Costello calls Abbott with some questions about Unix:
Costello: What is the command that will tell me the revision code of a program ?
Abbott: Yes, that's correct.
Costello: No, what is it ?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: So, which is the one ?
Abbott: No. which is used to find the
program.
Costello: Stop this. Who are you ?
Abbott: Use who am i not who r
yoo. You can also finger yoo to get information about
yoo.
Costello: All I want to know is what finds the revision code ?
Abbott: Use what.
Costello: That's what I am trying to find out. Isn't that true ?
Abbott: No. true gives you 0.
Costello: Which one ?
Abbott: true gives you 0. which
programname
Costello: Let's get back to my problem. What program? How do I find it?
Abbott: Type find / -name it -print to find
it. Type what program to get the revision code.
Costello: I want to find the revision code.
Abbott: You can't find revisioncode, you
must use what program.
Costello: Which command will do what I need?
Abbott: No. which command will find
command.
Costello: I think I understand. Let me write that.
Abbott: You can write that only if
that is a user on your system.
Costello: Write what?
Abbott: No. write that. what
program.
Costello: Cut that out!
Abbott: Yes. those are valid files for cut.
Don't forget the options.
Costello: Do you always do this ?
Abbott: du will give you disk usage.
Costello: HELP!
Abbott: help is only used for Source Code
Control System (SCCS).
Costello: You make me angry.
Abbott: No, I don't make me angry but I did
make programname when I was upset once.
Costello: I don't want to make trouble, so no more.
Abbott: No more? which will
help you find more. Every system has more.
Costello: Nice help! I'm confused more now!
Abbott: Understand that since help is such a
small program, it is better not to nice help. and more
now is not allowed but at now is. Unless of course
now is a file name.
Costello: This is almost as confusing as my PC.
Abbott: I didn't know you needed help with
pc. Let me get you to the Pascal compiler team.
From: [email protected] (Peter McWilliams)
The BBC web pages have links which allow you to send web pages to email addresses and to include a text message.
I just sent myself a page with the word Saturday in the body of the message. It arrived with the word changed to Sa****ay!
Hmmm. So I tried sending...
"I hope you still have your appetite for scraps of dickens when I bump into you in class in Scunthorpe, Essex on saturday"
Yes! It replied...
"I hope you still have your appetite for s****s of dickens when I ***p into you in class in S****horpe, Es*** on sa****ay"
Missed the ass, the tit and the dick though.
---Peter Mc*****ams
"This is not possible. **Impossible**. It will involve design change and no body in our team knows the design of the system. And above that nobody in our company knows the language in which this software has been written. So even if somebody wants to work on it, they can't. If you ask my personal opinion the company should never take these type of projects."
"This project will involve design change. Currently we don't have people who have experience in this type of work. Also the language is unknown so we will have to arrange for some training if we take this project. In my personal opinion, we should avoid taking this project."
"This project involves design change in the system and we don't have much experience in that area. Also not many people are trained in this area. In my personal opinion we can take the project but we should ask for some more time."
"This project involves design re-engineering. We have some people who have worked in this area and some who know the language. So they can train other people. In my personal opinion we should take this project but with caution."
"This project will show the industry our capabilities in remodeling the design of a complete system. We have all the necessary skills and people to execute this project successfully. Some people have already given in-house training in this area to other people. In my personal opinion we should not let this project go by under any circumstance."
"These are the type of projects in which our company specialize. We have executed many project of the same nature for many big clients. Trust me when I say that you are in the safest hand in the Industry. In my personal opinion we can execute this project successfully and that too well with in the given time frame."
When the Software industry had badly gone down, three software giants Sun, SCO(UNIX) ,and Microsoft started producing condoms and named them Java-condom, CondomiX, and MS-Condoms 98 respectively.
A customer using Java-condom complained to Sun that the condom didn't fit correctly. Sun replied: "Wait till we get the ISO standard". They boasted that it would fit any size irrespective of the underlying structure.
Well, the customer switched to CondomiX and found that by the time he would finish reading the instructions given along with it, his wife would fall asleep, and he himself would forget why he was using CondomiX.
Finally, he switched to MS-Condoms 98. To his surprise it was so good [...] and comfortable! He used it happily. Six months later, he found that his wife was pregnant. He got angry and complained to Microsoft. He got the following reply from Microsoft:
A PATCH IS COMING SOON [...]!!!
(With Apologies to Lewis Carroll)
'Twas e-mail, and the ftp
Did route and telnet to the node.
All rlogin to Xterms free
To let gopher download."Beware the Internet, my son!
The posts that spam, the speech that's free!
Beware the Netscape cache, and shun
The AOL mail id!"He took his HP mouse in hand.
Long time a higher bandwidth sought --
And wished had he for his old PC
A faster modem bought.And, as that wistful thought he gripped,
The Internet, with bait of flame,
Ran applets through the Javascript,
And mailbombed as it came!The war he waged! As on each page
The HP mouse he double-clicked!
And 'twas absurd, the hype he'd heard
'Bout sites that he had picked."And, hast thou surfed the Internet?
Come link my page, my newbie bud!
O Lycos night! Yahoo! Excite!"
He messaged on his MUD.'Twas e-mail, and the ftp
Did route and telnet to the node.
All rlogin to Xterms free
To let gopher download.
by Mike Hammerwocky Hammond.
The Top 10 ways a Computer Guy can impress his date:
ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.
BEEPILEPSY: The brief seizure people sometimes have when their beeper goes off (especially in vibrator mode). Characterized by physical spasms, goofy facial expressions and interruption of speech in mid-sentence.
ALPHA GEEK: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. "Ask Larry, he's the alpha geek around here."
CHIPS AND SALSA: Chips = hardware, salsa = software. "Well, first we gotta figure out if the problem's in your chips or your salsa."
DANCING BALONEY: Little animated GIFs and other Web F/X that are useless and serve simply to impress clients. "This page is kinda dull. Maybe a little dancing baloney will help."
DEPOTPHOBIA: Fear associated with entering a Home Depot because of how much money one might spend. Electronics geeks experience SHACKOPHOBIA.
FLIGHT RISK: Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave a company or department soon.
GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is. "We were so lost in generica, I actually forgot what city we were in."
IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The O.J. trials were a prime example.
MIDAIR PASSENGER EXCHANGE: Grim air-traffic-controller speak for a head-on collision. Midair passenger exchanges are quickly followed by "aluminum rain."
