Microsoft Widows 7′s campaign: Life Without Walls. I was thinking about that and I came to the conclusion that it’s a bit silly. I mean, if we don’t have walls, why do we need Windows? 
I was trudging through some blogs from startup companies in Silicon Valley and discovered a bunch of [short] presentations from some of the people involved with the startups there. I’ve (re)posted my favorites here – the ones that used humor to get their point across. I completely agree with the points I’ve had experience with, and I can see where they’re coming from on the others. If the first one doesn’t make you laugh, then the rest probably won’t either, you probably enjoy a different style of humor to me
I just watched Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo Bay and I have to say the best part of the movie for me was the poem that Kumar reads out. I figured when I’d heard it that it was probably not written specifically for the movie, although Googling it only turns up results that reference the movie in the first page! Maybe I’m just a geek, but I think it is just done so well!
“Square Root of 3″ by David Feinberg
I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three
The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine
For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic
I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality
When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three
As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer
We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands
Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed
I just finished reading the February ’09 issue of Nett magazine, and I have to say I agree with the final article by Stefan Sojka. It made me smile. I was going to tear it out and tape it to my door, but then I realised I’d probably never read it again. Oh what to do…blog it! Apologies if the scan is a little blurry, the file size gets quite large very quickly on full pages. It’s only shown in medium size, so click on the image to see the full size version.
Last night (well early hours of this morning actually; it’s nearly 2AM) I decided to play a buddy of mine at a game of chess. That’s my travel board and (nice German crafted) pieces in the picture. First game was good. It went for about 30 minutes, and then I started to lose interest a little bit and decided to take a risk and make a run for mate. I queued it up and had a good decoy to lure my opponent into helping me queue up the mate setting. It worked. He threw a spanner into the works because I wasn’t focussing on where he was able to move his queen, but I was still 1 move away from mate so I did check mate rather than defending mate own position (yay!).
2nd game is where it got interesting. My opponent messed up by moving his queen out too early, and I cornered it and took it. I also got a bonus bishop in the process. After that I basically took over the board. It ended up that I had taken all bar one knight, one bishop and rook and 3 pawns and I hadn’t even had to open up my king side of the board yet! I was in a position to take his rook and bishop anyway. We were both tired and he made his next move. I moved my queen out and took his rook. And then his bishop. And then I set to work taking his pawns and setting him up with my queen and my two bishops. Funny part? I wasn’t moving my queen; I was moving my king as if it was the queen! Neither of us noticed until I stopped and took a little longer for my move to figure out the mate movement. He had so much confidence in me playing correctly after winning the game that he trusted my moves and failed to check me.
So, to cheat at chess, just win the first game fairly and the other player will hold a false sense of confidence in you so that you can have your run of the board rules as you see fit! Actually I didn’t intend on cheating, we were just so tired that neither of us noticed. Suffice to say we both counted that game as my loss 
I was investigating the transfer performance of a USB HDD in Linux and stumbled across a news thread talking about the performance difference in compression prior to a transfer, against transferring the (larger) uncompressed file.
Oh by the way, performance of USB HDD transfers is bad due to no DMA = CPU spikes during the transfer…the faster CPU you have, the better performance you’ll get (I get about 5MB/s on a 1GHz Via Nehmiah before it pegs out).
It looks like some systems admins got involved in the thread though, so it became quite humorous
Post #176448
By pwhysall
1. What’s the fastest compression program? I’m willing to bet that gzip isn’t it. this [*] may warrant investigation – I’m going to have a play!
2. Is your gzip appropriately compiled for AMD64, or is it a generic i386 binary?
3. Your Quad Opteron would be much happier in my house. Ship it to me right away!
Post #176458
By broomberg
but it seems the increase in size will bite you more when moving things over a T1.
I’ll let you know later. Gotta go setup a new array and more some data.
