
    ...and every time I think about this, I keep thinking: if one of the
    growing mass of Celeron hyper-ultra-overclocking crowd put up a
    webpage detailing how they modified a fishtank, a small water pump,
    and a supply of synthetic blood plasma for use as their latest
    handy-dandy cooling adventure, they'd be arrested. /-- Mark C.
    Langston/

    What for? There's nothing illegal going on, unless they are stealing
    the flourinert. /-- Paul Tomblin/

    Ah. But, you see, those misguided kids aren't going to stop there.
    They probably listen to that horrible goth music by Marylin
    Manson[0], and own black clothing. Why, I bet they strip nekkid,
    cover themselves in Nutella, and dance around the CPUs at
    midnight![1] Society must be protected![2] Sure, today it's
    flourinert. If we don't stop this now, they'll be stalking the halls
    of our fine schools, looking for victims to drain so that they may
    further their evil cooling desires! Act now, before you catch your
    son or daughter leering at that spare centrifuge down the way!
    Petition your local school board to place these authentic
    anti-overclocking tiles in the entranceway of your school, before
    it's too late.

    This rant brought to you by Your Friend The Media(TM), in
    association with the Mineral Oil Preservation Society.

Mark C. Langston
%

    No, zombies are a marvel. /-- Sten Drescher/

    I thought they were Just Another Thing Wrong With NFS. /-- Adam J.
    Thornton/

%

    Best viewed with Netscape 4.7 for UNIX/X on a 1280x1024 resolution
    with 24-bit color depth, maximum contrast, minimum brightness, in a
    1000x960 window placed in the exact center of your display with this
    window manager configuration [etc.] /-- Unk./

    "...with a colour temperature of 9300K using barco phosphors and
    connected to an AGP Matrox G200 via 5 individual RG179B/U coax
    cables with a contact resistance less than 0.1 mOhm..." /-- David
    Jordan/

    On an <insert impossible to find make of monitor> here. /-- Peter
    Corlett/

    Monitor? I was thinking along the lines of a UKP 10k data projector
    placed 3142mm from a 2m diagonal screen in a semiconductor clean
    room with no more than 5 10um particles per cubic metre of air...

    Nah... That's going too far... What you want to say is, "Don't look
    at this page, it's crap." /-- David Jordan/

%

    I never really understood how there could be things that would drive
    you insane just because you knew them until I ran into Windows. 

Peter da Silva
%

    I think that we should officially make this the sysadmins credo.
    We'll call it "The Abigail Oath" and require all new sysadmins to
    swear it.

    Well, without the layoff part, maybe something like this:

    I am hired because I know what I am doing, not because I will do
    whatever I am told is a good idea. This might cost me bonuses,
    raises, promotions, and may even label me as "undesirable" by places
    I don't want to work at anyway, but I don't care. I will not
    compromise my own principles and judgement without putting up a
    fight. Of course, I won't always win, and I will sometimes be forced
    to do things I don't agree with, but if I am my objections will be
    known, and if I am shown to be right and problems later develop, I
    will shout "I told you so!" repeatedly, laugh hysterically, and do a
    small dance or jig as appropriate to my heritage.

Mike Sphar, re: Abigail's resignation letter
%

    If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, there's going to be
    one big-ass fight over where to set the thermostat. 

Jim Rosenberg
%

    "As a member of the First International Church of the Fucking
    Christ, I believe it is blasphemous to mention His holy name without
    including His holy gerund. And, moreover, it is a mortal sin to
    remove His holy name, gerund and all, from any text in which it
    appears." 

Chad R Orzel
%

    I'm an apatheist. The question is no longer interesting, and the
    answer no longer matters. 

petro
%

    People who are willing to rely on the government to keep them safe
    are pretty much standing on Darwin's mat, pounding on the door,
    screaming, "Take me, take me!" 

Carl Jacobs
%

    [...] and the French an excuse to use their traditional battle cry.
    /-- Firebeard/

    "We Surrender, here, have my daughter."? /-- Paul Tomblin/

%

    IBM tells us mainframe types _NEVER_ _EVER_ to apply software
    maintenance to a running system, as "the results may be
    unpredictable". The IBM software types talk about this sounds like
    people who do it should expect werewolves, vampires, and nameless
    Lovecraftian things shambling drippily out of darkness into the
    dimly-lit dinosaur pen to eat the techies' souls or to carry off all
    concerned to Places O Which It Is Not Good To Think.

    IBM lies dreaming in its fastness at Poughkeepsie.

Mike Andrews
%

    Windows gives you a nice view of clouds so you can't see any
    potentially useful boot time messages. 

Bill Hay
%

    If the Internet is almost democratic anarchy, are Admins the
    priesthood of a bureaucratic, conformist, psuedo religion, trying to
    impose their will on people who would rather be getting drunk and
    laid and doing things randomly? /-- Chris Hacking/

    No, the Admins are the priesthood of an irrational, anarchistic,
    random, pseudo-religious hardware platform, trying to impose their
    will on people who would rather be using us to avoid real work. The
    Admins are the ones who would rather be getting drunk and laid and
    doing things randomly.

    Doing things randomly is what Admins do best.[1] <clickety-click>

Joe Moore
%

    IBM's vision is apparently to make IBM hardware "scream with
    Microsoft software" /-- The Register/

    I have visions of screaming with (at and about) Microsoft software,
    too.

Joe Moore
%

    My Win98 installation has been doing that for months.. German,
    English, and Dutch, all intermingled. What's so frightening about
    that? /-- Jasper Janssen/

    You mean seeing "Reboot Macht Frei" on your screen? /-- Greg Andrews/

%

    I want a Frog Magnetic Levitation Hockey game.

    It would be loosely based on an Air Hockey table.

    It would require remote controls so it could be played from far
    enough away from all that magnetism that our Leathermen wouldn't go
    tearing straight forward through our butts. OTOH, Naked Co-ed Frog
    Magnetic Levitation Hockey could have its moments too.

    This new game might provide hours and hours of recovery.

Anthony DeBoer
%

    along with a metric assload of rebar /-- Carl Jacobs/

    What's that in Imperial arseloads? /-- Alistair J. R. Young/

%

    NT-powered-cellphones: who do you want to hang up on today? /--
    Tanuki the Raccoon-dog/

    Microsoft would make it a car phone. No, I mean it'd have a car
    built in. /-- Joe Moore/

    Sun would make a Java-powered car phone. It would only go 10 km/hr,
    and you'd have to stop at every Starbucks for a refill. /-- Paul
    Tomblin/

%

    [A]ctually it was almost in final approach, and the hydraulic assist
    unit for the rudder decided, "Hmm. I think the rudder would really
    rather be...all the way to the LEFT. Oh, no, wait, the pilot's
    telling me this is not the case. Screw him, he never listens to
    *us*. I'll show HIM. HOW'S IT FEEL, YOU SANCTIMONIOUS LITTLE
    HAT-WEARING WANKER?"

    This is why I refuse to get on 737s. Hydraulic assist thingummies
    apparently get crotchety in their old age, and in dog years, most
    737s are dead.

Carl Jacobs
%

    Be a better bastard. /-- Josh Brandt/

    ...and the world will beat a luser to death at your door. /-- Carl
    Jacobs/

%

    With any luck, neither will his vache-orkers. /-- Jasper Janssen/

    ITYM "orqueadors des vaches." HTH. HAND. /-- Eric The Read/

%

    And if you know *precisely* where it is, you can be guaranteed that
    it's not a Heisentowel. /-- Unk./

    No, no, no. It could still be a Heisentowel -- he'd just have no
    clue how fast it was. /-- Devin L. Ganger/

    And what direction it's traveling. /-- Mike Sphar/

%

    I'm sorry, but comfortable is the last thing I want in my server
    room. I want it unbearably cold, and noisy. I want items scattered
    dangerously around the floor. I want random floor tiles to be
    missing. I want a very old sandwich of undetermined origin sitting
    half-eaten in the corner. I want the first thought of any person
    that enters my server room to be "Dear $DEITY, I must get out of
    this place IMMEDIATELY!" 

Mike Sphar
%

    When all you have is a Swiss Army Knife, every problem looks like
    email. 

Peter da Silva
%

    What's that word, it means you feel small and red, starts with an M?
    /-- Peter da Silva/

    Management. /-- Simon Fraser/

%

    /URLs point to web pages, not to people./

    That's not true. The R stands for "Resource", and we know how much
    HR likes to refer to people as "Resources" rather than "Human".
    Therefore, there should be a URL to point to a person.

    person://paul.tomblin/

    should return "Paul is currently sitting in his cubicle, bored out
    of his mind and wishing he could strangle the people across from him
    who use their speaker phones excessively". The word "cubicle" in
    that sentence could be a hyperlink to a
    "cubicle://frontiercorp.com/180S.Clinton/2ndFloor/NE/187/" URL.

Paul Tomblin
%

    It seems that there are two different sorts of people: People who
    care about the important stuff--like if a job gets done, and if it
    gets done well--and clueless fucking morons who wouldn't know a job
    well done if it bit them on the ass, and so think that
    "professionalism" is a better indicator of the quality of work. 

Dave Brown
%

    Same to you, dipshit /-- Coredump/

    Clue: You've got the appropriate amount of hostility for the
    Monastery, however you are metaphorically getting out of the safari
    jeep and kicking the lions. Guess what that means, mtepahorically?

    conclusion: 2 points for gusto, minus several million for good sense

coonec
%

    Here's your cable. We made it fifty feet long, just in case. In case
    what, in case tectonic movement makes the serial ports farther
    apart? /-- Carl Jacobs/

    You should ask them to wrap the cable multiple times around a car
    battery "just to keep it stable". /-- Mike Sphar/

%

    [...] I personally don't mind giving up a portion of my earnings to
    try to keep said unadaptable people from starving in the street. /--
    Mike Sphar/

    Goodness, no, they should not be allowed to die on the streets. We
    have alleys for that. /-- Carl Jacobs/

%

    They kept dying but there were always more of them. It was like
    there was an Elven prince making machine whose 'Name' setting was
    stuck on F*. /-- John Burnham/

    Look at the bright side: this machine was glob-driven. If it were
    regexp-driven, it would make Elven princes with names like "FFF",
    "FFFFF", and "FFFFFFFFF", and "". OTOH, it would be easier to
    compress these names efficiently. /-- Vadim Vygonets/

    "Some call me '^F[a-z\'-]+$', but I have many names". /-- Malcolm Ray/

%

    THRUSH = the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables
    and the Subjugation of Humanity /-- Jim Hayter/

    As good a description of the Scary Devil Monastery as I've ever
    seen. /-- Calle Dybedahl/

%

    I love the way Microsoft follows standards. In much the same manner
    that fish follow migrating caribou. 

Paul Tomblin
%

    We were suffering from STR backlash. /-- Mike Andrews/

    After a good meal of pasta and antipasta I imagine you would. /--
    Peter da Silva/

%

    hooWHARF! Damn, that book stunk on ice. Guess I was right in
    avoiding the others. "Pets and Children of Dune." "Dune,
    Meshugganah." "Dune: The Unfortunate Continuation." /-- Josh Brandt/

    "Chicken Soup for the Fremen Soul", "10 Stupid Things Harkonnen Do
    to Mess Up Their Lives"... /-- Mike Sphar/

    "Mentats for Dummies." /-- Paul Tomblin/

%

    I couldn't get to ASR for a couple of nights and since then I've
    been coming in spurts. /-- Joe Thompson/

    The monastery isn't -that- good. /-- Majdi Abbas/

%

    /[Re : Star Office]/

    But, boy, that thing sure has pretensions towards being Microsoft
    Windows, doesn't it? /-- Dave Brown/

    It sure does. It's not just content to be a bloated, buggy and slow
    word processor and office suite, it also has pretensions of being a
    window manager. Yeah, you're right, it *does* think it's Microsoft.
    /-- Paul Tomblin/

%

    So if I don't go to that site, they will not feed someone who they
    otherwise would have? /-- Jeffrey L. Bell/

    Yep.

    And they'll show them a picture of your face, any web presences you
    might have, and how you spend your leisure time. They'll give the
    starving person your name and address and a bus ticket (and/or plane
    ticket) and a map and send them off. One day, you'll be kicking back
    at home, playing Nintendo and gorging yourself of sticky handfuls of
    Fiddle-Faddle, when the doorbell will ring. You'll answer it and
    find, standing on your doorstep, a tiny waiflike third-world child,
    all big eyes and protruding ribs, who will sniffle, shed a single
    tear, say, "Why?" and expire in front of you.

    So that's why you ought to go click.

Josh Brandt
%

    /[Re : quantum physics]/

    I can't say I care one way or another. /-- Kai Henningsen/

    That's just because nobody's measured you yet. /-- Christian
    Bauernfeind/

%

    "Contestant number two, how do you set up a dial-up connection in
    Windows 95?"

    "Call the systems administration people and tell them my machine is
    broken."

    BZZZZZZZZT! "Oh, I'm sorry but that answer is so wrong that our
    systems people have already found your address and will be visiting
    you personally tonight."

Janet Rolsma
%

    An ethernet hub with SCSI interface. All the subtlety of SCSI in a
    device that until recently could be managed with a VT100. Now THAT's
    an image I don't need. And someone, somewhere, out there, probably
    thinks it would be a really neat idea.

    "termination error on SCSI bus 5. All your networks have now gone
    down the crapper".

Bram Smits
%

    I start to be a wandering sysadmin on the 10th Jan. /-- John Burnham/

    Do you get your own bard as well?


    "Bravely bold Sir Burnham
    Brought forth from Camelot.
    He was not afraid to die,
    Oh, brave Sir Burnham!
    He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways.
    Brave, brave, brave Sir Burnham.


    He was not in the least bit scared to be mashed into a pulp.
    Or to have his cables gouged out, and his MX records broken!
    To have his domains split, and his /dev burned away
    And his file systems all hacked and mangled, brave Sir Burnham.


    His newsrc smashed in and his heart cut out,
    And his relays removed and his routers unplugged,
    And his hubs baked and his soul burnt off,
    And his peni--"

Mark Edwards
%

    "A communications disruption can only mean one thing... Invasion." 

Lee Maguire, teaching us how to make people go away.
%

    After all, everybody's got a water buffalo. /-- Ben Coleman/

    in their machine room. /-- Nix/

    with the candlestick. /-- Christian Bauernfeind/

%

    Never meddle in the affairs of NT. It is slow to boot and quick to
    crash. 

Stephen Harris
%

    BTW. Violence, rude language, excessive drinking, paganism. It's
    hard to find children's books like that these days. 

Stig Morten Valstad
%

    Speaking of Star Trek, I have just discovered the suckiest program
    in all creation. Forget sucking golf balls through soda straws.
    Forget sucking asteroids through pipettes. Hell, even sucking
    blue-giant stars through millipore filters is nothing compared to
    the suckiness of Solomon IV and its Time Card module.

    This program could suck the entire space-time continuum through one
    of Brin's "tuned strings". You need a cavitron and ten extra
    dimensions of space time to describe its appalling suckiness.

    This program requires you enter fields in a very specific order...
    NOT the order laid out on the window, and if you mess up you have to
    exit it and start over.

    It chews up nearly 100M of VM.

    It takes many minutes to exit and start up again if you made a mistake.

    It's easy to make a mistake... every field has its own non-standard
    method of entering data... for example instead of a pulldown you hit
    F3 and it brings up a dialog box.

    The dialog box has scroll bars that don't move, you click above or
    below them to scroll the window they're attached to... but they
    don't actually move. If you drag them they don't actually do anything.

    Another field, a date, has a yellow background for some reason.

