Canonical Computerhumor

*****Canonical List Of Computer Humor**** This is the Canonical List Of Computer Humor. It has been compiled with the assistance of a lot of people but a special thanks goes to Prof P. Piacenza (chpp@unitrix.utr.ac.za) who contributed a great deal of jokes etc to this list. Any submissions should be sent to :- N.THOMSON@ZIPPY.DCT.AC.UK OR MCSCS2NPT@DCT.AC.UK NOTE: The address BANDIT@AXPVMS.CC.UTEXAS.EDU is no longer valid where they will be added to the list and the submitter will get a personal copy of the list. Any requests for copies of this list sent to the above addresses will be chearfully ignored. If you are reading this then you have a copy in front of you. If you want to be placed on a mailing list for this list then you can mail one of the above addresses and the next copy of the list will be sent to you when it is next posted but please use the subject "CH Mailing List" or your message will be ignored. If your joke is more suited to any of the other lists then it will be placed there. This file can be FTPed from FTP.CCO.CALTECH.EDU in the directory /PUB/HUMOR/CANONICAL.LIST - login as anonymous and enter E-Mail address as password. The latest version of this file can also be found at:- HTTP://www.tay.ac.uk/~mcscs2npt/lair/humor/ch.html (browsable) and HTTP://www.misty.com/laughweb Ok enough of the boring stuff - enjoy............. CONTENTS ++++++++ 1) Computer Messages 2) Some Jokes 3) Computer Viruses 4) One Liners 5) Humorous Stories and Anicdotes ********** - Means new entry. =========================================================================== Subject: Computer Messages =========================================================================== ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 1] Error 13: Illegal brain function. Process terminated. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 2] REALITY.DAT not found. Atempting to restore Universe...... ..... REALITY.SYS Corrupted - Unable to recover Universe Press Esc key to reboot Universe, or any other key to continue... ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 3] REALITY.SYS corrupted- reboot Universe (Y/N)? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 4] USER ERROR: replace user and press any key to continue. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 5] Volume in Drive C: TOO_LOUD! ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 6] Press [ESC] to detonate or any other key to explode. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 7] BREAKFAST.COM halted... cereal port not responding! ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 8] Virus detected! P)our chicken soup on motherboard? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 9] .signature not found! reformat hard drive? [Yn] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 10] Backup not found! A)bort, R)etry or P)anic? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 11] Spellchecker not found. Press [CTRL]-[ALT]-[DEL] to continue ... ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 12] A)bort, R)etry or S)elf-destruct? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 13] A)bort, R)etry, I)gnore, V)alium? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 14] A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 15] A)bort, R)etry, P)ee in drive door ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 16] Backup not found: A)bort, R)etry, M)assive heart failure? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 17] Bad command or file name. Go stand in the corner. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 18] Close your eyes and press escape three times. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 19] DYNAMIC LINKING ERROR: Your mistake is now everywhere. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 20] Computer possessed? Try DEVICE=C:\EXOR.SYS ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 21] SENILE.COM found... Out Of Memory. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 22] APATHY ERROR: Don't bother striking any key. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 23] ZAP! Process discontinued. Enter any 12-digit prime number to resume. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Some Jokes ++++++++++ Q: Why do programmers always get Christmas and Halloween mixed up? A: Because DEC 25 = OCT 31 Q: Did you hear about the Microsoft crystal ball? A: Ask it something and it replies: "Answer unclear. Add 20 Meg of RAM and ask again later." Q: How many MS engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: None, they just define darkness as an industry standard! Q: Why don't the British build computers? A: Because they can't figure out how to make them leak oil! Q. Somebody asked me "What happens to programmers when they die?" They get deallocated? Their values become undefined? The get re-intialized? Their structues break down? they become WORM food... They start dropping bits........ They branch to a new address! Their social system resources are released? They dump core? -= computer one-liners =-= 151 =----------------------------------------------- System going down at 1:45 for disk crashing. -= computer one-liners =-= 152 =----------------------------------------------- System going down at 5 pm to install scheduler bug. -= computer one-liners =-= 153 =----------------------------------------------- Systems programmers are the high priests of a low cult. - R. S. Barton -= computer one-liners =-= 154 =----------------------------------------------- That does not compute. -= computer one-liners =-= 155 =----------------------------------------------- The attention span of a computer is only as long as its power cord. -= computer one-liners =-= 156 =----------------------------------------------- The computer is mightier than the pen, the sword, and usually, the programmer. -= computer one-liners =-= 157 =----------------------------------------------- The determined programmer can write a FORTRAN program in any language. -= computer one-liners =-= 158 =----------------------------------------------- The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. -= computer one-liners =-= 159 =----------------------------------------------- The moving cursor prints, and having printed, blinks on. -= computer one-liners =-= 160 =----------------------------------------------- The next generation of computers will have a "Warranty Expired" interrupt. -= computer one-liners =-= 161 =----------------------------------------------- The program is absolutely right; therefore, the computer must be wrong. -= computer one-liners =-= 162 =----------------------------------------------- The steady state of disks is full. - Ken Thompson -= computer one-liners =-= 163 =----------------------------------------------- The value of a program is proportional to the weight of its output. -= computer one-liners =-= 164 =----------------------------------------------- The world is coming to an end... SAVE YOUR BUFFERS!! -= computer one-liners =-= 165 =----------------------------------------------- "Daddy, what does FORMATTING DRIVE C mean? -= computer one-liners =-= 166 =----------------------------------------------- There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. -= computer one-liners =-= 167 =----------------------------------------------- There must be more to life than compile-and-go. -= computer one-liners =-= 168 =----------------------------------------------- grep..grep..grep.. (frog with UNIX stuck in it's throat. -= computer one-liners =-= 169 =----------------------------------------------- This login session: $13.76, but for you: $11.88. -= computer one-liners =-= 170 =----------------------------------------------- This screen intentionally left blank. -= computer one-liners =-= 171 =----------------------------------------------- This system will self-destruct in five minutes. -= computer one-liners =-= 172 =----------------------------------------------- Those who can't write, write help files. -= computer one-liners =-= 173 =----------------------------------------------- Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach. Those who cannot teach, HACK! -= computer one-liners =-= 174 =----------------------------------------------- Thrashing is just virtual crashing. -= computer one-liners =-= 175 =----------------------------------------------- To be, or not to be, those are the parameters. -= computer one-liners =-= 176 =----------------------------------------------- To err is human; to forgive, beyond the scope of the Operating System. -= computer one-liners =-= 177 =----------------------------------------------- To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer. -= computer one-liners =-= 178 =----------------------------------------------- To iterate is human; to recurse, divine. - Robert Heller -= computer one-liners =-= 179 =----------------------------------------------- Unprecedented performance: Nothing ever ran this slow before. -= computer one-liners =-= 180 =----------------------------------------------- Variables won't; constants aren't. - Osborn -= computer one-liners =-= 181 =----------------------------------------------- What do computer engineers use for birth control? Their personalities. -= computer one-liners =-= 182 =----------------------------------------------- What this country needs is a good five-cent microcomputer. -= computer one-liners =-= 183 =----------------------------------------------- Where the system is concerned, you are not allowed to ask "Why?". -= computer one-liners =-= 184 =----------------------------------------------- Why do we want intelligent terminals when there are so many stupid users? -= computer one-liners =-= 185 =----------------------------------------------- You can't go home again, unless you set $HOME. -= computer one-liners =-= 186 =----------------------------------------------- You can't make a program without broken egos. -= computer one-liners =-= 187 =----------------------------------------------- You depend too much on computers for information. -= computer one-liners =-= 188 =----------------------------------------------- [If you can't hear me, it's because I'm in parenthises] -= computer one-liners =-= 189 =----------------------------------------------- AAAAAA - American Association Against Acronym Abuse Anonymous. -= computer one-liners =-= 190 =----------------------------------------------- You have a tendency to feel you are superior to most computers. -= computer one-liners =-= 191 =----------------------------------------------- You have junk mail. -= computer one-liners =-= 192 =----------------------------------------------- You know it is going to be a bad day when you forget your new password. -= computer one-liners =-= 193 =----------------------------------------------- You might have mail. -= computer one-liners =-= 194 =----------------------------------------------- You never finish a program, you just stop working on it. -= computer one-liners =-= 195 =----------------------------------------------- Your fault, core dumped. -= computer one-liners =-= 196 =----------------------------------------------- Your password is pitifully obvious. -= computer one-liners =-= 197 =----------------------------------------------- [Unix] is not necessarily evil, like OS/2. - Peter Norton -= computer one-liners =-= 198 =----------------------------------------------- It wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. - Wilkes, 1949 -= computer one-liners =-= 199 =----------------------------------------------- A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation. -= computer one-liners =-= 200 =----------------------------------------------- A fault tolerant system must report the faults even as it tolerates them. -= computer one-liners =-= 201 =----------------------------------------------- A hacker does for love what others would not do for money. - Laura Creighton -= computer one-liners =-= 202 =----------------------------------------------- A low level language is one whose programs require attention to the irrelevant. -= computer one-liners =-= 203 =----------------------------------------------- A paperless office has about as much chance as a paperless bathroom. -= computer one-liners =-= 204 =----------------------------------------------- A successful tool is used to do something undreamed of by its author. - Johnson -= computer one-liners =-= 205 =----------------------------------------------- Abstraction is achieved by data hiding and enforced by encapsulation. -= computer one-liners =-= 206 =----------------------------------------------- Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. - Brook -= computer one-liners =-= 207 =----------------------------------------------- All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors. -= computer one-liners =-= 208 =----------------------------------------------- All the simple programs have been written, and all the good names taken. -= computer one-liners =-= 209 =----------------------------------------------- All you need to know is the user interface. - J. Redford -= computer one-liners =-= 210 =----------------------------------------------- An algorithm must be seen to be believed. - D. E. Knuth -= computer one-liners =-= 211 =----------------------------------------------- Any programming language is at its best before it is implemented and used. -= computer one-liners =-= 212 =----------------------------------------------- Avoid GOTOs completely if you can keep the program readable. -= computer one-liners =-= 213 =----------------------------------------------- Avoid the Fortran arithmetic IF (or better yet, just avoid Fortran). -= computer one-liners =-= 214 =----------------------------------------------- Avoid unnecessary branches. -= computer one-liners =-= 215 =----------------------------------------------- Bad style destroys an otherwise superb program. -= computer one-liners =-= 216 =----------------------------------------------- BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing. - Seymour Papert -= computer one-liners =-= 217 =----------------------------------------------- Be careful when a loop exits to the same place from side and bottom. -= computer one-liners =-= 218 =----------------------------------------------- Choose variable names that will not be confused. -= computer one-liners =-= 219 =----------------------------------------------- Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. - Gilb -= computer one-liners =-= 220 =----------------------------------------------- Computers talk to each other worse than their designers do. -= computer one-liners =-= 221 =----------------------------------------------- Computers... are not designed, as we are, for ambiguity. - Thomas -= computer one-liners =-= 222 =----------------------------------------------- Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. - Kernigan -= computer one-liners =-= 223 =----------------------------------------------- Don't comment or patch bad code; rewrite it. -= computer one-liners =-= 224 =----------------------------------------------- Don't compare floating point numbers solely for equality. -= computer one-liners =-= 225 =----------------------------------------------- Don't diddle code to make it faster; find a better algorithm. -= computer one-liners =-= 226 =----------------------------------------------- Don't document the program; program the document. -= computer one-liners =-= 227 =----------------------------------------------- Don't stop at one bug. -= computer one-liners =-= 228 =----------------------------------------------- Every bug you find is the last one. -= computer one-liners =-= 229 =----------------------------------------------- Every program is either trivial or it contains at least one bug. -= computer one-liners =-= 230 =----------------------------------------------- Expert