Channels ▼   April 1 and the Devil Speaks  Every year, this
interval is rife with silliness. Because any shocking news can
be told in earnest on April 1, many tech publications and sites
run far-fetched stories or news items to see how gullible we all
are. Items as unbelievable as "Oracle building and selling
SPARC-based servers" or "Microsoft open-sourcing Visual Studio"
are frequently featured. To avoid going down this well-trodden
path, I've chosen to share some humor from undeniably the
greatest wit in the history of computing, Stan Kelly-Bootle.
Stan has written a humor column, "Devil's Advocate," for decades
in various computer publications, including UNIX Review (mostly)
and ACM Queue (recently). His technical chops include getting a
Ph.D. at Cambridge in Computer Science, the first ever graduate
degrees offered in the field, he claims. He's written several
books on programming.  The book I want to focus on is his
Computer Contradictionary, in which he catalogued his pithiest
observations in a Devil's