It’s the Musical Geek Friday again! This week a song about how Every OS Sucks!

The song is written and performed a Canadian comedy group called Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. The Trolls currently consist of comedians Wes Borg, Joe Bird and Paul Mather.

The cast of the Trolls has changed over the years. At one point, a woman named Kathleen was in the group. The members of the group are in their forties about now.

I could not find more information about this band, so I ask you, my readers, to share anything you know about them in the comments of this post!

The song is about the history of computers. It says that before the days there were operating systems, the computers worked nicely and did not suck, but now, thanks to all the various operating systems, they all suck!

Here it is! The Every OS Sucks song:

Download this song: every os sucks.mp3 (musical geek friday #12)
Downloaded: 3358 times

Download lyrics: every os sucks lyrics (musical geek friday #12)
Downloaded: 1007 times

They also made a music video for this song, scroll to the bottom of this post for the video!

The lyrics of the song is quite lengthy:

You see, I come from a time in the nineteen-hundred-and-seventies when
computers were used for two things - to either go to the moon, or play
Pong… nothing in between. Y’see, you didn’t need a fancy operating
system to play Pong, and the men who went to the moon — God Bless ‘em —
did it with no mouse, and a plain text-only black-and-white screen,
and 32 kilobytes of RAM.

But then ’round ’bout the late 70’s, home computers started to do a
little more than play Pong… very little more. Like computers started
to play non-Pong-like games, and balance checkbooks, and why… you
could play Zaxxon on your Apple II, or… write a book! All with a
computer that had 32 kilobytes of RAM! It was good enough to go to
the moon, it was good enough for you.

It was a golden time. A time before Windows, a time before mouses, a
time before the internet and bloatware, and a time…
before every OS sucked.

*sigh*

[singing]

Well, way back in the olden times,
my computer worked for me.
I’d laugh and play, all night and day,
on Zork I, II and III.

The Amiga, VIC-20 and the Sinclair II,
The TRS 80 and the Apple II,
they did what they were supposed to do,
wasn’t much… but it was enough.

But then Xerox made a prototype,
Steve Jobs came on the scene,
read “Of Mice and Menus,” Windows, Icons
a trash, and a bitmap screen.

Well Stevie said to Xerox,
“Boys, turn your heads and cough.”
And when no-one was looking,
he ripped their interfaces off.

Stole every feature that he had seen,
put it in a cute box with a tiny little screen,
Mac OS 1 ran that machine,
only cost five thousand bucks.

But it was slow, it was buggy,
so they wrote it again,
And now they’re up to OS 10,
they’ll charge you for the Beta, then charge you again,
but the Mac OS still sucks.

Every OS wastes your time,
from the desktop to the lap,
Everything since Apple Dos,
Just a bunch of crap.

From Microsoft, to Macintosh,
to Lin– line– lin– lie… nux,
Every computer crashes,
’cause every OS sucks.

Well then Microsoft jumped in the game,
copied Apple’s interface, with an OS named,
“Windows 3.1″ - it was twice as lame,
but the stock price rose and rose.

Then Windows 95, then 98,
man solitaire never ran so great,
and every single version came out late,
but I guess that’s the way it goes.

But that bloatware’ll crash and delete your work,
NT, ME, man, none of ‘em work.
Bill Gates may be richer than Captain Kirk,
but the Windows OS blows!
And sucks!
At the same time!

I’d trade it in, yeah right… for what?
It’s top of the line from the Compuhut.
The fridge, stove and toaster, never crash on me,
I should be able to get online, without a PHD.

My phone doesn’t take a week to boot it,
my TV doesn’t crash when I mute it,
I miss ASCII text, and my floppy drive,
I wish VIC-20 was still alive…

But it ain’t the hardware, man.

It’s just that every OS sucks… and blows.

Now there’s lih-nux or lie-nux,
I don’t know how you say it,
or how you install it, or use it, or play it,
or where you download it, or what programs run,
but lih-nux, or lie-nux, don’t look like much fun.

