[humorix] Warning Labels Applied To vi, emacs

[James Baughn <jbaughn@xxxxxxx>]

Warning Labels Applied To vi, emacs
by William S., wschliep@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
and Zrax, http://www.translucentdragon.com/

RALEIGH-DURHAM, NC -- It all started as an innocent prank. A
Red Hat engineer and Emacs fanatic changed the RPM description
for vi to include the warning, "WARNING: This program contains
concentrated, obscure commands.  The stress from prolonged
usage of vi may result in uncontrollable pulling of hair,
leading to permanent hair loss and high blood pressure."

Soon after, a co-worker shot back by applying this warning
label to Emacs: "CAUTION: This product consumes ungodly
amounts of memory and swap space.  For best performance, do
not run Emacs concurrently with any other programs more
complicated than fortune(6)."

Now other Linux distributions, fearing that Red Hat was forced
to apply the warnings to fend off potential lawsuits, have
also attached warnings.  "Obviously Red Hat knows something we
don't," explained a developer for SuSE.   "The SCO fiasco was
a real eye-opener for the need to protect ourselves against
litiguous bastardry.  We don't want to take any chances...
what if somebody has a heart attack because of frustration
from trying to get something done in vi?"

As a result of their fear of lawyers, SuSE has created special
"Installation Messages" for YaST that will display warning
messages and confirmation prompts before certain "high-risk"
programs are installed.

Mandrake has taken the extra step of augmenting text editors
to detect certain "stressful" programming languages. For
instance, when you attempt to write Perl code in any text
editor, a warning dialog says, "WARNING: Perl is illegible no
matter how hard you try to make it so."

A spokesdroid for Microsoft was quick to take advantage of the
situation to slam Linux.  "Windows does not require such
'warning labels'.  The ease-of-use, quality, and security of
Microsoft solutions are top-notch and will never form the
grounds for a lawsuit.  This is undeniable proof that Windows
is superior to Linux.

RMS was not available for comment at press time.


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