Computer - Male or Female?
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As you are aware, ships have long been characterized
as being female. (e.g., "Steady as she goes" or "She's
listing to starboard, Captain!")
Recently, a group of computer scientists (all male)
announced that computers should also be referred to
as being female. Their reasons for drawing this
conclusion follows:
Five reasons to believe computers are female:
- No one but the Creator understands their internal logic.
- The native language they use to communicate with other
computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
- The message "Bad command or file name" is about as
informative as, "If you don't know why I'm mad at you, then I'm
certainly not going to tell you."
- Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory
for later retrieval.
- As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself
spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.
However, another group of computer scientists (all
female) think that computers should be referred to as if
they were male.
Their reasons follow:
- They have a lot of data, but are still clueless.
- They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the
time they ARE the problem.
- As soon as you commit to one you realize that, if you had
waited a little longer, you could have obtained a better model.
- In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.
- Big power surges knock them out for the rest of the night.
MJB's, Ellicott City MD
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