PEBCAK: Tech support shorthand for "Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard." Techies are a frustrated, often arrogant lot. They've submitted numerous acronyms and terms that poke fun at the clueless users who call them up with frighteningly stupid questions.
Another variation on the above is ID10T: "This guy has an ID-Ten-T on his system."
PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.
SQUARE-HEADED GIRLFRIEND: Another word for a computer. The victim of a square-headed girlfriend is a "computer widow."
TELEPHONE NUMBER SALARY: A salary (or project budget) that has seven digits.
UMFRIEND: A sexual relation of dubious standing. "This is uh [...] Dale, my [...] um [...] friend [...]"
UNINSTALLED: Euphemism for being fired. Heard on the voice mail of a vice president at a downsizing computer firm: "You have reached the number of an uninstalled vice president. Please dial our main number and ask the operator for assistance." See also DECRUITMENT.
VULCAN NERVE PINCH: The taxing hand position required to reach all of the appropriate keys for certain commands. For instance, the warm re-boot for a Mac II computer involves simultaneously pressing the Control key, the Command key, the Return key and the Power On key.
YUPPIE FOOD STAMPS: The ubiquitous $20 bills spewed out of ATMs everywhere. Often used when trying to split the bill after a meal: "We all owe $8 each, but all anybody's got is yuppie food stamps."
From March 2001/Vol. 44, No. 3 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM by EDSGER W. DIJKSTRA:
In academia, in industry, and in the commercial world, there is a widespread belief that computing science as such has been all but completed and that, consequently, computing has matured from a theoretical topic for the scientists to a practical issue for the engineers, the managers, and the entrepreneurs.
[...]
I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, "How not to make a mess of it", has not been met. On the contrary, most of our systems are much more complicated than can be considered healthy, and are too messy and chaotic to be used in comfort and confidence. The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed.
For us scientists it is very tempting to blame the lack of education of the average engineer, the shortsightedness of the managers, and the malice of the entrepreneurs for this sorry state of affairs, but that won't do. You see, while we all know that unmastered complexity is at the root of the misery, we do not know what degree of simplicity can be obtained, nor to what extent the intrinsic complexity of the whole design has to show up in the interfaces. We simply do not know yet the limits of disentanglement. We do not know yet whether intrinsic intricacy can be distinguished from accidental intricacy.
To put it bluntly, we simply do not know yet what we should be talking about, ... The moral is that whether computing science is finished will primarily depend on our courage and our imagination.
by Peter Deutsch.
Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences.
Given that there is a lot of discussion about whether or not our LAN really does have a System Administrator, and given that no empirical evidence of the existence or non-existence of the System Administrator is extant, I thought it would be helpful to have a frank and open discussion about the issues surrounding the concept.
Here are some popular arguments:
However:
At least this resolves one of the major issues: the Spinozist argument proves that *if* the System Administrator does exist, it cannot be intelligent.
The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and the users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and had been influenced by the "ratio studiorum" of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach---if not the Kingdom of Heaven---the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.
You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counterreformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions [...]
And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is Talmudic and cabalistic.
Umberto Eco, "La bustina di Minerva", Espresso (September 30, 1994).
by Scott Adams
Engineering is so trendy these days that everybody wants to be one. The word "engineer" is greatly overused. If there's somebody in your life who you think is trying to pass as an engineer, give him this test to discern the truth.
You walk into a room and notice that a picture is hanging crooked. You:
The correct answer is "C" but partial credit can be given to anybody who writes "It depends" in the margin of the test or simply blames the whole stupid thing on "Marketing."
Engineers have different objectives when it comes to social interaction. "Normal" people expect to accomplish several unrealistic things from social interaction:
In contrast to "normal" people, engineers have rational objectives for social interactions:
To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two categories:
Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems. Normal people don't understand this concept; they believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
No engineer looks at a television remote control without wondering what it would take to turn it into a stun gun. No engineer can take a shower without wondering if some sort of Teflon coating would make showering unnecessary. To the engineer, the world is a toy box full of suboptimized and feature-poor toys.
Clothes are the lowest priority for an engineer, assuming the basic thresholds for temperature and decency have been satisfied.
If no appendages are freezing or sticking together, and if no genitalia or mammary glands are swinging around in plain view, then the objective of clothing has been met. Anything else is a waste.
Dating is never easy for engineers. A normal person will employ various indirect and duplicitous methods to create a false impression of attractiveness. Engineers are incapable of placing appearance above function. Fortunately, engineers have an ace in the hole. They are widely recognized as superior marriage material: intelligent, dependable, employed, honest, and handy around the house. While it's true that many normal people would prefer not to date an engineer, most normal people harbor an intense desire to mate with them, thus producing engineer-like children who will have high-paying jobs long before losing their virginity.
Male engineers reach their peak of sexual attractiveness later than normal men, becoming irresistible erotic dynamos in their mid thirties to late forties. Just look at these examples of sexually irresistible men in technical professions:
Female engineers become irresistible at the age of consent and remain that way until about thirty minutes after their clinical death. Longer if it's a warm day.
Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth.
Engineers sometimes bend the truth to avoid work. They say things that sound like lies but technically are not because nobody could be expected to believe them. The complete list of engineer lies is listed below.
"I won't change anything without asking you first."
"I'll return your hard-to-find cable tomorrow."
"I have to have new equipment to do my job."
"I'm not jealous of your new computer."
Engineers are notoriously frugal. This is not because of cheapness or mean spirit; it is simply because every spending situation is simply a problem in optimization, that is, "How can I escape this situation while retaining the greatest amount of cash?"
If there is one trait that can best defines an engineer it is the ability to concentrate on one subject to the complete exclusion of everything else in the environment. This sometimes causes engineers to be pronounced dead prematurely. Some funeral homes in high-tech areas have started checking resumes before processing the bodies. Anybody with a degree in electrical engineering or experience in computer programming is propped up in the lounge for a few days just to see if he or she snaps out of it.
Engineers hate risk. They try to eliminate it whenever they can. This is understandable, given that when an engineer makes one little mistake the media will treat it like it's a big deal or something.
EXAMPLES OF BAD PRESS FOR ENGINEERS
The risk/reward calculation for engineers looks something like this:
Being practical people, engineers evaluate this balance of risks and rewards and decide that risk is not a good thing. The best way to avoid risk is by advising that any activity is technically impossible for reasons that are far too complicated to explain.