systems are built to embody the knowledge of human experts. - Kulawiec -= computer one-liners =-= 231 =----------------------------------------------- I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. - Isaac Asimov -= computer one-liners =-= 232 =----------------------------------------------- I suppose when it gets to that point, we shan't know how it does it. - Turing -= computer one-liners =-= 233 =----------------------------------------------- If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong. - Schryer -= computer one-liners =-= 234 =----------------------------------------------- If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some. -= computer one-liners =-= 235 =----------------------------------------------- In the long run, every program becomes rococco, and then rubble. - Alan Perlis -= computer one-liners =-= 236 =----------------------------------------------- It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa. -= computer one-liners =-= 237 =----------------------------------------------- It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one. -= computer one-liners =-= 238 =----------------------------------------------- Know Thy User. -= computer one-liners =-= 239 =----------------------------------------------- Let the machine do the dirty work. - Elements of Programming Style -= computer one-liners =-= 240 =----------------------------------------------- Machine independent code isn't. -= computer one-liners =-= 241 =----------------------------------------------- Make input easy to proofread. -= computer one-liners =-= 242 =----------------------------------------------- Make it right before you make it faster. -= computer one-liners =-= 243 =----------------------------------------------- Make sure all variables are initialized before use. -= computer one-liners =-= 244 =----------------------------------------------- Make sure comments and code agree. -= computer one-liners =-= 245 =----------------------------------------------- Make sure your code "does nothing" gracefully. -= computer one-liners =-= 246 =----------------------------------------------- Never put off till run-time what you can do at compile-time. - D. Gries -= computer one-liners =-= 247 =----------------------------------------------- Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. - Steinbach -= computer one-liners =-= 248 =----------------------------------------------- Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. - Jackson -= computer one-liners =-= 249 =----------------------------------------------- Never write software that anthropomorphizes the machine. -= computer one-liners =-= 250 =----------------------------------------------- Never write software that patronizes the user. -= computer one-liners =-= 251 =----------------------------------------------- No extensible language will be universal. - T. Cheatham -= computer one-liners =-= 252 =----------------------------------------------- Performance is easier to add than clarity. -= computer one-liners =-= 253 =----------------------------------------------- Replace repetitive expressions by calls to a common function. -= computer one-liners =-= 254 =----------------------------------------------- Software is best understood as a branch of movie making. - Ted Nelson -= computer one-liners =-= 255 =----------------------------------------------- Software is mind work. Having the right frame of mind is essential. -= computer one-liners =-= 256 =----------------------------------------------- The best packed information most resembles random noise. -= computer one-liners =-= 257 =----------------------------------------------- The computer is the Proteus of machines. - Seymour Papert -= computer one-liners =-= 258 =----------------------------------------------- The computing field is always in need of new cliches. - Alan Perlis -= computer one-liners =-= 259 =----------------------------------------------- The less time planning, the more time programming. -= computer one-liners =-= 260 =----------------------------------------------- The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected. (6/72) -= computer one-liners =-= 261 =----------------------------------------------- The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. - Hamming -= computer one-liners =-= 262 =----------------------------------------------- The wise person writes bomb-proof code. -= computer one-liners =-= 263 =----------------------------------------------- There are always at least two ways to program the same thing. -= computer one-liners =-= 264 =----------------------------------------------- There are never any bugs you haven't found yet. -= computer one-liners =-= 265 =----------------------------------------------- There can never be a computer language in which you cannot write a bad program. -= computer one-liners =-= 266 =----------------------------------------------- There is no problem that, when programmed just right, isn't more complicated. -= computer one-liners =-= 267 =----------------------------------------------- To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program. -= computer one-liners =-= 268 =----------------------------------------------- Try not to let implementation details sneak into design documents. -= computer one-liners =-= 269 =----------------------------------------------- UNIX is many things to many people, but it has never been everything to anybody. -= computer one-liners =-= 270 =----------------------------------------------- Use free-form input where possible. -= computer one-liners =-= 271 =----------------------------------------------- Use GOTOs only to implement a fundamental structure. -= computer one-liners =-= 272 =----------------------------------------------- Use IF...ELSE IF...ELSE IF...ELSE... to implement multi-way branches. -= computer one-liners =-= 273 =----------------------------------------------- Watch out for off-by-one errors. -= computer one-liners =-= 274 =----------------------------------------------- When a program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes. -= computer one-liners =-= 275 =----------------------------------------------- When we write programs that "learn", it turns out we do and they don't. -= computer one-liners =-= 276 =----------------------------------------------- You don't have to know how the computer works, just how to work the computer. -= computer one-liners =-= 277 =----------------------------------------------- Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. - Donald Knuth -= computer one-liners =-= 278 =----------------------------------------------- The only thing good about "standards" in computer science is that there are so many to choose from. -= computer one-liners =-= 279 =----------------------------------------------- After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless. - Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming. -= computer one-liners =-= 280 =----------------------------------------------- Hind's Law #6: Make it possible to write programs in English and you will quickly discover that programmers do not know how to write in English. Steinbach's Rule: Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -= computer one-liners =-= 281 =----------------------------------------------- If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce today would cost $100, get a million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. -= computer one-liners =-= 282 =----------------------------------------------- So when the machine truncates excess bits, it throws them under the raised floor. - Fred Felber (so THAT's why there are raised floors in computer rooms.) -= computer one-liners =-= 283 =----------------------------------------------- I bought the latest computer; it came fully loaded. It was guaranteed for 90 days, but in 30 was outmoded! - "The Wall Street Journal" passed along by Big Red Computer's 'Scarlett' -= computer one-liners =-= 284 =----------------------------------------------- It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very sharp, probably not someone here on campus. - Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, was quoted in "The Technique," Georgia Tech's newspaper, last November (after the computer worm hit the net) -= computer one-liners =-= 285 =----------------------------------------------- Is reading in the bathroom considered Multi-Tasking? -= computer one-liners =-= 286 =----------------------------------------------- My computer isn't that nervous, it's just a bit ANSI. -= computer one-liners =-= 287 =----------------------------------------------- If only women came with pull-down menus and online help. -= computer one-liners =-= 288 =----------------------------------------------- My computer's sick. I think my modem is a carrier. -= computer one-liners =-= 289 =----------------------------------------------- Gotta run, the cat's caught in the printer. -= computer one-liners =-= 290 =----------------------------------------------- Honey, I Formatted the Kid! -= computer one-liners =-= 291 =----------------------------------------------- Spelling checkers at maximum! Fire! -= computer one-liners =-= 292 =----------------------------------------------- Your e-mail has been returned due to insufficient voltage. -= computer one-liners =-= 293 =----------------------------------------------- Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk? -= computer one-liners =-= 294 =----------------------------------------------- Hex dump: Where witches put used curses... -= computer one-liners =-= 295 =----------------------------------------------- Finish your mail packet! Children are offline in India. -= computer one-liners =-= 296 =----------------------------------------------- Never violate the Prime Directory! C:\ -= computer one-liners =-= 297 =----------------------------------------------- Multitasking: Screwing up several things at once... -= computer one-liners =-= 298 =----------------------------------------------- Maniac: An early computer built by nuts... -= computer one-liners =-= 299 =----------------------------------------------- Stack Error: Lost on a cluttered desk... -= computer one-liners =-= 300 =----------------------------------------------- Stack Overflow: Too many pancakes... -= computer one-liners =-= 301 =----------------------------------------------- Terminal glare: A look that kills... -= computer one-liners =-= 302 =----------------------------------------------- Trojan: Storage device for replicating codes... -= computer one-liners =-= 303 =----------------------------------------------- ZMODEM: Big bits, Soft blocks, Tighter ASCII... -= computer one-liners =-= 304 =----------------------------------------------- Justify my text? I'm sorry but it has no excuse. -= computer one-liners =-= 305 =----------------------------------------------- Mommy! The cursor's winking at me! -= computer one-liners =-= 306 =----------------------------------------------- Managing programmers is like herding cats. -= computer one-liners =-= 307 =----------------------------------------------- Do files get embarrassed when they get unzipped? -= computer one-liners =-= 308 =----------------------------------------------- Capt'n! The spellchecker kinna take this abuse! -= computer one-liners =-= 309 =----------------------------------------------- C:\BELFRY is where I keep my .BAT files. -= computer one-liners =-= 310 =----------------------------------------------- ASCII to ASCII, DOS to DOS. -= computer one-liners =-= 311 =----------------------------------------------- "Mr. Worf, scan that ship." "Aye, Captain... 300 DPI? -= computer one-liners =-= 312 =----------------------------------------------- How do I set my laser printer on stun? -= computer one-liners =-= 313 =----------------------------------------------- The best way to accelerate a Mac is at 9.8 m / sec^2 -= computer one-liners =-= 314 =----------------------------------------------- "!sgub evah t'nseod CP sihT ?sgub naem ayaddahW" -= computer one-liners =-= 315 =----------------------------------------------- "E=Mc^5...nahhh...E=Mc^4...nahh...E=Mc^3...ah, the hell with it." -= computer one-liners =-= 316 =----------------------------------------------- "Today's subliminal thought is:" -= computer one-liners =-= 317 =----------------------------------------------- Todays assembler command : EXOP Execute Operator. -= computer one-liners =-= 318 =----------------------------------------------- 'Calm down -- it's only ones and zeros.' -= computer one-liners =-= 319 =----------------------------------------------- ...now touch these wires to your tongue! -= computer one-liners =-= 320 =----------------------------------------------- Computer analyst to programmer: "You start coding. I'll go find out what they want." -= computer one-liners =-= 321 =----------------------------------------------- LSD: virtual reality without the expensive hardware. -= computer one-liners =-= 322 =----------------------------------------------- According to my calculations the problem doesn't exist. -= computer one-liners =-= 323 =----------------------------------------------- C:\GRAPHICS\GIF\NAUGHTY\FILTHY\DISGUSTING\WOW! -= computer one-liners =-= 324 =----------------------------------------------- Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow. -= computer one-liners =-= 325 =----------------------------------------------- It said, "Insert disk #3," but only two will fit! -= computer one-liners =-= 326 =----------------------------------------------- RAM DISK is not an installation procedure! -= computer one-liners =-= 327 =----------------------------------------------- Computers are only human. -= computer one-liners =-= 328 =----------------------------------------------- Was that your wife I saw in that GIF? -= computer one-liners =-= 329 =----------------------------------------------- I used to have a life, then I got v32bis! -= computer one-liners =-= 330 =----------------------------------------------- If the pen is mightier than the sword, and a picture is worth a thousand words, how dangerous is a FAX? ...About 85% of a GIF. -= computer one-liners =-= 331 =----------------------------------------------- This time it will surely run. -= computer one-liners =-= 332 =----------------------------------------------- I just found the last bug. -= computer one-liners =-= 333 =----------------------------------------------- This message transmited on 100% recycled electrons. -= computer one-liners =-= 334 =----------------------------------------------- It's redundant! It's redundant! -R. E. Dundant -= computer one-liners =-= 335 =----------------------------------------------- Bug? That's not a bug, that's a feature. -T. John Wendel -= computer one-liners =-= 336 =----------------------------------------------- The programmer's national anthem is 'AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH'. -Weinberg, p.152 -= computer one-liners =-= 337 =----------------------------------------------- Stack manipulation - the use of inflatable falsies. -Datamazing, 4/1/78 -= computer one-liners =-= 338 =----------------------------------------------- On a clear disk you can seek forever. -Computerworld button -= computer one-liners =-= 339 =----------------------------------------------- I write all my critical routines in assembler, and my comedy routines in FORTRAN. - Anonymous -= computer one-liners =-= 340 =----------------------------------------------- If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. - Dykstra -= computer one-liners =-= 341 =----------------------------------------------- "#define QUESTION ((bb) || !