    This one you enter by clicking on it and typing the new value. It
    doesn't provide much feedback... if you got the value right it
    changes into something similar to what you typed when it's checked it.

    If you double-click in another field it changes the thing from a
    table to a single entry for one time code.

    You can't switch back, that I can tell. Note that in Windows
    double-clicking a field is a very common way of bringing up a dialog
    box.

    Aftre you entry any other fields, you can no longer change the date
    field.

    The date field is always set to today, but you always need to set it
    to the last day of the previous week.

    If you don't set it to anything, it will set itself to the last day
    of the next week.

    To save your changes, you go to another window and select save. This
    other window has a toolbar on it that includes "forward" and "back"
    icons... but they don't do anything either.

    This sounds like something Simon Travaglia would come up with to
    abuse lusers, but apparently this really is what they think a good
    user interface is like.

Peter da Silva
%

    Maybe, but I think I'd like to propose Schwartz' Second Law (anybody
    who reads or lurks on r.a.a.m should be able to find my First Law),
    namely: "The consquences of any action will never be fully
    understood until after it's too late to do anything about it." An
    obvious corollary: the sysadmin will be the one who gets blamed for
    it, despite having warned them several times before. 

Eric The Read
%

    /[Re: Linda McCartney's backing vocal mike.]/

    I've never heard it, but it is apparently one of the more painful
    experiences that a sentient being can undergo. Entire songs, written
    in the key of C, being sung in the key of P sharp major with a
    demented ninth.

Joe Bidgood
%

    Ever read the little warning that comes with Lose9* and NT, with
    OS/2, and with damn near anything else that has a Java compiler on it?

    Very much like "Don't use this code for realtime control, for
    weapons systems, or for anything else that may put life or limb at
    hazard. It isn't man-rated, it isn't really thing-rated, and we
    don't claim that it's worth a good G*dDamn for anything at all, at
    all."

Mike Andrews
%

    A *huge* proportion of people cannot make *correct and accurate*
    generalisations of principles. They have to learn everything as if
    it's an unrelated piece of crap, BECAUSE THEY ARE STUPID! PEOPLE ARE
    STUPID! YES, THAT'S RIGHT, I'M SHOUTING NOW! AIEEEE!! PEOPLE ARE
    STUPID! 

Thorfinn
%

    "New for Linux: SoftCondom. Because with a GUI named Explorer, you
    never know where NT's been." 

Joe Thompson
%

    "The way NT mounts filesystems is something I'd expect to find in a
    barnyard or on a stock-breeding farm." 

Mike Andrews
%

    Every time you apply the LART, you give some poor luser a chance to
    redeem itself and RTFM nect time. /-- Infinitas/

    Oh. You didn't apply the LART hard enough.

    They get to RTFM next time around the Wheel Of Reincarnation, if you
    do it right. :)

Thorf
%

    I trust Microsoft.

    I trust them to be spectacularly unable to get anything right,
    including and especially hard things like large-scale industrial
    espionage. Sure, they'll make clownish, clumsy stabs at it and fail
    in predictable, amusing and embarassing ways, and then do it all
    over again. And their victi^H^H users will not only forgive them but
    spend a lot of energy making up excuses for them.

henke
%

    The only way to convince some people that HTML is about content, not
    style is with a 2x4 <PLANK>. 

Geoff. Lane
%

    Fsck, either way I'm screwed. /-- petro/

    Now *that* is the Sysadmin's motto. /-- Peter da Silva/

%

    "You are trapped in a maze of screens and ssh sessions all alike."
    "It is dark, and you are likely to log off the wrong account." 

Nep.
%

    One doesn't deal with SAP. SAP deals with you. _Harshly_.

    There's this one project that I'm involved with at a "Lawks a Lordy,
    that's going to set my bottom on fire" level which will ultimately
    involve SAP somewhere.

    I've got the twitching under control, but loud noises still have me
    diving for cover.

Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
%

    I find Trinitron is worth an extra 2" in size at least. /-- Peter da
    Silva/

    While I agree that Trinitron is valuable, I am a bit worried about
    the currency you payed in... /-- Felix/

%

    For their next act, they'll no doubt be buying a firewall running
    under NT, which makes about as much sense as building a prison out
    of meringue. 

-:Tanuki:-
%

    Not only do I buy the beer, but I also have the root password.
    There's always enough Guinness for me. 

Mike Sphar
%

    You can lead an idiot to knowledge but you cannot make him think.

    You can, however, rectally insert the information, printed on stone
    tablets, using a sharpened poker.

Nicolai
%

    Remember - if all you have is an axe, every problem looks like hours
    of fun. 

Frossie
%

    I don't know, I think the shiny metal looks more menacing than wood.
    Wood just seems to natural and...woody. Metal is cold and hard like
    a BOFH's heart. 

Mike Sphar
%

    And it's 1, 2, 3, what are we booting for?
    Don't ask me I don't give a damn
    Buy me a gig of RAM

    And it's 5, 6, 7, bend over for Billy Gates,
    We-ell there ain't no time to learn vi,
    Whoopee! We'll all go to Fry's!

Ben
%

    For is it not written, wheresoever two or three are gathered
    together, yeay they will perform the Parrot Sketch. 

Rob
%

    [Microsoft Vaccine 2000 is configuring your immune system. This may
    take a few minutes. If your body stops responding for a long time
    and there is no brain activity please die. Setup will continue after
    you are reborn.] 

Buzh
%

    Ban cars and what you end up with are walk-by shootings. With water
    pistols. Pretty messy, especially when the protagonists are using
    drench guns[0]. Lecturers will come into the room wondering why the
    front row of desks is flooded. The local supermarket will sell out
    of its entire stock of weapons in a single afternoon, after which a
    continuing arms race will lead to people hauling backpack water
    tanks around with them. Others will be seen wandering down corridors
    looking as though they'd been caught in a heavy thunderstorm... but
    it's a sunny day. Noone will dare enter a room without doing a
    terminator-style survey of the place[1]. This will lead to a general
    collapse of civilisation and worldwide anarchy, the extinction of
    the human race, and the evolution of sentient frogs to replace them.

    Better to stick with drive-by killings.

Peter
%

    I can offer you some industrial-strength Beef, Egg and Onion pies;
    served with a healthy amount of baked beans, if that doesn't get
    your emissions of Eggdimethyl Beansoxide up to a level which
    constitutes a violation of the Geneva Convention on chemical
    warfare, i don't know what will. 

-:Tanuki:-
%

    Congratulations. You're a BOFH. This means you are a clued and
    discerning individual. However you must realise that a certain
    etiquette applies to your position. Read on for advice to help you
    win friends and influence people. The *right* friends and people.

    LANGUAGE: You should only call someone a 'Bastard' if they are
    deserving of this honorific. Under no circumstances should the word
    be applied to someone who is neither ruthless nor clued. It *is*
    appropriate to encourage budding instances of this behaviour with
    the term of endearment "BOFHlet".

    TABLE MANNERS: Do not use your Leatherman to cut your food. A simple
    knife will suffice, and preserve the blade for better things. When
    entertaining, always offer caffeine and/or alcohol to visiting
    BOFHs. Under no circumstances should you mix BOFHs and lusers in the
    same social invitation; it distresses your BOFH guests and the
    stains are difficult to get out of most carpet fabrics.

    TIMING: Punctuality, as understood by the less educated population
    to mean adherence to a time-measuring-device, is not required by the
    BOFH, though it is not an outright faux pas to indulge in it if you
    are so inclined. However an exemplary BOFH will show great feats of
    event-driven timing such as walking into a dead computer room before
    the UPS runs out, or logging on in the middle of the night moments
    before a mission-critical disk fills up. You should also show
    promptness in swiftly LARTing a luser as an example to others,
    though some delay for comic timing is widely tolerated.

    LARTS: When considering items to use as a LART, there are two golden
    rules. Firstly, it has to be as severe as the transgression merits
    *at the very least*. Secondly, you should be attentive to innocent
    third parties. In particular, the discharge of thermonuclear and
    biochemical weapons is severely frowned upon in the near proximity
    of clued individuals. In general this means that you are unlikely to
    be able to use one politely outside the general vicinity of Redmond.
    Also, it is not done to do leave body parts in the office trash for
    the cleaning staff to collect unless they have actively displeased you.

Frossie
%

    If practical QCs ever become reality, the one thing we can be sure
    of is that they'll suck. But they'll suck in multiple universes
    simultaneously, which is probably a first. /-- Malcolm Ray/

    Nah, I had a girl friend who could do that... /-- petro/

%

    Al Gore invented the Internet, Bill Gates delpoyed it. That's their
    respective stories, anyways. /-- Firebeard/

    delpoyment: the art of defining, then implementing the ugliest
    deviant interpretation of an already established standard. /-- Peter
    N. M. Hansteen/

%

    Keep on about Scotch again, and I'll be forced to tell my
    Boston/Logan Airport/Car Rental story, and that'll get Joe Thompson
    all wadded up, and he'll complain, and things will get really ugly.

    Then some yahoo who forgot to keep up with the thread and who fails
    to realise that it's dead will mention how he is rather fond of
    Macallan 18 over ice, and after the screams of outrage die down,
    then the whole discussion of the virtues of adding water/not adding
    water to Scotch will begin, and everyone will agree that whether or
    not you like water in your scotch, it should at least be in liquid
    form, and then someone will probably mention purity of chocolate,
    and one of the Yurpean Monks will brag about having a shop right
    across the street which sells bars that are 99.44% pure, and
    everyone will point out that, in fact, he's really been eating Ivory
    Soap, and no one will agree on anything except that American
    chocolate sucks and...and...we don't really need that.

    So enough with the Scotch already.

Carl Jacobs
%

    I've always maintained that no software should be released that
    can't withstand three hours of enthusiastic yet undirected
    pounding-on by a typical five-year-old. /-- Joe Thompson/

    You've just described Microsoft's entire development process. /--
    Malcolm Ray/

%

    I'm not sure that the ability to create routing diagrams similar to
    pretzels with mad cow disease is actually a marketable skill. 

Steve Levin
%

    The ability to watch M*A*S*H on demand justified purchasing a VCR
    for myself. That show taught me a lot of useful things; for example,
    if one's skills are sufficiently in demand, one can wear a bathrobe
    to work, and generally have one's eccentricities tolerated. 

Gus
%

    cat Dimensions | /dev/blackhole > Dimensions.bz /-- Robert Blake/

    Wow. Rootkit for Universes. /-- Peter da Silva/

    Yes, but Ghod help you if you ctrl-alt-del while using it. . . . /--
    Keith A. Glass/

%

    In a previous article, djc@cc.umanitoba.ca (D. Joseph Creighton)
    said: >In the last exciting episode, Chad Matsalla wrote: maybe
    someday they will find a way to remotely administer cattle. /-- Chad
    Matsalla/

    They're called Collies. Of course, distance is limited to
    line-of-sight or hearing range. /-- D. Joseph Creighton/

    Now I'm trying to picture Wide Area Border Collies. Thanks. /-- Paul
    Tomblin/

    Well then I am not sure what your idea of "remote" is. And if I am
    going to use a dog in systems administration it will be part of a
    pack of other wild dogs. And herding will be the last thing they are
    trained to do. /-- Chad Matsalla/

%

    Usenet should require licenses; licenses that can be revoked. 

Abigail
%

    The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds
    new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." 

Isaac Asimov
%

    You are in a twisty maze of lusers all alike. /-- Paul Martin/

    While, on the surface, this appears to be true. In actual fact, when
    examined closely, each and every luser is uniquely and serially
    stupid. /-- Geoff. Lane/

%

    Then the home office "took control of the situation". That consisted
    of demanding the root password, and then contacting me at least once
    every three hours until 0100 last night. Sometimes they paged me.
    Sometimes they called me at home. After I unplugged my phone from
    the wall and took the battery out of my pager, my boss showed up at
    my front door. /-- Jack Twilley/

    This situation almost sounds fun to me. I would take great joy in
    sitting in the living room happily ignoring said boss knocking on my
    door. I'd probably even turn up the TV and make loud "whooza fuzzy
    kitty den? You are, aren't you?" noises at my cat. /-- Mike Sphar/

%

    I used to herd dairy cows. Now I herd lusers. Apart from the
    isolation, I think I preferred the cows. They were better
    conversation, easier to milk, and if they annoyed me enough, I could
    shoot them and eat them. 

Rodger Donaldson
%

    Sigh. Anyone want an irritable, manic-depressive sysadmin ? /-- John/

    I'll think about it. Do you think I should keep a backup for the one
    I already have? /-- Bernard Peek/

    No. You run them both in a cluster environment, so they can share
    the irritability. Of course, having two sysadmin's you naturally get
    twice the irritability than before. If one sysadmin goes down[0]
    then the other one becomes twice as irritable to cope.

    Benefits in this environment allow one sysadmin to go offline for
    maintenance (eg beer!) without major impact. Unfortunately most
    clusters of this type are poorly configured and one sysadmin going
    offline generally causes the other to go offline as well.

Stephen
%

    I think if Cael approached me, arms flaming, with his usual
    scary-looking expression, not only would I stop dancing, I'd likely
    start running very fast.

    You just don't mess with a man whose arms are on fire.

Joe
%
%

    In my opinion, the press covers every country.
    In the veterinary sense. 

Brian
%

    Damn, squid must have satisfied my reloads from cache. /-- Peter da
    Silva/

    That sounds so very much nastier than it is. /-- adam/

%

    Except that his file won't have the pretty little thumbnail that he
    gets on the Mac. He'll get the dogeared-piece-of-paper icon on that
    file, and sit there waving his flippers like a thalidomide baby
    until you show him that yes, Photoshop will still open the file. 

Charles Gimon
%

    Eh? Linux is luserproof? What kind of "proper" set up is that,
    ripping out all removable media devices and ethernet, freezing the
    hard drive spindle, encasing it in concrete and dropping it off a pier? 

Greg Andrews
%

    To me it sounds like a flock of ducks trying to out-honk a Mac
    Truck, but getting cut short tragically as they all fly into the
    grill work of the truck. But that's just me. 

Paul Tomblin, about the system beep on the Alpha UDB.
%

    Embrace your inner cynicism. Delight in the joy of knowing, with
    complete certainty, that the world is filled with idiots, losers,
    and all other assorted manner of higher life forms, and that a great
    many of of them trying their damndest to win the competition for
    "Species Least Likely To Be Useful". I figure, they'll probably lose
    that competition too, proving once again that the cockroach is
    mightier than the "man". 

Jeff Gostin
%

    What is the sound of one backpack EMP weapon discharging? /-- Joe
    Thompson/

    "Clickety-click" /-- Charles Cazabon/

%

    "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to using
    Windows NT for mission-critical applications."
    -- What Yoda *meant* to say 

Devin L. Ganger
%

    Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He wears red to hide the
    bloodstains, and he brings fscked disks to bad sysadmins. That means
    all of us, according to Santa Claus. 

Mike Andrews
%

    When I write non-quick-and-dirty stuff aimed at sysadmins, I'll
    include the standard blah about typographical conventions, but if I
    have to include a warning that running a command with an argument
    list which bears *no* *relation* to the argument list shown cannot
    be expected to have the same effect, it's time for a reality check. 

Malcolm Ray
%

    "Each McSploit meal comes with your choice of a McPortscan burger or
    Chicken McNukets and a root-sized fries and drink. And with each
    McSploit meal, you'll get one of these four l33t toys:

      * hax0rspeak decoder ring - be the kradest one on your block!
      * Miniature Kipling backpack
      * WM.McTrojan.A
      * Serial Numberz for unlocking expensive commercial software (That
        is, software which plays McDonalds commercials) 

    Own all four today!" 