If that approach is not sufficient to halt the project, then the engineer will fall back to a second line of defense: "It's technically possible but it will cost too much."
Ego-wise, two things are important to engineers:
The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is to declare that the problem is unsolvable. No engineer can walk away from an unsolvable problem until it's solved. No illness or distraction is sufficient to get the engineer off the case. These types of challenges quickly become personal -- a battle between the engineer and the laws of nature.
Engineers will go without food and hygiene for days to solve a problem. (Other times just because they forgot.) And when they succeed in solving the problem they will experience an ego rush that is better than sex -- and I'm including the kind of sex where other people are involved.
Nothing is more threatening to the engineer than the suggestion that somebody has more technical skill. Normal people sometimes use that knowledge as a lever to extract more work from the engineer. When an engineer says that something can't be done (a code phrase that means it's not fun to do), some clever normal people have learned to glance at the engineer with a look of compassion and pity and say something along these lines: "I'll ask Bob to figure it out. He knows how to solve difficult technical problems."
At that point it is a good idea for the normal person to not stand between the engineer and the problem. The engineer will set upon the problem like a starved Chihuahua on a pork chop.
Frequently Asked Questions for Etch-A-Sketch Technical Support
Q: My Etch-A-Sketch has all of these funny little lines
allover the screen.
A: Pick it up and shake it.
Q: How do I turn my Etch-A-Sketch off?
A: Pick it up and shake it.
Q: What's the shortcut for Undo?
A: Pick it up and shake it.
Q: How do I create a New Document window?
A: Pick it up and shake it.
Q: How do I set the background and foreground to the same
color?
A: Pick it up and shake it.
Q: What is the proper procedure for rebooting my
Etch-A-Sketch?
A: Pick it up and shake it.
Q: How do I delete a document on my Etch-A-Sketch?
A: Pick it up and shake it.
Q: How do I save my Etch-A-Sketch document?
A: Don't shake it.
Dear Joe,
I object to your use of the word "dear." It shows you are a condescending, sexist pig. Also, the submissive tone you use shows that you like to be tied down and flagellated with licorice whips.
While I found your article "The Effect of Belly-Button Lint on Western Thought" to be extremely thought-provoking,
"Thought-provoking?" I had no idea you could think, you rotting piece of swamp slime.
it really shouldn't have been posted in rec.scuba.
What? Are you questioning my judgement? I'll have you know that I'm a member of the super-high-IQ society Menstruate. I got an 800 on my PMS exam. Your attempts constitute nothing less than censorship. There is a conspiracy against me. You, Riff Raff, and Simon Sinister have been constantly harassing me by email. This was an ad hominem attack! I have therefore cross-posted this to alt.flame, rec.nude, comp.graphics, and rec.arts.wobegon.
Perhaps you should have posted it in misc.misc.
It is my right, as granted in the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, the Bible and the Koran, to post where ever I want to. Or don't you believe in those documents, you damn fascist? Perhaps if you didn't spend so much time sacrificing virgins and infants to Satan, you would have realized this.
Your article would be much more appropriate there.
Can you document this? I will only accept documents notarized by my attorney, and signed by you in blood. Besides, you don't really exist anyway, you AI project, you.
Hot on the heels of the success of the show, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? welcome to Who Wants to Marry a Software Engineer? Silicon Valley's newest game show. Here's your contestant questionnaire.
[To the melody of Sadi Moma].
Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.Hoarders may get piles of money,
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.When we have enough free software
At our call, hackers, at our call,
We'll throw out those dirty licenses
Ever more, hackers, ever more.Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
Melody of Sadi Moma, a Bulgarian dance tune. (Dash means previous note continues; there are seven beats per measure.)
D-CB-A- B-CBAG- G--A--B C--B-BD A--A--- CDCB---
D-CB-A- B-CBAG- G--A--B C--B-BD A--A--- A------
Copyright 1993 Richard Stallman. Verbatim redistribution permitted if this notice is preserved.
echo
'[q]sa[ln0=aln256%Pln256/snlbx]sb3135071790101768542287578439snlbxq' |
dc
echo
'16i[q]sa[ln0=aln100%Pln100/snlbx]sbA0D4D465452snlbxq'|dc
Isaac Newton: If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Gerald Holton: In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
Hal Abelson: If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.
Brian Reid: In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.
Great software results from careful analysis of real-world problems and thoughtful examination of possible solutions. Obese software results from the far easier process of looking at an existing piece of software and asking, "What can I add next?"
From the programming notebooks of a heretic, 1990
Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in business, we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:
(with apologies to Lewis Carroll)
'Twas Ballmer and the slithey Gates,
Did FUD and fumble in the press.
All colored were the CRT's
With Blue Screens of Death."Beware the Windows troll, my son!
The Drestin Black, the Smith named Chris!
Beware the Mulligan and shun
The frumious sponge and S!"He took his GPL in hand
Long time the open source he sought --
So rested he, by the CVS tree,
And stood awhile in thought.And as in GNUish thought he stood,
The Windows troll, with post of flame,
Came whining down the Usenet feed,
And FUDed as he came!One, two! One, two! And through and through,
The killfile *PLONK* went snicker-snack!
He marked it read, reply unsaid,
And went GPLing back."And hast thou spurned the Windows troll?
Come to my arms, my Linux boy!
O KDE! O Gnome and E!"
(He chortled at Bill Joy.)'Twas Ballmer and the slithey Gates,
Did FUD and fumble in the press.
All colored were the CRT's
With Blue Screens of Death.
