>Well it was funny, till you went and over-analyzed it.. Put down your linux
>book for a few and RELAX.
You assume too much. I was actually reading books on the new OS I'm
learning about -- M'jovy.
tq vm, (burley)
P.S. It isn't over-analysis on the part of the "client" that is solely
responsible for this sort of humor failing: some humor simply doesn't
properly account for some kinds of (perhaps irrelevant, or erroneous)
excess knowledge on the part of the client, who simply can't help
referencing such knowledge in an attempt to analyze the semantic content
of the statement (analysis which, I believe, is crucial in the
determination of whether *anything* constitutes humor).
The server can mitigate this by providing clues that would more quickly
rule out that excess knowledge, especially if he has some idea of what
specific sorts of excess knowledge might interfere.
Perhaps instead of:
>Sendmail is not a Unix program. It is an NT program that someone
>ported to Unix twenty years ago.
It could have been written:
>Sendmail is not a Unix program. When Bill Gates wrote it for NT
>over twenty years ago, he didn't expect that software pirates
>would actually try to port it to Unix shortly thereafter.
Not necessarily funnier, or even *as* funny, overall, but the
use of *two* specific nouns -- Bill Gates *and* NT -- would have
been enough to keep my "NT is kinda descended from VAX/VMS"
neurons from triggering.
Then, we could have continued joking about how of *course* he expected
that, he *planned* on it, so the Unix community would be sucked into
spending all its time coping with Sendmail until it figured out it
needed its own, native, MTA, like qmail, and so on, instead of talking
about VAX/VMS.
(Now, *that* was over-analysis...gotcha! ;-)
