From:	IN%"SEWALL@UCONNVM.bitnet"  "Murph Sewall" 26-JUN-1990 20:15:35.69
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Subj:	More from the Henry Cate III archives

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From: Murph Sewall <SEWALL@UCONNVM.bitnet>
Subject: More from the Henry Cate III archives
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Several years ago, before AIDS became big news, mercury pollution was
trendy and political (and is probably as bad now as then).  One Friday
I was in a university cafeteria line behind an Old Hippie (who was old
enough to have been a beatnik).  "Mr. Natural" began loudly haranguing
one of the ladies behind the counter about the mercury content of the
fish she was serving.
     
She replied, "We catch them in the winter when the mercury is low."
     
The funny part was that he didn't catch the pun!
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
    In my prime I could do the cube in less than a minute, The Revenge in
less than five, the Pyraminx and the Missing Link were mere exercises to think
over as I bored myself to sleep.  Rubik's magic fell in one night of twiddling
and his clock puzzle only lasted about two hours.
     
    I can hear it already:
     
    'Well, isn't that Spatial.' (Ha!  Beat you all to the pun!)
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
To me, absolutes are found only in finite algebra and taxes.
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
What's the optimal number of reviewers?
     
3.1415926
     
     Or three full time programmers and  11 1/2 week old German Shepherd puppy.
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
Hack first, ask questions later.
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
      I bought the latest computer;
      it came fully loaded.
      It was guaranteed for 90 days,
      but in 30 was outmoded!
        - The Wall Street Journal passed along by Big Red Computer's SCARLETT
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
                                    (Richard Feynman)
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
I found this in the Warshawsky catalog ( a discount car parts
mail order store out of Chicago ) --
     
SAVE 22% -- IMITATION CELLULAR PHONE WITH ANTENNA
     
Incredibly realistic!  Almost impossible to spot as imitation!
     
Friends and strangers alike will think you have joined that
"special" group of mobile phone owners!  That's because this
fake phone is so realistic!  The shape, buttons, phone number,
switches, mouthpiece, ... everything is accurate down to the
smallest detail.  Only YOU will know it's a replica.  Mounts easily
with self-stick tape in any highly visible spot in your vehicle.
Weather-resistant simulated antenna with magnetic base mounts outside
your vehicle to complete the deception.  Phone can even be carried
inside your attache case, etc. to impress everyone you meet.
     
Regular price $8.99...................      NOW $6.99
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
A software company I will not name was pondering ways to get more attention
for their product.
     
One person suggested:
"Hey, why don't we make it offensive to Shia Muslims?"
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
I found a rather humorous ATM at a local bank.
     
Let me describe it to you.
It is a *drive* thru style.
     
It has a screen
that shows the menus and 4 menu buttons along the side of the screen to
pick the choices from the screen menu. It also has a keypad for typing
in your PID and cash ammounts. got that? Well here is the funny part:
     
The buttons are printed in braille.
     
How is a blind person supposed to read the screen to know which menu
button to choose?
     
And how many blind people do you know that drive?
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
Several years ago I was working as an instructor at a computer camp.  I was
assigned to teach the introductory class in TTL logic and peripheral design.
So there I was, explaining the TTL high and low states.  "Five volts
represents the 'high' state or a binary 1, and zero volts represents the
'low' state, or a binary 0."   And I went on and on explaining the various
TTL Gates (AND, NOR, NAND, etc).  Finally, I got to the Inverter (or NOT gate).
I explained that if you put 5 volts into it, you'll get 0 volts out, and if you
put 0 volts into it you'll get 5 volts out.  To this, one person replied:
     
"Wouldn't that thing be awfully useful during a power failure?"
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
Tonight on PBS there a fascinating special documentary about
the FORBIDDEN CITY in China. The announcer mentioned that it was
forbidden because no one except emperors, their wives and UNIX were
allowed inside the city walls.
     
Imagine...
     
What other operating systems were around those days? Why were they
discriminated against?
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
 A while back I used to work in a company doing workstations for stock and
commodity brokers.  These things are their bread and butter: if they don't
work, they can't do *a thing*.  They thus tend to get frustrated easily.
     