/*
* find the important things in Life, the Universe, and Everything
*/
typedef short some; /* some things are short */
typedef some very; /* some things are very short */
#define A /* The first letter of the English Alphabet */
#define LINE 2 /* 2 points define a line */
#define TRUTH BEAUTY /* truth is beauty */
#define BEAUTY 10 /* and beauty is a 10 */
#define bad char /* burnt on both sides */
#define old char /* the great Chicago Fire */
#define get strlen /* during your life, try to get some sterling */
#define youmake float /* you make it, I'll drink it */
#define yourgoals in terms you can understand
#include "yourdreams" /* for the future */
/* everyone needs goals */
short term;
double yourpleasure();
double yourfun;
long Term, play(), agame;
/* everyone needs diversions */
old *joke = "Why did the chicken cross the road?\n\t\
To get to the other side!\n\t\tWocka Wocka Wocka!\n";
tell(joke)
bad *joke; /* wait- you haven't heard it yet! */
{
short laugh; /* please */
laugh = get(joke);
write(1, joke, laugh); /* write it down- don't say it */
}
/* most folks like music */
long play(record)
long record;
{
very pleasant = TRUTH; /* if you like music */
while (record == pleasant)
play(record--);
return( pleasant ); /* music soothes the savage */
}
double yourpleasure(one, way) /* this is necessary if */
some one; /* is watching ,or if you have a */
long way; /* to go */
{
/* this can change one while maintaining one's identity */
one = one * one;
return( one ); /* after all, it should have at least doubled */
}
hold(temper) /* good advice */
A short temper; /* is a dangerous thing */
{
A long time; /* is what you need */
very calm; /* is how you should be */
calm = temper, temper;
while (calm--)
wait(&time);
return(calm); /* if possible */
}
/* now, on to the main thing */
main(thing, mustbe) /* to balance work, play, and goals */
some thing, mustbe; /* important, or we wouldn't be here */
{
long time(); /* know C */
very bored; /* the result of too few goals */
short hours; /* make */
long yourwork; /* which makes for */
short tempers; /* which can be improved by */
long laughing;
/* first, set priorities */
yourwork = 0;
yourfun = 1.0e+38;
if (yourpleasure( mustbe, yourwork ))
yourfun = yourwork;
else
yourfun = play( agame );
bored = yourfun - yourwork; /* nothing to do? */
/* reach out and touch someone! */
switch ( bored ) { /* connects all of this together */
default:
hours = hold(LINE); /* no way to avoid it, take a */
break;
}
/* take a music break */
while ( thing-- ) { /* you make my heart sing */
youmake everything;
very groovy;
}
/* focus on what is important to you */
while ( yourfun < 0 ) {
yourpleasure( mustbe, agame);
yourfun = play( agame );
}
tell(joke);
exit( laughing );
}
/*
Not-So Common C Declarations
struct SoftwareProfessional {
double salary;
long lunches;
float jobs;
char unstable;
void work;
};
auto accident;
register voters;
static electricity;
struct by_lightning;
void *where_prohibited;
char broiled;
short circuit;
short changed;
long johns;
unsigned long letter;
double entendre;
double trouble;
union organizer;
float valve;
short pants;
union station;
void check; unsigned check;
struct dumb by[sizeof member];
*/
/* Lover's Lane */
char*lie;
double time, me= !0XFACE,
not; int rested, get, out;
main(ly, die) char ly, **die ;{
signed char lotte,
dear; (char)lotte--;
for(get= !me;; not){
1 - out & out ;lie;{
char lotte, my= dear,
**let= !!me *!not+ ++die;
(char*)(lie=
"The gloves are OFF this time, I detest you, snot\n\0sed GEEK!");
do {not= *lie++ & 0xF00L* !me;
#define love (char*)lie -
love 1s *!(not= atoi(let
[get -me?
(char)lotte-
(char)lotte: my- *love -
'I' - *love - 'U' -
'I' - (long) - 4 - 'U' ])- !!
(time =out= 'a'));} while( my - dear
&& 'I'-1l -get- 'a'); break;}}
(char)*lie++;
(char)*lie++, (char)*lie++; hell:0, (char)*lie;
get *out* (short)ly -0-'R'- get- 'a'^rested;
do {auto*eroticism,
that; puts(*( out
- 'c'
-('P'-'S') +die+ -2 ));}while(!"you're at it");
for (*((char*)&lotte)^=
(char)lotte; (love ly) [(char)++lotte+
!!0xBABE];){ if ('I' -lie[ 2 +(char)lotte]){ 'I'-1l ***die; }
else{ if ('I' * get *out* ('I'-1l **die[ 2 ])) *((char*)&lotte) -=
'4' - ('I'-1l); not; for(get=!
get; !out; (char)*lie & 0xD0- !not) return!!
(char)lotte;}
(char)lotte;
do{ not* putchar(lie [out
*!not* !!me +(char)lotte]);
not; for(;!'a';);}while(
love (char*)lie);{
register this; switch( (char)lie
[(char)lotte] -1s *!out) {
char*les, get= 0xFF, my; case' ':
*((char*)&lotte) += 15; !not +(char)*lie*'s';
this +1s+ not; default: 0xF +(char*)lie;}}}
get - !out;
if (not--)
goto hell;
exit( (char)lotte);}
By Routers staff troll writer Django Shoenstopper, Copyright, 1999
Bill Joy, best known as one of the principal engineers and Operating Systems software developers at Sun Microsystems, and formerly a core developer of the free BSD UNIX operating system written at the University of Berkeley in the late '70's and early '80's, let down his hair yesterday and was caught reciting at a well known San Francisco Poetry Slam. Mr. Joy took the stage right after the well known Amistad Maupin, author of the classic Tales of the City series, recited his famous Ode to the claw-like scratches on this '70's bath house table during the Queen Phatima Amazon-Girl With Short-Spiked-Hair Poetry Slam and let loose his own sort of software Howl to the delight of audience software developers and the engineering uninitiated alike.
Entitled Free means FREE GODDAMMIT! (the GPL is EVIL) Mr. Joy eloquently presented his opinion on the Free Software licensing debate which has raged through engineering circles ever since East Coast programmer and Free Software advocate Richard Stallman hired several copyright attorneys to develop his so-called CopyLeft General Public License.
Here is an excerpt:
Free means FREE GODDAMMIT! (the GPL is EVIL)
I sit here at my terminal
coding a storm in my vi,
a malloc() for some array,
while strncpy() bounds a check,
but inside I seethe -- inside I rumble,
at all the lines locked up,
and the derived headers claimed with glee,
for I know the caged free()
consumed by the GPL!Free means FREE GODDAMMIT,
it means I take and offer as I please,
it doesn't mean to taint my work,
just because I swiped some header,
or one little readline,
it's the state of being FREE,
as opposed to the state of being NOT FREE!Don't you understand RMS,
the GPL is EVIL!,
it's a blight of a free license,
and a virus to behold,
consuming all code afterwards,
in an atomic chain reaction,
like red tide spread across our ocean,
all our oysters now inedible!Free coders far and wide,
listen to my swan-song by the sea,
for while Solaris kicks BSD's ass,
and my SCSL is a sight to see,
at least BSD and MIT leave code FREE,
unlike that UNAMERICAN red GPL crap,
with it RMS will suck you dry,
Because Free means FREE GODDAMMIT!
and The GPL is EVIL!