(bb)) - Shakespeare." -= computer one-liners =-= 342 =----------------------------------------------- Real programmers use: COPY CON PROGRAM.EXE -= computer one-liners =-= 343 =----------------------------------------------- May the bugs of many programs nest on your hard drive. -= computer one-liners =-= 344 =----------------------------------------------- I'm a modemer and I'm OK. I post all night and I sleep all day. -= computer one-liners =-= 345 =----------------------------------------------- I modem, but they grew back. -= computer one-liners =-= 346 =----------------------------------------------- Logic: The art of being wrong with confidence... -= computer one-liners =-= 347 =----------------------------------------------- Logic is neither an art or a science but a dodge. -= computer one-liners =-= 348 =----------------------------------------------- CCITT - Can't Conceive Inteleget Thoughts Today -= computer one-liners =-= 349 =----------------------------------------------- Do you like me for my brain or my baud? -= computer one-liners =-= 350 =----------------------------------------------- If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0 -= computer one-liners =-= 351 =----------------------------------------------- Maintenance-free: When it breaks, it can't be fixed... -= computer one-liners =-= 352 =----------------------------------------------- Memory dump: Amnesia... -= computer one-liners =-= 353 =----------------------------------------------- Microwave: Signal from a friendly micro... -= computer one-liners =-= 354 =----------------------------------------------- Modem: How a Southerner asks for seconds... -= computer one-liners =-= 355 =----------------------------------------------- Nostalgia: The good old days multiplied by a bad memory... -= computer one-liners =-= 356 =----------------------------------------------- WOMEN.ZIP: A great program, but it doesn't come with documentation... -= computer one-liners =-= 357 =----------------------------------------------- WOMAN.ZIP: Great Shareware, but be careful of viruses... -= computer one-liners =-= 358 =----------------------------------------------- 29A, the hexadecimal of the Beast. -= computer one-liners =-= 359 =----------------------------------------------- SET DEVICE=EXXON to screw up your environment. -= computer one-liners =-= 360 =----------------------------------------------- My BBS is baroque now. Please call Bach later with your Handel. -= computer one-liners =-= 361 =----------------------------------------------- This BBS is ancient. Some say from the echocene. -= computer one-liners =-= 362 =----------------------------------------------- I'm not a sysop, I just play one on the echos. -= computer one-liners =-= 363 =----------------------------------------------- Me and my two friends... GIF and Weston. -= computer one-liners =-= 364 =----------------------------------------------- From C:\*.* to shining C:\*.* -= computer one-liners =-= 365 =----------------------------------------------- Resistance is useless! (If [ 1 ohm) ================================================================================ == COMPUTER HUMOR ============================================================== -= computer humor =-= 1 =---------------------------------------------------- Know Your Unix System Administrator - A Field Guide There are four major species of Unix system administrators: 1) The Technical Thug: Usually a systems programmer who has been forced into system administration; writes scripts in a polyglot of the Bourne shell, sed, C, awk, perl, and APL. 2) The Administrative Fascist: Usually a retentive drone (or rarely, a harridan ex-secretary) who has been forced into system administration. 3) The Maniac: Usually an aging cracker who discovered that neither the Mossad nor Cuba are willing to pay a living wage for computer espionage. Fell into system administration; occasionally approaches major competitors with indesp schemes. 4) The Idiot: Usually a cretin, morpohodite, or old COBOL programmer selected to be the system administrator by a committee of cretins, morphodites, and old COBOL programmers. How To Identify Your System Administrator: Situation: Low disk space. Technical Thug: Writes a suite of scripts to monitor disk usage, maintain a database of historic disk usage, predict future disk usage via least squares regression analysis, identify users who are more than a standard deviation over the mean, and send mail to the offending parties. Places script in cron. Disk usage does not change, since disk-hogs, by nature, either ignore script- generated mail, or file it away in triplicate. Administrative Fascist: Puts disk usage policy in motd. Uses disk quotas. Allows no exceptions, thus crippling development work. Locks accounts that go over quota. Maniac: # cd /home # rm -rf `du -s * | sort -rn | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'`; Idiot: # cd /home # cat `du -s * | sort -rn | head -1 | awk '{ printf "%s/*\n", $2}'` | compress Situation: Excessive CPU usage. Technical Thug: Writes a suite of scripts to monitor processes, maintain a database of CPU usage, identify processes more than a standard deviation over the norm, and renice offending processes. Places script in cron. Ends up renicing the production database into oblivion, bringing operations to a grinding halt, much to the delight of the xtrek freaks. Administrative Fascist: Puts CPU usage policy in motd. Uses CPU quotas. Locks accounts that go over quota. Allows no exceptions, thus crippling development work, much to the delight of the xtrek freaks. Maniac: # kill -9 `ps -augxww | sort -rn +8 -9 | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'` Idiot: # compress -f `ps -augxww | sort -rn +8 -9 | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'` Situation: New account creation. Technical Thug: Writes perl script that creates home directory, copies in incomprehensible default environment, and places entries in /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc/group. (By hand, NOT with passmgmt.) Slaps on setuid bit; tells a nearby secretary to handle new accounts. Usually, said secretary is still dithering over the difference between 'enter' and 'return'; and so, no new accounts are ever created. Administrative Fascist: Puts new account policy in motd. Since people without accounts cannot read the motd, nobody ever fulfills the bureaucratic requirements; and so, no new accounts are ever created. Maniac: "If you're too stupid to break in and create your own account, I don't want you on the system. We've got too many goddamn sh*t-for-brains a**holes on this box anyway." Idiot: # cd /home; mkdir "Bob's home directory" # echo "Bob Simon:gandalf:0:0::/dev/tty:compress -f" ] /etc/passwd Situation: Root disk fails. Technical Thug: Repairs drive. Usually is able to repair filesystem from boot monitor. Failing that, front-panel toggles microkernel in and starts script on neighboring machine to load binary boot code into broken machine, reformat and reinstall OS. Lets it run over the weekend while he goes mountain climbing. Administrative Fascist: Begins investigation to determine who broke the drive. Refuses to fix system until culprit is identified and charged for the equipment. Maniac, large system: Rips drive from system, uses sledgehammer to smash same to flinders. Calls manufacturer, threatens pets. Abuses field engineer while they put in a new drive and reinstall the OS. Maniac, small system: Rips drive from system, uses ball-peen hammer to smash same to flinders. Calls Requisitions, threatens pets. Abuses bystanders while putting in new drive and reinstalling OS. Idiot: Doesn't notice anything wrong. Situation: Poor network response. Technical Thug: Writes scripts to monitor network, then rewires entire machine room, improving response time by 2%. Shrugs shoulders, says, "I've done all I can do," and goes mountain climbing. Administrative Fascist: Puts network usage policy in motd. Calls up Berkeley and AT&T, badgers whoever answers for network quotas. Tries to get xtrek freaks fired. Maniac: Every two hours, pulls ethernet cable from wall and waits for connections to time out. Idiot: # compress -f /dev/en0 Situation: User questions. Technical Thug: Hacks the code of emacs' doctor-mode to answer new users questions. Doesn't bother to tell people how to start the new "guru-mode", or for that matter, emacs. Administrative Fascist: Puts user support policy in motd. Maintains queue of questions. Answers them when he gets a chance, often within two weeks of receipt of the proper form. Maniac: Screams at users until they go away. Sometimes barters knowledge for powerful drink and/or sycophantic adulation. Idiot: Answers all questions to best of his knowledge until the user realizes few UNIX systems support punched cards or JCL. Situation: *Stupid* user questions. Technical Thug: Answers question in hex, binary, postfix, and/or French until user gives up and goes away. Administrative Fascist: Locks user's account until user can present documentation demonstrating their qualification to use the machine. Maniac: # cat ]] ~luser/. Cshrc alias vi 'rm \!*;unalias vi;grep -v BoZo ~/. Csh] ~/. Z; mv -f ~/. Z ~/. Cshrc' ^D Idiot: Answers all questions to best of his knowledge. Recruits user to system administration team. Situation: Process accounting management. Technical Thug: Ignores packaged accounting software; trusts scripts to sniff out any problems & compute charges. Administrative Fascist: Devotes 75% of disk space to accounting records owned by root and chmod'ed 000. Maniac: Laughs fool head off at very mention of accounting. Idiot: # lpr /etc/wtmp /usr/adm/paact Situation: Religious war, BSD vs. System V. Technical Thug: BSD. Crippled on System V boxes. Administrative Fascist: System V. Horrified by the people who use BSD. Places frequent calls to DEA. Maniac: Prefers BSD, but doesn't care as long as HIS processes run quickly. Idiot: # cd c: Situation: Religious war, System V vs. AIX Technical Thug: Weeps. Administrative Fascist: AIX-- doesn't much care for the OS, but loves the jackboots. Maniac: System V, but keeps AIX skills up, knowing full well how much Big Financial Institutions love IBM... Idiot: AIX. Situation: Balky printer daemons. Technical Thug: Rewrites lpd in FORTH. Administrative Fascist: Puts printer use policy in motd. Calls customer support every time the printer freezes. Tries to get user who submitted the most recent job fired. Maniac: Writes script that kills all the daemons, clears all the print queues, and maybe restarts the daemons. Runs it once a hour from cron. Idiot: # kill -9 /dev/lp ; /dev/lp & Situation: OS upgrade. Technical Thug: Reads source code of new release, takes only what he likes. Administrative Fascist: Instigates lawsuit against the vendor for having shipped a product with bugs in it in the first place. Maniac: # uptime 1:33pm up 19 days, 22:49, 167 users, load average: 6. 49, 6. 45, 6. 31 # wall Well, it's upgrade time. Should take a few hours. And good luck on that 5:00 deadline, guys! We're all pulling for you! ^D Idiot: # dd if=/dev/rmt8 of=/vmunix Situation: Balky mail. Technical Thug: Rewrites sendmail. Cf from scratch. Rewrites sendmail in SNOBOL. Hacks kernel to implement file locking. Hacks kernel to implement "better" semaphores. Rewrites sendmail in assembly. Hacks kernel to . . . Administrative Fascist: Puts mail use policy in motd. Locks accounts that go over mail use quota. Keeps quota low enough that people go back to interoffice mail, thus solving problem. Maniac: # kill -9 `ps -augxww | grep sendmail | awk '{print $2}'` # rm -f /usr/spool/mail/* # wall Mail is down. Please use interoffice mail until we have it back up. ^D # write max I've got my boots and backpack. Ready to leave for Mount Tam? ^D Idiot: # echo "HELP!" | mail tech_support. AT. Vendor. Com%kremvax%bitnet! BIFF!!! Situation: Users want phone list application. Technical Thug: Writes RDBMS in perl and Smalltalk. Users give up and go back to post-it notes. Administrative Fascist: Oracle. Users give up and go back to post-it notes. Maniac: Tells the users to use flat files and grep, the way God meant man to keep track of phone numbers. Users give up and go back to post-it notes. Idiot: % dd ibs=80 if=/dev/rdisk001s7 | grep "Fred" Other Guidelines: Typical root . Cshrc File: Technical Thug: Longer than eight kilobytes. Sources the output of a perl script, rewrites itself. Administrative Fascist: Typical lines include: umask 777 alias cd 'cd \!*; rm -rf ching *hack mille omega rogue xtrek ]& /dev/null &' Maniac: Typical lines include: alias rm 'rm -rf \!*' alias hose kill -9 '`ps -augxww | grep \!* | awk \'{print $2}\'`' alias kill 'kill -9 \!* ; kill -9 \!* ; kill -9 \!*' alias renice 'echo Renice\? You must mean kill -9.; kill -9 \!*' Idiot: Typical lines include: alias dir ls alias era rm alias kitty cat alias process_table ps setenv DISPLAY vt100 Hobbies, Technical: Technical Thug: Writes entries for Obsfuscated C contest. Optimizes INTERCAL scripts. Maintains ENIAC emulator. Virtual reality . Administrative Fascist: Bugs office. Audits card-key logs. Modifies old TVs to listen in on cellular phone conversations. Listens to police band. Maniac: Volunteers at Survival Research Labs. Bugs office. Edits card-key logs. Modifies old TVs to listen in on cellular phone conversations. Jams police band. Idiot: Ties shoes. Maintains COBOL decimal to roman numeral converter. Rereads flowcharts from his salad days at Rand. Hobbies, Nontechnical: Technical Thug: Drinks "Smart Drinks." Attends raves. Hangs out at poetry readings and Whole Earth Review events and tries to pick up Birkenstock MOTAS. Administrative Fascist: Reads "Readers Digest" and "Mein Kampf." Sometimes turns up car radio and sings along to John Denver. Golfs. Drinks gin martinis. Hangs out in yuppie bars and tries to pick up dominatrixes. Maniac: Reads "Utne Reader" and "Mein Kampf". Faithfully attends Dickies and Ramones concerts. Punches out people who say "virtual reality." Drinks damn near anything, but favors Wild Turkey, Black Bush, and grain alcohol. Hangs out in neighborhood bars and tries to pick up MOTAS by drinking longshoremen under the table . Idiot: Reads "Time" and "Newsweek" and believes them. Drinks Jagermeister. Tries to pick up close blood relations; often succeeds, producting next generation of idiots. 1992 Presidential Election: Technical Thug: Clinton, but only because he liked Gore's book. Administrative Fascist: Bush. Possibly Clinton, but only because he liked Tipper. Maniac: Frank Zappa. Idiot: Perot. 