Another joke that I can't credit! Why don't people write the authors anymore....Actually this is about 10 years old, so maybe people DO write authors now :)


Star Trek: Lost Episode Transcript

What kind of computer site would this be without at least one Star Trek reference?

(Picard) "Mr. LaForge, have you had any success with your attempts at finding a weakness in the Borg? And Mr. Data, have you been able to access their command pathways?"

(Geordi)"Yes, Captain. In fact, we found the answer by searching through our archives on late Twentieth-century computing technology."

(Geordi presses a key, and a logo appears on the computer screen.)

(Riker looks puzzled.) "What the hell is 'Microsoft'?"

(Data turns to answer.) "Allow me to explain. We will send this program, for some reason called 'Windows', through the Borg command pathways. Once inside their root command unit, it will begin consuming system resources at an unstoppable rate."

(Picard) "But the Borg have the ability to adapt. Won't they alter their processing systems to increase their storage capacity?"

(Data) "Yes, Captain. But when 'Windows' detects this, it creates a new version of itself known as an 'upgrade'. The use of resources increases exponentially with each iteration. The Borg will not be able to adapt quickly enough. Eventually all of their processing ability will be taken over and none will be available for their normal operational functions."

(Picard) "Excellent work. This is even better than that 'unsolvable geometric shape' idea."

(Data) "Captain, We have successfully installed the 'Windows' in the command unit and as expected it immediately consumed 85% of all resources. We however have not received any confirmation of the expected 'upgrade'."

(Geordi) "Our scanners have picked up an increase in Borg storage and CPU capacity to compensate, but we still have no indication of an 'upgrade' to compensate for their increase."

(Picard) "Data, scan the history banks again and determine if their is something we have missed."

(Data) "Sir, I believe their is a reason for the failure in the 'upgrade'. Apparently the Borg have circumvented that part of the plan by not sending in their registration cards.

(Riker) "Captain we have no choice. Requesting permission to begin emergency escape sequence 3F . . ."

(Geordi, excited) "Wait, Captain I just detected their CPU capacity has suddenly dropped to 0% !"

(Picard) "Data, what does your scanners show?"

(Data) "Apparently the Borg have found the internal 'Windows' module named 'Solitaire' and it has used up all the CPU capacity."

(Picard) "Lets wait and see how long this 'solitaire' can reduce their functionality."

(Riker) "Geordi what's the status on the Borg?"

(Geordi) "As expected the Borg are attempting to re-engineer to compensate for increased CPU and storage demands, but each time they successfully increase resources I have setup our closest deep space monitor beacon to transmit more 'windows' modules from something called the 'Microsoft fun-pack'.

(Picard) "How much time will that buy us ?"

(Data) "Current Borg solution rates allow me to predicate an interest time span of 6 more hours."

(Geordi) "Captain, another vessel has entered our sector."

(Picard) "Identify."

(Data) "It appears to have markings very similar to the 'Microsoft' logo"

(Over the speakers) "THIS IS ADMIRAL BILL GATES OF THE MICROSOFT FLAGSHIP MONOPOLY. WE HAVE POSITIVE CONFIRMATION OF UNREGISTERED SOFTWARE IN THIS SECTOR. SURRENDER ALL ASSETS AND WE CAN AVOID ANY TROUBLE. YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS"

(Data) "The alien ship has just opened its forward hatches and released thousands of humanoid shaped objects."

(Picard) "Magnify forward viewer on the alien craft"

(Riker) "Good God captain! Those are humans floating straight toward the Borg ship with no life support suits ! How can they survive the tortures of deep space ?!"

(Data) "I don't believe that those are humans sir, if you will look closer I believe you will see that they are carrying something recognized by twenty-first century man as doe skin leather briefcases, and wearing Armani suits"

(Riker and Picard together horrified) "Lawyers !!"

(Geordi) "It can't be. All the Lawyers were rounded up and sent hurtling into the sun in 2017 during the Great Awakening."

(Data) "True, but apparently some must have survived."

(Riker) "They have surrounded the Borg ship and are covering it with all types of papers."

(Data) "I believe that is known in ancient vernacular as 'red tape' - it often proves fatal."

(Riker) "They're tearing the Borg to pieces !"

(Picard) "Turn off the monitors. I can't stand to watch, not even the Borg deserve that."