When asked for comment Richard Stallman had only this to say,"Wow, Bill is a terrible poet!"
But some here suspect that Mr. Stallman's response only belies both his East Coast snobbery for missing out on the new poetry slam revolution here in San Francisco, and his envy at Mr. Joy's enlightened West Coast writing style and attitude.
One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons." Moon patiently told the student the following story:
"One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage collector...
In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play." Minsky shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
A student, in hopes of understanding the Lambda-nature, came to Greenblatt. As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by. "Is it true," asked the student, "that PL-1 has many of the same data types as Lisp?" Almost before the student had finished his question, Greenblatt shouted, "FOO!", and hit the student with a stick.
A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating his morning meal. "I would like to give you this personality test," said the outsider, "because I want you to be happy." Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the toaster: "I wish the toaster to be happy, too."
A man from AI walked across the mountains to SAIL to see the Master, Knuth. When he arrived, the Master was nowhere to be found. "Where is the wise one named Knuth?", he asked a passing student. "Ah," said the student, "you have not heard. He has gone on a pilgrimage across the mountains to the temple of AI to seek out new disciples." Hearing this, the man was Enlightened.
A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a Xerox 1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser. Wanting to help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network with the mouse, and asked, "what do you see?" Very earnestly, the Undergraduate replied "I see a cursor." The Hacker then quickly pressed the boot toggle at the back of the keyboard, while simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over the head with a thick Interlisp Manual. The Undergraduate was then Enlightened.
Author unknown.
I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.
One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.
Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.
An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.
The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.
The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.
The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well.
This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell).
Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone else's?
Any budding programmers amongst you are probably bewildered by all the different languages available to you. What language should you use for what project? Here are a few suggestions to be going on with.
| Knitting | Perl |
| Humourous | Tcl |
| Horse Racing | Forth |
| Starbucks | Java |
| Chat client | Smalltalk |
| Marine navigation | C |
| Marine/Aviation navigation | C+ |
| Marine/Aviation/Space navigation | C++ |
| Car Racing | VRML |
| Graphics | Visual Basic |
| Reptiles | Python |
| Speech recognition | Lisp |
| Manuals for these programs | Anything but English |
We propose the following extensions to the current version of Latex. We anticipate that it will help many struggling scientists who agonize over the correct formatting of their scientific papers.
We are excited about bringing these tools in front of the scientific community. Please send us your responses ([email protected]) about further additions to the list. (joint work with Chris)
A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy. Joseph Campbell
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history--with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. Mitch Ratliffe
A human being is a computer's way of making another computer. Yes, we are their sex organs. Solomon Short
All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer. IBM maintenance manual, 1925
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso
Computers will never take the place of books. You can't stand on a floppy disk to reach a high shelf. Sam Ewing
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to virgins. Robert Heinlein (in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress")
Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked. Jeff Pesis
It was not so very long ago that people thought that semiconductors were part-time orchestra leaders and microchips were very small snack foods. Geraldine Ferraro
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ...and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor. Wernher von Braun
No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either. Marvin Minsky
One thing a computer can do that most humans can't is be sealed up in a cardboard box and sit in a warehouse. Jack Handey
There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer. J.H.Goldfuss
They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction. Janet Reno
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents. Nathaniel Borenstein
To err is human and to blame it on a computer is even more so. Robert Orben
Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea--massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it. Gene Spafford
Wow! They've got the Internet on computers now! Homer Simpson
Time was when [...]
A computer was something on TV
From a science fiction show of note
A window was something you hated to clean
And ram was the cousin of a goat.Meg was the name of my girlfriend
And gig was a job for the nights
Now they all mean different things
And that really mega bytes.An application was for employment
A program was a TV show
A cursor used profanity
A keyboard was a piano.Memory was something that you lost with age
A CD was a bank account
And if you had a 3-inch Floppy
You hoped nobody found out.Compress was something you did to the garbage
Not something you did to a file
And if you unzipped anything in public
You'd be in jail for a while.Log on was adding wood to the fire
Hard drive was a long trip on the road
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
And a backup happened to your commode.Cut you did with a pocket knife
Paste you did with glue
A web was a spider's home
And a virus was the flu.
Enjoy your "middle age."
Words: (c) Steven Levine, 1983, Music: Gilbert & Sullivan - The Modern Major General
I've built a better model than the one at Data General
For databases vegetable, animal, and mineral;
My OS handles CPU's with multiplexed duality,
My PL/1 compiler shows impressive functionality.
My storage system's better than magnetic core polarity;
You needn't even bother checking out a bit for parity;
There isn't any reason to install non-static floor matting;
My disk drive has capacity for variable formatting.His disk drive has capacity for variable formatting;
His disk drive has capacity for variable formatting;
His disk drive has capacity for variable format-formatting.I feel compelled to mention what I know to be a gloating point;
There's lots of space in memory for variables floating point,
Which shows for input vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I've built a better model than the one at Data General.Which shows for input vegetable, animal, and mineral,
He's built a better model than the one at Data General.The IBM new home computer's nothing more than germinal,
At Prime they still have trouble with an interactive terminal;
While Tandy's done a lousy job with operations Boolean,
At Wang the byte capacity's too small to fit a coolie in.
Intel's mid-year finances are something of the trouble sort;
The Timex-Sinclair crashes when you implement a bubble sort;
All DEC investors soon will find they haven't spent their money well;
And need I even mention Nixdorf, Univac, or Honeywell?And need he even mention Nixdorf, Univac, or Honeywell?
And need he even mention Nixdorf, Univac, or Honeywell?
And need he even mention Nixdorf, Univac, or Honey-Honeywell?By striving to eliminate all source code that's repetitive
I've brought my benchmark standings to results that are competitive.
In short, for input vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I've built a better model than the one at Data General.In short, for input vegetable animal, and mineral,
He's built a better model than the one at Data General.In fact, when I've a Winchester of minimum diameter,
When I can call a subroutine of infinite parameter,
When I can point to registers and keep their current map around,
And when I can prevent the need for mystifying wraparound,
When I can update record blocks with minimum of suffering,
And when I can afford to use a hundred K for buffering,
When I've performed a matrix sort and tested the addition rate,
You'll marvel at the speed of my asynchronous transmission rate.You'll marvel at the speed of his asynchronous transmission rate.
You'll marvel at the speed of his asynchronous transmission rate.