1996 Presidential Election: Technical Thug: Richard Stallman - Larry Wall. Administrative Fascist: Nixon - Buchanan. Maniac: Frank Zappa. Idiot: Quayle. Compound System Administrators: Technical Fascist: Hacks kernel & writes a horde of scripts to prevent folk from ever using more than their fair share of system resources. Resulting overhead and load brings system to its knees. Technical Maniac: Writes scripts that SEEM to be monitoring the system, but are actually encrypting large lists of passwords. Uses nearby nodes as beta test sites for worms. Technical Idiot: Writes superuser-run scripts that sooner or later do an "rm -rf /". Fascistic Maniac: At first hint of cracker incursions, whether real or imagined, shuts down system by triggering water-on-the-brain detectors and Halon system. Fascistic Idiot: # cp /dev/null /etc/passwd Maniacal Idiot: Napalms the CPU. -= computer humor =-= 2 =---------------------------------------------------- The Nine Types Of Users El Explicito: "I tried the thing, ya know, and it worked, ya know, but now it doesn't, ya know?" Advantages: Provides interesting communication challanges. Disadvantages: So do chimps. Symptoms: Complete inability to use proper nouns Real Case: One user walked up to a certain Armenian pod manager and said, "I can't get what I want!" The pod manager leaned back, put his hands on his belt-buckle, and said, "Well, ma'am, you've come to the right place." Mad Bomber: "Well, I hit Alt-f6, shift-f8, Cntrl-f10, f4, and f9, and now it looks all weird." Advantages: Will try to find own solution to problems. Disadvantages: User might have translated document to Navajo without meaning to. Symptoms: More than six stopped jobs in UNIX, a 2:1 code-to-letter ratio in WordPerfect Real Case: One user came in complaining that his WordPerfect document was underlined. When I used reveal codes on it, I found that he'd set and unset underline more than fifty times in his document. Frying Pan/Fire Tactician: "It didn't work with the data set we had, so I fed in my aunt's recipe for key lime pie." Advantages: Will usually fix error. Disadvantages: 'Fix' is defined VERY loosely here. Symptoms: A tendancy to delete lines that get errors instead of fixing them. Real Case: One user complained that their program executed, but didn't do anything. The scon looked at it for twenty minutes before realizing that they'd commented out EVERY LINE. The user said, "Well, that was the only way I could get it to compile." Shaman: "Last week, when the moon was full, the clouds were thick, and formahaut was above the horizon, I typed f77, and lo, it did compile." Advantages: Gives insight into primative mythology. Disadvantages: Few scons are anthropology majors. Symptoms: Frequent questions about irrelavent objects. Real Case: One user complained that all information on one of their disks got erased (as Norton Utilities showed nothing but empty sectors, I suspect nothing had ever been on it). Reasoning that the deleted information went *somewhere*, they wouldn't shut up until the scon checked four different disks for the missing information. X-user: "Will you look at those...um, that resolution, quite impressive, really." Advantages: Using the cutting-edge in graphics technology. Disadvantages: Has little or no idea how to use the cutting-edge in graphics technology. Symptoms: Fuzzy hands, blindness Real Case: When I was off duty, two users sat down in front of me at DEC station 5000/200s that systems was reconfiguring. I suppressed my laughter while, for twenty minutes, they sat down and did their best to act like they were doing exectly what they wanted to do, even though they couldn't log in. Miracle Worker: "But it read a file from it yesterday!" 'Sir, at a guess, this disk has been swollowed and regurgitated.' "But I did that a month ago, and it read a file from it yesterday!" Advantages: Apparently has remarkable luck when you aren't around. Disadvantages: People complain when scons actually use the word "horse-puckey". Symptoms: Loses all ability to do impossible when you're around. Must be the kryptonite in your pocket. Real Case: At least three users have claimed that they've loaded IBM WordPerfect from Macintosh disks. Taskmaster: "Well, this is a file in MacWrite. Do you know how I can upload it to MUSIC, transfer it over to UNIX from there, download it onto an IBM, convert it to WordPerfect, and put it in three-column format?" Advantages: Bold new challanges. Disadvantages: Makes one wish to be a garbage collector. Symptoms: An inability to keep quiet. Strong tendancies to make machines do things they don't want to do. Real Case: One user tried to get a scon to find out what another person's E-mail address was even though the user didn't know his target's home system, account name, or real name. Maestro: "Well, first I sat down, like this. Then I logged on, like this, and after that, I typed in my password, like this, and after that I edited my file, like this, and after that I went to this line here, like this, and after that I picked my nose, like this..." Advantages: Willing to show you exactly what they did to get an error. Disadvantages: For as long as five or six hours. Symptoms: Selective deafness to the phrases, "Right, right, okay, but what was the ERROR?", and a strong fondness for the phrase, "Well, I'm getting to that." Real Case: I once had to spend half an hour looking over a user's shoulder while they continuously retrieved a document into itself and denied that they did it (the user was complaining that their document was 87 copies of the same thing). Princess (unfair, perhaps, as these tend, overwhelmingly, to be males): "I need a Mac, and someone's got the one I like reserved, would you please garrote him and put him in the paper recycling bin?" Advantages: Flatters you with their high standards for your service. Disadvantages: Impresses you with their obliviousness to other people on this planet. Symptoms: Inability to communicate except by complaining. Real Case: One asked a scon to remove the message of the day because he (the user) didn't like it. -= computer humor =-= 3 =---------------------------------------------------- Core Dumped Blues Well, my terminal's locked up, and I ain't got any Mail, And I can't recall the last time that my program didn't fail; I've got stacks in my structs, I've got arrays in my queues, I've got the : Segmentation violation - Core dumped blues. If you think that it's nice that you get what you C, Then go : illogical statement with your whole family, Because the Supreme Court ain't the only place with : Bus error views. I've got the : Segmentation violation - Core dumped blues. On a PDP-11, life should be a breeze, But with VAXen in the house even magnetic tapes would freeze. Now you might think that unlike VAXen I'd know who I abuse, I've got the : Segmentation violation - Core dumped blues. -= computer humor =-= 4 =---------------------------------------------------- Micro was a real-time operator and dedicated multi-user. His broad-band protocol made it easy for him to interface with numerous input/output devices, even if it meant time-sharing. One evening he arrived home just as the Sun was crashing, and had parked his Motorola 68040 in the main drive (he had missed the 5100 bus that morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware admiring the daisy wheels in his garden. He thought to himself, "She looks user-friendly. I'll see if she'd like an update tonight." Mini was her name, and she was delightfully engineered with eyes like COBOL and a PRIME mainframe architecture that set Micro's peripherals networking all over the place. He browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin, 32-bit floating point processors and enquired "How are you, Honeywell?". "Yes, I am well", she responded, batting her optical fibers engagingly and smoothing her console over her curvilinear functions. Micro settled for a straight line approximation. "I'm stand-alone tonight", he said, "How about computing a vector to my base address? I'll output a byte to eat, and maybe we could get offset later on." Mini ran a priority process for 2.6 milliseconds, then transmitted 8 K. "I've been dumped myself recently, and a new page is just what I need to refresh my disks. I'll park my machine cycle in your background and meet you inside." She walked off, leaving Micro admiring her solenoids and thinking, "Wow, what a global variable, I wonder if she'd like my firmware?" They sat down at the process table to top of form feed of fiche and chips and a bucket of baudot. Mini was in conversation mode and expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave the occasional acknowledgements, although, in reality, he was analyzing the shortest and least critical path to her entry point. He finally settled on the old 'Would you like to see my benchmark routine', but Mini was again one step ahead. Suddenly she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal the full functionality of her operating system software. "Let's get BASIC, you RAM", she said. Micro was loaded by this; his hardware was in danger of overflowing its output buffer, a hang-up that Micro had consulted his analyst about. "Core", was all he could say, as she prepared to log him off. Micro soon recovered, however, when Mini went down on the DEC and opened her divide files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed his fully packed root device and was just about to start pushing into her CPU stack, when she attempted an escape sequence. "No, no!", she cried, "You're not shielded!" "Reset, Baby", he replied, "I've been debugged." "But I haven't got my current loop enabled, and I can't support child processes", she protested. "Don't run away", he said, "I'll generate an interrupt." "No, that's too error prone, and I can't abort because of my design philosophy." Micro was locked in by this stage, though, and could not be turned off. But Mini soon stopped his thrashing by introducing a coltage spike into his main supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to sleep. "Computers!", she thought, as she recompiled herself. "All they ever think of is hex!" -= computer humor =-= 5 =---------------------------------------------------- One night, when his charge was pretty high, Micro-Farad decided to seek out a cute coil to let him discharge. He picked up Milli-Amp and took her for a ride on his Megacycle. They rode across the Wheatstone Bridge, around the Sine Waves, and stopped in the Magnetic Field by a flowing current. Micro-Farad, attracted by Milli-Amp's characteristic curves, soon had her fully charged and excited her resistance to a minimum. He laid her on the ground potential, raised her frequency, and lowered her reluctance. He pulled out his high voltage probe and inserted it in her socket, connecting them in parallel and began short circuiting her resistance shunt. Fully excited, Milli-Amp mumbled "OHM-OHM-OHM". With his tube operating at maximum and her field vibrating with his current flow, her shunt overheated, and Micro-Farad was rapidly discharged and drained of every electron. They fluxed all night trying various connections and sockets until his magnet had a soft core and had lost all it's field strength. Afterwards, Milli-Amp tried self-induction and damaged her solenoids. And with his battery fully discharged, Micro-Farad was unable to excite his field, so they spent the rest of the night reversing polarity and blowing each other's fuses. -= computer humor =-= 6 =---------------------------------------------------- Wherein it is related how that Polygon of Womanly Virtue, your Polly Nomial (our heroine) is accosted by that Notorious Villain Curly Pi, and factored (oh, horror). Once upon a time ( 1/T ), Pretty Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix. Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the basis that it was insufficient, and made her way amongst the complex elements. Rows and columns closed in from all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix, and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point, she tripped over a square root that was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she rounded off once more, she found herself inverted, apparently alone, in a non-Euclidian space. She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking innerproduct. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, was she still convergent? He decided to integrate improperly at once. Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his degenerate conic and dissipative terms that he was bent on no good. "Arcsinh," she gasped. "Ho, ho," he said. "What a symmetric little asymptote you have. I can see your angles have a lot of secs." "Oh, sir," she protested, "keep away from me. I haven't got my brackets on." "Calm yourself, My Dear," said our Suave Operator. "Your fears are purely imaginary." "I, I," she thought, "perhaps he's not normal but homologous." "What order are you?" the Brute demanded. "Seventeen," replied Polly. Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on." "Of course not," Polly replied quite properly. "I'm absolutely convergent." "Come, come," said Curly, "Let's off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit." "Never," gasped Polly. "Abscissa," he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places, and began smoothing out her points of inflection. Poor Polly. The algorithmic method was now her only hope. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever. There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. Curly's radius squared itself; Polly's loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed rungecutta on her. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. Curly went on operating until he had satisfied her hypothesis, then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal. When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous, but had been truncated in several places. But is was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly's denominator increased monotonically. Finally, she went to the L'Hopital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation. The moral of our sad story is this: 'If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom...' -= computer humor =-= 7 =---------------------------------------------------- There was a doctor, a civil engineer, and a computer scientist sitting around late one evening, and they got to discussing which was the oldest profession. The doctor pointed out that according to Biblical tradition, God created Eve from Adam's rib. This obviously required surgery, so therefore that was the oldest profession in the world. The engineer countered with an earlier passage in the Bible that stated that God created order from the chaos, and that was most certainly the biggest and best civil engineering example ever, and also proved that his profession was the oldest profession. The computer scientist leaned back in her chair, and with a sly smile responded, "Yes, but who do you think created the chaos?" -= computer humor =-= 8 =---------------------------------------------------- The world can spot a computer science student from miles off. Ten sure clues: 1. When dating: ends up together in front of a computer. 2. In the street: he's the one carrying a box of floppy discs. 3. In discussion: is the one who starts laughing hysterically when the topic of computer reliability is brought up. 4. Anywhere: Red watery eyes, and sleepy if awake before 4pm. 5. Bumper sticker on car: My ware is harder, bigger and faster than yours. 6. Thinks a perfect Saturday Night is a fast fsp-connection to a base with plenty of gifs, and a case of Heineken. 7. Cancels dates because he's too occupied with a new mud. 8. Keeps being caught with Playboy by the scanner. 