Labels: star trek joke microsoft

I had some problems publishing for a few days - the FTP server on my host went down and I forgot to bring it back up ;)
All good now!

I found this back in about 1999 (I was still using a dot matrix printer!). I've seen it reprinted a few times, and thought I'd jump on the bandwagon (and clean out the paper copies I've been hoarding!).


The Last Human

There was a knock on the door. It was the man from Microsoft. "Not you again," I said.

"Sorry," he said, a little sheepishly. "I guess you know why I'm here."

Indeed I did. Microsoft's $300 million campaign to promote the Windows 95 operating system was meant to be universally effective, to convince every human being on the planet that Windows 95 was an essential, some would say integral, part of living. Problem was, not everyone had bought it. Specifically, I hadn't. I was the Last Human Being Without Windows 95. And now this little man from Microsoft was at my door, and he wouldn't take no for an answer.

"No," I said.

"You know I can't take that," he said, pulling out a copy of Windows 95 from a briefcase. "Come on. Just one copy. That's all we ask."

"Not interested," I said. "Look, isn't there someone else you can go bother for a while? There's got to be someone else on the planet who doesn't have a copy."

"Well, no," the Microsoft man said. "You're the only one."

"You can't be serious. Not everyone on the planet has a computer," I said. "And certainly, not everyone has a PC! Some people own Macintoshes, which run their own operating system. And some people who have PCs run OS/2, though I hear that's just a rumor. In short, there are some people who just have no USE for Windows 95."

The Microsoft man look perplexed. "I'm missing your point," he said.

"Use!" I screamed. "Use! Use! Use! Why BUY it, if you can't USE it?"

"Well, I don't know anything about this 'use' thing you're going on about," the Microsoft man said. "All I know is that according to our records, everyone else on the planet has a copy."

"People without computers?"

"Got 'em."

"Amazonian Indians?"

"We had to get some malaria shots to go in, but yes."

"The Amish."

"Check."

"Oh, come on," I said. "They don't even wear BUTTONS. How did you get them to buy a computer operating system?"

"We told them there were actually 95 very small windows in the box," the Microsoft man admitted. "We sort of lied. Which means we are all going to Hell, every single employee of Microsoft." He was somber for a minute, but then perked right up. "But that's not the point!" he said. "The point is, EVERYONE has a copy. Except you."

"So what?" I said. "If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you expect me to do it, too?"

"If we spent $300 million advertising it? Absolutely."

"No."

"Oh, back to that again," the Microsoft man said. "Hey. I'll tell you what. I'll GIVE you a copy. For free. Just take it and install it on your computer." He waved the box in front of me.

"No," I said again. "No offense, pal, but I don't NEED it. And frankly, your whole advertising blitz has sort of offended me. I mean, it's a computer operating system. Great. Fine. Swell. Whatever. But you guys are advertising it like it creates world peace or something."

"It did."

"Pardon?"

"World peace. It was part of the original design. Really. One button access. Click on it, poof, end to strife and hunger. Simple."

"So what happened?"

"Well, you know," he said. "It took up a lot of space on the hard drive. We had to decide between it or the Microsoft Network. Anyway, we couldn't figure out how to make a profit off of world peace."

"Go away," I said.

"I can't," he said. "I'll be killed if I fail."

"You have got to be kidding," I said.

"Look," the Microsoft man said, "We sold this to the Amish. The Amish! Right now, they're opening the boxes and figuring out they've been had. We'll be pitchforked if we ever step into Western Pennsylvania again. But we did it. So to have YOU holding out, well, it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to the company. It's embarrassing to the product. It's embarrassing to Bill."

"Bill Gates does not care about me," I said.

"He's watching right now," the Microsoft man said. "Borrowed one of those military spy satellites just for the purpose. It's also got one of those high-powered lasers. You close that door on me, zap, I'm a pile of grey ash."

"He wouldn't do that," I said. "He might hit that copy of Windows 95 by accident."

"Oh, Bill's gotten pretty good with that laser," the Microsoft man said nervously. "Okay. I wasn't supposed to do this, but you leave me no choice. If you take this copy of Windows 95, we will reward you handsomely. In fact, we'll give you your own Caribbean island! How does Montserrat sound?"

"Terrible. There's an active volcano there."

"It's only a small one," the Microsoft man said.

