Collage 224               H u m o u r N e t               28 FEB 96

And here's another one that's been making the rounds recently ...

"Judge Rules on E-Mail Privacy Case"

TULSA, OKLA -- The Oklahoma Supreme Court has ruled on a case that
legal experts believe clearly delineates the e-mail privacy rights
of computer users in the workplace. Judge Stan Musing declared that
employees have a right to expect that their employers will refrain
from monitoring e-mail messages transmitted on company systems.

(Hmmm ... I notice he didn't say anything about your *government*
refraining from those practices. Come to think of it, I wonder if
this still applies if your employer *is* the government ... ?)

The case went to court after programmer Augustus Lindsey's
supervisor monitored his e-mail and intercepted a message from
Lindsey to a colleague. The message read:

   "That little sex kitten has been driving me wild. She's
   moaning and begging for it every minute. Last night I was
   afraid someone would hear, and we'd be thrown out of the
   building. But don't worry -- all is arranged. Wednesday
   she gets the knife."

Lindsey's supervisor alerted authorities, suspecting that a crime
was in the making. Lindsey was arrested on the spot and spent an
uncomfortable night discussing the situation with the police.
However, he was released in the morning, just in time to get his
female cat to the vet for spaying.

(Good save, Lindsey. And they say that fast thinking doesn't pay
anymore ...)

Lindsey sued his boss for invasion of privacy and sought punitive
damages as well.

(Oh, right. Poor kitty comes out on the short end of this deal, and
*Lindsey* gets the punitive damages. Socks (or whatever her name is)
oughta sue for invasion of private parts.)

That one was just too good to pass up. And so are the other two
pieces that compose this "Geeks at Work" Collage ...

"Bubba's User Manual" -- the piece that I accidentally deleted a
while back, and asked someone to kindly forward to me -- comes to us
c/o JD in New Jersey. This one is today's "mainstream" piece (i.e.,
it can be understood by your everyday geek).

The second piece, "Programming in C and Unix," is provided by my
technical supervisor (and one helluva nice guy) (really!) (he isn't
a subscriber, so I can't be saying that to suck up), John McCorkle.
This one will only be of interest to people who have experience
programming in that environment -- but if you're familiar with it,
even just a little bit, this piece is a real scream. Just like the
language. :-)

(Big thanks to JD and John for these awesome pieces.)

"Geeks at Work." Story of my life ...

- Vince Sabio
  HumourNet Moderator
  HumourNet@telephonet.com
____________________________________________________________________
          Opener (above) Copyright 1996 by Vincent Sabio
  Permission is hereby granted to forward or post this "Collage";
  please observe the guidelines stated at the end of the message.
____________________________________________________________________

SUBJ: Bubba's User Manual

I once unpacked a SCSI drive shipped from Bubba's in Louisiana, and it
arrived with these instructions in the packaging.

IMPORTANT! READ THIS BEFORE USING YOUR NEW DEVICE

Congratulations! You have purchased an extremely fine device that
would give you thousands of years of trouble-free service, except that
you undoubtedly will destroy it via some typical bonehead consumer
maneuver. Which is why we ask you to:

PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE READ THIS OWNER'S MANUAL CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU
UNPACK THE DEVICE. YOU ALREADY UNPACKED IT, DIDN'T YOU? YOU UNPACKED
IT AND PLUGGED IT IN AND TURNED IT ON AND FIDDLED WITH THE KNOBS, AND
NOW YOUR CHILD, THE SAME CHILD WHO ONCE SHOVED A POLISH SAUSAGE INTO
YOUR VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDER AND SET IT ON "FAST FORWARD," THIS CHILD
ALSO IS FIDDLING WITH THE KNOBS, RIGHT? WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST BREAK
THESE DEVICES RIGHT AT THE FACTORY BEFORE WE SHIP THEM OUT, YOU KNOW
THAT?!?