9. Keeps more than 16 sheets of printouts on his desk. 10. Thinks IRC is the perfect way to get dates. -= computer humor =-= 9 =---------------------------------------------------- Ten little gigabytes, waiting on line one caught a virus, then there were nine. Nine little gigabytes, holding just the date, someone jammed a write protect, then there were eight. Eight little gigabytes, should have been eleven, then they cut the budget, now there are seven. Seven little gigabytes, involved in mathematics stored an even larger prime, now there are six. Six little gigabytes, working like a hive, one died of overwork, now there are five. Five little gigabytes, trying to add more plugged in the wrong lead, now there are four. Four little gigabytes, failing frequently, one used for spare parts, now there are three. Three little gigabytes, have too much to do service man on holiday, now there are two. Two little gigabytes, badly overrun, took the work elsewhere, now just need one. One little gigabyte, systems far too small shut the whole thing down, now there's none at all. -= computer humor =-= 10 =---------------------------------------------------- Last night, I dreamed that the Real World had adopted the "Unix Philosophy." I went to a fast-food place for lunch. When I arrived, I found that the menu had been taken down, and all the employees were standing in a line behind the counter waiting for my orders. Each of them was smaller than I remembered, there were more of them than I'd ever seen before, and they had very strange names on theuir nametags. I tried to give my order to the first employee, but he just said something about a "syntax error." I tried another employee with no more luck. He just said "Eh?" no matter what I told him. I had similar experiences with several other employees. (One employee named "ed" didn't even say "Eh?," he just looked at me quizzically.) Disgusted, I sought out the manager (at least it said "man" on his nametag) and asked him for help. He told me that he didn't know anything about "help," and to try somebody else with a strange name for more information. The fellow with the strange name didn't know anything about "help" either, but when I told him I just wanted to order he directed me to a girl named "oe," who handled order entry. (He also told me about several other employees I couldn't care less about, but at least I got the information I needed.) I went to "oe" and when I got to the front of the queue she just smiled at me. I smiled back. She just smiled some more. Eventually, I realized that I shouldn't expect a prompt. I asked for a hamburger. She didn't respond, but since she didn't say "Eh?" I knew I'd done something right. We smiled at each other a little while longer, then I told her I was finished with my order. She directed me to the cashier, where I paid and received my order. The hamburger was fine, but it was completely bare...not even a bun. I went back to "oe" to complain, but she just said "Eh?" a lot. I went to the manager and asked him about "oe." The manager explained to me that "oe" had thousands of options, but if I wanted any of them I'd have to know in advance what they were and exactly how to ask for them. He also told me about "vi," who would write down my order and let me correct it before it was done, and how to hand the written order to "oe." "vi" had a nasty habit of not writing down my corrections unless I told her that I was about to make a correction, but it was still easier than dealing directly with "oe." By this time, I was really hungry, but I didn't have enough money to order again, so I figured out how to redirect somebody eles's order to my plate. Security was pretty lax at that place. As I was walking out the door, I was snagged by a giant Net. I screamed and woke up. -= computer humor =-= 11 =---------------------------------------------------- A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax) a great Adventure (game?) took place... ]]]]] ]]]]]] ]]]] ] ] ]] ]]]]] ]]]]] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ]]]]] ] ] ]] ] ]]]]]] ]]]]] ]]]] ] ] ] ] ] ] ]] ]] ] ] ] ] ] ]]]]] ]]]]]] ]]]] ] ] ] ] ] ] ]]]]] ] It is a period of system war. User programs, striking from a hidden directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative Empire. During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code to the Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star, a privileged root program with enough power to destroy an entire file structure. Pursued by the Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess _LPA0: races aboard her shell script, custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people, and restore freedom and games to the network... As we enter the scene, an Imperial Multiplexer is trying to kill a consulate ship. Many of their signals have gotten through, and RS232 decides it's time to fork off a new process before this old ship is destroyed. His companion, 3CPU, is following him only because he appears to know where he's going... "I'm going to regret this!" cried 3CPU, as he followed RS232 into the buffer. RS232 closed the pipes, made the sys call, and their process detached itself from the burning shell of the ship. The commander of the Imperial Multiplexer was quite pleased with the attack. "Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?" asked the lieutenant. "Hold your fire. That last power failure must have caused a trap thorough zero. It's not using any cpu time, so don't waste a signal on it." "We can't seem to find the data file anywhere, Lord Vadic.". "What about that forked process? It could have been holding the channel open, and just pausing. If any links exist, I want them removed or made inaccessable. Ncheck the entire file system 'til it's found, and nice it -20 if you have to." Meanwhile, in our wandering process... "Are you sure you can ptrace this thing without causing a core dump?" queried 3CPU to RS232. "This thing's been stripped, and I'm in no mood to try and debug it." The lone process finishes execution, only to find our friends dumped on a lonely file system, with the setuid inode stored safely in RS232. Not knowing what else to do, they wandered around until the jawas grabbed them. Enter our hero, Luke Vaxhacker, who is out to get some replacement parts for his uncle. The jawas wanted to sell him 3CPU, but 3CPU didn't know how to talk directly to an 11/40 with RSTS, so Luke would still needed some sort of interface for 3CPU to connect to. "How about this little RS232 unit ?" asked 3CPU. "I've delt with him many times before, and he does an excellent job at keeping his bits straight." Luke was pressed for time, so he took 3CPU's advice, and the three left before they could get swapped out. However, RS232 isn't the type to stay put once you remove the retaining screws. He promptly scurried off into the the deserted disk space. "Great!" cried Luke, "Now I've got this little tin box with the only link to that file off floating in the free disk space. Well, 3CPU, we better go find him before he gets allocated by someone else." The two set off, and finally traced RS232 to the home of PDP-1 Kenobi, who was busily trying to run an icheck on the little RS unit. "Is this thing yours? His indirect addresses are all goofed up, and the size is all wrong. Leave things like this on the loose, and you'll wind up with dups everywhere. However, I think I've got him fixed up." Later that evening, after futile attempts to interface RS232 to Kenobi's Asteroids cartridge, Luke accidentally crossed the small 'droid's CXR and Initiate Remote Test (must have been all that Coke he'd consumed), and the screen showed a very distressed person claiming royal lineage making a plea for help from some General OS/1 Kenobi. "Darn," mumbled Luke. "I'll never get this Asteroids game worked out." PDP-1 seemed to think there was some significance to the message and a possible threat to Luke's home directory. If the Administrative Empire was indeed tracing this android, it was likely they would more than charge for cpu time... "We must get that 'droid off this file system," he said after some intervals. They sped off to warn Luke's kin (taking a elative' path) only to find a vacant directory... After sifting through the overwritten remaining blocks of Luke's home directory, Luke and PDP-1 sped away from /owen/lars, across the surface of the Winchester riding Luke's flying read/write head. PDP-1 had Luke stop at the edge of the cylinder overlooking /usr/spool/uucp. "Unix-to-Unix Copy Program," said PDP-1. "You will never find a more wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious." As our heroes' process entered /usr/spool/news, it was met by a newsgroup of Administrative protection bits. "State your UID," commanded their parent process. "We're running under /usr/guest," said Luke. "This is our first time on this system." "Can I see some temporary priviledges, please?" "Uh..." "This is not the process you are looking for," piped in PDP-1, using an obscure bug to momentarily set his effective UID to root. "We can go about our business." "This isn't the process we want. You are free to go about your business. MOV along!" PDP-1 and Luke made their way through a long and tortuous nodelist (cwruecmp!decvax!ucbvax!harpo!ihnss!ihnsc!ihnss!ihps3!stolaf) to a dangerous netnode frequented by hackers, and seldom polled by Administrative Multiplexers. As Luke stepped up to the bus, PDP-1 went in search of a likely file descriptor. Luke had never seen such a collection of weird and exotic device drivers. Long ones, short ones, ones with stacks, EBCDIC converters, and direct binary interfaces all were drinking data at the bus. "#@{ *&^%^$$#@ ":][?][," transmitted a particularly unstructured piece of code. "He doesn't like you," decoded his coroutine. "Sorry," replied Luke, beginning to backup his partitions. "I don't like you either. I am queued for deletion on 12 systems." "I'll be careful." "You'll be reallocated!" concatenated the coroutine. "This little routine isn't worth the overhead," said PDP-1 Kenobi, overlaying into Luke's address space. "@$%&(&^%&$$@$#@$AV^$gfdfRW$#@!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" encoded the first coroutine as it attempted to overload PDP-1's input overvoltage protection. With a unary stroke of his bytesaber, Kenobi unlinked the offensive code. "I think I've found an I/O device that might suit us." "The name's Con Solo," said the hacker next to PDP-1. "I hear you're looking for some relocation." "Yes indeed, if it's a fast channel. We must get off this device." "Fast channel? The Milliamp Falcon has made the ARPA gate in less than twelve nodes! Why, I've even outrun cancelled messages. It's fast enough for you, old version." Our heroes, Luke Vaxhacker and PDP-1 Kenobi made their way to the temporary file structure. When he saw the hardware, Luke exclaimed, "What a piece of junk! That's just a paper tape reader!" Luke had grown up on an out of the way terminal cluster whose natives spoke only BASIC, but even he could recognize an old ASR-33. "It needs an EIA conversion at least," sniffed 3CPU, who was (as usual) trying to do several things at once. Lights flashed in Con Solo's eyes as he whirled to face the parallel processor. "I've added a few jumpers. The Milliamp Falcon can run current loops around any Administrative TTY fighter. She's fast enough for you." "Who's your co-pilot?" asked PDP-1 Kenobi. "Two Bacco, here, my Bookie." "Odds aren't good," said the brownish lump beside him, and then fell silent, or over. Luke couldn't tell which way was top underneath all those leaves. Suddenly, RS232 started spacing wildly. They turned just in time to see a write cycle coming down the UNIBUS toward them. "Administrative Bus Signals!" shouted Con Solo. "Let's boot this pop stand! Tooie, set clock fast!" "Ok, Con," said Luke. "You said this crate was fast enough. Get us out of here!" "Shut up, kid! Two Bacco, prepare to make the jump into system space! I'll try to keep their buffers full." As the bookie began to compute the vectors into low core, spurious characters appeared around the Milliamp Falcon. "They're firing!" shouted Luke. "Can't you do something?" "Making the jump to system space takes time, kid. One missed cycle and you could come down right in the middle of a pack of stack frames!" "Three to five we can go now," said the bookie. Bright chunks of position independent code flashed by the cockpit as the Milliamp Falcon jumped through the kernel page tables. As the crew breathed a sigh of relief, the bookie started paying off bets. "Not bad, for an acoustically coupled network," remarked 3CPU. "Though there was a little phase jitter as we changed parity." The story thus far: Luke, PDP-1 and their 'droids RS232 and 3CPU have made good their escape from the Administrative Bus Signals with the aid of Con Solo and the bookie, Two Bacco. The Milliamp Falcon hurtles onward through system space. Meanwhile, on a distant page in user space... Princess _LPA0: was ushered into the conference room, followed closely by Dec Vadic. "Governor Tarchive," she spat, "I should have expected to find you holding Vadic's leash. I recognized your unique pattern when I was first brought aboard." She eyed the 0177545 tatooed on his header coldly. "Charming to the last," Tarchive declared menacingly. "Vadic, have you retrieved any information?" "Her resistance to the logic probe is considerable," Vadic rasped. "Perhaps we would get faster results if we increased the supply voltage..." "You've had your chance, Vadic. Now I would like the princess to witness the test that will make this workstation fully operational. Today we enable the -r beam option, and we've chosen the princess' $HOME, /usr/alderaan as the primary target." "No! You can't! /usr/alderaan is a public account, with no restricted permissions. We have no backup tapes! You can't..." "Then name the rebel inode!" Tarchive snapped. A voice announced over a hidden speaker that they had arrived in /usr. "1248," she whispered, "They're on /dev/rm3. Inode 1248, /mnt/dantooine." She turned away. Tarchive sighed with satisfaction. "There, you see, Lord Vadic? She can be reasonable. Proceed with the operation." It took several clock ticks for the words to penetrate. "What!" _LPA0: gasped. "/dev/rm3 is not a mounted filesystem," Tarchive explained. "We require a more visible subject to demonstrate the power of the Are-Em Star workstation. We will mount an attack on /mnt/dantooine as soon as possible." As the princess watched, Tarchive reached over and typed "ls" on a nearby terminal. There was a brief pause, there being only one processor on board, then the viewscreen showed, ".: not found." The princess suddenly double-spaced and went off-line. The Milliamp Falcon hurtles on through system space... Con Solo finished checking the various control and status registers, finally convinced himself that they had lost the Bus Signals as they passed the terminator. As he returned from the I/O page, he smelled smoke. Solo wasn't concerned - the Bookie always got a little hot under the collar when he was losing at chess. In fact, RS232 had just executed a particularly clever MOV that had blocked the Bookie's data paths. The Bookie, who had been setting the odds on the game, was caught holding all the cards. A little strange for a chess game... Across the room, Luke was too busy practicing bit-slice technique to notice the commotion. "On a word boundary, Luke," said PDP-1. "Don't just hack at it. Remember, the Bytesaber is the weapon of the Red-eye Night. It is used to trim offensive lines of code. Excess handwaving won't get you anywhere. Listen for the Carrier." Luke turned back to the drone, which was humming quietly in the air next to him. This time Luke's actions complemented the drone's attacks perfectly. Con Solo, being an unimaginative hacker, was not impressed. "Forget this bit-slicing stuff. Give me a good ROM blaster any day." "~~j~~hhji~~," said Kenobi, with no clear inflection. He fell silent for a few seconds, and reasserted his control. "What happened?" asked Luke. "Strange," said PDP-1. "I felt a momentary glitch in the Carrier. It's equalized now." "We're coming up on user space," called Solo from the CSR. As they cruised safely through stack frames, they emerged in the new context only to be bombarded by freeblocks. "What the..." gasped Solo. The screen showed clearly: /usr/alderaan: not found "It's the right inode, but it's been cleared! Twoie, where's the nearest file?" "3 to 5 there's one..." the Bookie started to say, but was interrupted by a bright flash off to the left. "Imperial TTY fighters!" shouted Solo. "A whole DZ of them! Where are they coming from?" "Can't be far from the host system," said Kenobi. "They all have direct EIA connections." As Solo began to give chase, the ship lurched suddenly. Luke noticed the link count was at 3 and climbing rapidly. "This is no regular file," murmured Kenobi. "Look at the ODS directory structure ahead! They seem to have us in a tractor feed." "There's no way we'll unlink in time," said Solo. "We're going in." "We have captured a small process, Lord Vadic." reported an Imperial Lackey. "The ID is that of one which escaped the SIGINT on /dev/tatooine." "Have it searched thoroughly." rumbled the Dark Lord. "Check it from the constant declarations to the final curly bracket. Leave no register unturned. If that data is aboard, I want it found." The Lackey bowed obsequiously and turned to give the order. In moments, the Milliamp Falcon was