"Look," I said, "even if you DID convince me to take that copy of Windows 95, what would you do then? You'd have totally saturated the market. That would be it. No new worlds to conquer. What would you do then?"

The Microsoft man held up another box and gave it to me.

"'Windows 95....For Pets'?!?!?"

"There's a LOT of domestic animals out there," he said.

I shut the door quickly. There was a surprised yelp, the sound of a laser, and then nothing.

Labels: last human joke microsoft

I had a print out of this story from a few years ago. It is
said that it was posted in news.sysadmin (news group), I'm
guessing many years ago. I'm crediting Dave Platt for this
version though.




The more things change, the more they stay the same...

Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff
at Motorola (I believe it was) discovered a relatively
simple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-V
timesharing system (or it may have been CP-V's predecessor
UTS).  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 a perceived
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. separately.

Xerox apparently sat on the problem... they either didn't
acknowledge the severity of the problem, or didn't assign
the necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop
and distribute an official patch.

Time passed (months, as I recall).  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 system security systems
could be subverted.

They dug around through 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.

So... one 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
(as I recall... it's been a while since I heard the story):

- Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the
 middle of a job.

- Disk drives would seek back&forth so rapidly that they'd
 attempt to walk across the floor.

- The card-punch output device would occasionally start up
 of itself and punch a "lace card" (every hole punched).
 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
 recollate 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!  (Robin Hood)
 id1: Off (aborted)

 id2: Fear not, friend Robin!  I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's men!

 id3: Thank you, my good fellow! (Robin)

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 image (the /vmunix 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.

I believe that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola's
management about the merry-prankster actions of the two
employees in question.  To the best of my knowledge, no
serious disciplinary action was taken against either of
these guys.

Several years later, both of the perpetrators were hired by
Honeywell, which had purchased the rights to CP-V after
Xerox pulled out of the mainframe business.  Both of them
made serious and substantial contributions to the Honeywell
CP-6 operating system development effort.  Robin Hood (Dan
Holle) did much of the development of the PL-6
system-programming language compiler; Friar Tuck (John
Gabler) was one of the chief communications-software gurus
for several years.  They're both alive and well, and living
in LA (Dan) and Orange County (John).

Labels: motorola xerox robin hood friar tuck hack

I use a PHP web app for my invoicing runs. Part of this involves running a command every night to generate new invoices. Usually this is not a big deal because most invoices are created manually anyway. But I'm starting to get more auto-generated invoices, so I decided to whack the generation command into the crontab.

I noticed pretty quick that it wasn't running. Not happy! I know that often this results from a problem with the command being executed (execution permissions) or incorrect times in the crontab line. But what it also depends on, is the correctness of the file up to that line. If a line is incorrect, cron will fail on that line, and so you (may) notice that your command doesn't run!

Just make sure that all lines in the crontab are correct. Also, Debian requires the user to be listed in field 6, so most of the time when people say "add this line to your crontab" it won't work in Debian- you need to add the user after the run time.

I still use VirtualBox over VMWare, because VMWare Server (stable) won't compile on my machine. VMWare Server 2 (beta) compiles fine, but the evaluation licence does not permit production use, so I'm teathered to VirtualBox for the moment (unfortunately).

Anyway, much of the work I do invovles testing applications on CLEAN O/S installs so that I can deploy that server straight away, as opposed to having to reinstall the O/S and the application all over again. In VMWare I just copy the VDX file and create a new virtual machine with that hard drive image. In VirtualBox, with Windows hard drives, you'll get a complaint about the SID being the same if you try to do that on the same host. Apparently this is due to an MS Windows operation, but really I don't care, I just want the copy to work as I expect it to. To fix this in VirtualBox, you'll need to drop to the command line and use the VBoxManage command line tool to complete the copy. It will generate a new SId for the virtual drive.

Like this:

$ VBoxManage clonevdi
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.5.0
(C) 2005-2007 innotek GmbH
All rights reserved.

Usage:

VBoxManage clonevdi |

$


So I run:



$ VBoxManage clonevdi /media/disk/VirtualBox_Stock_HDD/WinXP-install.vdi /media/surplus/VirtualBox/WinXP-tony-word.vdi
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.5.0
(C) 2005-2007 innotek GmbH
All rights reserved.

0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
$


And it works. It's still annoying though. I can't wait for VMWare 2 to go stable so I can switch all my virtualization back to VMWare :)