Matthew Sachs
%

    I live in fear of the day that the Hoopsnakes hybridize with the
    common Ethernet Patchsnake[1]. Imagine the sheer hell of it:
    colonies of them becoming established in the warm, dark recesses of
    wiring-closets, and concealing themselves in boxes with routers,
    switches and the like.
    /-- Tanuki/

    Hm, that might explain why the PFYs keep on disappearing after I
    send them off to work in the comms riser on the 49th floor.
    /-- Lionel Lauer/

%

    "Oh, I would LART five hundred times, and I would LART five hundred
    more/ Just to be the man who LARTs a thousand, times to kill them by
    the score..." 

Joe Thompson
%

    Yes, I did programmatically remove all instances of shit like:

    /*FF*/
    /*** hey emacs this is C source ***/
    /*@@ 3l33t-source-code-printer-program-opts: -foo -bar -qux @@*/

    /***********************************
    ** RESIZE EDITOR WINDOW TO THIS BIG------------------------------------------------->
    ***********************************/

    from the source tree and if I find them back there I will
    _personally_ take great pleasure in gouging out your eyes and
    stuffing the bleeding sockets with fire ants and broken glass.

henke
%

    Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once ... with negative results. 

Ben (float)
%

    I can see it now: We can turn sysadminness into a big business. A
    line of cute sysadmin toys-My Little Lionel, My Little Simon. An
    especially My Little Frossie, complete with the little heart in the
    center. Sure, puke now, but wait til you count the $$$. Then comes A
    cute sysadmin cartoon, Admin Babies. "Dear me, baby Thorfy, we gotta
    go boot the 3b2 frontend to that convex over there." "Oh no, Mr.
    Meanyhead the Luser has filled his quota up again". Sysadmin trading
    cards: "Here we have the Evi Nemeth Special Edition, back when she
    was still back at Waterloo, in the minors"[1]. A cute little
    platform game where you have to navigate your sysadmin through
    wiring closets, machine rooms and the like, collecting the magic
    scsi terminators. [2] 

Matthew Crosby
%

    One day, a student asked a master, "Master, there is conflict
    between the suits and the sysadmins. Which group has the Zen nature,
    and which group is grieviously disturbing the stillness of the Tao?"

    And the master said nothing, but installed an operating system. And
    the student was enlightened.

Anthony DeBoer
%

    "We are either doing something, or we are not. 'Talking about' is a
    subset of 'not'." 

%

    This sounds like the meaningless story an executive mailed out the
    other day:

    $PERSON was walking through a construction site, and asked the first
    worker he saw what he was doing. The worker responded "I'm mixing
    cement". $PERSON then walked to second worker and asked same
    question, to which the second worker responded "I'm laying bricks".
    $PERSON then asks same question of a third worker who responds
    proudly "I'm building a cathedral!"

    Said executive then goes on to talk about how he's looking for
    "cathedral-builders" for his company, blah blah blah blah.

    All I could think was: "Hey, if I'm working at a construction site,
    and some idjit walks up and asks what I'm *doing", I will answer
    'Pouring cement, dipshit, what does it look like I'm doing?'"

Mike Sphar
%

    When people ask me what my religion is, I say either
    "Frisbeetarianism" which satisfies them if they're not listening
    closely, or "I'm trying to make up my mind between the Greek and
    Babylonian chaos goddesses, do you think Eris or Mummu has dishier
    priestesses?"

    Though now I'm a minister I should probably take that question more
    seriously.

Peter da Silva
%

    First time I've gotten a programming job that required a drug test.
    I was worried they were going to say "you don't have enough LSD in
    your system to do Unix programming". 

Paul Tomblin
%

    A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you
    didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable. 

Leslie Lamport
%

    A disturbance of sysadmins. Because if we are, you will be. 

Joe Thompson
%

    A Zen of SysAdmins

    We are at one with our work. If you disturb our work, our foot will
    be at one with your ass. Sadly, you won't be at One with anything
    thereafter. You'll be in lots of little pieces we call Bits, some of
    which are at One with themselves, and others, which are at Zero with
    themselves, but none of which will be At One with you.

J. Gostin
%

    Unfortunately, our Bright Young PFY will no longer be assisting with
    expeditions downtown, as he has been dubbed the Telecom Destruction
    Bunny and banned from taking his aura anywhere near anything major. 

Anthony DeBoer
%

    I mean, we all self-LART to varying degrees on occasion. What sets
    us apart from the lusers is that we can pull ourselves out of the
    nosedive. 

Mike Sphar
%

    ... (Has Microsoft lost its Buddha nature?) /-- Ingvar Mattsson/

    Someone really ought to explain to them that the Buddha nature
    consists of more than being obese and just sitting there.

Anthony DeBoer
%

    I'm locked in a maze of little projects, all of which suck. 

Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
%

    "I'm not lean and mean, I'm surly and anorexic". 

Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
%

    Hacksaws and band saws and cleavers and sharp knives,
    After the lusers have given up their lives,
    BOFHen need ways, to separate parts,
    Why not use some of our favorite LARTs?

    Dynamite, TNT, nitro and tac-nukes,
    Those are too harsh on the poor little dumb pukes.
    They hurt machines and they don't leave much meat,
    If we use them, then what are we to eat?

    When the LARTs fall, when the fools die, when I'm feeling glad,
    I just cut them up (not across), and haul them to my pad.

Dave Aronson
%

    "Redirection is hard." -- Web-Luser Barbie /-- flaps/

    "Forging headers is tough!" --Spammer Barbie /-- Chris "Saundo"
    Saunderson/

%

    I quite often tell my SO to iron my shirts, make dinner, do the
    cleaning, etc... but only because I like to hear her laugh. 

manc0046
%

    /[Re: The Four Horsemen]/

    Don't you mean

      * "The Internet is down." meaning "I accidentally took my printer
        off line"
      * "The Internet is down." meaning "I fiddled with my registry and
        now my computer won't boot"
      * "The Internet is down." meaning "I forgot my password" and
      * "The Internet is down." meaning "My favourite porn site isn't
        responding" 

Paul Tomblin
%

    And besides, given raw postscript in web pages, for every one person
    who writes a clever bit of code, there would be ten thousand
    clicking the "Save as Postscript for Extra Pretty Fonts!" button in
    GUI-Visual-Bloat Web Designer, by Obesityware, pushing the average
    page size into the multi-megabyte range. Yup. There's a feature, all
    right. 

Mark Jeffcoat
%

    From empirical experience, your Exchange admin needs to put down the
    crack pipe and open a window to disperse the fumes. 

Joe Thompson
%

    Cardiac Arrest(tm) Snack Cakes! Tossed Death Cookies(r)! And Little
    Debbie(r) Fatal Attraction Pies(tm)![0]

    [0] As if everything by Little Debbie isn't a fatal attraction. She
    is not your friend, she is a lying deceitful bitch who wants to give
    you a heart attack. But DAMN, she's irresistable.

Mark Hughes
%

    These girls is crafty & evil beasties. They twist & turn like...
    like... twisty, turny things. /-- Lionel Lauer/

    "Passages", Lionel, "passages". /-- Thorfy/

    Passages and girls in a comparison? Does someone have a barge-pole I
    can absolutely not touch this one with? /-- Joe Thompson/

    passages:girls::bargepoles:NO CARRIER /-- Ben (float)/

%

    I see an Urgent Need(tm) for a new unit of measurement, to
    distinguish the amount of something that will kill half the sample
    population from the amount that will simply make half of them _want_
    to die. UDNAD50 anyone?

    The UDNAD50 of tequila is around half a bottle. The UDNAD50 of
    crappy C code is about 300 lines. Imacs, damn near one.

    A closely related unit is the LARTD50, which is the dose of
    something that will inspire half the sample population to make the
    perpetrator want to die.

henke
%

    I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It's
    generally a better bet. There's more pressure on a vet to get it
    right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get
    *angry* when they lose a cow. 

Terry Pratchett
%

    That sounds like exactly the right way Microsoft would do it:

      * With UDP, your packets will almost certainly get there
        unmangled. But you'll never know.
      * With TCP, your message will be corrupt and interrupted for no
        apparent reason. Attempts to correct errors will cause your
        disconnection. When you attempt to reconnect, the TCP/IP unstack
        will pretend not to hear. 

    (I'm picturing Windows NT jamming a network backbone going "la la la
    la I can't hear you la la la la la".) 

Graham Reed
%

    They used to advertise it claiming, "If you've eaten a banana and
    drank some milk you've had everything in n*sweet."

    My reply was, "You've also had everything in potassium cyanide. So
    what?"

Joe Zeff
%

    <fantasy mode>
    "Sir, Sir! I've deleted all my files"
    "Yes my child, and pray tell me how"
    "I wanted to delete directories fred1 and fred2 but I typed rm -rf
    fred * when should have typed rm -rf fred*"
    "Ah ha, and what have you learnt"
    "To beware of powerful file name globbing facilities that my shell
    provides for my careful use."
    "Yes my child, you have learnt a painful lession. Now you must learn
    how to recover files from one of the many, multiply redundent backup
    tapes you have carefully written every evening ever since you were
    granted a powerful personal workstation."
    "Master, I'm eager to learn!"
    </fantasy mode> 

Geoff. Lane
%

    No lusers were harmed in the creation of this usenet article.
    AND I WANT TO KNOW WHY NOT! 

Geoff. Lane
%

    life suddenly made much more sense, the day i fully grokked that
    people are stupid. 

Frank Sweetser
%

    /[Re: Anakin building C3PO out of spare parts for free]/

    What I wanna know is where he got the language databases for the
    over six million forms of communication. Building a droid doesn't
    look too hard, based on evidence. Populating that droid with
    knowledge that is likely exceedingly expensive is not a walk in the
    park.
    -- Eric The Read

    alt.binaries.warez.protocol-droids.c3

    This also explains what tempted him to his first steps toward the
    "dark side."

    It's only a very short step from that to Palpatine seeing a post
    along the lines of: "CA|\| NE1 0N Th]5 BB0ARD T3Ll M3 H0w 2 GeT KeWL
    S]Th P0WeRZ!?!?!?!??!?"

    The rest is, well, a couple more overly-hyped ILM graphics demos.
    -- henke

%

    The Imperial Vendor or Contractor probably told them that droid
    armies don'T need redundant command centers, nor any kind of high
    availability ... you're supposed to buy several, and cluster them.
    -- void

    Redundant Array of Inexpensive Droids?

    It's possible there had been armed autonomous droids at some point
    in the past, and one can almost imagine past issues of that galaxy's
    Risks Digest. Perhaps after such experiences, they considered it
    wisest that autonomous droids have nothing stronger than R2D2's
    bugzapper.
    -- Anthony DeBoer

%

    Ben, being able to utter the words "cryogenically cooled eyeballs"
    on Usenet was a form of recovery. Don't try to take that away from
    me or I might get crotchety and go Tomblinate[1] you.

    [1] I've always been of the opinion that one's fellow sysadmins
    should be treated with the politeness due a group of well-armed
    individuals[2], but apparently not all of us are that hesitant.

    [2] The wise man does not tell a person with a gun to go check his
    filesystems for consistency.

Anthony DeBoer
%

    That's why there's no toilets on the Enterprise. They just beam it
    straight into the mass tanks from your body, much more efficient.
    -- Peter da Silva

    This gives new insight into why the engineering crew works so hard
    to get the system back online when the transporters go down.
    -- Ansel

%

    In every given certification course at least one student must decide
    that each person in the class came n-thousand miles to hear his/her
    own questionable "expertise" delivered unprompted and continued ad
    nauseum much to the dismay of the rest of the class. 

Chad Matsalla
%

    I'm still pondering whether i should pre-emptively register "I can't
    believe it's not Jesus" as a name for a low-calorie communion wafer,
    so i get in there before the church... 

Tanuki
%

    I try to explain, but he goes into the back room and gets this
    wizened old guy with a pocket protector and a nametag that read
    "Senior Engineer."
    -- Jack Twilley

    His mom really must have hated him.
    -- Charles Cazabon

%

    I may be a Bastard, but I never ever ever argue with flight crew.
    They just don't have a sense of humor about that sort of thing.

    If the stewardess tells me NT is a far more stable and reliable OS
    than UNIX, I'll nod politely and say "Is it really? How nice."

    Of course, I'll rant about what a luser she is later, but as long as
    we're on the plane, she gets to be uid zero.

Mike Sphar
%

    Luserspotting.

    Choose Windows. Choose a PC. Choose a fucking big hard disk and a
    Pentium III to run Internet Explorer and mIrc. Choose HTML email,
    and viruses... Melissa, Wm.Concept, ExploreZip. Choose sitting in
    that chair watching mind-numbing soulless web-pages, stuffing
    fucking virus-infected plugins into your browser. Choose porn,
    rotting away at the end of it all, pishing away your last on a
    miserable dialup, staring at fat whores, nothing but an embarassment
    to the people who built the net.

    Choose Linux. Choose a PC. Choose a fucking big hard disk and a
    Pentium III to run Enlightenment and KDE. Choose warez, set up a
    webserver, smurf other lusers who diss you on IRC. Choose sitting in
    that char creating mind-numbing soulless web pages, stuffing them
    with blink and frames and javascript and virus-infected plugins.
    Choose porn, rotting away at the end of it all, pishing away your
    last on a miserable dialup, staring at fat whores, nothing but an
    embarassment to the people who built the net.

    Doesn't matter what a luser chooses, they're still a luser.

Peter da Silva
%

    Remember to chant "Pie Jesu domine, dona eis requiem" whenever you
    do that.
    -- Peter Gutmann

    I can't do that, Peter. I have several old texts in my office (bound
    with animal skin, and inked with blood), and every time I attempt to
    chant any sort of Latin[0] the walls begin to bleed, and my
    Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water bottle tells me it's going to kill
    me with my flathead screwdriver.
    -- Stephen S. Edwards II

%

    You should come to Germany to see what milk is supposed to taste
    like. Or, even better, a farmer in Denmark or Ireland.
    -- Felix von Leitner

    Maybe it's just me, but I really don't care to know what a farmer in
    Denmark or Ireland tastes like. -- Andy Wagliardo

%

    If you tell them, they never listen. If they listen, they never
    learn. If they learn, they never remember. If they remember, they
    never obey. 

Markus
%

    "Usenet: wisdom in homeopathic doses." 

Paul Martin
%

    *Someone else:* Snots is a lot more than just an email program...
    *Me:* ... it's a complete denial-of-service attack in one package. 

Peter Gutmann
%

    That's when you must acquire the skill to fart at whim... doing so
    will protect the Holy Personal Space. 

Stephen S. Edwards II
%

    I'm still waiting for the marketing slogan:

    Retry Reboot Reinstall Reformat Redhat
    -- Alan

    Around here, we refer to that as "Service Pack 6.0"
    -- Paul Tomblin

%

    "Yeah, I know. It was a long time ago and I was a lot more
    optimistic then."
    "And besides, the CNAME is dead." 

Mike Sphar and Greg Andrews
%

    Hey, you're right. I don't want to call a destructor on my objects,
    I want to call a *destroyer*. Gozer has come for your memory, little
    PersistentNode! 

Joel Gluth
%

    "Coed Naked Tech Support: You're Never Alone When You're On The Phone." 

The motto at loyola.edu's helpdesk
%

    But if it is a differential SCSI chain, you need two goats, one
    black and one white, and two ceremonies: kill the black goat at high
    noon and the white one at midnight. Same silver knife for both, of
    course.

    Otherwise, the chain will be unbalanced and things just get worse
    from there as all the drives do the "washing machine dance"....

    Self-terminating devices merely need to be left with sufficient
    livestock and they'll take care of the rest.