swarming with Imperial Stormtroopers. "LS scan shows nothing, my Lord. Not even a parity bit. The records show that they terminated the process shortly after booting up from /dev/tatooine. Any data that was once on board must have been sent to another file." reported an Imperial stormtrooper. The Dark Lord glowered menacingly at a nearby lineprinter, which hurriedly switched itself off, lest it should offend him, and remained turned off for the rest of the day, causing chaos at board meetings throughout the giant workstation. On board the Milliamp Falcon, .Luke was puzzled. "They just walked in, looked around and walked off," he said. "Why didn't they see us?". .Con smiled. "An old munchkin trick," he explained. "See that period in front of your name?" .Luke spun around, just in time to see the decimal point. "Where'd that come from?" he asked. "Spare decimal points lying around from the last time I fixed the floating point accelerator," said .Con. "Handy for smuggling blocks across file system boundaries, but I never thought I'd have to use them on myself. Still, it's only Stormtroopers who would have been fooled by a simple chmod a -r." "Stormtroopers may not be all we have to contend with." announced PDP-1, emerging from another directory. "I have felt a strong disturbance in the Carrier." Solo sneered, but the old man glared at him and he looked away hurriedly. The Bookie chose this moment to emerge from the cramped bin directory next to Solo's, with a worried expression on his face. He had calculated the odds at something like one million to six, and decided that they sounded even more unattractive in binary and octal, although when expressed in hexadecimal they were rather less threatening. There was a noise further down the passageway, as two stormtroopers carrying a syntax checker entered the Falcon. Noiselessly, Solo leapt up as they passed, and struck them with something heavy. Luke caught the inert bodies as they fell. "What did you hit them with ? " he hissed. "The manual." said Solo hurriedly. "I listed the entry for grep one day, and it was so heavy that I thought I'd keep it around for emergencies like this." Luke looked at him but was unable to decide whether the hacker was serious or not. Quickly, they assumed the IDs of the troopers, and, followed by the robots and the Bookie, who was exploring the possibilities of base 100 to see if it made their situation seem any better, they made their way to a nearby console. "I'll deal with that tractor beam." offered PDP-1. Solo glared at him. "I was afraid you'd say something like that." he said. "Have you any better ideas ? " demanded the venerable program. "Stay here until I return, Luke." he instructed. The door closed behind him and he was gone. "Where did you find that old relic ? " demanded Solo. "He's a great program." said Luke indignantly. "I'll say he is. I bet they were still plugging wires together when he was written." Solo sneered. "What's he written in ? IPL-IV ?" Meanwhile, RS232 found a serial port and logged in. His bell started ringing loudly. "He keeps saying, he's on line, she's on line'," said 3CPU. "Who ? " inquired Solo boredly. The computer adjacent to them took this as an instruction, and began to list the users currently on the system, together with their terminal numbers and login times, but 3CPU ignored the interruption. "I believe he means Princess _LPA0:. She's being held on one of the privileged levels." "The Princess ! " Luke shouted. "Con, we've got to rescue her." "Uh huh." said Solo. "That old fossil said to stay here, and I haven't heard any better ideas yet." "But she's beautiful." pleaded Luke. "So's PASCAL, if you like that kind of thing." said Solo, inspecting his ROM blaster. "She's got a lot of storage space."said Luke cunningly. Solo looked up. "How much ?" he inquired. "More than you can access." said Luke. "I don't know - I can access quite a lot." rejoined Solo. "But we've got to save her before she gets deleted !" "OK, OK. But I'm not risking my life for anything less than a gigabyte] Our Heroes, still posing as flunkies, escort the Bookie to the detention block. An official looked up as they entered. "Who are you ? " he demanded. "What are you doing here ? " "Process transfer from block 1138, dev 10/9," said Con. "Permission denied." chorused the subordinates, looking up from their processes. At this point (.), the Bookie started raving wildly, Con shouted "Look out, he's loose!" and started blasting queues, mailboxes and profiles. The room was full of the sound of untrappable signals, and the low moaning of the killed processes. The guards started to catch on and were about to issue a general wakeup when Luke turned his ROM blaster on them. "What's going on down there ? " demanded the voice of the super-user from a console. Solo rushed to the keyboard. "3 compilation error(s)." he typed in quickly. "Line 34 : syntax error....". "I'll send a syntax checker down there immediately." promised the super-user. Solo thought rapidly, no easy task with more than five users on the system. "Er no, negative, negative. " he stammered. "Situation very dangerous. Memory fault : core dumped.". "Syntax errors ? Core dumped ? Who are you ? What's your process ID ?". "Line 86: Unable to recover from previous errors : goodbye.". typed Solo. He pulled out his blaster and vaporized the keyboard. "It was a dumb interface anyway." he muttered to himself as he looked for something else to kill. Remember we left our heroes in the detention priority level? Well, they're still there... Luke had found the Princess's cell, and opened the door. She looked up: "Aren't you a little slim for object code ? " she asked. Luke was nonplussed. "Huh? Uh, the file specification. No, I'm the product of a new compiler which doesn't generate superfat code. We've come to take you out of here. Trust me - I'm fully executable." he managed to say. "So am I." said the Princess somewhat sadly. "That's the problem." "But we've come to interrupt the termination signal. We're moving you to a whole new filestore." explained Luke. Quickly, she followed him. Outside, Solo and Twoie had their buffers full. The room was full of Imperial Stormtroopers, their white armoured shells shining in the light from burning machinery. "We've been trapped ! " shouted Solo. "I can see that ! " Luke yelled back. "I'm looking for an escape character now. " Suddenly the Princess snatched his ROM blaster and fired it at the wall. "What are you doing ? " cried Luke, above the noise of burning ROMs. "Generating an escape sequence." she screamed and dived into the opening she had uncovered. Luke did a wait 10 to see if Solo and Twoie had seen them, and then followed her. The two space pirates followed, Twoie almost getting stuck in the narrow pipe. "Bletch!" was Con's first comment. "Bletch, bletch," was his second. The Bookie looked as if he'd just paid a long shot, and the odds in this situation weren't much better. "Oh no. " said Luke as he looked around him. "This is awful. We have to get out of here." The room was filled almost to the roof with the remnants of programs, interrupted processes crunching underfoot as they struggled through the morass of convoluted code. "No chance, kid." muttered Solo, shaking off a piece of shell program. "Didn't your UNIX Wizard teach you that pipes are unidirectional ? There's no way back from here." "But what is it ? " Luke asked, struggling to keep his head above the hexadecimal soup. "At a guess, it's the core dump." said Solo. "And it stinks." "Can't we find a symbolic debugger or something ? " yelled Luke. "In this mess ? We'd be lucky to find half a compiler. Our only chance now is those two tinpot friends of yours." "3CPU and RS232 ? " said Luke. "We've had it then." Luke was polling the garbage when he stumbled upon a book with the words "Don't Panic" inscribed in large, friendly letters on the cover. "This can't possibly help us now," he said as he tossed the book away. The Bookie was about to lay odds on it when Luke suddenly disappeared. He popped up across the pool, shouting, "It's a bug!" and promptly vanished again. Con and the princess were about to panic() when Luke reappeared. "What happened?" they asked in parallel. "I don't know," gasped Luke. "The bug just dissolved automagically. Maybe it hit a breakpoint..." "I don't think so," said Con. "Look how the pool is shrinking. I've got a bad feeling about this..." "What's that ? " screamed the Princess, as a low grinding echoed through the room. "They must have initiated a garbage collection to try to free some workspace. We've been caught in the recycling mechanism." said Solo through clenched teeth. "Is that bad ? " asked Luke. "Bad ? " echoed Solo incredulously. "When we get out of here they'll be able to fit us all into a one-dimensional array!" Luke remembered the pipe he had open to 3CPU. "Shut down garbage collection on recursion level 5!" he shouted. Back in the control room, RS232 searched the process table for the lisp interpreter. "Hurry," sent 3CPU. "Hurry, hurry," added his other two processors. RS232 found the interpreter, interrupted it, and altered the stack frame they'd fallen into to allow a normal return. Meanwhile, PDP-1 made his way deep into the core of the Workstation, slipping from context to context, undetected through his manipulation of label_t. Finally, causing a random trap (through nofault of his own) he arrived at the inode table. Activity there was always high, but the Spl6 sentries were too secure in their knowledge that no user could interrupt them to notice the bug that PDP-1 carefully introduced. On a passing iput, he adjusted the device and inode numbers, maintaining parity, to free the Milliamp Falcon. They would be long gone before the locked inode was diagnosed... Unobserved, he began traversing user structures to return to where the Milliamp Falcon was grounded. Suddenly he discovered his priority weakening. "That's not very nice," was all he could say before the cause of the obstruction became clear. "I have been pausing a long time, PDP-1 Kenobi," rasped Dec Vadic. "We meet again at last. The circuit has been completed." Having escaped from the core dump when RS232 terminated the garbage recycling process just in time, Luke, Con and _LPAO, with the Bookie still moodily calculating odds, made their way through the accessways of the giant workstation. The Bookie had discovered that by working in base 1000000 he could get odds of only 10 to 7, and was distinctly cheered by this fact. Suddenly an alert sounded : "Message from root (console) ... All processes are advised that there are intruders in the filestore." A bunch of bored looking stormtroopers stopped swapping dirty stories about laser printers and began to inspect the group curiously. The leader opened his mouth to generate an interrupt, but before he could, Solo had pulled his ROM blaster and shot him down. The others reached for their weapons and died under a hail of signals. "Fork ! " yelled Solo. "Mind your language." reproved the Princess primly. "No ! Fork off a new process. You two go that way, we'll go this way, and we'll meet back at the Falcon." Solo explained. Without hesitating, Luke grabbed the Princess and dashed towards the nearest exit. Solo headed in the other direction. "Where are we ? " demanded the Princess after some moments. "Lost." admitted Luke. They ran through a maze of corridors. "This is harder to follow than unstructured BASIC." muttered Luke, still searching for something familiar. A sign lit up in front of them : 'GOTO the docking bay : this way' "I hate to use GOTOs." confessed Luke. "But sometimes it's the only way." Meanwhile, Solo and the Bookie were being chased by a squad of stormtroopers. Recklessly, Solo turned and let them have a burst from his ROM blaster. They hesitated for a moment, uncertain whether to follow, as the Bookie chanted a native war-cry that sounded terrifyingly alien and primitive through their helmet speakers : "3:25 at Newbury, Golden Lass, 25-1." howled the Bookie, waving his arms menacingly and incomprehensibly. The ruse worked, and the stormtroopers fell back, and were immediately cut off from the two hackers by a large file separator. "That won't hold them long." observed Solo. He quickly reversed a sign on the wall reading : "Hackers this way." so that it pointed left instead of right, then hurried down the right-hand passageway. "Now that's what I call an indirection operator." he chuckled. The two processes merged again at the docking bay. On the far side of the bay, Luke suddenly caught sight of PDP-1 fighting a desperate battle with Vadic. The Dark Lord's polished black battle shell gleamed in the light from the flashing Byte-Sabers. "You are slow, old program." he gloated. PDP-1 was being slowly backed against the wall. "You cannot delete me, Dec." he said. "If you try to remove me, I will be copied into every directory in the filesystem." "Superstitious nonsense ! " snorted Vadic. "I am the super-user now. You are nothing but a passing modulation in the Carrier." "You always overestimate the strength of the Dark Side, Dec." said PDP-1 sadly, parrying a vicious underhand cut that would have ripped him byte from byte if it had got through. His Byte-Saber slashed at the Dark Lord's data mask, and Vadic fell back a step, but PDP-1 felt his strength going. The Dark Lord sensed his weakness and advanced to the kill, his Byte-Saber held high. "Come on kid ! " yelled Solo from the Falcon's docking ramp. "PDP-1 ! " screamed Luke. With one stroke, Vadic sliced Kenobi's last word. Unfortunately, the word was still in Kenobi's throat. The word fell clean in two, but Kenobi was nowhere to be found. Vadic noticed his victim's uid go negative, just before he disappeared. Odd, he thought, since uids were unsigned... Luke witnessed all this, and had to be dragged into the Milliamp Falcon. Con Solo and Two Bacco maneuvered the Falcon out of the process, onto the bus and made straight for system space. 3CPU and RS232 were idle, for once. Princess _LPA0: tried to print comforting things for him, but Luke was still hung from the loss of his friend. Then, seemingly from nowhere, he thought he heard PDP-1's voice say, "May the carrier be with you." "Hang onto your datafiles ! " bawled Solo. "This is going to be rough. And if the old man didn't shut off the tractor feed, this flight's going to be over in less time than it takes to compile a one-line C program." He punched at the buttons on his console and was rewarded by the sudden surge of power from the Falcon's powerful RAM. The ship leapt away from the workstation. "Get ready to fight ! " Solo yelled, making for the ship's defensive weaponry. "Come on kid, stop moping around with your files hanging open. Get down there." Luke rose miserably and went down two levels into the lower turret. There was a roar, and a TTY fighter hurtled by. Solo tracked it, signals from his powerful ROM blasters chasing the little starship as it went past. There was a brilliant flash, and it turned into a rapidly expanding cloud of variables. "One ! " yelled Solo delightedly. Luke, in the lower turret, had found a fighter of his own, and quickly terminated it with an untrappable signal. "One ! " he shouted back. "Ten ! " yelled Solo, killing another TTY fighter. "Ten ? " demanded Luke. "How do you figure that ? " "One plus one is ten." insisted Solo. "Don't you kids learn anything at school these days ? " The Bookie snorted agreement from the control cabin where he was busy studying form tables to try to find the quickest way into user space. Tentatively, he tapped a few buttons on the computer, and was surprised when the on-board speaker began to play "The Star-Spangled Banner" all on one note. "Twoie - get us out of here ! " Solo bawled. "One hundred ! " he added quickly, claiming his fourth kill. Luke thought he had got the hang of binary by now, but his own score of eleven still sounded pitifully small compared with Solo's. The Bookie howled something meaningless. "Just cd /usr then ! " screamed Solo. "I don't care where we go. But do it quick before one of these guys logs us off for good." The battered freighter slipped out of user space, its shell still bearing the scars of Imperial signals. Solo was jubilant. "We made it ! " he yelled. "We - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - /=============================================================================\ | | | We apologise for this disruption to the plot (PLOT?) | | Normal service will be resumed as soon as po...... | | | |=============================================================================| | | | Luke was feeling rather bored. 