We're sorry. We just get a little crazy sometimes because we're
always getting back "defective" merchandise where it turns out that
the consumer inadvertently bathed the device in acid for six days.
So, in writing these instructions, we naturally tend to assume that
your skull is filled with dead insects, but we mean nothing by it.
OK? Now let's talk about:

1. UNPACKING THE DEVICE

The device is encased in foam to protect it from the Shipping People,
who like nothing more than to jab spears into outgoing boxes.

PLEASE INSPECT THE CONTENTS CAREFULLY FOR GASHES OR IDA MAE BARKER'S
ENGAGEMENT RING, WHICH SHE LOST LAST WEEK, AND SHE THINKS MAYBE IT
WAS LOST WHILE SHE WAS PACKING DEVICES.

Ida Mae really wants that ring back, because it is her only proof of
engagement, and her fiancee, Stuart, is now seriously considering
backing out on the whole thing in as much as he had consumed most of
a bottle of Jim Beam in Quality Control when he decided to pop the
question. It is not without irony that Ida Mae's last name is
"Barker," if you get our drift.

WARNING: DO NOT EVER AS LONG AS YOU LIVE THROW AWAY THE BOX OR ANY OF
THE PIECES OF STYROFOAM, EVEN THE LITTLE ONES SHAPED LIKE PEANUTS.

If you attempt to return the device to the store, and you are missing
one single peanut, the store personnel will laugh in the chilling
manner exhibited by Joseph Stalin just after he enslaved Eastern
Europe.

Besides the device, the box should contain:

* Eight little rectangular snippets of paper that say "WARNING!"

* A little plastic packet containing four 5/17-inch pilfer grommets
and two club-ended 6/93 inch boxcar prawns.

YOU WILL NEED TO SUPPLY: a matrix wrench and 60,000 feet of tram
cable.

IF ANYTHING IS DAMAGED OR MISSING: You should IMMEDIATELY turn to
your spouse and say "Margaret, you know why this country can't make
a car that can get all the way through the drive-through at Burger
King without a major transmission overhaul? Because nobody cares,
that's why."

WARNING: This is assuming your spouse's name is Margaret. And not
Pete.

2. PLUGGING IN THE DEVICE

The plug on this device represents the latest thinking of the
electrical industry's Plug Mutation Group, which, in a continuing
effort to prevent consumers from causing hazardous electrical current
to flow through their appliances, developed the Three-Pronged Plug,
then the Plug Where One Prong is Bigger Than the Other. Your device
is equipped with the revolutionary new Plug Whose Prongs Consist of
Six Small Religious Figurines Made of Chocolate.

DO NOT TRY TO PLUG IT IN!

Lay it gently on the floor near an outlet, but out of direct sunlight,
and clean it weekly with a damp handkerchief.

WARNING: WHEN YOU ARE LAYING THE PLUG ON THE FLOOR, DO NOT HOLD A
SHARP OBJECT IN YOUR OTHER HAND AND TRIP OVER THE CORD AND POKE YOUR
EYE OUT, AS THIS COULD VOID THE WARRANTY.

3. OPERATION OF THE DEVICE

WARNING: WE MANUFACTURE ONLY THE ATTRACTIVE DESIGNER CASE. THE ACTUAL
WORKING CENTRAL PARTS OF THE DEVICE ARE MANUFACTURED IN JAPAN. THE
INSTRUCTIONS WERE TRANSLATED BY MRS. SHIRLEY PELTWATER OF ACCOUNTS
RECEIVABLE, WHO HAS NEVER ACTUALLY BEEN TO JAPAN BUT DOES HAVE MOST OF
"SHOGUN" ON TAPE.

INSTRUCTIONS: For results that can be finest, we advising that:
NEVER to hold these buttons two times!! Except battery. Next
taking the (something) earth section may cause a large occurrence!
However. If this is not a trouble, such rotation is a very
maintenance action, as a kindly (something) virepoint as Drawing B.