 One of them calls, and says, "No matter what I type, it doen't work".
Get the machine exchanged, the keyboard is hopelessly damaged.  A couple
of days later, the same thing happens.  We discovered that the guy used
his *telephone handset* to bang on the keyboard to flip pages.  The
competition - obviously from similar experiences - had keyboards encased in
sheetmetal, with very tough springs; these people only hit one key at a time
anyway, and didn't touch type, so that was OK...
 In a similar vein, a frustrated customer had, on a bad trade, *ripped* his
console from the data feed - the back panel was still hanging to the wall
outlet.
 We got bit by this again when we introduced mice on our systems: now *they*
were getting banged up by people using them do dial the phone!!
 To solve all these problems, we had to install routines to detect
keyboard banging (lots of keys pressed too quickly in succession) and
mouse banging (that took some work) and beep *real loud* - they'd
get embarrassed and not do it anymore. Abuse management - a whole
new area in user interfaces!
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
I recall a story 1970's, told by a friend at the time, about a phone bill.
     
The local phone company, NJ Bell would include a keypunch card with
your bill. The card included the standard information about the
customer and the bill amount.  This friend of mine took the phone
bill card to keypunch and added an overpunch to the the bill amount
making it a negative number.  He sent in a check for the regular
amount with the altered card.  When he received his next months bill
there was a credit for his payment and a credit from his previous
balance due.
     
He never told me if the phone company ever caught on or not.
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
Anyone remember the Act Sirius 1 machine?  It was expensive, powerful and
pre-PC, and totally failed to take off (despite impressive graphics).
     
Anyway, the story was reported that many users complained of inability to
boot off the supplied system disks.  The response was always the same - the
user must have caused magnetic damage.  Apparently, they claimed that a
common source of this was to leave the disks next to an old (mechanical bell)
telephone for more than six rings!
     
Eventually the truth came out - they were indeed shipping blank system disks!
Someone in Quality Control went quite red!
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
A computer repairman was one day called to a grade school to repair their
no longer working computer.  When he opened up the processor, he found
a thick coating of white dust covering every component within, i.e.
backplane, mother board and all other PC boards, housing walls, etc.
He had never seen any coating like this in any other computer.  The repair
of the processor involved simply blowing out the dust.
     
A few days later he was on another service call within the school for another
computer.  Walking by the room that contained the unit he had previously
fixed he decided to peek into the room to see how it was doing.  What he
saw explained the white dust.  He saw several boys beating the chalk
board erasers next to the fan in the unit, and watching the unit suck
the dust inside.
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
The computer at some business somewhere (fill in your favorite
locations) had a bad tendency to go down at about 1pm on most afternoons.
Every time this happened, the operations folks would find the problem to
be hardware related.  To be specific, a particular board would always
fry--literally--and become covered with molten or charred muck.  One day
when the system crashed at about 1, the operations folks got into the
computer lab just in time to see the culprit:  a secretary heating a
sandwich on the cpu's vents!  Cheese would melt and drip down the vents
onto a system board, eventually causing it to fail and the system to
crash.
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
A documented feature of a remoted debugger that I once used was the
"find and fix feature". The documentation indicated that if you were debugging
a program and were having indeterminate problems, hitting the "F" key
would provide usefull insight as to what the problem was. I was new to
the Unix style of doing things, so I believed the documentation (8-)).
So, in the middle of running down a nasty hardware timing problem, I hit
"F". The debugger replied with "cosmic ray error". I actually believed this
error message for just long enough to get a great laugh out of it. It is now
great fun to find someone using this debugger and having problems.
     
If you tell the new user a few lies about artificial intelligence and
debugger sophistication, almost any bizarre message the debugger spits
out can be made to sound plausible to the gullible user.
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
A couple summers ago, I worked at a university department where the following
event occured.  One of the people in accounting had this program called
DRAIN.EXE which first displays a message
     
    System Error -- There is water in the disk drive
     
    Taking care of it now
    Draining water from disk drive
     
This is when the program starts to make trickling sounds.  Then, after a few
seconds, it would print the message
     
    Starting spin cycle
     
Here, the disk drive would start spinning and the computer makes a sort of
whirring sound which increases incrementally in pitch.
     