Note: I disagree. I think the quad opteron is much more happier in my safe, cool, raised floor, generator backup power, 24 x 7 attended, Gbit backbone, 31TB SAN attached, LTO2 backed up, halon workalike protected, 10mbit ethernet internet connected computer room than it could ever possibly be in your house.
And it would get lonely without all the other quad opterons to keep it company.
Oh, you thought it was the only one? nonononono.
That was the 1st box to prove it out. We are standardizing on them for our high end high io compute needs. They will replace the Sun 450s.
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.”
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.
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’mguessing 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 staffat Motorola (I believe it was) discovered a relativelysimple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-Vtimesharing system (or it may have been CP-V's predecessorUTS). Through a simple programming strategy, it waspossible for a user program to trick the system into runninga portion of the program in "master mode" (supervisorstate), in which memory protection does not apply. Theprogram could then poke a large value into its "privilegelevel" byte (normally write-protected) and could thenproceed to bypass all levels of security within thefile-management system, patch the system monitor, and donumerous other interesting things. In short, the barn doorwas wide open. Motorola quite properly reported this problem to XEROX viaan official "level 1 SIDR" (a bug report with a perceivedurgency of "needs to be fixed yesterday"). Because the textof each SIDR was entered into a database that could beviewed by quite a number of people, Motorola followed theapproved procedure: they simply reported the problem as"Security SIDR", and attached all of the necessarydocumentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc. separately. Xerox apparently sat on the problem... they either didn'tacknowledge the severity of the problem, or didn't assignthe necessary operating-system-staff resources to developand distribute an official patch. Time passed (months, as I recall). The Motorola guyspestered their Xerox field-support rep, to no avail.Finally they decided to take Direct Action, to demonstrateto Xerox management just how easily the system could becracked, and just how thoroughly the system security systemscould be subverted. They dug around through the operating-system listings, anddevised a thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patcheswere then incorporated into a pair of programs called RobinHood and Friar Tuck. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck weredesigned to run as "ghost jobs" (daemons, in Unixterminology); they would use the existing loophole tosubvert system security, install the necessary patches, andthen keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keepthe system operator (in effect, the superuser) from abortingthem. So... one day, the system operator on the main CP-Vsoftware-development system in El Segundo was surprised by anumber 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-systemdevelopers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, andX'ed them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hoodwas 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 beenkilled, and would start a new copy of the recently-slainprogram within a few milliseconds. The only way to killboth ghosts was to kill them simultaneously (very difficult)or to deliberately crash the system. Finally, the system programmers did the latter... only tofind that the bandits appeared once again when the systemrebooted! It turned out that these two programs had patchedthe boot-time image (the /vmunix file, in Unix terms) andhad added themselves to the list of programs that were to bestarted at boot time... The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicatedwhen the system staff rebooted the system from a cleanboot-tape and reinstalled the monitor. Not long thereafter,Xerox released a patch for this problem. I believe that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola'smanagement about the merry-prankster actions of the twoemployees in question. To the best of my knowledge, noserious disciplinary action was taken against either ofthese guys. Several years later, both of the perpetrators were hired byHoneywell, which had purchased the rights to CP-V afterXerox pulled out of the mainframe business. Both of themmade serious and substantial contributions to the HoneywellCP-6 operating system development effort. Robin Hood (DanHolle) did much of the development of the PL-6system-programming language compiler; Friar Tuck (JohnGabler) was one of the chief communications-software gurusfor several years. They're both alive and well, and livingin LA (Dan) and Orange County (John).
I was traveling down Wannerroo Road yesterday morning, and it’s a weird road that seems to change from 60 to 70kmh and back again all the way along. I noticed I was speeding, and I don’t want a speeding ticket at this point, so I slowed back to 60.
I was watching the car behind me get closer, and the driver didn’t look too happy – he overtook in his big Commodore. We got about 20 seconds down the road, and this police officer with a hand held radar walked out across the road into the right lane and waves the Commodore over. I love that irony heh
Maybe next time he’ll learn to invest in a radar detector…