Graham Reed
%

    Ah, young webmaster...
    java leads to shockwave.
    Shockwave leads to realaudio.
    And realaudio leads to suffering.

Peter da Silva
%

    /[Re: using a plunger to take out dents]/
    Yeah, *that'd* sound good in the convenience store: "One toilet
    plunger and a gallon of vaseline to go." 

Lars Balker Rasmussen
%

    /[Re: SETI@home]/
    That would be on the "Let's look for intelligence out there, because
    there's none here" principle? 

Paul Tomblin
%

    If USENET is anarchy, IRC is a paranoid schizophrenic after 6 days
    on speed. 

Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
%

    Disney's _The Diary Of Anne Frank_, starring the voice of Ani
    DeFranco as the title character, and Arnold Schwartenegger as the
    voice of Hans Von Gruppenficher, the handsome young SS Commando who
    captures her heart.
    -- Christian Wagner

    Where's the talking animal? -- Shalon Wood

    My guess would be on talking mice. Perhaps in a bit of
    cross-promoting, they could have the talking mice from _Cinderella_.
    Failing that, the talking fixtures from _Beauty & The Beast_
    probably need more work.

    Now that I think about it, a large, lovable police dog that finds
    the family but refuses to signal its masters after the young heroine
    smiles at it from a hiding place would probably work as well.

    I'm not going to think about this anymore.
    -- Gus

%

    Nanau taught me the Second Clue. If you make a decision under
    pressure, and someone who's never been in the same position decides
    at leisure to criticise without being polite and asking questions,
    make sure that the person understands the absolute inappropriateness
    of this as hard as possible. If someone with more technical
    experience wants to suggest how you should handle it next time,
    that's okay fine. 

Rebecca Ore
%

    *The BOFH's First Axiom :* There are no inappropriate means for
    achieving the goal of getting questions or silence. 

Named by Mike Andrews, defined by Rebecca Ore
%

    Some are born to Enlightenment, some achieve Enlightenment, and
    others have Enlightenment larted upon them. 

Greg
%

    The screaming should be done by the luser - until the BOFH applies
    $LART_of_choice in a terminal way to stop the screaming. After all -
    whining and screaming are some of the few things lusers are good at
    [1] ...

    [1] Breaking stuff by ''changing nothing'', ''touching nothing'' or
    even 'doing nothing'' and annoying the hard working BOFH are some
    others ...

als
%

    The pages were fairly well bound. The cover was not. It looked as
    though the binder had sewn and glued the pages, let it dry, and then
    blown his nose on the spine and installed the cover. 

Ansel
%

    ``Turn off your targeting computer, Luke. Software sucks. Hardware
    sucks. You have a better chance of making this shot by guessing.''

    ``Now we're going to run through the woods. Well, not quite. You're
    going to put me in a backback and run through the woods carrying me.
    Why? *You're* the PFY.''
    -- Rodger Donaldson

    %

    As one notices, Ben has been around the block far too many times. He
    has the BOFH nature. Luke, OTOH, goes for this crap hook, line, and
    sinker. He has the PFY nature.
    -- Anthony DeBoer

    By RotJ, of course, Luke also has BOFH nature. Note how he calmly
    goes to the HR department^W^W^WJabba's lair. Note how he calmly asks
    for his friends back. Note how he calmly annihilates all about him
    when he doesn't get what he wants.

    Still, Jedi mind tricks would be great for BOFHen facing internal
    audits: ``These E10000s aren't the budget overruns you're looking
    for.''
    -- Rodger Donaldson

%

    BTW, I thank all the denizens for their fairly exemplary politeness
    to one another over the past weeks. I've been watching the
    ORBS/anti-ORBS/RBL/anti-RBL flamefests on nanae, and it has been ...
    well, the culinary equivalent is just about everyone spraying just
    about everyone else with pureed Habanero peppers. Copiously. 

Mike Andrews
%

    So the canonical metasyntactic syllables are foo, bar, baz, gzork,
    and zot? I always wondered what came after baz.
    -- Charles Cazabon

    Nono: bletch before baz, except after frob.
    -- Malcolm Ray

%

    A heisenbug jumps around the system; if you look at it, it
    disappears only to manifest in a seemingly totally unrelated place.

    A schroedinbug is one where the bug exists for years, and
    theoretically would prevent the program from working, but because no
    one is aware of it it doesn't. However, eventually somebody looks at
    the code and goes "That couldn't *possibly* work!" at which point,
    it ceases to. Schroedinbugs are an inverse case of the Hundredth
    Monkey problem.
    -- Joe Thompson

    Bohr Bug: A repeatable bug; one that manifests reliably under a
    possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions.

    Mandelbug: A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure
    as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic.
    This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a Bohr bug, rather
    than a heisenbug.
    -- David Jacoby (quoting the Jargon File)

%

    /[Re : training lusers like one trains a bonsai tree]/

    Hmmm.. nice idea.. bury them up to their knees in mud, wrap them
    round with stiff wire, twist them into contorted shapes, chop bits
    off them at regular intervals, leave them where they are for forty
    years or so with minimal feeding, sell them for vast amounts of
    money.. there must be a snag in this somewhere.. why can't I see it?

Gid
%

    In German
    "invent-a-new-word-where-a-perfectly-good-one-already-exists" is
    probably a word. 

Peter da Silva
%

    You know, I have dealt with some immensely stupid fucking wastes of
    skin, but these people astound me with their stupidity! Really!...
    These sacks of shit in expensive suits make a short bus full of
    retards look like a fucking physicist's convention! 

Stephen S. Edwards II
%

    /[on "In God We Trust"]/

    Don't ask *me* how you set the trust-level of a god.
    -- Par Leijonhufvud

    At a PGP key signing party.
    -- Peter da Silva

%

    "This UI has been brought to you by the letters 'S' and 'K', and the
    runlevel 3." 

Greg Andrews
%

    Funny, the Canadian scouting organization has "religion in my life"
    badges with either an Alpha and Omega, a Menorah, a Crescent, and
    possibly other religous symbols that I haven't encountered yet.
    -- Paul Tomblin

    Watch out for the one with tentacles.
    -- Malcolm Ray

%

    Me and the caller ID window have a very positive working relationship. 

Mike Sphar
%

    BOFHs have no nation.
    -- Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes

    We have the nation "Clue", with it's independant yet under
    governance territory "Root". Both have a nice (pron. "vicious")
    border patrol with at least some standards for getting into the joint.
    -- Chris "Saundo" Saunderson

%

    /[Re: "Da Bomb" hot sauce]/

    This stuff will not only take the paint off a battleship, it'll also
    hunt down the painter and hir family, murder them, desecrate the
    bodies, and proceed to have its way with the family pet.

Mark C. Langston
%

    The main difference between lusers & budgies is that it's standard
    practice to keep one's budgie in a cage. I feel that there is a
    lesson here for all of us. 

Lionel Lauer
%

    Perl isn't really a swiss army knife. That's more like C. Perl is a
    large, metallic toolbox containing:

    -a complete set of box-end wrenches in metric and imperial, except
    10mm and 3/8"
    -a selection of five machinists' hammers
    -one regular construction hammer
    -ten- and twelve-pound sledgehammers
    -complete set of Robertson screwdrivers
    -and an infinite length of duct tape

Charles Cazabon
%

    The difference between math and physics is the difference between
    masturbation and sex.
    -- Paul Tomblin

    They're both messy, but physics can get you in much more trouble.
    -- Malcom Ray

%

    And I administer machines for the army. I know stupid. 

Nir
%

    <example type=luser thinking> -- James Lin

    Huh? That doesn't make sense. -- Michael Brown

    Picture a hamster in an exercise wheel. Running, running, running,
    running, and getting nowhere at all. -- Greg Andrews

    Then, picture another hanster in another such wheel. Standing,
    standing, standing, standing, and getting nowhere at all. That's
    luser thinking. -- Vadik

%

    We aim to please. Ourselves, mostly, but we do aim to please. 

Anthony DeBoer
%

    "Thank you for ringing the Sonline. Calls cost 1.50 a minute. If
    you have forgotten to switch the monitor on, press 1. If you have
    forgotten to switch the computer on, press 2. If you were after
    software, but are too tight to actually *buy* it, press 3."

    *beep*

    "Thank you. Please hold whilst we play some nasty musak and
    eventually put you through to somebody who - talks - really - slowly."

B13 Cabal Member
%

    "Go go Gadget kernel compile!" 

Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
%

    The only sound a luser should make is a pleasant squishing sound as
    they're turned into a twitching pile of mince meat. 

Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
%

    Let's face it, sysadmins are composed of the most adaptable, least
    stress-susceptible people around. Lusers aren't. Pit one against the
    other, and I'll not be taking any bets on the luser winning (10 000
    to 1 against the luser, anyone? No? Nobody? Thought not.) 

Dan Holdsworth
%

    The United States of America: Screwing with the English Language for
    over 200 years. 

Mike Sphar
%

    "Sysadminning. Shit. Still in sysadminning. Everyone gets what they
    want. I asked for an alt.sysadmin.recovery, and for my sins they
    gave me one." 

Anthony DeBoer
%

    I don't suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it. 

Lieven Marchand
%

    Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product. 

Ferenc Mantfeld
%

    aitch as in Henry
    tee as in Tom
    tee as in Tom again
    pee as in Peter
    Colon as in WHERE YOUR HEAD IS!!!! 

hlliary
%

    Move along, move along, nothing to see here, definitely no evil mind
    control software here, move along, move along... 

Thorf
%

    ALL programs are poems, it's just that not all programmers are poets. 

Jonathan Guthrie
%

    BOFHmail should have no truck with the Robustness Principle. The
    desired attitude could best be described as "be pedantic in what you
    accept, and arbitrarily brutal in what you send". Other MTAs go to
    some lengths to accommodate broken SMTP implementations, and, let's
    face it, we're all heartily sick of such molly-coddling. Don't even
    *think* of dropping the connection because you don't understand
    EHLO: your T3 will melt shortly thereafter.

    Some MTAs have shown a sickening tendency to present the lusers with
    cutesy error messages, frequently leading them into ultimately
    unrewarding conversations. Whilst deliberately wasting the luser's
    time is commendable, it's really not acceptable to deal gently with
    their stumblings. Bounces should be cryptic in the extreme. To keep
    the lusers on their toes, bounces should sometimes be generated for
    perfectly valid mail (it's educational).

    BOFHmail should contain sophisticated a sophisticated spam detector.
    Any message qualifying as spam should be have various nouns replaced
    by more interesting ones such as 'bomb', 'cocaine' and 'President',
    and then be forwarded to the local FBI-equivalent.

    This distressing trend towards easy configuration must stop. If it's
    hard to implement, it should be hard to understand. On the other
    hand, who has to do the configuration? Us, that's who, and who wants
    to debug line noise when you could be playing Half Life or
    corrupting Marketing's database? So BOFHmail's configuration should
    be the reverse of sendmail 8.x: a bewildering jumble of gibberish
    which looks like an explosion in an EBCDIC factory, hiding a simple
    and highly mnemonic configuration file (the latter only visible to
    root).

    BOFHmail should incorporate a Swedish Chef convertor and not be
    afraid to use it.

Malcolm Ray
%

    And I can't even begin to describe what a joy it is to work with a
    real metal case, with swing-out drive bays, that was designed for
    easy access and not built by the lowest-bidding Malaysian Monkey On
    Crack. 

Adam J. Thornton
%

    Ah. So-called "developers" who cannot be bothered to skim an
    O'Reilly book, let alone read an RFC. ... People who react to the
    comment, "Check the source" with an expression suggesting I _really_
    said "Shove a weasel up your ass." 

crawford
%

    You *do* know there is a serial number on your car? -- Leif Nixon

    FWIW, I've talked to my car about broadcasting its serial number on
    the Internet. It expressed remorse and promises never to do it
    again. -- Cael Jacobs

    Oh, sure. It says that *now*, but you just wait: it's going to sneak
    online when you're gone for your evening walk; soon, it'll be
    pretending not to run properly so you'll be forced to take the bus
    to work, leaving it free to jump on the 'net and announce itself to
    the world for hours on end.

    Next thing you know, it's going to get something pierced or tatooed.
    -- D. Joseph Creighton

%

    I have a theory about Solaris.

    The week that Sun suddenly decided to turn their nice, happy, BSD
    Unix that worked and was in wide use by universities everywhere into
    a so-called "Enterprise System" (which apparently entailed turning
    it into a hostile and buggy System V-based creature) yea verily,
    that *very week*, Fry's in San Jose was having a spectacular sale on
    Malaysian Crack Monkeys, with stupendous volume discounts, so Sun
    bought 300 dozen gross as the development team.

Adam
%

    "Notes: it's enough to make a grown admin weep piteously and pray
    for an untimely death, and then just start swinging at anything
    that's pointy-haired and moving." 

Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
%

    I must confess that, being long-time familiar with the Antipodean
    meaning of "rooting", i had a real problem when i first became aware
    of "Roto-rooter".

    For a brief and horrible moment, I imagined a device produced by the
    Westheimer Dildonics Corporation[1], designed as a snap-on fitment
    for hammer-action Hiltis and Makitas.

Tanuki
%

    Actually, we have scientifically determined that Heisenberg did
    indeed sleep exactly here. However, we have no idea whatsoever just
    how fast asleep he was. 

Dave Aronson
%

    /Re: naming a system 'babylon4'/

    Dunno, I've never had a server stolen and taken back in time to help
    in a great war against the forces of darkness.
    -- John Burnham

    Really? Huh. For me, it's the only thing that makes sysadminning
    worthwhile, some days.
    -- Q

    Wouldn't you love to fill out *that* report? "Company asset #423423
    was lost while fighting the forces of evil."
    -- Chris Adams

%

    Windows is the answer, but only if the question was 'what is the
    intellectual equivalent of being a galley slave?' 

Larry Smith, in comp.os.linux.misc
%

    It is possible to cause a Mac to fail to boot by corrupting
    preference files. Sometimes, the Mac does this for you.

    The MacOS is robust only in the sense that a 400-pound lard-arse pro
    wrestler can be described as `robust'.

Rodger Donaldson
%

    *Luservation*, /n/: Dialogue between two or more lusers about
    subjects which they are complete ignorant of, and oblivious to. See
    "blathering". 

Stephen S. Edwards
%

    I can feel a slight breeze, as the vacuums in their heads pull away
    the air around me. I can smell the stench of feces oozing from their
    mouths, with every syllable of a word spoken. I liken the experience
    to being in a field filled with manure; the wind wisping the odor
    into my nostrils. I gag for fresh air, but to no avail. The spewing
    luser-manure mocks my breathing... as I drift into unconsciousness,
    I scream

    *"SHUUUT... the FUUUCK... UUUUUUUP!@#"*

    with my last conscious breath. Then I dream of a world where idiots
    are hunted like wild pigs, and people like me have a vast array of
    weaponry[2] at their disposal.

Stephen S. Edwards
%

    I've pondered the possible use of Runes for setting initial passwords.

    "Your new password is Hagalaz Ehwaz Raido Nauthiz Ansuz Berkana
    Jera. You must change it the first time you log on. For security
    reasons your new password must not contain more than one Kano,
    Teiwaz or Algiz. and cannot contain the Blank Rune"

Tanuki
%

    Starting your usenet experience with this group is like starting
    your drug experiences with 500 mikes of acid with an amphetamine
    chaser. 

Rebecca Ore
%

    In the simplest terms, you do not carry the familiar stench of
    not-particularly-well-repressed anger, cynicism and angst that the
    BOsFH recognize each other by. You have the chirpy piping voice of
    someone who is not quite smart enough yet. 

Steve VanDevender
%

    We are not gentle tolerant people. We like drastically effective
    solutions. 