You'll marvel at the speed of his asynchronous transmission-mission rate.Though all my better programs that self-reference recursively
Have only been obtained through expert spying, done subversively,
But still, for input vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I've built a better model than the one at Data General.But still, for input vegetable, animal, and mineral,
He's built a better model than the one at Data General.
People often ask me how I was able to learn so much about computers. They never forget to remind me that my parent's generation didn't have the same access to computers that we enjoy today.
But the truth is this: Mama was the best computer teacher that I ever had!!!
For years I badgered my mother with questions about whether Santa Claus is a real person or not. Her answer was always "Well, you asked for the presents and they came, didn't they?"
I finally understood the full meaning of her reply when I heard the definition of a virtual device: "A software or hardware entity which responds to commands in a manner indistinguishable from the real device."
Mother was telling me that Santa Claus is a virtual person (simulated by loving parents) who responds to requests from children in a manner indistinguishable from the real saint.
Mother also taught the IF ... THEN ... ELSE structure: "If it's snowing, then put your boots on before you go to school; otherwise just wear your shoes."
Mother explained the difference between batch and transaction processing: "We'll wash the white clothes when we get enough of them to make a load, but we'll wash these socks out right now by hand because you'll need them this afternoon."
Mother taught me about linked lists. Once, for a birthday party, she laid out a treasure hunt of ten hidden clues, with each clue telling where to find the next one, and the last one leading to the treasure. She then gave us the first clue.
Mother understood about parity errors. When she counted socks after doing the laundry, she expected to find an even number and groaned when only one sock of a pair emerged from the washing machine. Later she applied the principles of redundancy engineering to this problem by buying our socks three identical pairs at a time. This greatly increased the odds of being able to come up with at least one matching pair.
Mother had all of us children write our Christmas thank you notes to Grandmother, one after another, on a single large sheet of paper which was then mailed in a single envelope with a single stamp. This was obviously an instance of blocking records in order to save money by reducing the number of physical I/O operations.
Mother used flags to help her manage the housework. Whenever she turned on the stove, she put a potholder on top of her purse to reminder herself to turn it off again before leaving the house.
Mother knew about devices which raise an interrupt signal to be serviced when they have completed any operation. She had a whistling teakettle.
Mother understood about LIFO ordering. In my lunch bag she put the dessert on the bottom, the sandwich in the middle, and the napkin on top so that things would come out in the right order at lunchtime.
There is an old story that God knew He couldn't be physically present everywhere at once, to show His love for His people, and so He created mothers. That is the difference between centralized and distributed processing. As any kid who's ever misbehaved at a neighbor's house finds out, all the mothers in the neighborhood talk to each other. That's a local area network of distributed processors that can't be beat.
Mom, you were the best computer teacher I ever had.
The Law of Volunteering
If you dance with a grizzly bear, you had better let him lead.
The Law of Avoiding Oversell
When putting cheese in a mousetrap, always leave room for the mouse.
The Law of Common Sense
Never accept a drink from a urologist.
The Law of Reality
Never get into fights with ugly people, they have nothing to lose.
The Law of Self Sacrific
When you starve with a tiger, the tiger starves last.
The Law of Motivation
Creativity is great, but plagiarism is faster.
Boob's Law
You always find something in the last place you look.
Weiler's Law
Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
Law of Probable Dispersal
Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
Law of Volunteer Labor
People are always available for work in the past tense.
Conway's Law
In any organization there is one person who knows what is going on. That
person must be fired.
Iron Law of Distribution
Them that has, gets.
Law of Cybernetic Entomology
There is always one more bug.
Law of Drunkedness
You can't fall off the floor.
Heller's Law
The first myth of management is that it exists.
Osborne's Law
Variables won't; constants aren't.
Main's Law
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
Weinberg's Second Law
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the
first woodpecker that came along would have destroyed civilization.
Ogden Nash:
The one L lama, he's a priest
The two L llama, he's a beast
And I will bet my silk pyjama
There isn't any three L lllama.
But in C:
A one-l NUL ends a string.
A two-l NULL points to no thing.
And I will bet a golden bull
That there is no three-l NULLL.
AlphaNodeSemaphore=*(int)(&(unsigned long)(BetaFrameNodeFarm));
"I can't because I've almost got my RISC-based OSI/TCP/IP client connected by BIBUS VMS VAX using SMTP over TCP sending SNMP inquiry results to be encapsulated in UDP packets for transmission to a SUN 4/280 NFS 4.3 BSD with release 3.6 of RPC/XDR supporting our ONC effort working."
May your signals all trap
May your references be bounded
All memory aligned
Floats to ints roundedRemember ...
Non-zero is true
++ adds one
Arrays start with zero
and, NULL is for noneFor octal, use zero
0x means hex
= will set
== means testuse -> for a pointer
a dot if its not
? : is confusing
use them a lota.out is your program
there's no U in foobar
and, char (*(*x())[])() is
a function returning a pointer
to an array of pointers to
functions returning char
Forty years ago:
A Computer was something on TV
From a Science Fiction show of note
A Window was something you hated to clean
And Ram was the father of a goat.Meg was the name of a girlfriend
And Gig was a job for the nights
Now they all mean different things
And that really Mega Bytes.An Application was for employment
A Program was a TV show
A Cursor used profanity
A Keyboard was a piano.A Memory was something that you lost with age
A CD was a bank account
And if you had a 3-inch floppy
You hoped nobody found out.Compress was something you did to the garbage
Not something you did to a file
And if you Unzipped anything in public
You'd be in jail for a while.Log on was adding wood to the fire
Hard drive was a long trip on the road
A Mouse pad was where a mouse lived
And a Backup happened to your commode.Cut you did with a pocket knife
Paste you did with glue
A Web was a spider's home
And a Virus was the flu.I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper
And the Memory in my head.
I hear nobody's been killed in a Computer crash
But when it happens they wish they were dead.
In order for UNIX(tm) to survive into the nineties, it must get rid of its intimidating commands and outmoded jargon, and become compatible with the existing standards of our day. To this end, our technicians have come up with a new version of UNIX, System VI, for use by the PC---that is, the"Politically Correct."
Politically Correct UNIX
System VI Release notes
UTILITIES
SHELL COMMANDS
TERMINOLOGY
by Richard Stallman (from a Linuxcare interview):
Do you know about the bug that depends upon the phase of the moon?
