____ __ __ ____ ____ __ ____
/\ _`\ /\ \/\ \/\ _`\ /\ _`\ /\ \ /\ _`\
\ \ \L\ \ \ \_\ \ \ \L\ \ __\ \ \/\ \\ \/ \ \,\L\_\
\ \ ,__/\ \ _ \ \ , / /'__`\ \ \ \ \\/ \/_\__ \
\ \ \/ \ \ \ \ \ \ \\ \ /\ __/\ \ \_\ \ /\ \L\ \
\ \_\ \ \_\ \_\ \_\ \_\ \____\\ \____/ \ `\____\
\/_/ \/_/\/_/\/_/\/ /\/____/ \/___/ \/_____/
____ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ ______ ____
/\ _`\ /\ \/\ \/\ \/\ \/\ \/\ \/\ \/\ \/\__ _\ /\ _`\
\ \ \L\ \ \ \_\ \ \ \ \ \ \ `\\ \ \ `\\ \/_/\ \/ __\ \,\L\_\
\ \ ,__/\ \ _ \ \ \ \ \ \ , ` \ \ , ` \ \ \ \ /'__`\/_\__ \
\ \ \/ \ \ \ \ \ \ \_\ \ \ \`\ \ \ \`\ \ \_\ \__/\ __/ /\ \L\ \
\ \_\ \ \_\ \_\ \_____\ \_\ \_\ \_\ \_\/\_____\ \____\\ `\____\
\/_/ \/_/\/_/\/_____/\/_/\/_/\/_/\/_/\/_____/\/____/ \/_____/
WMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWM
#9 Stuff to Think About
Contents:
- Truth about cats
- Toasters
- Universal sayings
- C and UNIX
- Statues
****************************************************************************
========================< H U M O U R N E T >=======================
This question was posed to the Usenet Oracle:
If you drop a buttered piece of bread, it will fall on the floor
butter-side down. If a cat is dropped from a window or other high
and towering place, it will land on its feet. But what if you
attach a buttered piece of bread, butter-side up to a cat's back and
toss them both out the window? Will the cat land on its feet? Or
will the butter splat on the ground?
And in response, thus spake the Oracle:
Even if you are too lazy to do the experiment yourself you should be
able to deduce the obvious result. The laws of butterology demand
that the butter must hit the ground, and the equally strict laws of
feline aerodynamics demand that the cat can not smash its furry
back. If the combined construct were to land, nature would have no
way to resolve this paradox. Therefore it simply does not fall.
That's right, you clever mortal (well, as clever as a mortal can
get), you have discovered the secret of antigravity! A buttered cat
will, when released, quickly move to a height where the forces of
cat-twisting and butter repulsion are in equilibrium. This
equilibrium point can be modified by scraping off some of the
butter, providing lift, or removing some of the cat's limbs,
allowing descent.
Most of the civilized species of the Universe already use this
principle to drive their ships while within a planetary system. The
loud humming heard by most sighters of UFOs is, in fact, the purring
of several hundred tabbies.
The one obvious danger is, of course, if the cats manage to eat the
bread off their backs they will instantly plummet. Of course the
cats will land on their feet, but this usually doesn't do them much
good, since right after they make their graceful landing several
tons of red-hot starship and pissed-off aliens crash on top of them.
****************************************************************************
If they made toasters ....
If IBM made toasters ...
They would want one big toaster where people bring bread to be
submitted for overnight toasting. IBM would claim a worldwide
market for five, maybe six toasters.
If Microsoft made toasters ...
Everytime you bought a loaf of bread, you would have to buy a toaster.
You wouldn't have to take the toaster, but you'd have to pay for it
anyway. Toaster'95 would weigh 15,000 pounds (hence requiring a
reinforced steel countertop), draw enough electricity to power a small
city, take up 95% of the space in your kitchen, would claim to be the
first toaster that lets you control how light or dark you wanted your
toast to be, and would secretly interrogate your other appliances to
find out who made them. Everyone would hate Microsoft toasters, but
nonetheless would buy them since most of the good bread only works
with their toasters.
If Apple made toasters...
It would do everything Microsoft toaster does, but 5 years earlier.
If Fisher-Price made toasters ...