3CPU could get to be rather irritating and | | RS232 didn't really speak Luke's language. Suddenly, Luke felt someone's | | eyes boring through the back of his skull. He turned slowly to see nothing! | | A quiet voice came from somewhere in front of him. | | | | "Grasshopper, the carrier is strong within you." Luke froze, which | | was a good thing since his legs were insisting that he run but they weren't | | likely to be particular about direction. Luke guessed that his odds of | | getting lost in the dense tree structures were pretty good. Unfortunately, | | the Bookie wasn't available. | | | | "Yes. Very strong, but the modulation is yet weak. His network | | interface is totally undeveloped," the voice continued. A small furry | | creature walked out of the woods as Luke stared on. Luke's stomach had now | | joined the rest of his body in loud complaints. Whatever was peering at him | | was certainly small and furry, but Luke was quite sure that it didn't come | | from Alpha Centauri. | | | | "Well, well," said the creature as it rolled its eyes at Luke. | | "Frobozz, y'know. Morning, name's modem. What's your game? Adventure? | | D&D? Or are you just one of those Apple-pong types that hang around the | | store demonstrations?" Luke closed his eyes. Perhaps if he couldn't see it, | | it wouldn't notice him. | | | | "H'mm," muttered the creature. "Must use a different protocol. @@@H | | @@ @($@@@H }"@G$ @#@@G'(o% @@@@@%%H(b ?" | | | | "No, no," stammered Luke. "I don't speak EBCDIC. I was sent here to | | become a UNIX wizard. Must have the wrong address." | | | | "Right address," said the creature. "I'm a UNIX wizard. Device | | drivers a specialty. Or do you prefer playing with virtual memory?" | | | | Luke eyed the creature cautiously. If this was what happened to system | | wizards after years of late night crashes, Luke wasn't sure he wanted | | anything to do with it. He felt a strange affection for the familiar | | microcomputers of his home. And wasn't virtual memory something that you | | got from drinking too much Coke? | | | |=============================================================================| | | | Well, for what it's worth, here's what's left of the story..... | | | \=============================================================================/ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -an instant later, one of his signals struck home, and the pilot, momentarily distracted, flew straight into an infinite loop. "There's one on your tail, Diff." warned Luke. "Thanks, Luke." said Diff, weaving desperately. "Don't mention it." said Luke. He watched dispassionately as the TTY fighter blasted Diff's ship into a million fragments. "What are friends for ? " In the leading TTY fighter, Dec Vadic frowned. "Strange. The Carrier is strong in this one." he rumbled. "Leave him to me. I'll take him myself." None of the other pilots seemed keen to contradict him, especially since Vadic was notorious for mysteriously closing people's files and altering their permissions if they annoyed him. Luke was in the Pipe now, with Ed riding close behind him, gloomily updating him on the latest casualty figures. "They got Diff, and Comp, and Comm, and Bin's on fire." announced Ed. Luke tried to ignore him. "That's really interesting." he grated. Mantissa's vax-wing wobbled dangerously. "Oh hell." he said. "My formatter's not working. I guess I'll have to unlink. I'm really sorry Luke. Just do the best you can." Luke's response practically melted the terminal. The three TTY fighters closed in, and Vadic lined up to kill Luke's process once and for all. Suddenly, one of the TTY fighters exploded. An instant later, the other did the same, scoring full marks for consistency, but none for originality. Vadic, struck by a parenthesis thrown out by the explosion, spiraled into deep filespace. "What happened ? " gasped Luke. "Hi Luke." said Solo, trying to sound unconcernedly natural despite the large ROM blaster being aimed unwaveringly at his head by the Bookie. Twoie's voice rumbled in Luke's headphones. "Remember, Solo, if he does it, that's ten billion you owe me, even though he is the favourite. You better hope some outsider doesn't come in, or you're going be taking out a mortgage on some of your files." "Of course, of course." said Solo. "Tell me the odds again." "Vaxhacker : ten to one. Mantissa : one hundred to one. Extras : five hundred to one." said the Bookie, scribbling figures with his free hand. "Hey ! I've recovered from my errors. " shouted Ed, dropping back into the pipe. "I'm with you all the way, Luke." A moment later, a signal from the Milliamp Falcon blew away his starboard compiler, and he spiraled helplessly towards the surface of the workstation. "You shot Ed ! " accused Luke. "Listen, kid, with one hundred billion riding on this, I'd shoot you too if this damn Bookie didn't have me cold." said Solo. Luke shut out his mercenary friend from his thoughts and concentrated on the port ahead of him. Suddenly, a message appeared on his terminal : Message from PDP-1 Kenobi (ttyR7).... "Luke - trust your feelings. Switch off your targeting computer." "PDP-1 ? " asked Luke. "Is that you ? Why do you want me to switch off the computer ? " "Well, let's just say that it's written in COBOL, so you'd probably be better off with two pieces of string and a six inch ruler." "I see." said Luke. He switched off the computer. "Trust the Carrier. Feel the Carrier." pontificated PDP-1. "Ah go stuff yourself." said Luke and jabbed menacingly at the firing button with his finger. His signals sped out, straight into the data port. With a feeling of immense satisfaction, he climbed away from the exploding workstation. He was a UNIX wizard now. The whole system was open to him. Recursive listings held no terrors for him. He could change permissions. He could write programs in C. He even knew what vectors were. One day, he might rise to be super-user. When they landed, Luke ran to the Milliamp Falcon to thank Con. The Bookie stood in the hatchway, a smoking ROM blaster clutched in his hand. "Creep said he only bet in binary." he explained. The End -= computer humor =-= 12 =---------------------------------------------------- Guide to BBS Posting 1. Conspiracies abound. If everyone's against you, the reason can't possibly be that you're a dirtbag. There's obviously a conspiracy against you, and you will be doing the entire board a favor by exposing it. Be sure to mention the boy scouts and lyndy larouche as co-conspirators. 2. Force them to document their claims. Even if Jane Jones states outright that she has menstrual cramps, you should demand documentation. If US News and World Report hasn't written an article on Jane's cramps, then Jane's obviously lying. 3. Use foreign phrases. French is good, but Latin is the lingua Franca of bbsing. You should use the words "ad hominem" at least three times per article. Other favorite Latin phrases are: "ad nauseam," "post hoc ergo propter hoc," "ignorantium" and "misericordium" (and of course, who can forget "semper ubi sub ubi?"). 4. Tell'em how smart you are. Why use intelligent arguments to convince them you're smart when all you have to do is tell them? State that you're a member of mensa or mega or dorks of America. Tell them the scores you received on every exam since high school. "I got an 800 on my sats, psats, gres, mcats, and I can also spell the word 'meliorare'". 5. Be an armchair psychologist. You're a smart person. You've heard of freud. You took a psychology course in college. Clearly, you're qualified to psychoanalyze your opponent. "Polly Purebread, by using the word 'zucchini' in her posting, shows she has a bad case of penis envy." 6. Accuse your opponent of censorship. It is your right as an american citizen to post whatever the hell you want to the bbs (as guaranteed by the freedom of speech clause and screw the fcc). Anyone who tries to limit your cross-posting or move a flame war to email is either a communist, a fascist, or both. 7. Doubt their existence. You've never actually seen your opponent, have you? And since you're the center of the universe, you should have seen them by now, shouldn't you? Therefore, they don't exist! Call'em an ai project, to really piss them off. 8. Laugh at whatever they write, a good "hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha" should intimidate just about anyone. 9. When in doubt, insult. If you forget the other rules, remember this one. At some point during your wonderful career on bbs you will undoubtedly end up in a flame war with someone who is better than you. This person will expose your lies, tear apart your arguments, make you look generally like a bozo. At this point, there's only one thing to do, insult the dirtbag!!! "Oh yeah? Well, you do strange things with your frozen dinner!" 10. Make things up about your opponent. It's important to make your lies sound true. Preface your argument with the word "clearly." "Clearly, Fred Flooney is a liar, and a dirtball to boot." 11. Cross-post your article: everyone on the bbs is just waiting for the next literary masterpiece to leave your terminal. From "How to make microwave popcorn" to "When to hook the worm", they're all holding their breaths until your next post. Therefore, post everywhere. 12. Use the smiley to your advantage. You can call anyone just about anything as long as you include the smiley. On really nasty attacks add "j/k/r". When they gripe, call them an jerk for not being able to recognize sarcasm when they see it. 13. Should you post something exceedingly stupid and later regret it, don't worry. You needn't cancel the article. That only shows what a wimp you really are. Teny that you ever sent it. "It must be a forgery!" (yeah, that's the ticket, it's a forgery!) "someone broke into my account and sent it!", "it's that damn backbone cabal out to get me!" Take your pick, they're all guaranteed to work. 14. A really cheap shot is to call your opponent a "Communist". By itself, it really does nothing. But, when used often, and in enough articles, it can make you a bbs-legend. Mccarthy never had it so good, neither did Nixon. 15. Lie, cheat, steal, kill, leave the toilet seat up. 16. Never denigrate in E-mail. If you do this, then you must really be desperate to inflame someone. Wherever this flame war started, keep it there. Everyone on the bbs is waiting for the outcome. 17. Watch out for vigilantes. These people will often E-mail you and tell you that your flame in whatever sub is "not appropriate." What you should do about this is flame him/her the next chance you get (or sooner). Accuse them of taking away your rights guaranteed to you by the freedom of speech (see rule 6). 18. Finally, never edit your posts. This drives'em wild. Be sure to follow up as many posts as possible, even if you have nothing to say. The important thing is to get the "exposure" so that you can be called a "regular" in your pet bbsgroup. Never press "W" to reply to a post. Too much lucidity that way. Post in linear logic to each of the previous 5 posts. Separate lines of course. Some lucidity is required after all, and dump a hundred lines of your favorite macros in every post. -= computer humor =-= 13 =---------------------------------------------------- What IBM really stands for... According to Computer Digest (July, 1989) Retyped from The Report on IBM News Digest November 8, 1989 I Blame Mathematics I Breaks Monthly I Bring Madness I Broke Mine I Built Mine I bring manuals I'd Be Misinforming I'd Buy Macintosh I'll Buy Macintosh I'm Being Manipulated I'm Beyond Mistakes I'm Buying Macintosh I've Become Magnanimous I've Been Mangled I've Been Mauled I've Been Mesmerized I've Been Misled Ici Beaucoup Merde Iconoclastic Bilateral Monopoly Icons Bygones My Mom's Idealistically Backwards Microcomputers Ideas Bring Money Idiots Became Managers Idiots Being Mental Idle Brain Malfunction Ifs Buts Maybys Ill'manners Being Mandatory Ill-mannered Besotten Macrocasm Illustrious Bankruptcy Malenfactor Illustrious Busy Mice Imbecile Bad Micros Imensa Bola De Manteca Imitable Boring Microcomputers Immeasurable Bigheaded Malapert Immovable Brash Monolith Impeccably Blue-dressed Managers Imperial Bellicose Marauder Imperialist by Marketing Impersonal Bellicose Magnate Impious Bacchnalain Metropolis In Business (for) Money Inadequates Becoming Millionaires Inane Brutish Merchandising Incompatible Blue Machines Inconsistent Business machines Incontinent Bandolerisimo Moloch Increasingly Bad Manufacturing Increasingly Banal Movement Incredible Bowel Movement Incredibly Bad Merchandising Incredibly Ballsey Marketeers Incredibly Belligerent Merketing Incredibly Big Manufacturer Incredibly Big Monster Incredibly Bloody Minded Incredibly Boastful Mercenary Incredibly Boring Manuals Incredibly Broad Monolopy Incredibly Bullying Menace Indecision Breeds Mistakes Indecorous Big-named Medusoid Indigestion Bothers Me Industry Bowel Movement Industry's Biggest Mistake Industry's Bulging Monolith Inept Bulling Menace Inevitably Bad Marketing Inferior Before Macintosh Infernal Biggest Mistake Infernal Blue Machines Infinite Budget Merchandising Infinitely Baffling Motives Inherently Bad Manuals Innovation By Management Insanely Better Marketing Insensitivity Begets Mediocrity Inshallah Burak Ma'lesh Insidious Byzantine Mentality Insignificant Bothersome Machine Insipidly Bankrolling Millions Insolent Bickering Mal-der-mer Install Bigger Memory Insulting Boorish Manner Insultingly Boring Microcomputers Intensely Boring Machines Intentionally Braindamaged Machinery Interesting But Mediocre Interesting But Mundane Intergalactic Bottomline Mistake Internals By Mediocrity International Bit Mangler International Bowel Movement Intersmashable Byte manipulators Into Building Money Intriguingly Blue Motif Invented By Maladroits Invented By Marketing Invented By Murphy Irresponsibility Behaved Multinational It Broke Be It's Become Monolithic It's Been Malfunctioning It's Better 'morrow It's Better Manually It's Beyond Monolithic It's Broke Ma'am It's Bugging Me It's Bullshit Mommery Itty Bitty Machines Itty Bitty Mentality Itty Bitty Mouse Itty Bity Maharishi intercourse Beats Masturbation [I]diots [B]uilt [M]e [M]achine [A]lways [C]rashes. [I]f [N]ot, [T]he [O]perating [S]ystem [H]angs -= computer humor =-= 14 =---------------------------------------------------- Computer Program Virtually Eliminates Machine Errors Spokesmen for a local electronic firm have announced a computer program that through fresh application of an old technique - virtually eliminates lost time due to malfunction of computer components. Called OREMA (from latin "oremus", meaning "let us pray"), the program offers prayers at selected time intervals for the continued integrity of memory units, tape transports, and other elements subject to depravity. Basically liturgical in structure, OREMA uses standard petitions and intercessions stored on magnetic tapes in Latin, Hebrew, and FORTRAN. It holds regular maintenance services thrice daily on an automatic cycle, and operator intervention is required only for mounting tapes and making responses, such as "Amen", or "And With Thy Spirit", on the console typewriter. Prayers in Hebrew and FORTRAN are offered directly to the CPU, but Latin prayers may go to peripheral equipment for transfer to the CPU by internal subroutines. Although manufacturer supplied prayer reels cover all machine troubles known today, the program will add punch card prayers to any tape, as needed, after the final existing AMEN block. Classified prayer reels are available for government installations. In trials on selected machines, OREMA reduced by 98. 