NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/rec/humor/38848

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-25 | 17.4 KB

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From: hcate@hobbes (Henry CateIII)
Newsgroups: rec.humor
Subject: Life  6.T
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 25 Jan 93 18:31:28 GMT
Sender: [e-mail]
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Organization: XSoft (Xerox Corporation), Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 373




Date: 15 Jan 91


----------------------------------------------------

A boxer suffers from insomnia.  A friend advises: "Try counting till you
get asleep."  Next day: "It didn't work: at 9 I always got up again."

----------------------------------------------------

POLICEMAN : "I'm afraid that I'm going to have to lock you up
             for the night."
MAN       : "What's the charge?"
POLICEMAN : "Oh, there's no charge.  It's all part of the
             service.

----------------------------------------------------

Three men stood before a judge on a charge of drunk and
disorderly conduct in a public park.
JUDGE   : What were you doing?
1ST MAN : Oh, just throwing peanuts in the pond.
JUDGE   : And what were you doing?
2ND MAN : I was throwing peanuts in the pond, too."
JUDGE   : Sounds harmless.  And you, were you throwing peanuts
          in the pond as well?
3RD MAN : No, sir.  I AM Peanuts!

----------------------------------------------------

If George Bush wants to provoke a war, he should arrange for Roseanne Barr to
sing the Iraqi national anthem.

----------------------------------------------------

During an operatic concert at the Festival Hall, while the nervous
soprano was fumbling her way noisily through her role in Don Giovanni,
one man in the audience turned to his friend and whispered : "What do you
think of this singer's execution?"
"Oh, I'm all for it." was the reply.

----------------------------------------------------

A new arrival, about to enter hospital, saw two white coated
doctors searching through the flower beds. "Excuse me," he
said, "have you lost something?" "No," replied one of the
doctors. "We're doing a heart transplant for an income-tax
inspector and want to find a suitable stone.

----------------------------------------------------

`You seem to be in some distress,' said the kindly judge to the witness. `Is
anything the matter?'
`Well, your Honour,' said the witness, `I swore to tell the truth, the whole
truth and nothing but the truth, but every time I try, some lawyer objects.'

----------------------------------------------------

The following are from the San Jose Mercury News, 28 October, 1990:

Wrong place, wrong time
-----------------------
    Darnell Madison, 37, was shot and killed in July in Homewood,
Ala., when he burst into a motel room intending to rob the seven men
whom he had seen with a wad of money.  He was unaware they were armed
police officers working on another case.

    In June a replacement bus driver hired by Greyhound during the
drivers' strike met the bus he was to drive from Delaware to New York
City.  However, a passenger on the bus wound up driving to New York
because the substitute driver could not drive a stick shift.

    Rory Johnson, 29, was arrested in May for a liquor store
robbery in Elkhart, Ind.  Johnson had parked in the back of the store
to facilitate his getaway but had trouble exiting because of
congestion due to road construction.  Five minutes after the robbery,
he was sitting in his car, having moved only a few feet, and liquor
store employees pointed him out to police.

----------------------------------------------------

Quoted from Martin Snapp's election results in the Oakland Tribune:

        Politician with the most staying power:
        Judge Frank Ogden of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma,
        who was re-elected with 91 percent of the
        votes, despite the fact that he died three
        months ago.
        Moral:  In Chicago, dead people vote.  In
        Oklahoma, they get elected.

----------------------------------------------------

A graphic design takes an award at Harold's Chicken Shack in
Hyde Park, Chicago.  This sign that has a large "NO" on the left, and
smaller lettering on the right saying:

    "DOGS / EATING / BICYCLES"

----------------------------------------------------

In a recent Columbus Dispatch, a photo of two billboards, one above
the other.  The top one is a typical campaign ad: "Reelect Chalmers
Wylie", photo, "fine record", etc. etc.

The bottom one is one from a series of teaser ads, the punch line to
be revealed in a few days.  It says, simply, in huge letters:

    Why?

The billboard company swears the juxtaposition is not intentional.

----------------------------------------------------

In a 1st year practical class today, I saw "fine tuning" of a program
taken to a new extreme.  The student was using audible output from a PC
to tell him where he was up to in his program.

Each audible output was a different note.  Thus, as his program ran, he
could "hear" where it was up to.  Needless to say it provided much amusment
for those around him.....

This certainly opens a new market for debugging tools and other products.
"I'll take Wordperfect in C major, with Quatro in E flat."

        The sales assistants would certainly have to be sharp!