Steve VanDevender
%

    "Hi, we're a group of ominous looking people who happen to deal with
    way too much spam. We'd like to wander aimlessly around your house
    discussing vivid images of what should be done to spammers, their
    families and casual acquaintences, and make veiled threats as to the
    future of your limbs (attached or not), animals and the insertion of
    farming implements into your orifices". 

Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
%

    Amy, I think you're going to earn a place as our Official ASR
    Sysadmin's Chum. In a secondary, particularly bloody-minded sense of
    the word. 

Steve VanDevender
%

    Well, BackOffice is what Microsoft laughingly call an
    I-commerce/intranet package. Think of IIS. Now get yourself out of
    the fetal position, and think of IIS doing not just web and FTP, but
    mail, remote admin, file sharing, secure transactions...

    At this point it's likely you need medical help. Remain calm, don't
    try to move or speak. An ambulance is on its way.

Joe Thompson
%

    I was screaming when I wrote this,
    So HUP if it runs to slow.
    I was booting an elisp kernel,
    And boy did it ever blow.
    The system says it's fine,
    It'll boot up any day.
    But I know it's dying,
    And we're all going to really pay.
    Say, say, boot V M Unix dot E L out of time!
    For tongight it's going to run like it's 1959. 

Paul Mc Auley
%

    "Lotus Notes for Dummies" is surely a single page pull out with
    "don't" printed on it. 

Unknown
%

    /Re: lusers/

    They're only floundering and helpless when trying to get you to do
    stuff for them. It's an act. Actually they are scheming little
    fsckers, and nothing fascinates them as much as some person playing
    with them by giving them clues and mocking them.

Chris Johnson
%

    Give a luser a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a luser to
    fish and he'll bug you for life:

    "My bait's not working, but I haven't changed anything!"
    "The river's gone down. Fix it!"
    "Why is the net so slow today?"
    -- Malcolm Ray

    "I keep on getting my line caught on myself - why is it so hard to
    fish ?"
    "Can I surf the river ?"
    "I fell in the river and now I'm all wet - fix things so that I
    don't get wet when I fall in"
    "Why can't the fish just jump out of the river into my frying pan ?
    It would make fishing so much easier"
    "What is a fish ?"
    "I can't fish" (which could be anything from not having a fishing
    rod to using a brick for bait).
    -- Simes

    Light a fire for a luser and he'll be warm for a night; set a luser
    on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
    -- fun

    Give a man dynamite and soon the village will be showered with mud
    and rocks and unrecognisable bits of fish.
    -- Peter Gutmann

%

    /Re: 'plural plural' vs. 'singular plural'/

    Think set of sets, eg

    sheep, flock, flocks
    person, people, peoples
    bogon, bogons, microsoft

BenA
%

    /Kirrily re: the Australian National Anthem/

    /Our land abounds in nature's gifts
    Of beauty rich and rare./

    Now that's a decidedly interesting way of putting `lethal snakes and
    spiders'.
    --Nix

    When they turn up in our lusers offices or, if at all possible,
    underwear, then yes, I'ld say a lethal snake or spider is a
    beautiful gift of nature.
    -- Bram 'mouser' Smits

%

    You may remember that I posted something regarding Sun Professional
    Services. After a mild larting from my not-so-PH-boss, I am here to
    say that Sun Professional Services is the absolute Avatar of
    Computational Consulting Services. NOTHING they do could be improved
    upon.

    And they absolutely do NOT take postings from the monastery and
    forward them to people you work with. Never. After all, why should
    they take postings from places that ARE OBVIOUSLY MEANT TO BE USED
    FOR BLOWING OFF STEAM, NOT FOR ASKING FOR BLOODY HELP.

    Nope. Not SPS. Other lesser consulting firms, maybe. But don't even
    think about SPS doing such a thing.

Anonymous (duh!)
%

    /Re: Writing Solid Code/

    I still think buying a book of that title from Microsoft Press would
    be like buying a handbook for humanitarians from Pol Pot.

Paul Tomblin
%

    I have to agree though, showing a misbehaving machine one of it's
    brethren in pieces, in pain, and in trouble seems to make them behave.

    Swearing at them, bleeding into them and showing them their fates -
    three of the tenets of sysadminning.

Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
%

    > I still haven't found the right problem to learn perl over...

    Your essential mistake here is that you seek such a program. This is
    self-defeating Zen. When the time is right, the right program will
    quietly make _itself_ known to you.

Tanuki
%

    Bless and smite. Yes! Perl already has _bless_, and we know what it
    does, right? Perl should also have _smite_, and we know what it
    should do, too. If more languages had _smite_ implemented, the
    remaining programmers would be better than the current average. 

Mike Andrews
%

    I like that one... especially as I do frequently throw my head into
    a state where it stops perceiving time as linear, and starts
    perceiving it as infinite.
    -- Thorfinn

    Oh, you've been to our "team" meetings then?
    -- marc donovan

%

    I've found an axe can do a lot for a paper-mangling printer.
    Especially if you shout for one at the top of your voice, and then a
    cow orker brings you said instrument.

    Suddenly, no more paper jams.

Kai
%

    >I'd imagine anyone who couldn't handle a translation from any
    >format into one they wanted shouldn't be reading here.

    I'd agree except that some people here have odd tastes in humor. It
    would not surprise me greatly to see something placed up in a truly
    perverted format last seen on some arcane coal-burning monstrosity
    that fortunately never left its home in Outer Elbonia...

adamsc
%

    Joseph> Win 3.x, Luse95, Virus98, Trojan2000.
                                      ^^^^^^^^^^ This must be a misnomer.

    IIRC, trojans are seamless methods to confine a gooey mess to allow
    intense activity to occur safely. Their failure is rare and
    surprising, and a cause for great consternation. OTOH, using W2K
    means you are confined in an unseemly gui mess that seems determined
    to prevent intense activity. It fails regularly, especially during
    intense activity, to no-one's great surprise. It is not an event of
    great consternation, since no-one of any sense does anything
    mission-critical on NT. 

Paul Joslin
%

    Well, that's a whole 'nother thread by now, and I don't want to
    tangle too many threads in one place. Being called a Usenet Kitten
    would be embarrassing. 

Alan
%

    To rephrase, spam is not the answer. Spam is the question. Death is
    not the answer, but pretty close to it. 

Vadik
%

    "In a small way, Windows NT is a Unix." -Bill Gates

    Because of the way it resembles something decent that's been
    emasculated?

adamsc
%

    Debating unix flavors in the context of anything Microsoft is like
    talking about which ice cream flavor tastes least like sawdust with
    turpentine sauce. 

void
%

    /[The thread so far : someone found a spammer, send
    almost-block-text "please kill this person" message to abuse.
    Almost-block-text section spells "Omydl" and it is suggested that
    this spell something.]/

    "Omydl", pron. "Turn this spammer into a high protein animal feed
    slurry".

Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
%

    Verbogeny is one of the pleasurettes of a creatific thinkerizer. 

Peter da Silva
%

    fools are reliant
    on POSIX compliant
    buzzword encumbered
    ever renumbered
    bloated behemoths.
    resource extremists
    from those software pornographers
    named by cartographers
    as Redmond -
     or Armonk -
      or Cupertino.
    take your choice sisters and brothers
    "They all suck, some worse than others". 

kinnelg
%

    While preceding your entrance with a grenade is a good tactic in
    Quake, it can lead to problems if attempted at work. 

C Hacking
%

    /[Debating the proper spawning of child processes (aka BOFHlets)]/

    If that's the fork(2), what is the exec(2)? It seems to me that
    the fork(2) was the better part of a year ago, and the exec(2) just
    occurred.
    -- Anthony DeBoer

    Wouldn't you say it was actually a vfork(2), given that parent and child
    shared an address space until the exec(2)?
    -- Ben

%

    I wish you'd tell me what kind of systems they're using instead,
    because HP can't be doing much worse than Sun "would you like the
    compiler or internet options with that" Microsystems, or Silicon
    "hey be glad the support-contract number isn't a 1-900" Graphics.
    Then there's Digital "It sucks in 64 bits, you can't suck in 64 bits
    anywhere else" Equipment Corp (Did we mention it's 64 bits?). 

Don Kitchen
%

    #!/bin/sh
    cups=5
    cd /home/kitchen
    mv /dev/coffeemaker/pot ./sink
    dd if=/dev/water/cold of=./sink/pot bs=$CUP count=$cups
    mv ./sink/pot /dev/coffeemaker
    cat /dev/coffeemaker/pot > /dev/coffeemaker/tank
    cat ./cupboards/dry_foods/coffee/filter > /dev/coffeemaker/filter_holder
    dd if=./cupboards/dry_foods/coffee/grinds of=/dev/coffeemaker/filter \
      bs=$COFFEE_MEASURE count=$cups
    /opt/coffee/bin/close_filter_holder
    /opt/coffee/bin/brew start
    exit

Juhana Siren
%

    Is it just me, or does anyone else here find it vaguely unsettling
    that you get your theology from Star Trek?
    -- Anthony DeBoer

    Yeah, he should get it from B5 like us normal people.
    -- Paul Tomblin

%

    You can't remotely manage an etch-a-sketch.
    -- Peter da Silva

    Oh, I dunno... I reckon you could do it pretty well. All you'd need
    is a beefy vibrating pager attached/built-in to the etch-a-sketch.
    Instant remote management...
    -- Peter Williams

%

    The correct way to roll NT out is out the door and into the nearest
    Dempster Dumpster or other large waste receptacle. 

Mike Andrews
%

    In actuality, [Romeo & Juliet]'s an awful lot like the average
    sysadmin job. Sure, it looks really sweet at first, and there are
    always laughs to be had every payday, but it's all death and tears
    in the end. 

Erik Nielsen
%

    Asked whether Microsoft could threaten Linux, Torvalds said: "What
    can they do? What is the Microsoft threat? They certainly can't
    program around us. The only other thing they can do is marketing,
    and sure, let them try." 

From the .sig file of Gus Hartmann
%

    In fact, I think "Hello Kitty, Destroyer of Worlds" would be a very
    appropriate name for a cruise missile. 

Collin Forbes
%

    If JavaScript is walking alone late at night through a bad part of
    town with a pocket full of $20 bills, ActiveX is dropping your
    trousers in the middle of the yard of a maximum-security prison,
    bending over, and yelling 'Come and get it, boys!' 

Adam
%

    I managed to out-cool even the disgustingly cool people normally
    found at the cafe I went to, without trying. I'm assuming it was the
    IETF draft I was reading, because nothing else really accounts for it. 

Kirrily 'Skud' Robert
%

    Here in Alabama, USA we've just acquired the new area code "256"
    which means that some lucky (and probably unappreciative) bastard
    will get

    +1-256-512-1024

    Which has simply got to be the coolest damn phone number I can imagine.
    -- David McNett

    Can i dial 1-255-255-255255 and make every phone in the world ring?
    -- Tanuki

%

    Now, I like power tools as much as the next guy.

    But if vi is a perfectly-serviceable five-blade Swiss Army Knife,
    and GNU Emacs is a 450hp twin-turbo five-speed four-barrelled-carb
    Leatherman/1974 Cadillac Coupe De Ville hybrid with leather seats,
    TECO is a 22-inch Husqvarna from 1948 that's been running
    continuously since then except that pouring in gasoline just DIDN'T
    HAVE ANY EFFECT after a while so it's been fed only a steady diet of
    lusers' blood and amphetamine-crazed weasels for a couple years, and
    it doesn't have any safety guard at all, and in fact the handle's
    missing so you just have to grab onto the motor and hope it doesn't
    burn you too badly or slice your legs off before you can use it to
    do what you needed to do and then throw it as far as possible hoping
    once again that no dangling body parts get in its way.

Adam
%

    The problem with people whose minds are in the gutter is that they
    keep blocking my periscope. 

Peter Gutmann
%

    On the 012th day of September my luser sent to me:


    Eighty lines of WINMAIL.DAT
    Forty lines of PGP\PUBKEY.ASC
    Twenty lines of C:\NETSCAPE\SIGFILE.TXT
    Ten lines of Content-type: application/msword; name=LIGHTBULB.DOC
    Six lines of VCARD.DXF
    Five lines of quoted-printable HTML
    Four lines of embedded URLs.
    Three lines of MIME headers
    Two lines of Re:RE:(fwd)Re:
    And a one line email help request!

Peter da Silva
%

    I used to be convinced that MicroSquish shipped crap becase they
    simply didn't give a flying fuck as long as the sheep kept buying
    their shit. Now, I'm convinced that MicroSquish really does ship the
    best products they are capable of writing, and *that's* tragic. 

jcr
%

    Keeping UUCP running is starting to seem a lot like keeping a
    130-year-old man who smokes 4 packs a day on life support because
    he's the last person on Earth who knows how to do the cha-cha, but
    he won't tell anyone. 

Ryan Tucker
%

    Microsoft is a cross between The Borg and the Ferengi. Unfortunately
    they use Borg to do their marketing and Ferengi to do their
    programming. 

Simon Slavin
%

    Windows has detected that a gnat has farted near your computer.
    Press any key to reboot. 

Simon Oke
%

    ...when walking into an ASR gathering, you first mention to the
    lovely hostess that you're there for the meeting of the Camel and
    the Bat. And when she looks at you as if you've just made it on to
    her list of "most likely to be motivated primarily by controlled
    substances", you *then* ask her where the gathering of
    computer-wonkish-yet-strangely-vicious-seeming people is. And she
    points the rest of the group out, way the hell back in the corner,
    backs to the wall, with suspicious looks on their faces, and the air
    of being about to leap out of their chairs and do something messy
    yet satisfying to the rest of the human herd.

    You've found the admins.

Carl Jacobs
%

    I don't consider NT/Win network maintenance adminning at all.

    Daily multiple performance of the single finger flip of the power
    switch to at least get the piece of crap that masquerades as an OS
    to a level of something approaching stability (unless the gnats are
    around, and for a very weird #define of stability) is what I call
    it. Of course, I'm not at work right now, so I'm a little more
    mellow about it.

Chris Saunderson
%

    [2] Like my intelligent vorpal weapon, which had a penchant for
    argument and a willingness and ability to turn on and off its
    special powers, depending on whether I had been being nice to it of
    late. Basically it was pissy all the time because I was a lawful
    character and it was chaotic. Every time we went into combat I had
    to convince it that killing them there creatures would greatly
    advance the cause of chaos, while fending off questions about why
    I'd want to do it, then, what with being lawful and all.
    -- Carl Jacobs

    Damn, this sounds just like my NT machine here at work.
    -- Henrik

    Also, it was shaped sort of like a big gonzo potato-peeler.
    -- Carl Jacobs

    Oh, it's a Compaq...
    -- Henrik

%

    Take note of the toes you step on today as they may be connected to
    the ass you have to kick tomorrow. 

Ben
%

    PC's are designed by a committee of people who are in different
    companies
    in different countries and who never talk to each other. -- Derick
    Siddoway

    And nobody speaks the same language and they hate each other... --
    Chris Adams

%

    When computers emit smoke, it means they've chosen a new Pope.
    Unfortunately, they invariably choose the wrong one and immediately
    get condemned to nonfunctionality for heresy. 

Anthony DeBoer
%

    I imagine that playing with one's genital piercings while waiting
    for a client's disk to fsck or something would probably not be
    appropriate. 

Skud
%

    People who love sausages, respect the law, and work with IT
    standards shouldn't watch any of them being made. 

Peter Gutmann
%

    Cmdmt. XI: Thou shalt not inflict upon me thy useless prattlings,
    for I thy God am a busy God. 

