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From: cate3@netcom.com (Henry Cate)
Message-Id: [199405261357.GAA02904@netcom.com]
To: JWry.dl@netcom.com
Subject: Life A.L
Reply-to: cate3@netcom.com
Status: R
---------------
Date: 7 Sep 93 12:22:17 PDT (Tuesday)
Subject: Life A.L
----------------------------------------------------
The following are from the mailing list:
silent-tristero@world.std.com
--------------------------
From: dave mankins [dm@think.com]
Would the pre-Tina Brown _New Yorker_ run a cartoon about the Internet?
(If it hasn't been faxed to you yet:
One dog, sitting at a terminal, to another: ``On the Internet,
no one knows you're a dog.'')
--------------------------
From: Michael Hawley [mike@whammo.media.mit.edu]
"For the first time since the invention of the telescope,
a comet is hitting a planet."
-- Amateur astronomer David Levy of Tucson, co-discoverer of a comet
called Shoemaker-Levy 9 that's due to strike Jupiter next summer.
--------------------------
From: Ephraim Vishniac [ephraim@think.com]
In case anybody thinks there's anything the least bit novel about
this, read Jack London's _Martin_Eden_ (about 1910?). Eden struggles
against great odds to educate himself and to find an outlet for his
writing. When at last his writing begins to sell, he stops writing
completely and feeds the publishers his huge pile of formerly rejected
manuscripts. They snap up the same stuff they previously sneered at,
of course, while Eden's estimate of their intelligence goes through
the floor. Disillusioned, he kills himself at the height of his
popularity.
--------------------------
From: Nichael Cramer [ncramer@bbn.com]
Q: KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
A: Who's there?
Q: Recursion.
A: Recursion who?
Q: KNOCK KNOCK
A: Who's there?
Q: Recursion.
A: Recursion who?
Q: KNOCK
A: Who's there?
Q: Recursion.
A: Recursion who?
Q:Uh... this is the part I've not figured out yet...
--------------------------
Subj: someone stole my next sig
From: John Robinson [jr@ksr.com]
"A typical long haired half mad computer programmer on a typical computer
keyboard with odd toys scattered liberally about."
--------------------------
From: dave mankins [dm@hri.com]
License plate seen on an old Cadillac in New Hampshire:
CADZILLA
From: Dick Koolish [koolish@bbn.com]
--------------------------
From: John Robinson [jr@ksr.com]
seen in Forbes magazine, a quote from book by Paul F. Boller, Jr,
entitled Presidential Anecdotes:
After he became president, John Tyler decided to take a trip and sent his
son Bob to order a special train. The railroad superintendent, a devout
Whig, told Bob that he didn't run special trains for Presidents. "What!"
cried Bob, "didn't you furnish a special train for the funeral of General
Harrison?" "Yes," said the superintendent. "And if you bring your father
here in that shape, you shall have the best train on the road!"
--------------------------
From: till@lucid.com (Don Tillman)
My sister lives in Colorado and reports on the Pope's visit. It seems
that one of the local Denver brew pubs cooked up a special beer just
for the occasion called... [get ready...] [you know it's comin'...]
"Ale Mary, Full of Taste"
--------------------------
From: Sean Colbath [sean@think.com]
]From: bates@mango.ucsb.edu (Andrew M. Bates)
Just to put all the criticism about the Newton into perspective, here's
a paraphrase of a review of the Macintosh 128K from BYTE, February 1984:
"Although the Macintosh is a good computer, it is much too expensive to
make any sort of niche in the home computer market. That role will be
left to other, less expensive personal computers such as the TI/99,
the TRS-80, the IBM PCjr, and the Coleco Adam."
--------------------------
From: rsalz@osf:org
--
The worlds first 3-D .sig! + . . . . . . .
Look at the picture on the + : : : : : : :
right cross-eyed and really + 3 3 3 3 3 3 3
_really_ close. + D D D D D D D
--------------------------
From: harry@brain.jpl.nasa.gov (Harry Langenbacher)
Seen on a hall wall at JPL:
(each letter appears to have been cut out of a magazine
and pasted on the paper )
we have your
satelite if you
want it back
send 20 billion
in martian
money. No funny
business or
you will never
see it again
--------------------------
From: Fred Beihold [beihold@ll.mit.edu]
I might have already sent you this. Sign was seen:
I will heel you.
I will save your sole.
I will even dye for you.
on a shoe repair store near Central Sq.
--------------------------
From: "Russell Nelson" [nelson@crynwr.com]
Subj: .sig of the day
Christopher Davis # People on the net are always telling other people to "get
[ckd@kei.com] # a life." It would be so much simpler if there were one
[ckd@eff.org] # available under the GPL. "If you use this life, you must
[CKD1] MIME RIPEM # tell other people where to get a life of their own."
