My dad had cause to ask me the other day why I was swearing at my iBook.
The reason for this was that I had typed find /Applications -name '*.app' -exec open '{}' ';' into a zsh. Y'know, for the craic. I was watching the machine paging continuously, as it had been doing for the previous two hours. Suspecting it to be thrashing, I had to explain, in layman's terms, what I'd done, and what the problem was.
"Well, UNIX is pretty powerful. You can make the machine do a lot of work with a very little typing. I just asked it to start every application it could find. It didn't like that."
"Wow. Something like getting infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters, eh?"
"Well, not really. Even though the monkeys are infinite, there's only a limited number of typewriters to go around. In the end, all the monkeys are too busy stealing each others' typewriters to actually write anything."