By, Bye Microsoft Pie parody

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From - Mon Aug 21 14:05:44 2000
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From: cujo_twp@my-deja.com
Newsgroups: rec.music.filk,comp.os.linux.misc,alt.2600,rec.humor
Subject: FYA - Parody: Microsoft Pie (The Day the Servers Died)
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 17:08:48 GMT
Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy.
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Microsoft Pie - To the tune of "American Pie" by Don McClean
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Rev. History
V1.0 - 05/2000 - Written by "Cujo The Wonder Puppy"
(cujo@psychokitty.com)
---------------------------------------------------------------------

A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How my system used to run for months
And I knew when I went home at night
The enterprise would be alright
And, the users, they'd be happy for a while.

But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep;
I couldn't take one more step.

I can't remember if I cried
When I read about Win NT "5", (1)
But management made me take the ride
The day the servers died.

Say bye-bye to your system uptime
Installed NT on the servers,
Now the servers are fried
And them IT(2) guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
Gonna buy a new house with mine...

Did you read the HCL(3)
And do you have faith in Gates above...
If press releases tell you so?
Do you believe in beta code,
Can patches save your mortal soul,
And can you afford to spend two hours on hold?

Well, I know the boss loves Microsoft
Cause he's buying up a pile of stock
But you know you'd love to say
just Where Bill should go today.

I was a former Unix Sys Admin
With an MCSE(4) and an NT pin
I had no clue how deep I was in
The day the servers died.

I started singin',
Say bye-bye to your system uptime
Installed NT on the servers,
Now the servers are fried
And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
Gonna buy a new house with mine...

Now for ten years we've been on our own
The desktop's bloated, the command line gone
But that's not how it used to be.
The box was fast and the OS(5) lean
No 3d saver on the console screen
Response times in the millisecond range

Oh, but while IT was looking down,
The VP(6) took their techie crown.
FT(7) went away
And PC's stole the day
What bosses read in PC Week(8)
Became the gospel for IT
and Windows was the strategy
the day the servers died

We were singing,
Say bye-bye to your system uptime
Installed NT on the servers,
Now the servers are fried
And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
Gonna buy a new house with mine...

Helter Skelter in the summer swelter.
NORAD(9) put NT in the fallout shelters
Eight miles high and falling fast.
A BSOD(10) dumped a silo's core
Sent fifty missiles through China's door
And launched another world war
When one more server died

The courts(11) were after Bill and crew
and Unix, once again, was cool
We all got up to dance,
Oh, but we never got the chance!
`Cause Linux tried to take the field;
But Microsoft refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the servers died?

We started singing,
"bye-bye" to our system uptime
Installed NT on the servers,
Now the servers are fried
And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
Gonna buy a new house with mine...

Oh, and there we were all in one hall,
Following 2000's siren call
With no time left to start again.
So come on: Bill be vague and Bill be Slick!
Come show us what makes 2K tick
Cause NT4 is crashing as you speak.

Oh, and as I watched Bill on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage.
No angel born in hell
Could break that Satan's spell.
They applauded four ohs uptime week(12)
and cheered at 2k's 3 month peak
"My Sun's (13) been up since '93"
but no one heard me cry

As the profits climbed high into the night
The Redmond campus grew beyond sight
I saw Bill laughing with delight
The day the Servers died

He was singing,
Say bye-bye to your system uptime
Installed NT on the servers,
Now the servers are fried
And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
Gonna buy a new house with mine...

(14)
I met a girl who wrote for Bill
And I asked if she had had her fill,
But she just smiled and turned away.
'cause Windows bought her house, you see
The code's unstable(15), but it's not free
It's IT job security
Whenever servers die

And in the streets the users screamed,
The admins cried, and managers dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The systems all were broken.
And the three men who had heard the call
Raymond, Stallman and Torvalds(16)
They'd tried to save us from the fall
The day the servers died.

But did we listen?