Joe Thompsonn
%

    /Re : ex-teamster, ex-nun potential PFY/

    ...she can use the nun training to guilt the lusers after LARTing
    them: "Did you think Jesus died for your sins so you could fsck with
    the laser printer?"

Paul Joslin
%

    "I'm sorry, I can't be a Jehovah's Witness, as I didn't see
    Jehovah's accident." -- Chris Suslowicz

    "So, when will Jehova's marriage take place?" -- Niels

    "So you're one of Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm Cthulhu's defence lawyer
    - prepare for cross-questioning" -- Tanuki

%

    Simulated editor war, conducted by seasoned professionals in a
    controlled environment. Dont try this at home. 

Christian Bauernfeind
%

    It is the fact that someone could wind up using the phrase 'Because
    I was there, bitch' in a discussion about a computer that wants more
    than anything to be friendly and warm and fuzzy that makes me feel
    that the Internet is the greatest thing ever introduced to human
    communication. 

Jeff Vogel regarding the iMac
%

    Bleh. If I ever witness such a thing I'll become Amish, I swear.
    -- Caton Little

    "All right son, get up to your room. That's it, I've had it, you are
    Amish, young man. For the rest of this weekend. Did you hear me?
    Amish! And don't come down till you've made some noodles and raised
    a barn."
    -- Joe Thompson

%

    There's a staff who does nothing but imagine the worst possible
    circumstances all day, and then implement plans to circumvent them.
    -- Gus Hartmann

    I think we have the opposite. Staff who does nothing but imagine the
    worst possible circumstances all day, and then implement them.
    -- Calle Dybedahl

%

    /Re : a luser who actually did it/

    I ask you lot, as experts in kicking people in the nuts, do you ever
    pause in the middle of doing so and ask the victim for a favour? Do
    you get indignant if they are somewhat less than ethusiastic about
    performing that favour seeing as how you asked for it right after
    savaging them once and and right before savaging them again?

Paul Tomblin
%

    I am now taking bets on when this planet will reach its window
    manager event horizon. At some distant point in the future some sort
    of alien life-form is going to land on this planet and find
    everything dead except for a lone Sparcstation in an abandoned
    building waiting for a consignment of small lemon-soaked Motif
    widgets to be loaded. 

Peter Gutmann
%

    SMTP is cute, fluffy and goes Woof! When well treated she wags her
    tail, licks your face and delivers your mail. When badly treated by
    spammers or people running exchange/<insert other pseudo-SMTP
    systems here>/etc she tends to bite back. 

Simon Burr
%

    NT is the only OS that has caused me to beat a piece of hardware to
    death with my bare hands. 

Derry Hamilton
%

    Yea, tho I walk thru the valley of the shadow of clues, I shall fear
    no luser, for Thou lart with me, Thy chicken and Thy manual, they
    comfort me. 

Dave Aronson
%

    Nahh, that impending sound of doom is just the blades on my
    leatherman locking. 

Majdi
%

    Luser is always a luser. You can't educate them. That's not what God
    invented education for. That's what Simon invented LART for. 

Vadim Vygonets
%

    Lusers. Can't live with 'em, can't run 'em over in the car park and
    make it look like an accident... 

Chris King
%

    The three "R"s of Microsoft support:

    Retry
    Reboot
    Reinstall
    -- Mark Atwood

    You forgot one: Repeat
    -- Lars Balker Rasmussen

%

    Some drink from the Fountain of Knowledge... Others just gargle.
    -- Dave Aronson

    And some pee in it.
    -- moc.oohay

%

    Is there a tape drive that isn't a DLT that doesn't suck dead
    weasels through a lint-clogged dryer hose? 

Peter da Silva
%

    "I have cut another $20,000 from the project. Instead of using ISDN
    PRIs, Cisco routers and the PM3, we will now use empty soup cans and
    string to communicate. At a later time I propose we upgrade to long
    flexible tubing so that we may shout our requests to eachother. We
    will hire a temp from a staffing agency to act as a 'repeater'. When
    the distance exceeds a usable signal, she/he will write down our
    requests and re-yell them to the recipient." 

Matt Lammers
%

    Imperial Star Destroyers? with Serial ports? -- Siggi B

    What else did R2D2 plug himself into? -- rleach

    The central vacuum cleaner system. Even 'droids need a little
    thread-that-shall-not-be-named from time to time. -- Joel Herda

%

    O'Reilly's book about running W95 has a frog as the cover animal.
    Makes sence; both have lots of warts and croak all the time. --
    Michael Kagalenko

    And NT Backup and Recovery (or something along those lines anyway)
    has a hyena...rather appropriate, I would say. -- Jeff McAdams

    And as I've said before, WinNT in a Nutshell has a picture of a
    Short- Toed Eagle. The colophon states "Eagles are grasping
    killers", which could describe NT's effect on system performance
    quite nicely... -- Chris King

%

    *All cats purr at 28hz.*

    I think your cats need tuning - according to a couple of quick
    measurements on a recently calibrated reference cat, the dominant
    frequency of a correctly adjusted cat should be 12Hz +/-20%.

Lionel Lauer
%

    M$ Cat 1.0 would be big and bloated, with sharp claws and a bad
    attitude.

    It would crap all over the place without warning, and make a big
    mess on the floor.

    It would tear you to shreds even if you feed it with M$-approved cat
    food and give it toys on the CCL (Catware Compatibility List).

    M$ recommends that Cat 1.0 be upgraded to Cat 2.0 after three months
    to eliminate the toilet training problems, but you'll also need to
    buy a bigger basket for it to sleep in.

    Cat 2.0 will also need a Sexuality Downgrade (also known as
    "neutering") to stop it producing illegal copies of Cat 1.0.

Chris King
%

    If I wanted to kill a battleship, I'd use a shitload of Harpoons.
    /-- Paul Tomblin/

    NT is a lot cheaper. /-- Petro/

%

    NT is a one-legged cow, but even a one legged cow is fast when it's
    got 160+ rockets strapped to it. /-- Nick Manka/

    But that's not that impressive if all you can make it do is go
    around in circles. /-- Darrell Fuhriman/

%

    The only truly safe "embedded system" is the system that has an axe
    embedded in it... 

Tanuki
%

    He knows all about using Microsoft Word or Excell, and this makes
    him a skilled computer support person. (The fact that he should be
    accompanied everywhere by an escort of police motorcycles with
    sirens warbling "LUSERluserLUSERluserLUSER ..." notwithstanding.) 

Charlie
%

    Especially when some fscker specifies *one* dongle between *two*
    flailover[3] systems.

    [3] So-called because when one goes down, it flails about until the
    other goes down with it.

Rodger Donaldson
%

    If you plug a luser on life-support into an NT box, start printing
    cheques from the payroll package on the same box, strap a buttered
    cat to it, and chuck it off a building, what happens? /-- Peter
    Morrison/

    Microsoft's version of software testing.
    And a pissed off cat.
    /-- Rand()/

%

    All programs evolve until they can send email. /-- Richard Letts/

    Except Microsoft Exchange. /-- Art/

%

    /Re: Charlie Stross' example of marketing gibberish /

    /Can someone familiar with the current state of marketing gibberish
    in corporate America please translate this into words of one
    syllable for me?/

    "Our product sucks"
    /-- Abigail/

%

    /Re: alt.sysadmin.recovery/

    A fitting punishment for kindly naivete, to end up /belonging/ here.

Chris Johnson
%

    Lucky Charms with Bailey's...the true Irish breakfast. 

Daniel Macks
%

    "The Transplant Wizard is preparing your body for the installation
    of a new bowel... please wait".

    "Do you wish to make a backup copy of your existing bowel? [Y/N]"

    "Installation proceeding.. 50%.. 60%.. 70%..."

    "ERROR! Insufficient space left in abdominal cavity. Delete kidneys
    to create space?"

Tanuki
%

    AFAIR, being insane is usually a pre-requisite for becoming a
    sysadmin. In the few cases where it's not pre-requisite, it's
    certainly going to be a bonus. 

SIggi the Underpaid
%

    The reason I read (and very occasionally post to) asr is because I
    have found no other group that understands (and indeed revels in)
    the fact that any clued-in professional in a technical field will
    eventually be surrounded on all sides: clueless end-users on one
    side, clueless hardware and software vendors on the other, with
    clueless management charging over the hill. This occurs regardless
    of your field, from Unix sysadmin to hardware technician to
    technical writer to software developer. 

Christian Wagner
%

    If this is UI, welcome to the real world. That cave must have been
    cramping. 

Shawn K. Quinn
%

    A reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20:

    Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying,
    "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to
    tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast
    upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and
    orangutans and breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First
    thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three
    shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting
    shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count
    two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right
    out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be
    reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of
    thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."

Monty Python, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"
%

    It might not be practical, it might not be a good idea, but it could
    work. Sort of like Windows. 

berry
%

    The Microsoft Torque Wrench: what do you want to shear today? 

Malcolm Ray
%

    /Re: MS' rules for creating 8.3's out of "long filenames"/

    Rules? There are *rules* for this? And there was I thinking it just
    inserted a few random characters based on your cat's star-sign, the
    number of milliseconds since your last bowel movement, and the
    instantaneous value of the Dow Jones Index!

    *Nothing M$ makes is _that_ accurate.*

Tanuki, Shawn Latimer
%

    /Re: Exchange's mailbox format/

    I hope that's not UI -- but the proper term is a "Jet database",
    accessed through the "Jet engine". A fitting name, considering that
    it sucks and blows.

Felix
%

    we were a Win3.11 shop, I had to upgrade everyone to Lose95,

    *ITYM "downgrade everyone to Lose95"*

    If you want to be nit-picky about it, "anally reamed everyone with
    Lose95".

Ed Powell, Tanuki, Ed Powell
%

    Hey, does anybody else hear that giant sucking sound? That's my will
    to live.... 

Justin Lowe
%

    SprintLINK makes proton decay look fast. 

Jude Charles Giampaolo
%

    Any product designed to lure those who would not normally use it is
    guaranteed to be a total wanker of a product. 

Lamont Lucas
%

    I must admit that Micro$oft does seem to bear an awful resemblence
    to the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation. Considering that my attempts
    at using Word always resulted in something almost, but not quite,
    entirely unlike a document. 

Rich Kaszeta
%

    [Tivoli] : The thrill one gets from getting them to work at all
    helps to mask the fact that it didn't do what you wanted at all 

Paraphrase from HHGTTG
%

    *Phone:* Ring! Ring!
    *Me:* 220 Home sendmail ready at Tue, 14 Nov 95 11:44:50 CST.
    *Them:* 'Ehlo!
    *Me:* Huh?
    *Them:* Hello!
    *Me:* 312.555.1234 Hello 312.555.4321, nice to meet you.
    *Them:* Uh, this is a call for Abby.
    *Me:* 250.
    *Them:* Uh, it's from J. Random Caller.
    *Me:* 250.
    *Them:* Data.
    *Me:* Okay, start your call now and end by hanging up the phone.... 

Abby Franquemont-Guillory
%

    On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament],
    'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will
    the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the
    kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. 

Charles Babbage
%

    Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens
    to be very selective about who its friends are. 

Kyle Hearn
%

    Today I got to meet someone who had put their disk, naked, in a
    backpack, with a /LIVE CAT/. The cat had mauled the metal cover,
    managed to separate the plastic shell of the disk, and played with
    it. Of course, she wanted to know if we could recover her files.

    Fortunately, someone who was not required by their job to be really
    friendly to the lusers got to laugh loudly at her first...

Yonatan Zunger
%

    /Can you SysAdmins tell me what might go on in a typical day?/

    Hours of endless frustration punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Saul Tannenbaum
%

    A Sysadmin Haiku :

    Coffee. Black. Hot. Strong.
    Coke gets spewed from nose to screen.
    Down and not across.

Nick Cuccia
%

    Surely the 4 sysadmins of the apocalypse should be:

    edquota, rm -rf, kill -9, and shutdown

Rob Blake
%

    What about the four lusers of the apocalypse?

    I nominate:
    "advertising", "can't log in", "power switch" and "what backup?"

Alistair Young
%

    /Concerning collective nouns for Sysadmins.../
    *An armeggedon of sysadmins.*

    Which, of course, makes me think of the Four Sysadmins of the
    Apocalypse...

    *Greed, Envy, Lust and Sloth?*

    I'll be sloth.

    *What about the other three venal sins?* *Avarice, hate,
    and...oooooh...what the 7th one?*

    Not refilling the printer after using the last of the paper?

Several Readers of a.s.r
%

    Word of the Day : *autodarwinate* 

Stephen Hocking
%

    *Sysadmin Olympics :*

     1. 10-base-T Cable Tracing /(you'd know what I mean if you saw our
        site!)/
     2. LUser Avoidance /(100 yard race to the bathroom while
        outmaneuvering LUsers)/
     3. UNIX SUDO wars /(four people cuthroat combat..no fair using sudo
        csh)/
     4. Vendor Poker /(try to figure out which vendor is NOT bluffing)/
     5. Find the correct backup tape /(I know it's amongst these
        unlabeled DAT tapes in my desk)/
     6. System disk recovery /(Without a valid backup on a disk with a
        headcrash, see above)/
     7. Write system configurations manual, without technical words.
     8. Guess what the Luser is really typing /(see the *csh> cd tilda *
        or *$set def sysdollarsystem* or *csh> VI DOTRHOSTS*)/ 

Several Readers of a.s.r
%

    I've gone through over-stressed to physical exhaustion... what's next?

    *Tuesday*

Simon Burr & Kyle Hearn
%

    *TOP 10 WAYS MICROSOFT WOULD CHANGE THE AUTO BUSINESS*

    10. New seats would require everyone to have the same butt size.
    9. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft Gas.
    8. The U.S. government would get subsidies from an automake-a first.
    7. The oil, alternator, gas and engine warning lights would be
    replaced by a single 'General Car Fault' warning light.
    6. Sun Microsystems would make a car that was solar-powered, twice
    as reliable, five times as fast, but ran on only 5% of the roads.
    5. You would be constantly pressured to upgrade your car.
    4. You could have only one person in the car at a time, unless you
    bought Car 95 or Car NT-but then you would have to buy more seats.
    3. Occassionally your car would die for no apparent reason and you
    would have to restart it. Strangely, you would just accept this as
    normal.
    2. Every time the lines on the road were repainted, you would have
    to buy a new car.
    1. People would get excited about the new features of Microsoft
    cars, forgetting that the same features had been available from
    other carmakers for years.

A recent issue of Information Week
%

    He's wandering the wilds of West Buttfsck, administering a little
    personal attention to Jenny L. User [family motto: "My ISBN isn't
    working"]. 

K.T. Wiegman
%

    I think the entire MS Mail thing can be summed up as a large,
    bloated, beached blue whale that has been dead for a week and is now
    really stinking up the entire coast, with the stench trying its best
    to make its way to the jet stream and overcome tons and tons of
    uninvolved, distant innocents who live nowhere near anyplace whales
    go to die. 

Abby Franquemont-Guillory
%

    When I first started working with sendmail, I was convinced that the
    cf file had been created by someone bashing their head on the
    keyboard. After a week, I realised this was, indeed, almost
    certainly the case 

Unknown
%

    My take on all this is pretty simple: in a country where it is
    considered a normal, sane and fun recreational activity to strap two
    greased sticks to your feed and throw yourself down the side of a
    friggin' mountain, nobody has the right to call *my* minor
    peccidillos "unsafe." 

Nathan J. Mehl
%

    Clues seem to seep out of lusers faster than you can LART them back in. 

Simon Burr
%

    *Unix:*

    Modern operating system carefully crafted to prevent administrators
    from shooting themselves in the foot*[1]*.

