The Monster's Lawyer says:

hahahahahahahahahaha!

Raff says:

I’d rather have a USB plug-in version of the George Foreman grill.

Freyar says:

Crumbs…

Montanaguy says:

This is old news – I’ve already turned a corrupted hard drive into a salad spinner.

MikeN says:

You’re right Rick. That’s coming:

Once upon a time, in a sunny kingdom not far from here, King Gosling summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do you think this is?”

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?”

The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I’ll show you a working prototype.”

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don’t just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don’t look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.”

“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.”

“The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, ‘Cook yourself.’ The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.”

“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with inheritance and let’s not forget security. Of course, users don’t want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so multithreading is required, too.”

“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won’t buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message ‘Booting Solaris v. 8.3’ appears on the screen. (Solaris 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.”

“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object-oriented language that supports inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!).”

deowll says:

So if you want to recycle an old PC you can just make it into a smart toaster?

Cool!

GregAllen says:

I like that the ad says, “bread sold separately.”

Cap'nKangaroo says:

Poptarts baby, its all about Poptarts

Glenn E. says:

I should have thought bacon would be the snack food of choice. But I guess it’s too greasy. BTW, this is very old news. The Commodore Amiga computer had a “Toaster” model (as John D. will tell you), AKA the Video Toaster, back in the 1990s. But for something that ACTUALLY makes toast, and has sophisticated software, you’d have to give credit to the Tv series “Red Dwarf” for their “Talking Toaster”. See-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7YJRNhsYA

Actually there was a better Talking Toaster bit, from an earlier season. But this was all I could find on Youtube. And truth be told, Pop Tarts thought up the idea first, in 1975.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-HfXBdzzWo

Besides, image your PC toaster getting that SP3 upgrade. Oh the horror!