However you say it, it’s getting great press,
though how it survives is anyone’s guess,
If you ask me, it’s a great big mess,
for elitist, nerdy shmucks.

“It’s free!” they say, if you can get it to run,
the Geeks say, “Hey, that’s half the fun!”
Yeah, but I got a girlfriend, and things to get done,
the Linux OS SUCKS.
(I’m sorry to say it, but it does.)

Every OS wastes your time,
from the desktop to the lap,
Everything since the abacus,
Just a bunch of crap.

From Microsoft, to Macintosh,
to lin– line– lin– lie… nux.
Every computer crashes,
’cause every OS sucks.

Every computer crashes… ’cause every OS sucks!

Here is Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie performing the song:

This week on Musical Geek Friday - the famous BitTorrent Song!

The song is written and performed by Brent Simon. Brent describes himself as a super nerd who plays the synth and makes original music that’s honest and from the heart. He keeps composing and his latest music can be found on his MySpace page - brentsimon.

The song, when I first downloaded it, was actually called “Mininova”, in honor of one of the largest BitTorrent sites on the net - Mininova.org.

I was curious about the history of this song and emailed Brent. It turns out the original title of the song is “World Wired West” and Mininova torrent renamed to song to “Mininova” when they put it for download on their site!

Here is what Brent had to say about the history of the song:

I decided to write “World Wired West”, which has become better known as “the Bittorent song”, based off of my experience with the net and torrents. I wanted to write something as geeky as possible and see if anyone knew what I was talking about. It looks like you guys do! The second verse is actually a short poem I wrote for the literary journal back in high school. I was transitioning from DOS to Windows at that point; that’s why I have the old DOS references of “Bad command or file name” and D-I-R.

I also asked him about the mysterious final verse, he said:

I had just read Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, which was the most confusing and disturbing book I’ve ever read, and my cousin Jim wanted me to write a song about it. That verse is the combined total of what I could make out from the book and what I remember from the movie (which I haven’t seen in many years). There was no way I could write a whole song about it, but I was able to fit a verse together and there you have it.

Here it is! The BitTorrent Song!

Download this song: the bittorrent song.mp3 (musical geek friday #11)
Downloaded: 2068 times

Download lyrics: the bittorrent song lyrics (musical geek friday #11)
Downloaded: 738 times

Here is the lyrics of The BitTorrent Song:

-Verse 1-
Gather ’round and hear my story
‘Bout the new old west
I sought torrents, rips, and ISO’s
Logged in under guest

Movies, music, games and porno,
Warez and killer apps,
Compressors, CODECs and keygens
Compilers, hacks and cracks

-Chorus-
Data’s streamin’ my hard drive’s screamin’
Fragmenting the night
Bit’s are flowin’ corruption’s growin’
Into every last byte

-Verse 2-
Bad command or file name
OK, now what’s next
D-I-R where is my brain
It’s coded in base hex

Alright now you’ll feel my wrath
Don’t ever mess with me
Cram this up your Gigabyte
So long Format C:

-Chorus-
Data’s streamin’ my hard drive’s screamin’
Fragmenting the night
Bit’s are flowin’ corruption’s growin’
Into every last byte

-Bonus Verse-
If you watch my lips real closely
You’ll see they don’t match what I’m saying
My typewriter emits fluids
All of which are intoxicating

Staring at my shoes all after-
Noon on heroin isn’t boring
Just to poop I need the surgical
Equivalent of apple coring

-Chorus-
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch

Here is Brent Simon performing The Bittorrent Song:

Remember the song from Musical Geek Friday #7 - Just One More Hack? I said that it was the only song ever about a debugger. I must admit that I was wrong! This week I bring to you another song about a debugger - the DDT debugger (and the ancient TECO text editor).

TECO stands for Text Editor and COrrector. It was developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was one of the first text editors ever written. It grew over the years, gaining popularity and features. Along the way, it also became a Turing-complete programming language. Several sets of editor macros were developed and used. I was surprised to find that around 1975 Richard Stallman organized these Editor MACroS into the first Emacs-like text editor. Here is an article about the history of TECO.