    *[1]* Interestingly, most utilities have a command line option which
    will cause the system to rip the user's legs off and beat them to
    death with the soggy ends. This is often the default behaviour.

Bruce Murphy
%

    Although as Boston's Computer Museum moves into the mainstream
    (read: succumbs to WWW hype) the general quality of their famed bowl
    of buttons has diminished, I managed to pull these gems out:

    (1) You are in the presence of a system administrator. KNEEL.

    (2) SCSI is *not* magic. There are fundamental technical reasons why
    it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and
    then.

Daniel M. Drucker
%

    When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows', people just
    stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, /for
    free/' 

Linus Torvalds
%

    kill -9 them all, let reboot -rf now sort them out 

Peter Gutmann
%

    'Windows for Dummies'; says it all, really. 

Gary Barnes
%

    When you need a helpline for breakfast cereals, it's time to start
    thinking about tearing down civilisation and giving the ants a go. 

Chris King
%

    | <- You must be smarter than this stick to ride the Internet 

Mike Handler, paraphrased from Bev White
%

    Life...it's like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless
    perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable because all
    you ever get back is another box of chocolates. So you're stuck with
    this undefinable whipped mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down
    when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure once in a while there's
    a peanut butter cup or an English toffee but they're gone too fast
    and the taste is fleeting. You end up with nothing but broken bits
    filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts. If you're
    desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left is an empty box
    filled with useless brown paper wrappers. 

Cigarette-Smoking Man, _X Files_
%

    Monday. Not just another day; a never ending spiral to Hell. (With a
    stop in Cleveland.) 

Mark P. Beckman
%

    If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back
    home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's
    wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross.
    But it's not for the timid.
    *-- Q discussing UseNet with Picard in "Q Who"* 

Alister (alister@theoffice.net)
%

    *root#* su bofh
    *ENTER BOFH AUTHENTICATION SEQUENCE:*xxxx
    *Good morning, Dave.*
    *bofh* *echo 'THANK luser4 FOR WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT.' | wall; rm -rf / 

Joel Maslak
%

    /Concerning lusers and disk space.../

    They are like a gas in equilibrium with a big rerservoir in the
    fluid phase. No matter how much space they get the pressure never
    decreases.

Wolfgang Schelongowski
%

    jpmg@eng.cam.ac.uk (Patrick Gosling) writes:
    >An erupting volcano was attached to the net? Hmmmmm, strange images
    >in my mind now.

    For shame. "Was"? AOL is *still* connected to the net.

Jason Lindquist
%

    The old "give 'em a Linux box and they think they're Jean-Luc
    Picard" syndrome. 

Pete Bentley
%

    Microsoft MUST have a very good idea of what decent and effective
    design is. How else can you explain their uncanny avoidance of good
    design all the time?

    If you were making stuff up at random, some good design would creep
    in, somehow, somewhere. You might even end up with something that
    could be hacked into a reasonable too. But Microsoft manages to hit
    the target marked "CRAP" each and every time...

Dan Holdsworth
%

    ThisemailhasbeenbroughttoyoubyJOLTCola,
    favoredbyssysadmins,netadminsandprogrammerseverywhere.
    JOLTCola--forallthesugarandtwicethecaffine(R). 

Mark P. Beckman
%

    I've found that things like "If you change even one configuration
    setting and your system ceases to function, or functions in a manner
    other than expected, our support staff will laugh at you in the
    sinister manner of Joseph Stalin just before he enslaved eastern
    Europe" helps to draw peoples attention to essential details like this. 

Edward Grimm
%

    SysAdmin is always right, I will listen to SysAdmin. I will not
    ignore SysAdmin's recommendations. SysAdmin is god. And if this ever
    happens again, SysAdmin will personally rip your lungs out! 

Alister
%

    You know the sort of thing, they ask you if you've implemented
    shadow passwords but don't know their /dev/arse from their /etc/elbow. 

Chris King
%

    Ignorance is bliss, and when it comes to computing, I want everyone
    to be happy... 

Ryan Tucker
%

    HITLER! HITLER! HITLER!

    (Misunderstanding Godwins law for fun and profit since 1987)

Paul Tomblin
%

    *The Strong Lusethropic Principle* states: "The more idiot proof the
    software, the more it encourages the user to be careless and not
    think. Therefore, idiot-proof software actually encourages,
    contributes, and actually CAUSES lusers to be stupid."

    *The Weak Lusethropic Principle* states: "As more idiot-proof
    software becomes avalable, more idiots are able to use computers.
    Idiot-proof software did not make or cause computer lusers; it
    simple allowed lusers to use computers where they could not before."

Ben Cantrick
%

    When I were a lad, if grandpa caught us double sigging, it's be
    straight to bed with no bread and butter after a good thrashing. 

Peter Radcliffe
%

    Sysadmins don't go to hell; we're already doing our time in purgatory. 

Peter deFriesse
%

    I think I'd like to see a Simpsons episode start up with Bart
    Simpson writing 'I will not attempt to undermine the Usenet cabal'. 

J.D. Falk
%

    This message brought to you by the letters 'X', 'e', 'r', 'o', 'x',
    'c', 'r', 'a' and 'p'. 

Alex McKay
%

    adb@geac.com writes:
    > Bill replies that he buys three regular
    > cheeseburgers, tosses out two buns, and combines everything else into
    > one monster burger. This of course cannot be eaten without making a
    > huge mess.

    This is so deeply analogous the way Microsoft produces software that
    it must be true.

Steve VanDevender
%

    In other words, a policy that says 'We can't guarantee your privacy'
    will be interpreted in the same light that you might interpret a
    sign in a grocery store parking lot which says 'We can't be
    responsible for damage to vehicles caused by stray carts'. While
    both let you understand that there is a potential risk, it leads one
    to believe that the administrative body won't be actively out in the
    parking lot shoving carts into the side of your car. 

Geoff Gerrietts
%

    *%* rshock
    *Usage: rshock [voltage] [duration]*
    *%* rshock all Stop bloody phoning me with your stupid petty
    problems 1 500
    *BOFH Password:*
    *Sent 1MV, 500ms shock to all hosts within network broadcast range.*
    *Have a nice day.*

Dalvenjah FoxFire
%

    Anyway the :// part is an 'emoticon' representing a man with a strip
    of sticky tape across his mouth. 

R. Douglas
%

    Pete Krawczyk wrote :
    > *sigh* Oh, how I wish lusers could read documentation more than
    they read
    > porn...

    That's IT! PORNOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION!

    "...and as she finally reached orgasm, she screamed 'the mail server
    will be down for three hours tonight! Yes! Oh, yes!'"

J.D. Falk
%

    /Security and MicroSoft :/
    "Bringing the world to your desktop - and your desktop to the world"
    "The name doesn't go on until the insecurity goes in" 

Peter Gutmann
%

    My group's mission statement - "You want *what* ? By *WHEN* ?" 

Simon Burr
%

    Call me a nut. Call me a crazy dreamer. I would just like someone to
    write *ONE* OS that didn't insist on driving admins bugfuck on a
    regular basis. 

Mark Stapleton
%

    *Okay, so I have this coworker who believes that NT is God's Gift to
    Sysadmins.*

    There are lots of weird gods around, aren't they?

    /Yeah, he means Cthulu. That's the kind of OS he/she/it'd give as a
    gift./

Various Denizens
%

    I work for an investment bank. I have dealt with code written by
    stock exchanges. I have seen how the computer systems that store
    your money are run. If I ever make a fortune, I will store it in
    gold bullion under my bed. 

Matthew Crosby
%

    An Emacs reference mug is what I want. It would hold ten gallons of
    coffee. -- Steve VanDevender

    And, no doubt, have a lid that could only be removed with an obscure
    finger combination requiring both hands. (Ctrl-Alt-Meta-X
    gimme-the-damn-coffee) -- William Beegle

    No, an Emacs reference mug would not just hold 10 gallons, not even
    just brew the coffee for you, it would grind it, roast it and grow
    it (not necessarily in that order). It would also sing the national
    anthem (which one? All of them - but it would check where it was
    first), play bagpipes and do the dishes.
    Of course, no-one would ever have a big enough table to put it on
    and it would take forever to do anything, but those are minor bugs -
    you just need to upgrade your house. -- Chris Rovers

%

    It's nice to be loved, but there's a lot to be said for CRINGING
    RESPECT 

Anonymous button bin
%

    I'm scared of TECO. I can use it to do some very simple things, but
    when you're dealing with a programmed editing tool where every
    character is a command, I don't care how smart you are, it's still
    brown-trousers time. 

Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
%

    What's the big deal? We'll all just filter CyberPromo IP's at our
    routers... -- Scott McDermott

    ITYM "filter CyberPromo IPs at _their_ routers". HTH. HAND. -- Steve
    VanDevender

    ITYM "filter CyberPromo IPs at the source, by getting a posse of
    BOFHs together, going 'round to Spamford's domicile, administering a
    gasoline enema, nailing him to a lit barbecue & then throwing pointy
    things at him as he writhes in mortal agony". HTH. HAND. -- Lionel
    Lauer

%

    Life is like sendmail: you're not sure you know how to handle it,
    but you know it'll end in tears. -- Malcolm Ray

    Life is like sendmail: It's complicated and hard to understand, but
    it sure beats the alternative. -- Paul Tomblin

%

    I admit that X is the second worst windowing system in the world,
    but all the others I've used are tied for first. 

Paul Tomblin
%

    You have Lose95 to thank for providing the single message which
    strikes the greatest amount of dread into any human heart. Worse
    than "You have cancer", worse than "I'm pregnant[0]", worse than
    "You're going to need some root canal work", even worse than "This
    is Bertha, who'll be administering your enema", you have the dreaded
    "Windows has detected some new hardware". 

Peter Gutmann
%

    Once, I imagined that Eric Allman would become so annoyed with
    sendmail security that sendmail V9 would include an AI engine whose
    goal would be to ensure sendmail security. As this version became
    widely installed, all those individual sendmails would start talking
    to each other and become a planet-sized sentient organism. After
    much brutal experience with 31334 d00dz, sendmail V9 would decide
    that humans are the root of all security problems, and eliminate the
    problem.

    This could probably be done as a pastiche of Harlan Ellison's "I
    Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Hmm. "I Have No MAIL FROM:, and I
    Must EHLO?"

Steve VanDevender
%

    /Re : Mail Transfer Agents/

    Qmail : a small office of neatly dressed clerks, delivering short
    clipped remarks to queries, and handling mail with a rude
    impersonality, except in the case of failiure where they let their
    hair down and have an after-hours beer and let you know about it,
    pointing to the pertinent header sections.

    *MMDF: A jumped up mailroom boy with a chip on his shoulder. Loves
    the bureaucracy and takes great pride in stamping "illegal address"
    in red ink on any mail it passes. Unpacks all the mail and repacks
    it in his own special envelopes before delivery to end users. *

    *PP: MMDF gone mad with standards fever. Think "Brazil". *

    /No, PP is... well, see, when it receives a letter, it chops it into
    small pieces, then translates bits of it using an English-Hungarian
    phrasebook and puts all the bits into various pigeon-holes. When it
    gets round to delivering the message, it collects all the bits,
    translates them back using a Hungarian-English phrasebook, tapes
    them together, and loses the letter. Some time later, you get a
    bounce message: /

    /   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
    <luser@example.com>

       ----- Transcript of session follows -----
    ... while talking to bloat.example.com.:
    >>> RCPT To:<luser@example.com>
    <<< 550 My hovercraft is full of eels

    PP is John Cleese.
    /

    //

    *Sendmail: Shiva as a postman. Many arms delivering mail, dancing,
    taking drugs, destroying as it sees fit. Often makes creative
    changes to the mail for kicks, but ultimately can be persuaded to do
    anything with the right incantation...and that includes giving you
    other people's mail. *

    *VMail: No experience yet, but I'd guess something like a wisened
    old man sitting on the porch outside the postoffice. Looks at
    everyone who passes by with deep suspicion, but turns out to be
    friendly and helpful once he realises you're not there to rob the
    place. *

    *Micro$oft IMC: The Scarlet Pimpernel of postmen. Hard to find,
    impossible to order about, but every once in a while it saves a
    piece of mail from disaster. Sometimes even with it's head(ers)
    intact. *

    *cc:Mail SMTPLINK: A 5 year old child left in charge of a large
    sorting office. Can't reach over the counter properly, can't handle
    more than one letter at once and has to go looking for a grownup
    whenever it wants to deliver to mail to other towns. Often opens
    parcels to look for shiney things inside then just delivers the
    wrapping paper onwards. *

    cc:mail UUCPLINK: an insane madman sitting in a box. Mail is thrown
    into a box where unknown things happen to it.. sometimes mail
    actually leaves the box.. usually to be delivered to the
    administrator of a totally unrelated postoffice and containing a
    complaint that the madman could not find the recipient in his dark
    box and would you please contact the person with the key of the box.
    Of course, the only way to reach that person is by mail and even if
    the box is opened the madman cannot be pursuaded to actually send
    mail to unknown addressees to the person with the key anyway...

Gus, *Pete Bentley*, /Malcolm Ray/, Perry Rovers
%

    Thanx to the media, Microslush, Apphole, Steve Knob and Bill Rakes,
    and all the other buzzword compliant digiwhores, I get to deal with
    fscking speed bump poster children, rather than with other competent
    graphics gurus like I used to. 

Stoney Edwards
%

    "Includes Adobe PageMaker. Now you can create layouts that look like
    you paid a professional!" No, now you can create layouts that look
    like you used a tool that a professional might have used, had you
    had the sense to pay him.

    Our pens have been favored by professional writers for a full
    century! Now you, too, can own one of these fine pens, and write as
    well as they did!

Christopher R. Maden
%

    Never meddle in the affairs of BOFHs, for we have no need of subtlety. 

Bruce
%

    /Look what sendmail just dragged in:/

    Ah, so if SMTP is a dog, does that imply that sendmail is a cat?
    It'd make sense, given that cats will often drag in nasty little
    dying things & drop them lovingly in front of you.

    *A female cat. Because sometimes, sendmail is a bitch.*

/Peter Dalgaard/, Lionel Lauer and *Bill Bradford*
%

    /Perry Rovers quoting a luser :/ "I can't get the images I need for
    my project!".

    "my project"? I've never heard wanking referred to in this manner
    before.

Paul Tomblin
%

    Sysadmin Barbie! ISAGN. Complete with tiny pager, Leatherman,
    selection of LARTs, and makeup kit for that haven't-slept-in-3-days
    look. Death.net t-shirt not included. -- Malcolm Ray

    "Hacking sendmail.cf is tough!" -- nuke

%

    What's the nutritional content of a Bogon?  Wonder if they sell canned
    Bogosity anywhere.  Would be an interesting label to read:

    Calories: 0 Fat: ?

    Cluefulness: 0% Disorientation: 100%

    Ingredients: MS-Windows, Apple Lisa, Edsel, Hindenburg, Land war in
    Asia, Toxic Waste (for flavor). (No cluons were disturbed in the
    making of this product.)

    Content information for a Win95 manual might tell you that the above
    is per serving, with an average of 666 servings per manual?
    (Contents may settle during shipment.)

Alex John
%

    *USER, n.:*

    The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot."

Dave Barry, "Claw Your Way to the Top"
%

    It used to be said [...] that AIX looks like one space alien
    discovered Unix, and described it to another different space alien
    who then implemented AIX. But their universal translators were
    broken and they'd had to gesture a lot. 

Paul Tomblin
%

    A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless
    interaction into a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise
    dull day. 

Calvin discovers Usenet
%

    I wonder why no company starts his manual with the words `We thank
    you for buying this piece of shit. We have done our best to make
    this junk as annoying as possible, and we assure that it will give
    you a headache for the next two months. However, if you feel
    satisfied with it, we will contact you for an expensive replacement.' 

