One of these things is not like the others

[harry-whodunnit.livejournal.com]

The office noob I was complaining about in this post has been staying late to get some night shift training from me this week, and I'm beginning to thaw towards him a little bit. It's good to have him around, just because of the unintentional comedy he introduces into the evening.

Monday he'd been in a bad mood most of the afternoon, because of people in other sections of the IT dept. speaking to him 'disrespectfully'. People with years of seniority and much higher positions than him. Around here, sarcasm is practically part of the dress code. And honestly, he's been asking for it. ("I'm getting a 'page cannot be displayed' error message." "Someone must have hacked your account!") It annoyed him enough to bypass our team leader and go directly to the section head to complain about it.

The section head should know what to expect by now, because last week Mr Noob bypassed our team leader to complain to him that the field tech he booked to install a shortcut for a telnet session on his desktop was taking too long about it. (Really, how did this guy get hired for a helpdesk? I offered to help him set the shortcut up himself, but he doesn't want to do the tech's job for him.) I'm sure he's congratulating himself on developing such a close working relationship with the SH, and eagerly anticipating his promotion to a senior management position.

Our night-time conversation has included these gems:

Him: "Bill Gates has created the very worst OS of all time! That's why I love Linux!"
Me: "Oh, I didn't know you ran Linux."
Him: "I run Windows XP."

Him: "Harry, are you busy?"
Me: "Nope. What's up?"
Him: "When AMD started making pentium chips, they licenced the technology from IBM. Then later when they started manufacturing their own design, IBM reverse engineered it and incorporated the technology into their own chips."
Me: "??? ...that's interesting."

Comments

[fenrirvallin.livejournal.com]

...wait, wut?

If he's annoying members of management like that, at least the problem will sort itself out fairly quickly.

In his defense, I like Linux, too. But I run XP because I'm a lazy gamer. :P

[the-reda.livejournal.com]

Ou know, I -still- all for him unclogging the manager's cables... or even better, his C drive.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

K'reck me if I am wrong, but IBM hasn't ever been involved in the design of Pentium chips, have they?

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

Not that I'm aware of.

They were however involved in the design of motorola (powerpc) chips. Maybe he got confused?

[dreamatdrew]

PowerPC was actually a derivative of IBMs POWER processors. Which was cross-licensed/developed to/with Apple and Moto into a microprocessor.

Yeah, I'm betting on massive confuzzlization here...

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

Nope, IBM's sole foray into x86 CPU design was in the 386/486 era.

[tregare.livejournal.com]

And even then it was not their design, Cyrix IIRC licensed the 5x86 and 6x86 (again IIRC) to IBM and also used IBM foundries for their chips.

cool chips, the 5x86 and 6x86....

just looked, yup, IBM and SGS Thompson were manufacturers of those chips for Cyrix, I remember a fairly high failure rate of the ones fabbed by SGS-Thompson.
fairly accurate info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix_Cx5x86

[mawz.livejournal.com]

This predates the 5x86 actually, I'm talking about the IBM 386SLC, 486SLC and Blue Lightning. The SLC's were based on the Intel core designs, but had additional IBM-designed improvements (cache and power-management features to be exact), the Blue Lightning was a true 32bit follow-on to the 486SLC.

Note the Cyrix 486SLC is an entirely different CPU than the IBM, albeit with the exact same target market ( low-power 386SX pin-compatible CPU's for cheap systems and laptops).