----------------------------------------------------

(Borrowed from an overhead slide used by a major workstation manufacturer)

----------------

THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

1) Order the T-shirts for the Development team

2) Announce availability

3) Write the code

4) Write the manual

5) Hire a Product Manager

6) Spec the software
        (writing the specs after the code helps to ensure that the
        software meets the specifications)

7) Ship

8) Test
        (the customers are a big help here)

9) Identify bugs as potential enhancements

10) Announce the upgrade program

----------------------------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (Brian Kantor)

From: [e-mail] (Paul M Dubuc)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: What You Can Do to the Bible With A Computer
Date: 29 Oct 90 07:23:47 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories

I thought some here might get a kick out of this.  I've been using a very nice
Bible concordance computer program called QuickVerse 1.21 from Parsons
Technology.  Recently they offered me an upgrade to QuickVerse 2.0 which I
promptly took and recently received and installed.  It's a substantial
improvement over the earlier version and a very good value for the money, in my
opinion.  There was just one problem with my RSV upgrade.  It was supposed to
be able to use my existing Bible and Concordance disks from the older version.
Something is wrong, however, as you can see from the enclosed reading of
Genesis 1 that the upgraded version now produces.  I called Parsons and they
are quickly working on a fix to the upgrade.  Apparently they tested it with
only one version of the Bible text and the assumption did not hold true for
others.  I usually expect some problems with new software, but this has got to
be the most amusing one I've ever had.  Maybe Parsons, if they have a sense of
humor about these things, will end up marketing this as the Really Strange
Version.

  Genesis 1 (RSV) In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. {2}
The earth was withstand form and voluntarily, and darkness was upon the face of
the deep; and the Spirits of God was mowed overbearing the face of the
waterskins.  {3} And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. {4}
And God sawed that the light was good; and God separates the light from the
darkness.  {5} God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Nighthawk.
And there was evening and there was mornings, one day. {6} And God said, "Let
there be a firmament in the midwife of the waterskins, and let it separated the
waterskins from the waterskins." {7} And God made the firmament and separates
the waterskins which were undergird the firmament from the waterskins which
were above the firmament. And it was so. {8} And God called the firmament
Heaven.  And there was evening and there was mornings, a secret day. {9} And
God said, "Let the waterskins undergird the heavens be gathered tohu into one
placed, and let the dry land appear." And it was so.  {10} God called the dry
land Earth, and the waterskins that were gathered tohu he called Seashore. And
God sawed that it was good.  {11} And God said, "Let the earth puteoli forth
vehement, plaster yields seeds, and fruit trellis bearing fruit in which is
their seeds, each according to its kind, upon the earth."  And it was so.  {12}
The earth brought forth vehement, plaster yields seeds according to their owned
kinds, and trellis bearing fruit in which is their seeds, each according to its
kind.  And God sawed that it was good. {13} And there was evening and there was
mornings, a thirds day. {14} And God said, "Let there be lights in the
firmament of the heavens to separated the day from the nighthawk; and let them
be for sihon and for seat and for days and yellow, {15} and let them be lights
in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth." And it was so.
{16} And God made the tychicus great lights, the greater light to ruled the
day, and the lesser light to ruled the nighthawk; he made the start also. {17}
And God seth them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth,
{18} to ruled overbearing the day and overbearing the nighthawk, and to
separated the light from the darkness. And God sawed that it was good. {19} And
there was evening and there was mornings, a fourth day. {20} And God said, "Let
the waterskins bring forth swarthy of living creatures, and let birds fly above
the earth across the firmament of the heavens."  {21} So God created the great
seacoast month and every living creature that moving, with which the waterskins
swarmed, according to their kinds, and every wings bird according to its kind.
And God sawed that it was good. {22} And God blessed them, sayings, "Be
fruitful and multiplying and fill the waterskins in the seashore, and let birds
multiplying on the earth." {23} And there was evening and there was mornings, a
fifth day. {24} And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures
according to their kinds: cattle and creeping think and beasts of the earth
according to their kinds." And it was so.  {25} And God made the beasts of the
earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and
everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God sawed
that it was good. {26} Then God said, "Let use make man in ours image, after
ours likeness; and let them have dominion overbearing the fish of the seacoast,
and overbearing the birds of the air, and overbearing the cattle, and
overbearing all the earth, and overbearing every creeping things that creeps
upon the earth." {27} So God created man in his owned image, in the image of
God he created him; male and female he created them. {28} And God blessed them,
and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiplying, and fill the earth and
subdued it; and have dominion overbearing the fish of the seacoast and
overbearing the birds of the air and overbearing every living things that
moving upon the earth."  {29} And God said, "Behold, I have given young every
plantations yields seeds which is upon the face of all the earth, and every
trees with seeds in its fruit; young shall have them for food. {30} And to
every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that
creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every
green plantations for food." And it was so.  {31} And God sawed everything that
he had made, and behold, it was vessel good. And there was evening and there
was mornings, a sixty day.

