From: cate3.osbu_north@xerox.com (Henry Cate III)
Reply-to: cate3.osbu_north@xerox.com
Organization: XSoft (A Xerox Company)
Date: 26 Sep 91 07:51:00 PDT (Thursday)
Subject: Life 7.I
----------------------------------------------------
From: ellens@ai.mit.edu (Ellen Spertus)
TV is in its infancy. That must be why it needs changing so much.
----------------------------------------------------
From: Vincent.Cate@furmint.nectar.cs.cmu
If the pen is mightier than the sword, and a picture is worth
a thousand words, how dangerous is a FAX?
----------------------------------------------------
A Jay Leno joke, quoted in the Mercury News:
"Why does NASA want to go to Mars? There's no water there, there's no
plant life, and there's no atmosphere. Why don't they just go to LA?"
----------------------------------------------------
As seen on the sheet accompanying a new MasterCard(TM):
VALUE YOUR CARD!
Your card should be protected in the
same manner as you would handle cash.
Make sure it is returned to you afer
each transaction.
----------------------------------------------------
There was a man that always brought his dog to Carolina [Or any college!]
football games. Whenever the team made a good play, the dog would run up and
down the sidelines excitedly. When the team kicked a field goal, the dog would
run out on the field, jump around and bark in complete exhuberance! Well, the
crowd really enjoyed its new adopted "mascot." At halftime, a fan went up to
the dog's owner and asked, "Your dog does all these entertaining stunts when
the team does good things. What does he do when the team scores a TOUCHDOWN?"
"I'm not sure, I've only brought him to 9 games..."
----------------------------------------------------
-"I have two hobbies -- hunting and Women."
-"Really ? What do you hunt ?"
-"Women."
-"I'm dreaming of being a millionare, just like my father."
-"Oh ? Is your father a millionare ?"
-"No, but he's dreaming of being one."
----------------------------------------------------
From Lloyd Smith, MD, during his address at the graduation ceremony for
the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, May 25:
"Then there was the man who was so imbued with science that he sent
two of his children to Sunday school and kept the other two home as
controls."
----------------------------------------------------
Q: How many Unix Support staff does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Read the man page!
Q: How many Support staff does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None. The bulb was fine you just forgot to turn the switch on.
Q: Is there a UNIX FORTRAN optomizer?
A: Yeah, "rm *.f"
Q: Is there a proper procedure for asking the support staff questions?
A: Questions will not be answered by the support staff unless the
proper procedure is used.
Q: How do I send electronic mail?
A: I'm busy now, please send me e-mail.
Q: Why do support staff email messages always end in quotes no one
understands?
A: "The way is void" -Musashi
Q: Is there some documentation for the "tn3270" command?
A: It's here with a description of emacs vi-mode.
----------------------------------------------------
Computer hacker's response upon being caught burglarizing a house:
(1) "I have a perfect right to be here; you don't have a very good
lock on your door."
(2) "I had a duty to break in to show you that your lock can be picked."
(3) "I can pick locks; I'm a genius of great value to society."
----------------------------------------------------
Elegant, adj, of code: when the description of the
algorithm a code implements is longer than the code
itself.
Hack, adj, of code: when the description of the function
of a line of code is longer than the line itself.
----------------------------------------------------
Picture two rocks, sinking to the bottom of the water. One rock is
labelled "Burroughs", the other labelled "Sperry". The "Burroughs" rock,
holding a piece of rope, says "Maybe if we tie ourselves together,
we'll float."
It was much funnier when I was working at Burroughs/Unisys, just after
the merger.
----------------------------------------------------
"... Perhaps of even greater significance is the
continuous and profound distrust of science and technology
that the environmental movement displays. The environmental
movement maintains that science and technology cannot be
relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to produce
a pesticide that is safe, or even bake a loaf of bread that
is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives.
When it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that
there is one area in which the environmental movement
displays the most breathtaking confidence in the reliability
of science and technology, an area in which, until recently,
no one -- even the staunchest supporters of science and
technology -- had ever thought to assert very much confidence
at all. The one thing, the environmental movement holds,
that science and technology can do so well that we are
entitled to have unlimited confidence in them, is FORECAST
THE WEATHER! -- for the next one hundred years..."
George Reisman, "The Toxicity of Environentalism"
----------------------------------------------------
From: peter@aix1.uottawa.ca (Pete Hickey)
When I was a T.A., a student came to me wondering why his
Pascal program wouldn't print anything. I compiled it
and ran it myself, and sure enough, no output. I looked
through the program, and the WRITELNs were there. This became
a problem I *had* to solve. I added some of my own, and
still, nothing was written to the screen.
After about 15 minutes of careful examination, I noticed that
the *entire* program had been commented out. This guy was
compiling a comment. I pointed this out to him, but he
said to me,
"Yeah but I had to do that. It was the only way to get
rid of all of the errors."
----------------------------------------------------
From: tact04.enet!sid@decwrl.UUCP (Sid Gordon, Digital Israel, EIS)
My brother claims that this morning he heard his 5-year-old
and his 3-year-old in the bathroom together and eavesdropped on
their conversation:
Little brother: What do I do now?
Big brother: Throw the toilet paper in the toilet.
Little brother: Like this?
Big brother: Yeah.
Little brother: Now what?
Big brother: Hit "ENTER".
Little brother: "ENTER"?
Big brother: I mean "flush".