Say bye-bye to your system uptime
Installed NT on the servers,
Now the servers are fried
And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
Gonna buy a new house with mine...

They were singing,
bye-bye to your system uptime
Installed NT on the servers,
Now the servers are fried
And them IT guys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "Gotta love that paid overtime..."
Gonna buy a new house with mine...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft Pie - Copyright (C) 2000 "Cujo The Wonder Puppy"
(http://www.psychokitty.com/~cujo)
This parody is free; you may redistribute it and/or modify it as long
as this copyright notice remains intact and you agree to abide by the
terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation. (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html);
------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Before it was called Windows 2000, the media referred to the next
release as Windows NT 5.0

(2) Information Technology

(3) Hardware Compatibility List - A list of hardware that doesn't
instantly burst into flames when used with Microsoft products. Based on
comments and presentation materials from the Windows 2000 launch, this
means that if you're lucky, it'll run for a week without hanging up or
requiring a reboot under NT 4.0 or 3 months in a "clean room" scenario
under Win2K.

(4) Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer - A designation that certifies
that you either know your way around Microsoft products or that you
bought a set of Exam Cram guides and you're good at memory work.
Neither of which actually has anything to do with engineering.

(5) Operating system - In the "good old days", the core software which
provided a set of tools and interfaces to the hardware. The OS would
consume a fraction of the system resources and provide the bare
necessities required for the applications to have a common interface to
the hardware. Now it refers to a huge pile of unrelated applications
tied together seemingly at random to consume the greatest possible
percentage of memory and CPU while still providing the false hope of
usability.

(6) Vice President. ie: any senior manager that shouldn't be making
technology decisions, but feels empowered to do so.

(7) Fault Tolerant (system). A term that no longer has any meaning
outside of mainframes and some clustered environments. A system with
sufficient redundancy and fail-over capabilities that it can continue
running uninterrupted even when a major component fails. There is no
such thing as a FT system running Windows. There are "High
availability" (HA) Windows configurations, but this just means that if
one node dies, you lose your session and pick up again on another node.
(ie: Who cares if one of the twins dies? We've got a backup.) In an FT
environment, you wouldn't even notice the failure.

(8) "PC Week" is meant to encompass the entire gamut of publications
that managers somehow get their hands on during long business trips.
(search for "Management by In-Flight Magazine") PC Week is not, in and
of itself, a bad thing. It's just that these magazines dumb down the
technology far enough that managers believe themselves to be computer
literate and subsequently start making technology decisions without
understanding (or even caring about) the implications.

(9) North AmeRican Air Defence. NORAD isn't actually stupid enough to
trust Windows with anything beyond a game of Minesweeper or Solitaire.
This verse is just poetic license

(10) Blue Screen Of Death - The blue screen that indicates that Windows
has crashed. I've actually seen monitors on servers with the page fault
message burned into them (since the screen saver cuts in during normal
operations, but a Page Fault stays on-screen until reboot.)

(11) The US Department Of Justice declared Microsoft a Monopoly (no
kidding, Sherlock....you could have asked anyone in IT and you would
have found that out in a matter of minutes)

(12) This is not an exaggeration. At the Windows 2000 launch in Feb
2000, the audience actually applauded when Gates indicated the Windows
NT 4.0 ran (on average) for a week without a reboot. If IBM told
companies that they'd have to reboot their 370's every week, there'd be
hell to pay.

(13) It was actually a Pyramid, but Sun fit the cadence better. I've
had NCRs SUNs and AT&T 3B2 systems that have run literally for years
without ever *requiring* a reboot (excluding administrative reboots for
kernel tuning or to install new hardware)

(14) Yeah...I know it doesn't jive with the original song, but I wrote
it, liked it and then realized that it was the wrong verse. Tough. If
you don't like it, you're entitled to double your money back.

(15) See #12.

(16) I originally had Kernigan, Ritchie and Torvalds. But since the
Open Source movement and not Unix per se, is really the nail in
Microsoft's casket, I thought that I'd update it.


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