We always liked to talk about the bugs that depended on the phase of the moon. So, when Guy Steele wrote the Rabbit compiler, which is a scheme compiler, he made it print out a comment at the beginning which showed the time it was compiled and so on, but it also put in the phase of the moon. So, you could always look. If you had a bug that depended on the phase of the moon, you could look at the thing and see at what phase of the moon it was compiled, and that might help you figure out what went wrong.
Eventually, he got a bug report about a certain program that had been compiled once, and worked, and when it was compiled at another time it didn't work. So, he looked and he discovered that when the initial comments were printed out, the LISP feature that would automatically put in a line break if a line got too long was activated on one occasion, because the phase of the moon took too many characters to print out. So, it triggered that feature, and the last part of the phase of the moon was on another line, and therefore it wasn't marked by comments. So it was just sitting there in a file, whereas at another time the phase of the moon didn't take up so many characters, and the whole thing was properly commented.
So, this was a bug that actually depended on the phase of the moon.
by Kevin D. Weeks, VB Tech Journal, January 1998.
Forget about competency tests, previous work history, personality profiles like the MBTI, reference-checking, and follow-up interviews. After years of rigorous and admittedly maverick research, I've identified five key characteristics you can use to quickly assess the fitness of a programmer candidate. I humbly submit that if you follow my advice and check for these attributes, you'll shorten your hiring cycle and simultaneously increase your success rate.
The best programmers prefer cats as pets. I've canvassed hundreds of programmers on the subject of preferred pets, and despite the odd ferret-lover (and believe me, ferret-lovers are odd), time after time cats turn out to be the non-human companion of choice. Think about it; it makes perfect sense because programmers are human cats. Cats are night animals, as are programmers. Cats are independent, like programmers. Cats prefer to be left alone except when they want attention, and so do programmers. Cats are notoriously elegant animals and ... uhm, well ... programmers love elegant code. What's more, software guru Meilir Page-Jones has likened managing programmers to herding cats.
Turning to the next characteristic, programmers have a highly developed sense of the absurd. And if you think about it, this makes no sense at all. I don't know why so many programmers can quote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or know the entire Naughty Hungarian Phrase Book skit, but they do. The next time you interview a programmer candidate throw a "You're all individuals" at him and see what he says.
Perhaps a sense of the absurd matters because so much of what developers put up with is absurd - absurd schedules, absurd requirements, absurd hours. Treating the absurdities of the average development process with humor makes developers' jobs much easier.
Developers are usually science-fiction fans. Great programmers love technology, especially technology that doesn't yet exist. You're in a business where the only constant is change, and you need developers who don't mind a few arrows in their backs. Make sure your candidate has read Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. And remember, every programmer worth her salt knows what grok means. Many developers also are musicians, painters, or photographers. Some will claim this is because both programming and artistic endeavors require great creativity. They're wrong. It's because programming is more like painting than engineering. Like painters, when programmers make mistakes, they just code right over them.
Then there's the matter of puns. I've witnessed online pun-fests that lasted as long as a week, with as many as 30 programmers trying to outdo each other. I've noticed that some participants are punctilious about staying with the root word, while others approach them as pun-tests where misspelling words is permitted. Again, the predilection makes perfect sense. Programming is about using language to accomplish something, and programmers have a highly evolved appreciation of how a language can be manipulated to specific ends. Puns are ways of both displaying a mastery of language and honing it.
So there you have it. Look for developers who love cats, quote Monty Python, read Heinlein, play guitar, and are accomplished punsters. If you find all these characteristics in a single individual, hire that person immediately - confident you're hiring a truly great developer.
LAW 1: No major project is ever completed on time, within budget, with the same staff that started it, nor does the project do what it is supposed to do. It is highly unlikely that yours will be the first.
Corollary 1: The benefits will be smaller than initially estimated, if estimates were made at all.
Corollary 2: The system finally installed will be completed late and will not do what it is supposed to do.
Corollary 3: It will cost more but will be technically successful.
LAW 2: One advantage of fuzzy project objectives is that they let you avoid embarrassment in estimating the corresponding costs.
LAW 3: The effort required to correct a project that is off course increases geometrically with time.
Corollary 1: The longer you wait the harder it gets.
Corollary 2: If you wait until the project is completed, its too late.
Corollary 3: Do it now regardless of the embarrassment.
LAW 4: The project purpose statement you wrote and understand will be seen differently by everyone else.
Corollary 1: If you explain the purpose so clearly that no one could possibly misunderstand, someone will.
Corollary 2: If you do something that you are sure will meet everyone's approval, someone will not like it.
LAW 5: Measurable benefits are real. Intangible benefits are not measurable, thus intangible benefits are not real.
Corollary 1: Intangible benefits are real if you can prove that they are real.
LAW 6: Anyone who can work effectively on a project part-time cer- tainly does not have enough to do now.
Corollary 1: If a boss will not give a worker a full-time job, you shouldn't either.
Corollary 2: If the project participant has a time conflict, the work given by the full-time boss will not suffer.
LAW 7: The greater the project's technical complexity, the less you need a technician to manage it.
Corollary 1: Get the best manager you can. The manager will get the technicians.
Corollary 2: The reverse of corollary 1 is almost never true.
LAW 8: A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than expected. A carefully planned project will only take twice as long.
Corollary 1: If nothing can possibly go wrong, it will anyway.
LAW 9: When the project is going well, something will go wrong.
Corollary 1: When things cannot get any worse, they will.
Corollary 2: When things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.
LAW 10: Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so vividly manifests their lack of progress.
LAW 11: Projects progress rapidly until they are 90 percent complete. Then they remain 90 percent complete forever.
LAW 12: If project content is allowed to change freely, the rate of change will exceed the rate of progress.
LAW 13: If the user does not believe in the system, a parallel system will be developed. Neither system will work very well.
LAW 14: Benefits achieved are a function of the thoroughness of the post-audit check.
Corollary 1: The prospect of an independent post- audit provides the project team with a powerful incentive to deliver a good system on schedule within budget.
LAW 15: No law is immutable.
The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it contains most of the ideas of the general Proof.
"Trivial."
Works well in a classroom or seminar setting.
Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special symbols.
An issue or two of a journal devoted to your Proof is useful.
'The reader may easily supply the details'
"The other 253 cases are analogous"
"..."
A long plotless sequence of true and/or meaningless syntactically related statements.
The author cites the negation, converse, or generalization of a theorem from the literature to support his claims.
How could three different government agencies be wrong?
"I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP-Complete."
"Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete [Karp, personal communication]."
