Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Proud to be Indian, relax oye!

The following email came screaming for a reply. What could I do!

-----Original Message-----

AN Indian discovered that nobody can create a folder
anywhere named as "con" in any drive

This is something pretty cool...and unbelievable... At Microsoft the
whole
Team, including Bill Gates, couldn't answer why this happened!

Try it out yourself..

--------- Reply---------
"Hmm Please record my name also, as I claim that you can't make a folder with the name "PRN"!

Alright, now coming to the logic behind this (I am surprised who asked Bill Gates and the whole MS team!): There were certain "reserved names" in the underlying OS, that time called DOS - Disk Operating System.

CON was the reserved name for CONsole (i.e. a display system) PRN was the reserved name for PRiNter (i.e. a printer).

These reserved names were used to output to display system, such as a monitor, and a printer respectively.

So to be "backward compatible" such names are disallowed even today. There are more such names.

My sympathy for Bill Gates."

Are we, Indians, really suffering from such an identity crisis? Bah!

And that also brings me to my theory that with each new "batch" of people inducted into the cyberworld, there is an increase in the per capita spam/forwards. More on this later.

By the way who was that Indian? :)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Now thats a cool reply. I get so many "Proud to be an Indian" emails but the reality is that with almost half of the world's population being Indians I expect much more.

Kanishk | कनिष्क said...

Fandoo reply to such stupid email. BTW for this anonymous: Is the world's poulation just a little over 2 billion ? Need to chk some stats..!!!

Anonymous said...

Sorry Kanishk! The population of India to the world population is only around 17%. Will be careful next time.:)

Aragorn said...

Neways
one can create con on windows

Go to dos prompt
just type

mkdir \\.\con

have a healthy time;)