More Computer Jokes
Upside of Y2K:
January 1, 2000 Re: Vacation Pay
Dear Valued Employee:
Our records indicate that you have not used any vacation time over the past 100 year(s). As I'm sure you are aware, employees are granted 3 weeks of paid leave per year or pay in lieu of time off. One additional week is granted for every 5 years of service.
Please either take 9,400 days off work or notify our office and your next pay check will reflect payment of $ 8,277,432.22 which will include all pay and interest for the past 1,200 months.
Sincerely, Automated Payroll Processing
Two computer programmers are driving on a Highway. They switch on the radio and there is a warning: Please note that a car is driving on highway 75 against the traffic. The programmer near the driver looks at him and says: "One? There are hundreds of them!"
A doctor, a civil engineer, and a computer scientist were arguing about what was the oldest profession in the world. The doctor remarked "Well, in the Bible it says that God created Eve from a rib taken from Adam. This clearly required surgery so I can rightly claim that mine is the oldest profession in the world."
The civil engineer interrupted and said "But even earlier in the book of Genesis, it states that God created the order of the heavens and the earth from out of the chaos. This was the first and certainly the most spectacular application of civil engineering. Therefore, fair doctor, you are wrong; mine is the oldest profession in the world."
The computer scientist leaned back in his chair, smiled, and said confidently, "Ah, but who do you think created the chaos?
There was an engineer, manager and programmer driving down a steep mountain road. The brakes failed and the car careened down the road out of control.
Half way down the driver managed to stop the car by running it against the embankment narrowing avoiding going over a cliff.
They all got out, shaken by their narrow escape from death, but otherwise unharmed.
The manager said "To fix this problem we need to organize a committee, have meetings, and through a process of continuous improvement, develop a solution."
The engineer said "No that would take too long, and besides that method never worked before. I have my trusty pen knife here and will take apart the brake system, isolate the problem and correct it."
The programmer said "I think you're both wrong! I think we should all push the car back up the hill and see if it happens again."
Q: What's the best way to accelerate a Mac?
A: 9.81 m/s2
Customer: "I'm running Windows '95."
Tech: "Yes."
Customer: "My computer isn't working now."
Tech: "Yes, you said that."
Here is a story about one of the classic computer hacks.
Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick the system into running a portion of the program in `master mode' (supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply. The program could then poke a large value into its `privilege level' byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to bypass all levels of security within the file-management system, patch the system monitor, and do numerous other interesting things. In short, the barn door was wide open.
Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an official `level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of `needs to be fixed yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR was entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a number of people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they simply reported the problem as `Security SIDR', and attached all of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc.
The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an official patch.
Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security safeguards could be subverted.
They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then incorporated into a pair of programs called `Robin Hood' and `Friar Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as `ghost jobs' (daemons, in UNIX terminology); they would use the existing loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them.
One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual phenomena. These included the following:
* Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle of a job.
* Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they would attempt to walk across the floor.
* The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of itself and punch a lace card. These would usually jam in the punch.
* The console would print snide and insulting messages from Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa.
* The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A (unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was placed into stacker B). One of the patches installed by the ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator to re collate them manually.
Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X'ed them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was X'ed, the following sequence of events took place:
!X id1
id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me! id1: Off (aborted)
id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's men!
id1: Thank you, my good fellow!
Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program within a few milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was to kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash the system.
Finally, the system programmers did the latter --- only to find that the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted! It turned out that these two programs had patched the boot-time OS image (the kernel file, in UNIX terms) and had added themselves to the list of programs that were to be started at boot time.
The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicated when the system staff rebooted the system from a clean boot-tape and reinstalled the monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox released a patch for this problem.
It is alleged that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola's management about the merry-prankster actions of the two employees in question. It is not recorded that any serious disciplinary action was taken against either of them.
I heard that if you play the Windows NT 4.0 CD backwards, you'll get a satanic message. But the most frightening thing is that if you play it forward, it installs NT 4.0!
Bill Gates died and found himself in Purgatory being sized up by God. "Well, Bill," God said, "I'm really confused about this call; I'm not sure whether to send you to Heaven or Hell. After all, you helped society by putting a computer in almost every home in the world, and yet you created that ghastly Windows 95. So I'm going to do something I've never done before. In your case, I'm going to let you decide where you want to go!"
Bill replied, "Well, thanks, God. What's the difference between the two?"
God said, "I'm willing to let you visit both places briefly if it will help you make a decision."