4. WARRANTY

Be it hereby known that this device, together with but not excluding
all those certain parts thereunto, shall be warranted against all
defects, failures and malfunctions as shall occur between now and
Thursday afternoon shortly before 2, during which time the
Manufacturer will, at no charge to the Owner, send the device to our
Service People, who will emerge from their caves and engage in rituals
designed to cleanse it of evil spirits. This warranty does not cover
the attractive designer case.

WARNING: IT MAY BE A VIOLATION OF SOME LAW THAT MRS. SHIRLEY PELTWATER
HAS "SHOGUN" ON TAPE.

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: Programming in C and Unix

"Creators Admit UNIX, C Hoax"

MURRAY HILL, NJ - AT&T - In an announcement that has stunned the
computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan
admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language
created by them is an elaborate prank kept alive for over 20 years.
Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum,
Thompson revealed the following:

In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the
GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had started work
with an early release of Pascal from Professor Niklaus Wirth's ETH
labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant
simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored of
the Rings,' a National Lampoon parody of the Tolkien's 'Lord of the
Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics
environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the
operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new OS
to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users'
frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well
as other more risque allusions. We sold the terse command language
to novitiates by telling them that it saved them typing.

Then Dennis and Brian worked on a warped version of Pascal, called
'A.' 'A' looked a lot like Pascal, but elevated the notion of the
direct memory address (which Wirth had banished) to the central
concept of the language. This was Dennis's contribution, and he in
fact coined the term "pointer" as an innocuous sounding name for a
truly malevolent construct.

Brian must be credited with the idea of having absolutely no
standard I/O specification: this ensured that at least 50% of the
typical commercial program would have to be re-coded when changing
hardware platforms. Brian was also responsible for pitching this
lack of I/O as a feature: it allowed us to describe the language as
"truly portable."

When we found others were actually creating real programs with A, we
removed compulsory type-checking on function arguments. Later, we
added a notion we called "casting": this allowed the programmer to
treat an integer as though it were a 50kb user-defined structure.
When we found that some programmers were simply not using pointers,
we eliminated the ability to pass structures to functions, enforcing
their use in even the simplest applications. We sold this, and many
other features, as enhancements to the efficiency of the language.
In this way, our prank evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C.

We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=3DC;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

[Editor's Note: One of our resident C experts believes that this
might really compile. This level of C is way over my head, but I
think you might need the not-very-popular "Gaelic C" compiler for
this. </vs>]

At one time, we joked about selling this to the Soviets to set their
computer science progress back 20 or more years.

Unfortunately, AT&T and other US corporations actually began using
Unix and C. We decided we'd better keep mum, assuming it was just a
passing phase.

In fact, it's taken US companies over 20 years to develop enough
expertise to generate useful applications using this 1960's
technological parody. We are impressed with the tenacity of the
general Unix and C programmer. In fact, Brian, Dennis and I have
never ourselves attempted to write a commercial application in this
environment.

We feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly awesome
programming projects that have resulted from our silly prank so long
ago.

Dennis Ritchie said: "What really tore it (just when ADA was
catching on), was that Bjarne Stroustrup caught onto our joke. He
extended it to further parody Smalltalk. Like us, he was caught by
surprise when nobody laughed. So he added multiple inheritance,
virtual base classes, and later ... templates. So we now have
compilers that can compile 100,000 lines per second, but need to
process header files for 25 minutes before they get to the meat of
"Hello, World."

Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this
time.

Borland International, a leading vendor of object-oriented tools,
including the popular Turbo Pascal and Borland C++, stated they had
suspected this for a couple of years. In fact, the notoriously late
Quattro Pro for Windows was originally written in C++. Philippe
Kahn said: "After two and a half years programming, and massive
programmer burn-outs, we re-coded the whole thing in Turbo Pascal in
three months. I think it's fair to say that Turbo Pascal saved our
bacon." Another Borland spokesman said that they would continue to
enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop
C/C++.

Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal,
Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, cryptically said, "P.T.
Barnum was right." He had no further comments.

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