--------------------------
From: "Dan Franklin" [dan@diamond.bbn.com]
This is the summary statement from an extensive discussion of address formats
that appeared in one of the network-related USENET groups recently. Apparently
there are several proposed addressing formats to replace the
obviously-too-small 32 bits currently in use on the Internet. Some of these
formats are 64 bits wide, while others are arbitrarily long. The author,
Tony Whyman (whyman@mwassocs.demon.co.uk), discusses some addressing needs,
with particular respect to routing, and shows that 64 bits is a bit tight.
He concludes:
Even though 64-bits may be sufficient to identify all atoms in the
known universe, it is clearly not sufficient to address them.
--------------------------
From: danfuzz@kaleida.com (Dan Bornstein)
Two eight-hundred numbers to be aware of:
1-800-COOL-101: A free service set up by MCI that lets you hear
any of 12 different "cool refreshing" sound bites to keep you
going through the hot summer.
1-800-7-NEWTON: The Apple Newton info line, with a script too
cheesy for words.
--------------------------
From: Paul Dourish [dourish@parc.xerox.com]
X-Subliminal-Message: Send me all your money
] My email address (an alternate address, actually) was recently printed in a
] magazine, and I've been getting about five messages per day for the last
] month. Most of them have been appropriate and gracious, but on the weirder
] edge:
]
] One guy wrote simply "love your hair" (the article had a photo).
EuroPARC was once featured on "Tomorrow's World", a once-great and now
sadly rather pathetic popular science programme on the BBC. The film
report focussed on our video communication work, and featured a
good-looking colleague of mine in her traditional type-cast role as
"video bimbette" (her term).
At one point, a mail message appeared from her, and, in the interests
of corporate advertising (since the BBC had refused to identify the
research lab in their report), it carried her real email address,
which flashed on the screen for a second.
Yes, she did get mail from it. This is kinda worrying -- I mean, you
don't want mail from the kind of people who not only watch this show,
but *video* it.
--------------------------
From: Sherri.Alashari@Eng.Sun.COM (Sherri Al-Ashari)
Remember that Microsoft joke that someone sent out last week, the one
that says it doesn't take any Microsoft engineers to screw in a
light bult because they'd just redefine darkness to be the standard?
Well it was amazingly prescient.
Seattle's Saturday newspaper carried a front-page story about Bill
Gates' most recent traffic ticket. Rather than pay the $47 fine for
turning left against *three* "No Left Turn" signs, he had his
lawyers challenge the legality of the sign! And not only that sign;
they asked the city to prove it has the legal right to post any
traffic signs!! Can you believe it. The challenge didn't work, but
the city was so slow about proving the signs okay--it's not like
they do it every day--the traffic judge dismissed the ticket.
So next time you hear something about MS in jest, think twice.
--------------------------
Monday morning God decided that the world had reached the point of no return.
So, he called Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and Bill Gates to the gates of
heaven. He informed them of his decision and told them to go back to their
people and prepare them for the end of the world on Thursday.
Boris Yeltsin gets on state television and tells his people that he has bad
news and worse news. After decades of telling the Soviet citizens that there
is no God, he now realizes that he was wrong. He has seen God with his own
eyes. Worse yet, God has decided to destroy the world and each person needs to
prepare for Thursday as each sees fit.
Bill Clinton calls a press conference and says that he has good news and bad
news. After centuries of telling the US citizens that there is a God, he has
proof that we've been right. He has seen God with his own eyes. But the bad
news is that God has decided to destroy the world and each person needs to
prepare for Thursday as each sees fit.
Bill Gates calls an all-hands meeting. He says that he has wonderful news and
even more wonderful news. God, by calling him to the gates of heaven with the
leaders of the two most powerful nations in the world, has just confirmed how
important Bill Gates really is. The even better news is that on Thursday, IBM
will stop shipping OS/2.
--------------------------
From: John Robinson [jr@ksr.com]
[many headers stripped; this is apparently from a Boston Comic News ad]
WE ARE MICROSOFT
OS/2 IS IRRELEVANT
UNIX IS IRREVELANT
OPENNESS IS FUTILE
PREPARE TO BE ASSIMILATED
--------------------------
Sender: Chris Kent Kantarjiev [cak@parc.xerox.com]
------- Forwarded Message
... I thought you might like to know what Abraham Lincoln would've
said if he'd been writing his notes on a Newton instead of paper.
"Bookstore avis screen deans ago, our fort fathers brownies
front it on fits continent a new nation, concerned in in berry
and bridge area to fire proposition that air me fire created
erasers...."