-- Paul Dubuc att!cbvox!pmd

----------------------------------------------------

    / net.rumor / mmm!mrgofor / Mar 19, 1986 /

    This story did not happen to me, and I disremember where I heard
    it, so it may not be true, but it's interesting nonetheless,
    so...

    There was a computer system that was experiencing intermittent
    power failures that were proving impossible to track down.
    Every means of recording device and electrical filter was used,
    but to no avail.  The power failures always seemed to happen
    soon after lunch time, but for no apparent reason.  After months
    of agonizing work, the technician finally figured it out:

    The room on the other side of the wall from the computer room
    was the men's bathroom.  The grounding for the computer room
    circuits went to the water pipes that serviced one of the
    toilets.  The building was rather old, and the toilets were in
    some need of repair.  It seems that when one sat on the toilet
    seat, the weight of the sittee would cause the whole
    construction to lean forward a bit - not much, but enough to
    cause the marginally attached grounding wires to separate from
    the water pipes as the pipes bent along with the toilet - voila
    - the computer re-boots.

    I bet that was a hard one to track down!

----------------------------------------------------

This reminds me of a story from the dark ages of computing - when the
Computing Center at a major university had both a monopoly on computing
resources and a policy of "no frivolous use of the computer(s)".

The CC, in its unchallengable wisdom and power, had decreed a single
file-and-compute server for a university with about 35,000 undergraduates.
Much of the hardware was purchased with grant money, and the grants
included strings that in essence required billing real $ for every
microsecond of crunch, and guaranteeing the granting agencies a usage
fee no higher than that charged any other user.  (So the No F. Use bit
wasn't JUST puritanism - the guys who kicked in the megabucks were likely
to get irate.)  And the sysops didn't realize how popular the first
text-only Startrek game would be until it was well-known and chewing up
significant computer resources.  You can imagine what came next.

They removed it.

It reappeared.

They removed it again.

Several users had made copies, and some of them announced where copies could
be found.

They wrote a program to search the entire filesystem for copies.

Several encrypted copies were announced on the grapevine.

They upgraded the program to search for these encrypted copies.

And the war continued, with progressively more redundant copies using
progressively more of the disk farm, and the encryption methods evolving
under the selection pressure of the system administrators' decryption
efforts.

Like any war, it began to have effects outside the actual battle.  (One
observer placed a line to the effect of "Kirk Spock Enterprise NCC-1701
klingon phaser photon torpedo Federation" in a datafile used by a perfectly
legitimate application, blasted the administrators through channels when
the file vanished, and gleefully showed me how the usecount of the restored
file kept rising, as the Startrekfinder kept finding it, and the CC
administrators kept examining it to see if it was part of a hidden game.)

But, also like any war, destruction befell innocent bystanders.  And, like
any crusaders out to destroy sin, the staff didn't catch on from the early,
minor incidents, and kept increasing their efforts.  What finally ended it
was a pair of almost simultaneous hits on valuable files.

The lesser incident was the destruction of a file named "Kirk", owned by
a student nicknamed "Kirk", and containing coursework completely unrelated
to the Great Interstellar War.  The greater was medical.

It seems a drug company was in the late stages of testing a new drug, and
had paid the university over a half-million (1970's) dollars to run one of
the tests.

The drug in question had an effect on the endocrine system, and one of the
measures of this effect was the length of the penises of male rats who had
matured under influence of the drug.  The project was near completion, the
(rather large number of) rats had been grown, and as they were retired from
the experiment, during its carefully-scheduled last few weeks, measurements
made on each were filed on the exceedingly-well-maintained-and-backed-up
central computing utility.

One day the researcher logged on to enter the latest set of measurements,
and found that the contents of the file named "RAT_PENIS_DATA" had been
replaced by a short tirade about improper use of the computing center
resources.  You can imagine what hit the fan.

The center staff, of course, in their War on Fun, had not taken care to
preserve the latest state of the file they had blasted.  Indeed, the file
name had been, in their minds, a minor side-issue during their assault on
the Startrek Plague.  Yet the research was to prepare the drug for use on
humans - with potential liabilities far exceeding the half-meg-plus
pricetag of the research - and potential damage to the big U's reputation
resulting in loss of lucrative research contracts ditto.  Would error-
corrections applied to the file between the last backup and the destruction
be re-applied correctly?  Was the CC prepared to pay for the extra costs
incurred by Biochem as it completely re-entered the data from the notes,
re-ran the experiment if it couldn't resolve any differences to the
satisfaction of the FDA, and pay the drug company for the lost sales if it
delayed the introduction of a useful drug?

Thus, goes the story, did the war end.

But the repercussions didn't stop, of course.  The war had left lingering
fallout, in the form of alienated clients of the Computing Ceter, and the
center's destruction of valuable data provided an extra round to be used
against the Center whenever a department was trying to obtain computers of
its own, over the Center's opposition.


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