PRICE:
If you are a registered user of all 3 clickBOOM games (Capital Punishment, Myst and Quake) then you can preorder Napalm at half the price!
  (please note this is a time-limited offer)

(3)  WIN A GAME OF YOUR CHOICE:
Every week, until Napalm release date, we will hold a draw among users who preordered, where lucky winners get clickBOOM game of their choice.
   The sooner you preorder the more chances at winning you have, because your name will be entered into every draw from the time you preorder.
  So you will have a chance of winning every week!

For complete information please visit:
            clickboom.com
            pxlcomputers.com

Gateway Sports New Name, Logo

The North Sioux City-based PC manufacturer whose major claim to fame is its distinctive black and white, cow-spotted box, announced today it was changing the official name of the company from Gateway 2000 to simply Gateway.

The new nomenclature comes with a new logo, which now includes a hand-drawn representation of the famous cow-spotted box, and the company name splashed in a new green bookman-based font. According to the company, the color green was chosen because it represents growth, momentum, and vitality.

A new advertising campaign, using the new tagline "Let's talk about your Gateway", launches during tonight's prime time television telecasts.

Windows '98 embarasses Gates

Bill Gates learnt the value of a good OS recently, when at a demonstration, Windows '98 spectacularly crashed on him while attempting to show off its' dynamic driver loading. The dreaded Windows blue error screen came out, and Bill was thus made to look rather silly by his own "masterpiece" OS. All Bill could say was:
"So that's why we're not shipping yet"...

Watch it happen in MOV...download it now!(~1Mb)

H & P announce new support staff

HAAGE & PARTNER NEWS April, 1998

New Support Employees

We are proud to be able to announce that we have been able to improve our support by adding five new people. They started to care for requests by e-mail some days ago and they are also present at the respective mailing lists.

Please welcome Udo, Martin, Klaus, Sebastian and Philipp :-)

There is also a new and improved support page on our web site that covers all kinds of support we offer for our products.

To get more information, please visit our homepage: www.haage-partner.com

H & P release Tornado3D v1.5

HAAGE & PARTNER NEWS April, 1998

Tornado3D v1.5 - The storm rages on!

Version 1.5 of the 3D-rendering-program Tornado3D is immediately available. A number of improvements and extensions have been made from version 1.0 and special attention was paid to the wishes and suggestions of the program users.

The latest version offers, among other things, the possibility to render single objects using conventional raytracing and freely combine them with objects rendered by other means.
Freeform-deformation-cages offer much easier and realistic object-morphing and the newly added field-rendering and broadcast encoding make Tornado3D fit for recording animations to video in the highest possible quality.

For creating objects from scratch Tornado3D now offers the popular spline-skinning method. Additionally, a number of spline-paths in pre-defined shapes (such as squares, circles) are available in the object-menu.

Creating animations has now become even easier and more intuitive - almost any kind of keyframe is created automatically. On top of that Tornado3D now offers a pose-manager that makes maintaining the object properties much easier and also enables you to inter- and extrapolate new keyframes from existing ones.

The Virge-chip on the CyberVision64/3D graphics-card is now fully supported - this results in a much faster computation of the preview images, the speed of which is unsurpassed even by a 68060 CPU.

Regarding object materials there are news as well: Tornado3D now offers displacement maps and textures. Displacement maps, unlike bumpmaps, cause a real modification to an object's geometry which makes possible numerous and realistic effects that could not be achieved through bumpmapping, which is a purely optical effect.

The camera-model used by Tornado3D now offers an almost complete simulation of a real reflex camera, the technical parameters of which can be adjusted within very large limits. Hand in hand with that goes an improved depth-of-field simulation and better control over the motion blur effect.

For beginners Tornado3D now offers useful hints and tips that are displayed upon program start and whenever the user desires.

Project saving has been made safer and more convenient - all objects used in a project are stored in a dedicated project-directory - thus it is not possible anymore to accidentally store a project and forget to save the objects it contains. Furthermore, Tornado3D now offers 'quick-access' menus for objects and projects which contain the six most recently loaded projects/objects.

On top of that a large number of details were improved which can not all be listed here.

Version 1.5 is shipped to all registered users directly by Eyelight.

To get more information, please visit our homepage: www.haage-partner.com