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Disorienteering

The Flame of the Week feature has been running for over two years here at Vulture Central. But it's time for a companion award: the most confused correspondent of the week.

As we're sure you'll agree, these two set an exceptionally high standard.

Subject: do RH matters?

if red had realy matters anymore then ? whioute the bigest distro for linx os but i think linuk nerd will very qusik dvelop soem other good destibouerts when it bugth buy big bad tw aol (just think abut how they made troll tech (bakabone for qt the eh kernel fro kde linux windoweslliek desltop like a big bad for profit company;)

isnt this that will make linux mainstream? http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8728350077.html

Jørgen Spangen

Easy, you're thinking - to gain admission to The Confused Lounge, all I need to do is spoof a hilarious foreigner writing English badly, right? Wrong! That in itself is not funny. You need to be deeply confused, profoundly disorientated, or in this case, faced with a simple point, miss it completely.

This missive comes from a regular and valued correspondent, which shows that even the Bright can be confused. The Lounge does not discriminate…

Subject: Might I suggest (re: the Verity Stobbs piece a week and some ago)

… that The Register responds to this?

I think that it would be in the interest of everyone to sort this out; I have pointed out to Dr. Pournelle that the original piece was written by Verity at Dobbs; but I think you should have responded to him, Dr. Pournelle is very respected in the industry; indeed, I have been reading his article in Byte since he
wrote the first one.

[BEGIN Pournelle]
Wednesday,

I keep getting references to this:

Borland's Dead C Scrolls

And then An-ders, an elder in the tribe of the sons of Kahn, dreamed a dream. And he called together all the tribe and spake unto them saying: Brothers - last night I dreamed that everyone in the world paid tribute to the god Vi Su-Albahsic. And the Mic-rosoftees did come down into the valley
of Scotts, and forced all men who dwelt there to worship Vi Su-Albahsic. And the sons of Kahn gave in and became programmers like Jerripur-Nel, the scribe of Bytemag, who toileth still upon Roberta's Basic flash-card program; yea, yet he hath toiled upon it for seven and four-score years or more, as it seemeth to me.

Which is fun, but in fact the DOS version of Roberta's Program was written in CBASIC, from Digital Research although the first version was from Stuctured Systems Group, which was Commander Gordon Eubanks who later was
Symantec, and it was done a very long time ago. I started on that with a working model of the program done in regular old BASIC; the Mac Version was done in Supercard; and the Windows version was done, not by me, in Delphi,
not Visual Basic at all. I wrote them to that effect, but I have had no reply or even acknowledgment that I wrote them, which reduces my respect for
The Register.
[END Pournelle]

No reflection on you, Andrew, this was just the address I picked to respond ala The
Register
, as I think you have the best perspective there. This email is written in the
interest of some cooperation among the industry.

--Andy

Yikes Andy. Of course we have no wish to offend Jerry (except on the occasions when we do), and we're pretty sure the urbane and fragrant Verity Stob doesn't either.

However the point is that Verity's piece is satirical, and in a satire, you expect facts to become exaggerated.

Just as there wasn't really an anarcho-syndicalist commune in the time of King Arthur (as featured in Monty Python's Holy Grail), so Jerry hasn't really toileth on Roberta's Basic for seven and four-score years or more. He's been busy saving the Republic from the pink and yellow hordes, instead, and quite right too.

So similar failures of the humour gland will find themselves immediately considered for the Lounge. You are warned. ®

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