You must first remove the plastic
cover. By doing so you agree to accept
and honor Microsoft rights to all TV dinners. You may
not give anyone else
a bite of your dinner (which would constitute an infringement
of
Microsoft's rights). You may, however, let others smell and
look at your
dinner and are encouraged to tell them how good it is.
If you have a PC microwave oven, insert the
dinner into the oven. Set the
oven using these keystrokes:
<\mstv.dinn.//08.5min@50%heat//
Then enter:
<ms//start.cook_dindin/yummy\/yum~yum:-)gohot#cookme.
If you have a Mac oven, insert the dinner and press
start. The oven will
set itself and cook the dinner.
If you have a Unix oven, insert the dinner, enter the
ingredients of the
dinner (found on the package label), the weight of the
dinner, and the
desired level of cooking and press start. The oven will
calculate the time
and heat and cook the diner exactly to your specification.
Be forewarned that Microsoft dinners may crash, in which case
your oven
must be restarted. This is a simple procedure.
Remove the dinner from the
oven and enter
<ms.nodamn.good/tryagain\again/again.crap. This process may
have to be repeated. Try unplugging the microwave and
then doing a cold
reboot. If this doesn't work, contact your hardware
vendor.
Many users have reported that the dinner tray is far too big,
larger than
the dinner itself, having many useless compartments, most of
which are
empty. These are for future menu items. If the tray is
too large to fit in
your oven you will need to upgrade your equipment.
Dinners are only available from registered outlets, and only
the chicken
variety is currently produced. If you want another
variety, call
Microsoft Help and they will explain that you really don't
want another
variety. Microsoft Chicken is all you really need.
Microsoft has disclosed plans to discontinue all smaller
versions of
their chicken dinners. Future releases will only be in
the larger family
size. Excess chicken may be stored for future use, but must
be saved only
in Microsoft approved packaging.
Microsoft promises a dessert with every dinner after
'98. However, that
version has yet to be released. Users have permission
to get thrilled in
advance.
Microsoft dinners may be incompatible with other dinners in
the freezer,
causing your freezer to self-defrost. This is a
feature, not a bug. Your
freezer probably should have been defrosted anyway.
----------
Addendum to MS TV Dinner News, from the Chief Technology Officer,
MSTVD:
None of this will be an issue for MS TV Dinner98. A
paradigm shift has
changed the way we think of TV Dinners and Microwaves, and
the new MS
interface to TV dinners now owns the entire Microwave
desktop, which will
be henceforth known as the ActiveMicrowave*. This will
allow a wide
bandwidth for merchandisers and financier markets to gain a
new and unique
foothold on the consumer, providing access and services to
every user in
every home, right next to the julienne sliced carrots, corn
bread and
refried beans. Low-level interfacing with Web TV is now being
beta tested
in a local market of barca- loungers.
----------
Addendum to MS TV Dinner News:
In case you were looking for the Manual, Microsoft no longer
ships
manuals with TV dinners. You must now use the Oven Help
file which will be
displayed on your microwave oven's 20-character information
screen. This
is actually much better than having manuals because it will
always be
current and you won't have to find a place to store it.
You may, however,
need to add more memory to your microwave oven, but it will
work better
with more memory anyway. You may also wish to consider
getting a monitor
for your microwave oven so you can read more than 20
characters of your
help file at a time, and if you do that you might as well get
an OvenCam so
you can watch your food cook on the monitor. That's much
easier than trying
to see your food cook through all those holes in the
radiation shield.
Your neighbors, who you know to be power cookers, probably
already have one
and are already enjoying their oven experiences more than you
are.
-----------------
Follow up news article:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.-Aug. 1, 1997 Sun Microsystems,
Inc. and Netscape
Communications Corp. (NASDAQ: NSCP) today announced the
developer release of the Java TV Dinner SDK, a comprehensive
set of meal components and services designed to simplify preparation of
dinner. Unlike
platform-specific solutions, Java TV Dinner lets developers
"cook once, eat
anywhere."
"I cooked dinner on my wristwatch and then crawled
inside my microwave to
eat it," said Marc Andreessen, Sr. VP of
Technology at Netscape. "Damn
near busted the door off, but boy, was it ever
convenient." Meal components
include beans, peas, zucchini, nonfat blueberry frozen
yogurt, penne pasta,
and some leftover beef panang. IBM will provide a great
big huge rare
steak with potatoes and gravy and hollandaise sauce, and
Oracle will provide
that icky green stuff that you find inside a lobster shell.
Services
include spoons and knives. Forks will be provided in a
future version of
the product.
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