"To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is decide-able, we reduce it to the halting problem."
The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883.
A large body of useful consequences all follow from the proposition in question.
Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample.
The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or meaningless. Popular for Proofs of the existence of God.
In reference A, Theorem 5 is said to follow from Theorem 3 in reference B, which is shown to follow from Corollary 6.2 in reference C, which is an easy consequence of Theorem 5 in reference A.
A method is given to construct the desired Proof. The correctness of the method is proved by any of these techniques.
A more convincing form of Proof by example. Combines well with Proof by omission.
It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience.
Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given.
Reference is usually to a forthcoming paper of the author, which is often not as forthcoming as at first.
Some of the standard but inconvenient definitions are changed for the statement of the result.
Cloud-shaped drawings frequently help here.
Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,Longing for the warmth of bedsheets, Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line, I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
and waited for the disk to store,
Only this and nothing more.Deep into the monitor peering, long I sat there wond'ring, fearing,
Doubting, while the disk kept churning, turning yet to churn some more.
"Save!" I said, "You cursed mother! Save my data from before!"
One thing did the phosphors answer, only this and nothing more,
Just, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"Was this some occult illusion? Some maniacal intrusion?
These were choices undesired, ones I'd never faced before.
Carefully, I weighed the choices as the disk made monstrous noises.
The cursor flashed, insistent, waiting, baiting me to type some more.
Clearly I must press a key, choosing one and nothing more,
From " Abort, Retry, Ignore?"With my fingers pale and trembling, slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,
Praying for some guarantee Timidly I pressed a key.
But on the screen there still persisted, words appearing as before.
Ghastly grim they blinked and taunted, haunted, as my patience wore,
Saying."Abort, Retry, Ignore?"I tried to catch the chips off-guard - I pressed again, but twice as hard.
I pleaded with the cursed machine: I begged and cried and then I swore.
Then I tried in desperation, sev'ral random combinations,
Still there came the incantation, just as senseless as before.
Cursor blinking, mocking, winking, flashing nonsense as before.
Reading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"There I sat, distraught, exhausted; by my own machine accosted
Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor.
And then I saw dreadful sight: a lightning bolt cut through the night.
A gasp of horror overtook me, shook me to my very core.
The lightning zapped my previous data, lost and gone forevermore.
Not even, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"To this day I do not know The place to which lost data goes.
What demonic nether world is wrought where data will be stored,
Beyond the reach of mortal souls, beyond the ether, in black holes?
But sure as there's C, Pascal, Lotus, Ashton-Tate and more,
You will one day be left to wander, lost on some Plutonian shore,
Pleading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
Life Before The Computer
An application was for employment
A program was a TV show
A cursor used profanity
A keyboard was a piano!Memory was something that you lost with age
A CD was a bank account
And if you had a 3 1/2 inch floppy
You hoped nobody found out!Compress was something you did to garbage
Not something you did to a file
And if you unzipped anything in public
You'd be in jail for a while!Log on was adding wood to a fire
Hard drive was a long trip on the road
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
And a backup happened to your commode!Cut - you did with a pocket knife
Paste you did with glue
A web was a spider's home
And a virus was the flu!I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper
And the memory in my head
I hear nobody's been killed in a computer crash
But when it happens they wish they were dead!
I read,
Looks like folks are now beginning to credit the development of UNIX to Kernighan and Ritchie, but I thought the principal investigators were *Thompson* and Ritchie. Did something change?
The differences between Kernighan Ritchie Thompson are real but very subtle. We all look alike (middle aged with scruffy graying beards). Note these distinctions:
--Dennis (circa 1991)
From A Shortage of Engineers by Robert Grossbach.
Regarding Engineers: The good ones get out (usually).
Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will.
Shopper Jim's Commentary: True but incomplete. For sufficiency we must add, Anything that can't go wrong also will.
Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time allotted for it.
Shopper Jim's Commentary: Incorrect. Work expands beyond the time allotted for it.
Peter Principle: In a hierarchy, people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence.
Shopper Jim's Commentary: This applies only to managerial personnel. A competent engineer is so valuable that he's kept at his position until he is laid off.
# unzip ; strip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ; yes ; umount ; sleep
Sung to the tune of The Beatles' Nowhere Man. This version is a somewhat mutated variant of the original by Brad Morrison (circa 1986).
He's a real UNIX Man
Sitting in his UNIX LAN
Making all his UNIX plans
For nobody.Knows the blocksize from du(1)
Cares not where /dev/null goes to
Isn't he a bit like you
And me?UNIX Man, please listen(2)
My lpd(8) is missin'
UNIX Man
The wo-o-o-orld is at(1) your command.
(The wo-o-o-orld is your at(1) command.) in Brad's originalHe's as wise as he can be
Uses lex and yacc and C
UNIX Man, can you help me At all?UNIX Man, don't worry
Test with time(1), don't hurry
UNIX Man
The new kernel boots, just like you had planned.He's a real UNIX Man
Sitting in his UNIX LAN
Making all his UNIX plans For nobody ...
Making all his UNIX plans For nobody.
USA = Microsoft, Europe = UNIX
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantises its position to one of 6 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as an index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognised the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialise this class into subclasses: grains, pork and poultry. The specialisation process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs and various omelette classes."
"The ham and cheese omelette class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy and poultry classes. Thus we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users should click on it and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen.(UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel Pentium with 32MB of memory, a 500MB hard disk and 17inch SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multi-tasking, object-oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!)."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
A poll conducted among INFOCUS magazine readers had established "waka" as the proper pronunciation for the angle-bracket characters <, though some readers held out resolutely for "norkies."
The following poem appeared recently in INFOCUS magazine. The original authors were Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese of Calvin College & Seminary of Grand Rapids, MI.
The text of the poem follows:
<> !*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<> ~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED
The poem can be appreciated only by reading it aloud, to wit:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.
A fragment of a drinking (or financing?) song called Hatless Atlas:
^<@<.@*
}"_# |
-@$&/_%
!( @|=>
;`+$?^?
,#"~|)^G
hat less at less point at star
backbrace double base pound space bar
dash at cash and slash base rate
wow open tab at bar is great
semi backquote plus cash huh DEL
comma pound double tilde bar close BEL
[ Assorted Humor | Krishna Kunchithapadam ]
Last updated: Sun Jun 27 17:00:19 PDT 2004
URL: http://www.geocities.com/krishna_kunchith/humor/computer.html