DDT, on the other hand, was a collection of several debugger programs. These debugging programs included a command shell from which TECO was also used interchangeably with DDT. DDT stands for Dynamic Debugging Technique (initially known as DEC Debugging Tape).

Talking about the 10th geek song, it’s written and performed by a band called “red martian“.

Enough of facts, here is the TECO and DDT song:

Download this song: teco and ddt.mp3 (musical geek friday #10)
Downloaded: 2344 times

Download lyrics: teco and ddt lyrics (musical geek friday #10)
Downloaded: 682 times

TECO and DDT Lyrics:

Oh, you can hack anything that you want with just TECO and DDT.
You can hack anything that you want with just TECO and DDT!

Oh, no, you don’t have to tell me what would I need because it’s simply plain to see…
That I can hack anything that I want with just TECO and DDT!

Yeaha!

Oh, you can hack anything that you want with just TECO and DDT.
Oh, you can hack anything that you want with just TECO and DDT!

Oh, no, you don’t have to tell me what would I need because it’s simply plain to see…
That I can hack anything that I want with just TECO, just TECO, just TECO and DDT!

I’d like to thank Adam for letting me know about this song.

This week on Musical Geek Friday - The Free Software Song!

The song is written and performed by the founder of Free Software Foundation and the most active free software advocate Richard Stallman (scroll down for a video of Mr. Stallman performing it himself).

Richard wrote this song at a filksinging session at a science fiction convention. He realized he had never written a filksong relating to free software, so he figured it was time he did. He remembered that he had never written a filksong using Bulgarian dance music, so he figured that would be a good thing to do for once. He chose Sadi Moma because it is not too fast or complicated, and is easy to sing.

Here it is - The Free Software Song!

Download this song: the free software song.mp3 (musical geek friday #9)
Downloaded: 2322 times

Download lyrics: the free software song lyrics (musical geek friday #9)
Downloaded: 699 times

Here is the lyrics of The Free Software Song:

Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.
Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.

Hoarders may get piles of money,
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That’s not good, hackers, that’s not good.

When we have enough free software
At our call, hackers, at our call,
We’ll throw out those dirty licenses
Ever more, hackers, ever more.

Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.
Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.

Here is Richard Stallman himself performing The Free Software Song:

The audio quality of this video is poor. Here is a much better version by a band with a hilarious title “The GNU/Stallmans”:

This week on Musical Geek Friday - The Bill Gates Song!

I found this song while watching a TED Talk on good vs. bad software interfaces called “When It Comes to Tech, Simplicity Sells” (scroll to the bottom to view this talk). To funny things up the speaker, David Pogue, bursted into a few songs, one of them being a song about Bill Gates.

David Pogue is the personal-technology columnist for the New York Times. Each week, he contributes a print column, an online column and an online video. His daily blog, “Pogue’s Posts,” is the Times’s most popular blog.

So, here it is! The Bill Gates Song:

Download this song: the bill gates song.mp3 (musical geek friday #8)
Downloaded: 6672 times

Download lyrics: the bill gates song lyrics (musical geek friday #8)
Downloaded: 890 times

Here is the lyrics of The Bill Gates Song:

I’ve been a geek forever,
And I wrote the very first DOS.
I put my software and IBM together,
I got profit, and they got the loss!
I write the code that makes the whole world run,
I’m gettin’ royalties from everyone.
Sometimes it’s garbage, but the press is snowed,
You buy the box, I sell the code.

Every software company
Is doing Microsoft’s R&D.
You can’t keep a good idea down these days.
Even Windows is a hack
We kinda based loosely on the Mac.
So it’s big, so it’s slow,
You’ve got nowhere to go!
I’m not doing it for praise!

I write the code that fits the world today,
Big mediocrity in every way.
We’ve entered planet domination mode,
You’ll have no choice, you’ll buy my code.
I am Bill Gates, and I write the code!

Here is the TED Talk with the song. The talk includes another two songs about Steve Jobs and technical support nightmare.