"Fine, but where should I go first?"
God said, "I'm going to leave that up to you."
Bill said, "Okay, then, let's try Hell first." So off Bill went to Hell. It was a beautiful, clean, sandy beach with clear waters. There were thousands of beautiful women running around, playing in the water, laughing and frolicking about. The sun was shining, the temperature was perfect. Bill was very pleased. "This is great!" he told God. "If this is Hell, I REALLY want to see Heaven!"
"Fine," said God and off they went.
Heaven was a high place in the clouds, with angels drifting about playing harps and singing. It was nice, but not as enticing as Hell. Bill thought for a quick minute and rendered his decision. "Hmm, I think I prefer Hell," he told God.
"Fine," God replied, "as you desire." So Bill Gates went to Hell.
Two weeks later, God decided to check up on the late billionaire to see how he was doing in Hell. When God arrived in Hell, he found Bill shackled to a wall, screaming among the hot flames in a dark cave. He was being burned and tortured by demons. "How's everything going, Bill?" God asked.
Bill responded (his voice full of anguish and disappointment), "This is awful; this is not what I expected. I can't believe this happened. What happened to that other place with the beaches and the beautiful women playing in the water?"
"Ah," God smiled and said, "That was just the screensaver."
While my brother-in-law was tapping away on his home computer, his ten-year-old daughter sneaked up behind him. Then she turned and ran into the kitchen, squealing to the rest of the family, "I know Daddy's password! I know Daddy's password!"
"What is it? her sisters asked eagerly.
Proudly she replied, "Asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk!"
The box read "Requires Windows 95 or better", so I bought a Macintosh.
I haven't lost my mind.
It's backed up on a disk somewhere . . .
Q: How many Windows 98 support staff employees does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Well, we have an exact copy of your bulb here, and it works fine. Did you check your CONFIG.SYS?
Q: How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None, it's a hardware problem, man!
Q. Why did the Y2K programmer cross the road?
A. Because the other side pays $125 hour.
Friday, we had a tornado drill. Our department is situated underneath a parking garage (funny how corporations just love putting the nerds in a basement), and there's a PA announcement repeating itself ad nauseum: "This is a tornado drill. Please move quickly away from any and all windows."
Somebody yelled out: "Quick! Get to a DOS prompt."
More Innovative Programs for the New Millennium?
Last year, I upgraded my GirlFriend 5.0 to GirlFriend 5.1, which installs itself as Fiancee 1.0. Recently, I upgraded Fiancee 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and it's a real memory hog. It has taken up all my space, and Wife 1.0 must be running before I can do ANYTHING.
It is also spawning Child Processes that are further consuming system resources. Some applications, such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all.
Additional plug-ins were automatically installed, such as Mother-In-Law 55.8, and there is no uninstall feature for these plug-ins. No mention of these behaviors was discussed in the brochures or documentation, although other users have reported similar problems.
Because of this, some users that I know have decided to avoid the headaches associated with these upgrades, and simply move from Girlfriend 5.0 to Girlfriend 6.0. Unfortunately, this is not without its perils either, as all traces of Girlfriend 5.0 must be removed from the system before attempting installation of 6.0.
Even then, Girlfriend 6.0 will repeatedly run system checks (usually in the background, and often late at night when the system is asleep) to find evidence of previous versions. To cap it off, Girlfriend 6.0 apparently has a nag feature reminding about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0
However, I do like some of the features that you are planning to include in the upcoming Girlfriend 6.1 release:
1. The "Don't remind me again" button
2. A Minimize button
3. The Shutdown feature
4. An install shield feature so that Girlfriend can be completely uninstalled if necessary (so you don't lose cache and other objects)
Unfortunately, since I've already upgraded to Wife 1.0, I don't think I will be able to take advantage of any of these new features, unless you decide to include them in the next Mistress release. But, of course, there is a whole raft of problems associated with the use of Mistress 1.0 and Wife 1.0 on the same system - most notably are system conflicts and continual disk thrashing, which starts shortly after Wife 1.0 detects Mistress 1.0.
Interestingly enough, all versions of PersonalLawyer still work fine. Finally, Wife 1.0 apparently deletes all MSMoney files before uninstalling itself; following that, Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.
I personally find all these new tools and conflicts to be too confusing and time consuming. I'm sticking with Dog 1.0b3. It slobbers and chews up the paper, but all in all these bugs are tolerable. It is simple to operate and we get along fine.