----------------------------------------------------
T h e V O G O N N e w s S e r v i c e
VNS TECHNOLOGY WATCH: [Mike Taylor, VNS Correspondent]
===================== [Littleton, MA, USA ]
COMPUTERWORLD 1 April
CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson,
Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating
system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April
Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent
UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:
"In 1969, ATT had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/ATT
Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early
release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in
Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and
power. Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a
hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien 'Lord of the
Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics
environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating
environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as
complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration
levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more
risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped
version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually
trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional
cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped
when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when ATT and
other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has
taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even
marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody,
but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the
general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have
been working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past
few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly
bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago."
Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including ATT, Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time.
Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools,
including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they
had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance
their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM
spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a
hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000,
merely stating 'VM will be available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic
statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the
Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P.
T. Barnum was correct.
In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating
that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates
concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM
spokesman have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is
an internal prank gone awry.
{COMPUTERWORLD 1 April}
{contributed by Bernard L. Hayes}
[][][][][][][][] VNS Edition : 2336 Tuesday 4-Jun-1991 [][][][][][][][]
----------------------------------------------------
The Day the Telephone Bug Bit
-- by Richard Pence
Those big phone outages of recent weeks have had me feeling a
bit guilty over what's been happening.
You see, I remember exactly how all this started. Back in
1950 I was a novice seahand aboard a cruiser based In Philadelphia,
barely six months out of high school and fresh from the plains of
South Dakota.
One Friday night in November, we were granted shore leave at
the end of a two week training cruise. Homesick and seasick, I
headed immediately for the row of pay phones that lined the dock.
Depositing a carefully preserved nickel (remember?), I dialed
"0." The following is a roughly verbatim account of what transpired
after the Philadelphia operator answered:
"I'd like to place a station to station collect call to the Bob Pence
residence in Columbia, South Dakota," I said in my best telephone
voice.
The Philadelphia operator was sure she had heard wrong. "You mean
Columbia, South Carolina, don't you?"
"No, I mean Columbia, South Dakota." I had tried to call home once
before, and I was ready for that one.
"Certainly. What is the number, please?" I could tell she still
didn't believe me.
"They don't have a number," I mumbled. I'd tried to call home before,
and I knew what was coming.
She was incredulous. "They don't have a number?"
"I don't think so."
"I can't complete the call without a number. Do you have it?" she
demanded.
I didn't relish seeming like even more of a bumpkin, but I was in the
Navy and I knew authority when I heard it. "Well ... the only thing I
know is ... two longs and a short."
I think that's the first time she snorted. "Never mind. I'll get the
number for you. One moment please."
There followed an audible click and a long period of silence while she
apparently first determined if, indeed, there was a Columbia, S.D.,
and then if it was possible to call there.
When she returned to the line, she was armed with the not-insignificant
knowledge necessary complete her task.
In deliberate succession, she dialed an operator in Cleveland, asked
her to dial one in Chicago, asked Chicago to dial Minneapolis, and
Minneapolis to dial Sioux City, Iowa. Sioux City called Sioux Falls,
S.D., and the operator there dialed one in Aberdeen, S.D. At last,
Aberdeen dialed the operator in Columbia.
By this time, Philadelphia's patience was wearing thin, but when
Columbia answered, she knew what had to be done.
"The number for the Bob Pence residence, please," she said, now in
control.
Columbia didn't even hesitate. "Two longs and a short," she declared.
Philadelphia was set back for an instant but valiantly plowed on. "I
have a collect call from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for anyone at
that number. Will you please ring?"
"They're not home," said Columbia, again not missing a beat.
Philadelphia digested this and decided not to press the point.
Instead, she relayed the message I'd already heard. "There is no one
at that number, sir. Would you like to try again in later?"
Columbia quickly interrupted: "Is that you, Dick?"
"Yeah, Margaret ... Where are the folks?"
Philadelphia was baffled, but her instincts told her to look out for
the company. "Sir, madam ... you can't ..."
Margaret ignored her. "They're up at the school house at the
basketball game. Want me to ring?"
I knew I was pushing my luck with Philadelphia, so I said it likely
would be too much trouble to get them out of the game.
"No trouble at all," said Margaret. "It's halftime."
Philadelphia was still in there trying to protect the company. By this
time, though, she was out of words. "But ... but ... " she stammered.
I caved in to Margaret, mainly because I didn't want to have to start
over later. "All right."
Philadelphia made one last effort. Mustering her most official tone,
she insisted: "But this is a station to station collect call!"
"That's all right, honey," said Columbia, "I'll just put it on Bob's
bill."
Philadelphia was still protesting when the phone rang and was answered
at the school house.
"I have a station-to-station collect call for Bob Pence," Philadelphia
said, certain that Ma Bell had somehow been had.
"This is he," replied my father.
"Go ahead," whispered an astonished Philadelphia.
I'm glad I couldn't see her face when I began my end of the conversation
the way all Midwesterners do:
"Hi, Dad, how's the weather?"
"Jeez," said Philadelphia and clicked off.
Now comes the confession. I have it on good authority it was the next
Monday morning that AT&T began to automate phone service. And now look
where we are.
July 16 {Philadelphia Inquirer}, on the editorial page.
Richard Pence is a Washington, D.C., writer and editor. He wrote this
for the {Washington Post}.
Back to my Life Humor Page
Back to my humor page
Back to my home page