--------------------------
From: John Robinson [jr@ksr.com]
from someone at JPL...
--------
There are lots of theories posted on people's office doors here at JPL, like
the picture of two martians in a UFO pulled up alongside MO, and one of them
dashing from MO to their ship with a box in his hand, saying, "Ok, I got the
radio, let's get outta here!" My personal favorite is the letter that's made
from cut-out magazine letters saying, "We have your spacecraft. If you want
it back send 20 billion in Martian dollars, and no funny business if you ever
want to see it again." Some of the theories are less serious.
--------------------------
From: Andrew B Jones [ajones@world.std.com]
CHILDREN RETRIEVE 2,000-YEAR-OLD EGG AFTER DEAL
SYDNEY, Australia (Reuter) - Six children who found a giant
fossilized egg which floated from Madagascar 2,000 years ago to
Australia, then buried it to stop it from being confiscated, dug
it up again Friday and gave it to a museum for safekeeping.
The egg of the extinct Madagascan elephant bird was handed
to the Western Australian Museum in Perth Friday after it
insured the fossil for Australian $165,000, one of the children
told Reuters.
The children claim ``finders, keepers,'' while the Western
Australian government says it was found on public land and
therefore belongs to the government.
Western Australian Arts Minister Peter Foss said Friday the
children had agreed to a deal whereby the egg would be put on
display Monday and a public appeal would be launched to raise
money to pay them for the egg.
The government has agreed the children should receive
$106,000. It will pay the egg's scientific value -- about
$16,500 -- and launch a public appeal to raise the rest.
The children found the egg while playing in sand dunes in
Cervantes about 150 miles north of Perth in January.
--------------------------
In article [23eaftINNbdb@darkstar.UCSC.EDU], eugene@nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) writes:
] I think the thing we have learned about building better OSes is not
] to place everything (including the kitchen sink) in the OS.
] We need a theory of OS building along the lines of language theory, so
] we can pick and choose minimal (but common) features. But this was
] hashed back in the mid-70s. But I suspect that soon, my kitchen sink will
] have a microprocessor in it, and I should be concern what OS it should have.
--------------------------
Tanenbaum's "Computer Networks", second edition, p.49:
Image that you have trained your St. Bernard, Bernie, to carry a box
of three floppy disks instead of a flask of brandy. (When your disk
fills up, you consider that an emergency.) These floppy disks each
contain 250,000 bytes. The dog can travel to your side, wherever you
may be, at 18 km/hour. For what range of distances does Bernie have
a higher data rate than a 300 bps telephone line?
--------------------------
From: zsmith@adoc.xerox
Actually, about 15 years ago, there was a nice calculation working out the
bandwidth of a semi filled with cartridge tapes driving coast to coast. The
calculation pointed out that (compared with satellite transmission) not only was
it *cheaper* to buy the truck, fill it with the tapes of data, and dump it in
the ocean when you got there---it was actually *faster*, given the
then-available bandwidth.
--------------------------
From: Patrick Tufts [zippy@cs.brandeis.edu]
From: Franklin Davis [fad@Think.COM]
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 93 15:49:20 EDT
Actually, the best bandwidth calculation I ever saw was a
fully-loaded freight train of CD-ROMs going coast-to-coast.
You must mean DASL (direct access steam locomotive).
Oh sure, the bandwidth is great, but the latency? Don't ever let IBM
sell you one of these dinosaurs.
--------------------------
One great way to generate some net volume is to post a message
complaining about everyone else's spelling and "grammer". But I
thought this followup worth sharing, especially since "it's" errors
tend to peeve me. (from the RAILROAD listserv list).
/jr
------- Start of forwarded message -------
From: Ed Alfonsin [ALFONSEJ%SNYPOTVX.bitnet@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU]
Anyone who is going to preach from a 'protocol platform' should check for
standardized spelling in his or her text--'grammar' is the standard spelling.
(It's not quite the same as spelling the color designation 'grey' or 'gray'
depending on personal preference.)
The problem with the one-word form for 'of it' arises because it's the newest
pronoun in the language and we're just not used to its appearance. (You won't
find it in Shakespeare or the King James Bible, for example--the KJV uses 'his'
for both 'of him' and 'of it.')
Please, let's stay with railroads and not get into non-issues like spelling--
just remember it was a mark of learning in Shakespeare's day to be able to
spell a word in a different fashion every time one used it; any idiot could
learn one way--it took genius to think up new ways. And a lot of our list
people have remained in the grand Renaissance tradition. Let's all just bite
our tongues and spelling checkers and enjoy the trains. :-)
Ed Alfonsin/English at SUNY Potsdam
Really a Nineteenth Century Philologist Born a Hundred Years Too Late
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