"Baby's First Toaster" would have a hand-crank that you turn to toast
the bread that pops up like a Jack-in-the-box.
If The Rand Corporation made toasters ...
It would be a large, perfectly smooth and seamless black cube. Every
morning there would be a piece of toast on top of it. Their service
department would have an unlisted phone number, and the blueprints for
the box would be highly classified government documents. The X-Files
would have an episode about it.
If the NSA made toasters ...
Your toaster would have a secret trapdoor that only the NSA could
access in case they needed to get at your toast for reasons of
national security.
Does Digital (formerly DEC) still make toasters ...
They made good toasters in the '70s, didn't they?
If Hewlett-Packard made toasters ...
They would market the Reverse Polish Toaster, which takes in toast and
gives you regular bread.
If Sony made toasters ...
Their "Personal Toasting Device", which would be barely larger than
the single piece of bread it is meant to toast, can be conveniently
attached to your belt.
If The Franklin Mint made toasters ...
Every month you would receive another lovely hand-crafted piece of your
authentic Civil War pewter toaster.
If Cray made toasters ...
They would cost $16 million but would be faster than any other
single-slice toaster in the world.
If Thinking Machines made toasters ...
You would be able to toast 64,000,000 pieces of bread at the same time.
If Timex made toasters ...
They would be cheap and small quartz-crystal wrist toasters that take a
licking and keep on toasting.
If Radio Shack made toasters ...
The staff would sell you a toaster, but not know anything about it. Or
you could by all the parts to build your own toaster.
If K-Tel sold toaster ...
They would not be available in stores, and you would get a free set of
Ginsu knives with each one.
If the University of Waterloo made toasters ...
They would immediately spin-off a company called WatToast.
If the PQ made toasters ...
They wouldn't want to be on the same counter-top as the rest of the
appliances.
****************************************************************************
\\//
~~~~o00o~(,,)~o00o~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
() DISTRIBUTED BY: "THE INTERNET FUNNYBONE"
\__/
QUOTES ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE
======================================
Carl Zwanzig: "Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side,
a dark side, and it holds the universe together...."
Douglas Adams: "There is a theory which states that if ever
anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is
here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something
even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which
states that this has already happened."
Albert Einstein: "Only two things are infinite, the universe and
human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Unknown: "Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a
comforting thought for those people who can't remember where they
leave things."
Edward P. Tryon: "In answer to the question of why it happened,
I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of
those things which happen from time to time."
John Andrew Holmes: "It is well to remember that the entire
universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."
Max Frisch: "Technology is a way of organizing the universe so
that man doesn't have to experience it."
Kilgore Trout: "The universe is a big place, perhaps the
biggest."
Woody Allen: "I'm astounded by people who want to `know' the
universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown."
Douglas Adams: "In the beginning the Universe was created. This
has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a
bad move."
William J. Broad: "The crux... is that the vast majority of the
mass of the universe seems to be missing."
Rich Cook: "Programming today is a race between software
engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof
programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better
idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
Fred Hoyle: "There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I
don't know what it's a plan for."
Ray Bradbury: "We are an impossibility in an impossible
universe."
Christopher Morley: "My theology, briefly, is that the universe
was dictated but not signed."
Edward Chilton: "I'm worried that the universe will soon need
replacing. It's not holding a charge."
Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson): "The surest sign that
intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has
never tried to contact us."
****************************************************************************
========================< 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. ]
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.
****************************************************************************
For decades, two heroic statues, one male and one female, faced each
other in a city park, until one day an angel came down from heaven.
"You've been such exemplary statues," he announced to them, "That I'm
going to give you a special gift. I'm going to bring you both to life
for thirty minutes, in which you can do anything you want." And with
a clap of his hands, the angel brought the statues to life.
The two approached each other a bit shyly, but soon dashed for the
bushes, from which shortly emerged a good deal of giggling, laughter,
and shaking of branches. Fifteen minutes later, the two statues
emerged from the bushes, wide grins on their faces.
"You still have fifteen more minutes," said the angel, winking at
them.
Grinning even more widely the female statue turned to the male statue
and said, "Great! Only this time you hold the pigeon down and I'll
shit on it's head!"
****************************************************************************