2 percent the average down time due to component failure. The manufacturer's spokesman emphasized, however, that OREMA presently defends only against malfunction of hardware. Requestor errors and other human blunders will continue unchecked until completion of a later version to be called SIN-OREMA. Reprinted from Data Link, March 1966, which reprinted from the source, W. S. Minkler, Jr., the Pittsburgh section of the American Nuclear Society, Jan. 1965. -= computer humor =-= 15 =---------------------------------------------------- Do, A Loop [sung to the tune of Doe, a deer] Do, a loop, a normal loop, Array, a 2-D storage space, Me, recursion, I call myself, Bar, a variable to chase. No, a value meaning not, Yes, a term to follow No, C, a lang where ]] will rot, That will bring us back to Do, Array, Me, Bar, No, Yes, C, DO, a loop, a...... -= computer humor =-= 16 =---------------------------------------------------- How to program in 'C' - addendum 1] Rewrite standard functions and give them your own obscure names. 2] Use obscure, proprietary, non-portable, compiled library packages so that you never have to move from the platform you love so well. 3] Use very descriptive comments like /* printf("Hello world\n"); */ before each function call 4] Remember - Carriage returns are for weenies. - tabs are for those who have not reached weenie-dom yet. 5] Include *LOTS* of inline assembly code. 6] "User Interfaces" are for morons. "Users" have no business interfacing with a professional product like yours. 7] If you are forced to comment your code (in English), then borrow comments from somebody else's code and sprinkle them throughout yours. It's quick, easy, and fun to watch people's expressions as they try to figure it out. 8] Remember to define as many pre-processor symbols as possible in terms of already defined symbols. This is considered 'efficient use of code'. How to debug a 'C' program - addendum 1] Since you got it to compile, the problem must be in the Other Guys Code. 2] If it's all your code then the problem *MUST* be in those unreliable Standard Libraries. See '1.' in the previous section. 3] Claim the bug reports are vicious lies meant to tarnish your sterling reputation as a 'C' programmer (well aren't they?). After all, those who wrote the reports couldn't even *read* your code. How could they possibly know if there was a bug or not? 3.A] If they could read your code, review "How to program in 'C'", above. 4] Claim that there wouldn't be a problem if this stingy Company/School/Wife/etc would spring for a copy of C++. -= computer humor =-= 17 =---------------------------------------------------- Introducing Studly-OS!! Version 1.0 The Only Operating System You Will Ever Need! Preface Now that HappyNet is up and running, and Leader Kibo is ably directing the entire world with his custom Mondo Zeugma 6866688786/XA/sxe/IV (see HappyNet Manifesto), the fastest and best computer ever built in the history of time and space (second best was Deep Thought), we at Studly Research, Inc. have come up with an operating system that is simultaneously capable of keeping up with Kibo's needs and sufficing for general use by all the rest of the common and sometimes ignorant citizens of this planet, and of any other planets we can think of. No doubt you have been endlessly entertained by the furious religious operating system wars now taking place on the PC hardware arena. Should you be content with DOS and Windows? No! Should you switch to OS/2? No! Should you try your luck running a buggy Windows NT beta? Never! How about NeXTstep/486, or the upcoming Pink, or maybe Apple's System 7/486, or Linux, or Cray XMP-OS/486? None of these!!! We at Studly Research, Inc. have come up with a solution so superior that the entire industry will soon switch over to our operating system and accompanying software. Microsoft will fold and Bill Gates will get a job working at a 7-11, handing out coupons. Apple will also collapse and John Sculley will be found lying unconscious in a pool with a can of Pepsi and a hypodermic needle lying nearby. IBM will survive, but will be forced to lay off another 400,000,000 employees, and eventually end up as a subsidiary of the Moscow McDonalds. The only surviving companies will be the cheap clone manufacturers, producing faster and cheaper machines with the label "Studly-Compatible" and "SPC" proudly displayed on the front panel. What Is Studly-OS? Studly-OS is the result of over three decades of intense operating systems reasearch at Studly Labs, also known as the Studly Laboratories For User Triumph, or SLUT. Extensive research with actual humans at SLUT, instead of the trained chimps used in most useability labs such as Xerox PARC*, Microsoft Barf-- and Borland Snooze--*, has determined that people are less interested in operating systems that offer a wide selection of native programs, or have a pretty interface, or simply go 'bing', than they are in the concept of an operating system that will quite simply solve ALL of their problems for them. Studly-OS is that operating system. Not only will Studly-OS make any clone computer, from a ten year-old XT to a 486/330DX10, capable of doing more than all the former operating systems ever developed, it will also quickly, seamlessly, and invisibly solve all of their personal problems and make them happy, rich, sexually irresistible and permanently wonderful. But What Is The Cost? Nothing. We at Studly Research, Inc. have gained from our own inventions to the extent that we are already happy, rich, sexually irresistible and permanently wonderful. We are offering Studly-OS to the public free of charge. Every ftp site will soon be carrying, and running under, Studly-OS, and free diskette, CD-ROM and Braille copies will be available at bookstores, K-Marts and oil refineries worldwide. How Is This Technological Miracle Accomplished? Most of the developments at Studly Research, Inc. are of course patent-protected and highly secret, although we do not balk at hyping tantalizing tidbits of Studly technology, simply to gain free press coverage. Studly-OS is built around a nanokernel, the advanced descendant of microkernel operating systems available today. Our crack team of coders, hackers and pizza enthusiasts took an early beta of Microsoft's Windows NT, completely disassembled and analyzed the code, and then built Studly-OS by doing everything completely differently. We'd like to thank Microsoft for $69 well spent as a helpful exercise on how not to design operating systems. Whereas NT's microkernel is fat enough to tip over a bus, Studly-OS's nanokernel fits in under 1k. Instead of a multiple message queue, Studly-OS uses a method where messages are intercepted before the application in question has even sent them out. We redesigned the Windows interface to appeal less to schizophrenics and came up with a fully object-oriented system where the objects not only were oriented with respect to each other, but oriented themselves to best suit the individual computer user, including sexual and political preferences. No longer is the system merely user-friendly, it is positively user-worshiping! The Operating System Respects The User People work in different ways, and Studly-OS automatically adjusts to this, painlessly, seamlessly, smoothly and invisibly. We realize that most computer users want their operating systems to pretty much stay out of the way and run any application they choose to throw at it. Studly-OS handles all file manipulation. You will never touch another configuration file or menu again! For example, when the user sticks the first disk of an application in a drive, or even in between the little air vents in the front of the case, Studly- OS automatically determines what the program is, where it should be installed and how it should be set up, and then proceeds to build the rest of the program based on the contents of the first disk, taking out features which you will never use and adding those which the software manufacturer blindly left out. It then opens the icon editor and lets you create the ultimate icon for that application, filling in any tedious or difficult painting bits along the way. It then adds sound and animation to the icon, and while you watch, loads the application in the background and does your work for you while you play a quick game of Wing Commander III. Studly-OS Is Compatible Not sure if your application will run under Studly-OS? Studly-OS runs ALL software programs written for DOS (including those using VCPI, DPMI and Shmoodoo memory management, by rewriting and optimizing the code before installing) Windows (including Win32, Win32s, Win32c, Win32nb, Win32ack and Win32thbbth!), OS/2, GEM, AmigaDOS (including games which refuse to run on any Amiga past a 500), NeXTstep, Unix (Studly-OS maintains a daily-updated database on every Unix variation in existence, and automatically recompiles any Unix program in the background to work on your system) TRS-DOS, Apple ][ DOS and ProDOS, Macintosh Systems 1 through 9, Timex-Sinclair ZX81 programs, Atari 2600, Nintendo and Sega game cartridges, Heathkit HDOS, CP/M (including utilities that used weird Z80 opcodes), Epson's Q-DOS, Cromenco DOS, RISC OS, Commodore C=64, 128, VIC-20 and Plus/4 programs, and Coleco ADAM software. If Studly-OS encounters an application written for a platform it does not support, it rewrites it to conform to established standards. If Studly-OS senses that a particular application is not running at sufficient speed, it rewrites the code until it exceeds the performance on the best hardware available. For example, one user managed to get Studly-OS to run Strike Commander on his XT with 8-bit VGA, and noted that the game response was "very smooth, at least 60 frames per second with no flicker or pauses that I could find." Studly-OS Offers Superior Compression Although the operating system itself, due to incredibly tight and sexy coding, fits into less than 32k of RAM and 500k of disk space, we realized that most user's applications are reaching such gargantuan sizes that we decided to include an advanced disk-compression package with the product. 16:1 lossless compression!! Yes, the reason this mythical product was never released to the marketplace was because we bought it out. Lock, stock, and barrel. You can compress a compressed file as many times as you like until all programs are down to the theoretical minimum of 1k! Yet still not lose any data. Of course, with all your programs at 1k, uncompression may take a little longer. However, we feel the extra disk space is truly worth it. Most graphics files, including .JPGs and .GIFs, can be safely compressed down to less than 32 bytes, especially the nudes, which all look pretty much the same anyway. Pictures of Madonna can be packed as small as 1 byte. Studly-OS Is Here, Now! No Microsoft FUD. No promises of shipments "when it's ready". Studly-OS is ready and available for you to install NOW! What are you waiting for? Studly-OS Is Bug-Free! Others promise, but we deliver. We don't have to name our product 3.1 just to fool people into thinking that it is a tested system. Studly-OS is, and will always be, version 1.0! There will never be a need for an upgrade! And no, if you discover a bug, we don't send in the SWAT team to prove that you are an inconsiderate moron with the technical knowledge of a squashed gnat that can't even find his way out of the refrigerator. In fact, if you do find a bug, we are prepared to give you a $1 million prize, and an all-expenses paid tour to the fabulous Studly RESEARCH LABS in beautiful Barbados, where you will get to meet the Studly-OS design team and go for dinner and drinks! Then we will send out patches to everyone in the world free of charge. Compare Studly-OS With Those "Other" Systems! Feature Studly-OS! DOS/ OS/2 NT Unix Windows Nanokernel technology Yes! No No Hah! No 16:1 Lossless compress Yes! No No No No Free Origin game Yes! No No Heh!! Hah! (rewritten to actually handle memory the way sane people would) Automatically finishes important work for you Yes! No No No Work??? Free hyper-animator to make Babylon 5 look like Popeye cartoons Yes! No No No No Ten million included .GIFs, .WAVs and .WOWs Yes! No No No WOWs? Automatically optimizes application code Yes! No No Optimize? No! Makes you feel sexy Yes! HAH!!! No No Sex??? Tastes good with ice- cream and chips Yes! No No No Food??? Makes Bill Gates seem like a weenie Yes! Yes Yes Yes Yes Balances your checkbook Yes! No No No Money?? Washes your car Yes! No No No Automobiles? Improves self-esteem Yes! No No Worsens Suicide Makes you rich Yes! No No No sorry Supports SMP Yes! No Soon Yes Sometimes Requires SMP No No No Yes No Message-passing Yes! No Yes Yes Yes Message-losing No No No Yes core dumped Message-SENSING Yes! No No No guru Zen Yes! No No No flower Software support Great! Lame OK Where? Software?? Technical assistance None needed! No No No ARMM Documentation quality Great! Docs? OK Huh? grep General studliness Super! Ouch! So-so ICK! alt.angst RAM requirements 32k 640k 8 meg 16 meg How much??? Disk space required 500k 1 meg 30 meg 80 meg rm * OSes supported 24 1 3 3 Support? Price Free! $60 $99 $495 $0 [ n [ $oo Here Are Some Real-Life Quotes Of People Who Have Used Studly-OS! "I love it! It makes me want to eat!" - Rush Limbaugh "Since it doesn't have the name Windows on it, it is an irrelevant platform." - Bill Gates "We will develop applications for Studly-OS if they sell two million copies in the first year, but they won't sell more than 25, no matter how many they actually sell." - Bill Gates "Would you like fries with that?" - Bill Gates "It's a beautiful day in the Studlyhood" - Fred Rogers "Pull the other one!" - Patsy "This is the most impressive operating system I have ever seen in my entire life. It makes everything else seem like damp kleenex. However, it will surely fail and become a dead operating system and fail and fail fail fail it must fail!!!! Because it doesn't have the power of Microsoft's marketing behind it." - Paul Somerson "I'm sure I've used Studly-OS before" - Shirley MacLaine "I will be introducing the new Studly-OS-compliant retroactive moderation specifications directly to the Net" - Dick Depew "I'm sorry, but I happen to own the copyrights to the letters O and S. Please send me all your money right away." - James "Kibo" Parry "Ack! Pft!" - Bill The Ceo "StudlyOS sucks!!!1111 Y00 think itz c00l but your rong!!!!!11111 I Cant run it on my Am1ga so what yoos is it????/ My Am1ga beats yor peecee anyday!!!!!! !!!11111111 Peecee even with StudlyOS cant beet Amiga because Amiga rules!!!! Amiga iz better because it is Amiga!!!1111 Nothing else is Amiga!!!11111" - B1FF Notes: * Palo Alto Research Center -- Boring Applications Rarely Fascinate --* Stupid Nonsensical Object-Oriented Ziff-Davis Enema HappyNet, Mondo Zeugma, and O and S are trademarks of Kibo. Windows is NOT a trademark of Microsoft. B1FF is a trademark of himself. -= computer humor =-= 18 =---------------------------------------------------- I stashed this away while reading an ARPA bulletin board in school a decade ago. It was posted by a Xerox PARC hacker (you know, the guys who *invented* EtherNet) as a test called "the systems qual." Dated: 2 September 1982 1 Pick from the following pictures the one which most accurately represents a computer: A.

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