Then it would all stop and display the message that everything was now OK and
the person could use the computer.  Well, as I said, one person had this
program which he left on a disk in the victim's computer.  He naturally set-up
the AUTOEXEC.BAT file to run the program.  Having been forewarned about the
afternoon entertainment, we waited for the tell-tale noise.  Later, as planned
the victim turns on her computer.
     
As we listened, we heard the trickling sound.  Then it stopped.  Then we heard
it again.  When we looked into her office, she looking underneath the computer.
Perhaps she was looking for the water draining out of the disk drive.
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
My tenth grade geometry teacher (which dates this story at 1978)
had this big old German built calculator with huge keys to fit
his big pudgey fingers.  The thing was practically an antique
at that time.  It had the old fashioned green fluorescent tubes
for the numerical display and weighed about 10 pounds.  Naturally
it had only the add, subtract, multiply, and divide functions,
and also naturally it had no batteries, but would only work off
the AC.
    One day when he was out of the room, I took it upon myself to
see whether it had been properly debugged.  I plugged it into the
wall and typed "12/0=".  To my amazement, no error message appeared.
Instead, it went into some kind of infinite loop.  Ok, so I *should*
have unplugged it at that point, but my curiousity got the better of
me and I let it continue.  Roughly 5 minutes later (about the time
that the teacher returned to the room), there were lovely wisps of
blue smoke wafting out of the back of the machine.  Imagine my
disappointment when I had to buy a calculator which didn't even
work anymore!
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
    My brother goes to Caltech. Awhile ago he told me of a student there
who had come up with a way to physically destroy an IBM PC from
software. This student told Big Blue about it, and they just couldn't
resist.
    They made him an offer- they would supply an IBM PC for him to
destroy in their presence. If he was successful, he would tell them how
he did it, and they'd give him a free (functioning) IBM.
    Well, the appointed day came, and so did IBM. They set up their
machine on a table and sat down to watch. The student quietly inserted a
disk and turned the machine on, then sat down. After the memory check,
the computer loaded the program from disk. The drive kept running for a
while. Soon the machine started to shake, then shake violently, and
would have walked itself off the table had the power supply not shut
down. It was quite dead and emitting that funny burnt-resistor smell.
The IBM reps checked it and declared it irreppairable.
    My brother's friend now has a nice IBM PC he uses for terminal
emulation, and support for his plants.
     
    This is how it worked- the program simply sped up and slowed down
the disk drive until it found the resonant frequency of the case of he
machine. The case slowly started to resonate, and soon the whole machine
would be shaking. This would cause the cards and other innards to flex,
and contacts would be made and broken, destroying chips left and right.
Eventually something would short and the power supply would go. Pretty
effective, tho it did take a while.
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
         I remember hearing that an early version of the Commodore
Pet would catch fire if certain addresses had certain contents. Something
about the clock being forced to run at too high a speed. (Can anyone confirm/
deny this?)
     
----------------------------------------------------
     
Nah, Nah, Nah - yer got it all wrong, squire.
The story goes (and this one is true) that the Commodore Pet early versions
not only had integral monitors (all one big box, y'know) but the software
had a _certain_ amount of control over the screen.  This meant that, if you
REALLY knew what you were doing you could
  (i) disable the refresh interrupt where the raster beam (the thing that
      scans down a monitor at huge speeds to make the picture) retraces to
      the top left corner
  (ii) stop the beam in its place
     
result: one VERY BRIGHT SPOT in the middle of the screen somewhere, which if
        left will burn clean through the monitor, causing irreprable damage.
     
This contradicted the first law of such machines: nothing you can type at the
keyboard could do any PHYSICAL damage to the machine.  I wonder if anyone
else has examples of this sort of behaviour?  (not wishing to drag out
an already overlong theme ;-) )
