Actually, he probably set back the Singularity by ten years or so. 
The closest thing I can think of is calling a repairman to look at your furnace because the pilot won’t light after you tried to repair it yourself, and he finds a miniature nuclear reactor where the burner used to be.
And I can’t get over how unfunny it is.
Stupid locked-down work computers.
Would someone tell me what the mouseover is?
Damnit Marley! I am stuck in an infinite loop now!
Not really much help.
Thank you anyway!
I didn’t get it either, because I’m not a Unix man, but come on, guys, lighten up. So some of the jokes are specialized. You know what? When Randall hits YOUR area of specialty, you’ll appreciate it like Unix people enjoyed this one.
“Little Bobby Tables.” Heh, heh, heh.
I mistook “ls” for “is” when reading the comic the first time so I was really confused. Now that I understand it is the unix command “ls” the comic is only marginally better. This one is definitely lacking in the humor department.
Matter of taste. I found it quite funny. I was considering printing it out and sticking it up on my cube wall, in fact. (Right next to Password Strength, as a further commentary on my workplace and coworkers.)
It will only ‘speak’ to a limited audience.
But I’ve been reading his strip for years and he’s never told a good prison guard joke yet.
The joke is, the guy’s computer is really fucked up, ludicrously so. That should be a simple enough explanation for anyone. It’s the same sort of joke as if a clumsy fellow went in for X-rays for minor pain and found they had in fact somehow managed to tie their bones in a pretzel.
Kudos, TriPolar for your explanation being funnier than the original comic. 
It is really not hard to do what he did:
alias ls=’/usr/share/Adobe/doc/example/android_vm/root/sbin/ls.jar’ would do it (it might not return that error message, but aliasing the ls command is trivial. I always have ls aliased to ‘ls -la’ anyway.
Right, although the joke is that he presumably reached that state unintentionally. That might be a bit harder.
More discussion on the xkcd forums.
Aliasing ls is easy, yes. It will definitely not return that error message, no matter what you point the command to or how your directories are configured. This post in the XKCD forum thread hit all the high points, I believe.
Definitely.
Understood. It’s just that people were saying “ls” is such an integral part of the system that it pointing elsewhere was a sign the system was borked.
I think the “singularity” punchline is that only a superintelligent AI (commonly associated with the singularity) could unravel that horrible mess. Either that or it’s saying that the only way the computer could get that screwed up is that it’s intelligent and has achieved singularity status prematurely.