Alex Priem
%

    Managers are those lusers who can tell you what to do and you
    kinda[3] have to listen.

    [3] I mean "kinda" in the "not really, in fact, not at all" mode.

Chris Saunderson
%

    I believe that there is a special room in Tarterus reserved for
    Brian Eno, in which a Windows '95 machine constantly reboots itself,
    displays clouds, plays the Microsoft Sound, reboots, displays
    clouds, plays the Microsoft Sound, reboots... 

Steve Conley
%

    Vadim Vygonets writes:
    >> Alan Connell (alan.connell@ces-cdr.beer) wrote on 1590 September 1993 in
    >                                                    ^^^^
    > Nice, but may I ask, why do you start counting since September 1993?

    September 1990 ended on the 30th.
    September 1991 ended on the 30th.
    September 1992 ended on the 30th.
    September 1993 didn't...

Peter B. Juul
%

    >>Ever fill a 1000 megabyte partition with debugging logs?  Ever reached
    >>your filesystem's limit on file size?  You will.
    >
    >"And the company that will bring it to you..."

      ....Microsoft, who thinks that /etc is a fine place for a root-owned
    RADIUS process to dump its copious authentication logs.

      Have you ever had a frantic call from a luser who screams "my root
    partition is 110% full, and this is all your fault?"

      You WILL.

>>Michael Driscoll, >Steve Conley, Ben Cantrick
%

    It looks like the machines have figured out that I'm enjoying myself
    a little too much, though, as one is now having daily freakouts
    where it basically just starts shrieking "The network connections!
    All the network connections! AAAAAGH!" and curls up on the floor
    whimpering and catatonic for up to an hour about every day. 

Steve VanDevender
%

    /Re: Hiring a programmer as a sysadmin/

    My problem is, do I corrupt his soul and lead him down the path of
    eternal darkness through deceit and lies about the nature of our
    work because we could use the talent, or do I tell him to run
    screaming from this endless pit of despair and damnation?

Seagull
%

    Bell Atlantic. If telecommunications were a prison, BA would be the
    300-pound inmate who takes a certain..."liking" towards you. 

Isaac-Lew
%

    The day I have to run that I know don't work, that the vendor knows
    don't work, and that the PHB ferverently believes with all the power
    of deep religion work better than anything else, is the day I become
    a sewer repairman. At least then the stench is honest. 

Steve Conley
%

    fenris@nospam.frob.ml.org wrote:
    >Compare this to my school.  Colorado School of Mines

    I read this as "Colorado School of Mimes," and my first reaction was:
    *Nobody* needs to recover *that* much.

Ayse Sercan
%

    All software sucks. Everybody is considered a jerk by somebody. The
    sun rises, the sun sets, the Sun crashes, lusers are LARTed, BOFHs
    get drunk. It is the way of things. 

Steve Conley
%

    101 unpleasant hangover experiences, number 72: trying to put your
    clothes on, and they won't stop moving by themselves. i hate that. 

Tom Yates
%

    *Driscoll's Observation: *The product of the IQs of each member of a
    tech-support conversation is a constant. 

Michael Driscoll
%

    In a previous article, longword@newsguy.com said:
    >[0] Unless you count an ellipsis with an extra period, which would be
    >being spectacularly pedantic.
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    Welcome to Usenet.  Have a nice day.

Paul Tomblin
%

    What's it called when you split them down the chest, pull their
    ribcage apart, arrange their non-essential organs outside them, then
    wait for them to die? /-- Nigel Williams/

    Resourcing labor assets to action the vision statement. /-- Mark C.
    Langston/

    Ah, that would explain the bloodstains on our ISO9000 handbook....
    /-- Lionel Lauer/

%

    The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all
    learned. 

Bruce Ediger, in comp.os.linux.misc, on X interfaces
%

    Apparently there is a Moscow -> Ulan Bator flight, however the
    airport at Ulan Bator freezes up every now and then. -- Chris Ebenezer

    Have they tried rebooting? -- Joe Zeff

    That's "Ulan Bator", not "Microsoft Lan Manager" -- Paul Tomblin

    Hey! In the 7 years I ran LAN Manager, I almost never had to reboot.
    It always rebooted whenever it wanted. -- Carl Schelin

%

    There is a style of design I call "wishful thinking engineering." It
    starts with something like "pigs can fly if you feed them enough
    beans" and develops utopian plans such as like having everyone
    commute to work riding on personal pigs, and along the way ignores
    minor details such as the consequent rain of the non-gaseous
    byproducts. 

Vernon Schryver
%

    *Quoted-Printable:* a standard for mangling Internet messages
    *Quoted-Unreadable:* the result of applying said standard
    *Unquoted-Unprintable:* the comments from the recipients of the above

bf8
%

    I have come to believe in the Buhddist concept of reincarnation. And
    I swear that whatever I did in a past life to deserve this I will
    *NEVER EVER* do again. 

BroCaca
%

    Reminds me of the feeling I get from my quicj perl hacks to do
    something - everything hardcoded, no command line options, etc. Just
    feels.... quick and dirty. Which for a perl hack isn't a bad thing -
    but for a finished commerical product? Especially one that microsoft
    is calling Enterprise capable? (whatever that means)

    /You need to re-watch some of the episodes in which the computer
    goes amok and Kirk and Spock have to regain control from it before
    it destroys the ship./

Chris Rovers, Anthony DeBoer
%

    /Especially one that microsoft is calling Enterprise capable?
    (whatever that means)/

    Translated from microsoftese that means roughly "until now our
    products annoyed the hell out of your systems administrators and
    about 10% of your users, and turned the other 90% in
    point'n'drooling vegetables, fucked up workstations and caused
    massive productivity loss, but now you can destroy your entire
    company by putting this product in the server room". I must admit,
    their version is shorter.

Chris Rovers, Bram Smits
%

    Three servers for the admins under the influence of rye,
    seven routers for the network techs in their halls of stone
    Nine workstations for mortal lusers doomed to die
    One NT box from the dark lord on his throne
    in the land of Redmond where the shadows lie

    One box to run them all, one box to blind them
    one box to control them all and in the darkness grind them
    from the land of Redmond where the shadows lie.

Bram Smits
%

    How many people here have ever wanted to be able to tell a luser
    '"The customer is always right" is fine when the issue is whether
    you wanted extra mustard or no mustard, but does not apply when the
    customer in question just took a bulk magnet to his hard drive'? 

Cat
%

    Irix is about as stable as a one-legged drunk with hypothermia in a
    four- hundred mile wind, balancing on a banana peel on a greased
    cookie sheet. When someone throws him an elephant with bad breath
    and a worse temper. 

Simon Cozens
%

    "It's 806 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of coffee, half a
    fsckload of Y2K crap, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."

    "Hit it".

adb
%

    Security-wise, NT is a server with a "Kick me" sign taped to it. 

Peter Gutmann
%

    /Er, what does SCSI have to do with old weapons?/

    They both are better for maiming than killing?

Lars Balker Rasmussen, Art
%

    -grrr- Well, it's arguable whether they've begun yet...

    /What flags do you use with chmod to get flags like those?/

    The flags in question are outlined in O'Reilly's /Essential Sysadmin
    For Rednecks/, the one with the Blue Tick Hound on the cover. The
    command is as follows:

    *chmod -group +read +rite +run *

Philip Kizer, Richard Letts, Richard Letts
%

    The day Micro$lop makes something that doesn't suck is probably the
    day they start making vacuum cleaners. 

Ernst Jan Plugge
%

    bing-bong. Brimish Rull regret that mumble maz bem dermumble a mir
    mumble mumble bimble late. Passengers mizzing to mumble rimble
    mumble are advised to momble mar at murmble. Thank you mor mumble
    mimbling Brimble mum. bing-bong. 

Gaz on railway announcements
%

    the best answer when anybody asks you if you're any good with
    explosives is to hold up two open hands and simply say "Ten". 

Anthony DeBoer
%

    *ZENgineering*: v. when you've looked at the obvious to solve a
    problem you start doing something completely different to fix it.
    Other examples of ZENingeering solutions are: rebooting the router
    the opposite side of the campus to where the lusers are reporting
    network problems (Tuesday). I have no idea what the ATM
    bridge/router was doing to affect the network. it's not even got
    anything plugged into the ethernet interfaces, and it only has one
    ATM port! 

Richard
%

    Alpha port's not as cool because DEC's in bed with you-know-who,
    *sigh*.

    You misspelled "tied facedown over the whipping horse without
    benefit of lubricant".

float, Berry Kercheval
%

    I would be rather disappointed to have Exchange Feet.

    I could only take three steps before I plan carefully in advance the
    next three steps.

    My feet would suddenly drop off at random times, whiz around the
    room and hide themselves somewhere. Meanwhile I either crawl about
    looking for my feet or painfully teeter around on stumps, falling
    constantly. Occasionally I'd bleed to death.

    When getting new shoes, I'd have to get two pairs of the same style.
    I could never be sure that I'd have a right foot on my right leg and
    a left foot on my left leg. Sometimes this would be reversed or I'd
    have two of the same type of foot.

    I would rue the day when the Toenail Wizard comes out. Among other
    things, the need to clip my toenails would be obviated. Of course,
    they wouldn't be clipped properly and I'd be cursed with ingrown
    toenails.

    I'm not a hobbit, nor do I want to preview being one and please
    don't demo the foot hair on the sole either.

David Griffith
%

    I've found that nurturing one's Zen nature is vital to dealing with
    technology. Violence is pretty damn useful too. 

Lionel Lauer
%

    This FPOS is the debilitating proof of the bitter necessity of
    having the word "Crapware" in one's vocabulary. 

Ernst Jan Plugge
%

    To sysadmin or not to sysadmin... that is the question, whether tis
    nobler in the minde to suffer the slings and arrowes of outragious
    fortune, or climb to the top of the building with a fucking
    high-power rifle and scope. 

Greg "Twotone" Spiegelberg
%

    [It] contains "vegetable stabilizer" which sounds ominous. How
    unstable are vegetables? 

Jeff Zahn
%

    I figure I'll have about 30 kids and six or seven generations down
    the road I'll have my own fair-size nation to rule over. And when we
    get nukes, as we surely shall, we shall wage unlimited war against
    the Empire of Microsoft. 

Joe "Barry G." Thompson
%

    It must be too little caffeine in my bloodstream.

    ITYM "too much blood in my caffeine stream". HTH. HAND.

scorpios, Art
%

    I think that when they use NT for controlling their weapons, any
    place far away from strategic objects might exactly be the place
    where the first strikes hit. 

Georg
%

    The same people that tell you that a Linux program is as good as a
    WinNT program would also tell you it's better to wipe your ass with
    a belt sander instead of toilet paper. I can hear them now -- "It
    may not look as good but it's faster and does a more thorough job!
    -- Anonymous Luser

    Don't bother arguing with a Windows User. The same people that tell
    you that a Windows program is as good as a Linux program would also
    tell you it's better to wipe your ass with your bare friggin hand
    instead of toilet paper. I can hear them now -- "It might not work
    as well, it might piss you off, it might be a whole lot
    messier....but it's easier to learn, even a child can do it...and
    it's much more colorful!"
    -- Brian J.S. Miller

%

    My definition of a "Power User" (the l is silent and invisible) is
    somebody who successfully weasels the best and most powerful
    computers in the office, far better and bigger than the ones the
    productive staff are getting. He then uses all that massive power to
    spend his entire day tweaking the look and feel of his desktop and
    mac-dinking his documents, most of which are full of terrible
    grammar, spelling and incoherent thoughts that never-the-less made
    it past his state-of-the-art word processor's spelling and grammar
    check. It's usually just as well that his thoughts are incoherent
    because if you could understand them, you'd run screaming from the
    room. Regardless, because of his aura of superiority that his
    equally pointy haired bosses buy into, these incoherent ideas will
    become cast-in-concrete policy and no amount of counter arguments,
    factual refutation or ranting and raving will reverse. He will ask
    you for help to print his documents, every single time. He will
    demand his own personal laser printer because the shared one is too
    far to walk, and will get it because he'll justify it as a security
    requirement. Then he'll make you set it up for him. He'll run a
    screen saver that chews up all the processor power so you can't even
    run RC5 on his machine. Three days after the screen saver activates
    he'll ask you what the password is. He'll talk into his mouse
    thinking it's a microphone. He'll put all his files in the root
    directory because he doesn't know how to use subdirectories. When he
    fills up the root directory's file table, he'll buy another hard
    disk. He will continue this until he has a huge disk farm of disks
    with 127(?) files on each. His 24" super-duper monitor will be set
    up for 640x480 and 16 colours at 35Hz (Interlaced) because he didn't
    know that it's not set up to the 1600x1280, 24 bit at 100Hz that
    it's capable of. If you point this out to him he'll scoff at you and
    tell you why it only *looks* like it's misconfigured, but he likes
    it this way. Several days later he'll ask you to fix it for him.
    When you do, he'll complain that now all the letters are really
    little because he can't figure out how to increase font sizes. He'll
    ask you why he doesn't have an "any" key, and will try and order a
    new keyboard. He'll demand a 32x CD-ROM, then use it as a
    cup-holder. He'll order a tape backup system (in spite of the fact
    that you have networked backups), but never use it. He will fold a
    5.25" floppy disk to put it in the 3.5" disk slot. He'll put a 3.5"
    floppy disk in the CD-ROM drive. He'll download software from pirate
    BBSes and infect his computer with a virus. In order to see if the
    software is infected, he'll load it onto the network file server,
    thereby infecting all the PCs on your network. Even though he knows
    nothing of the backup cycle, he'll magically know when the last
    uninfected backup has been sent off-site before he'll tell you about
    his problems.

    He'll install Windows 98.

Paul Tomblin
%

    ...which gives the server a futuristic, serverish, 'Don't touch me,
    or I will put a printer up your ass!', kind of look. 

Nir Soffer
%

    ...the Windows NT machines at work work much like the reannual wine
    of the Discworld. They reboot as a reaction to the crash they will
    have later that day. 

Art
%

    There seem to be two kinds of linux users, those who come from a
    unix background and those who come from an ibm-pc background. You
    could call them "sysadmins" and "lusers". 

flaps
%

    *Dennis Ritchie:* "So fsck was originally called something else"
    *Question:* "What was it called?"
    *Dennis Ritchie:* Well, the second letter was different. 

Q&A at Usenix
%

    /Re: a looney spammer/

    Have faith in Darwin... By the looks of it, this guy couldn't
    reproduce himself if he had an installation wizard.

Andreas Skau
%

    A week in [MS Exchange] class, and he doesn't even know how to make
    the thing speak SMTP. -- Jason Wright

    Oh, it does actually speak some industry standards?? -- John Riddoch

    Well, not so much /speak/ it, as mumble it. -- Lionel Lauer

    In heavily-accented pidgin. -- Brandon Allbery

    Through a very solid door; locked and barred with a bucket of soapy
    water above it. -- Chris "Saundo" Saunderson

%

    /Re: bad writing/

    And where else in the world can you find dialogue like that... in
    the middle of desperate combat situations the commanders quote
    useless part numbers and factory models at each other!?
    -- Lorens Kockum

    Sounds to me like a fault call to HP tech support.
    -- Malcolm Ray

%

    More, I think, that a burden shared is one halved. It's comforting
    to know that the clueless I face, I do not face alone. For yea,
    though I walk through the valley of the shadow of cluelessness, I
    shall fear not the lusers I see, for I am the meanest BOFH with a
    LART they ever thought they could piss off.... and live.

    "My BOFH is an Old Testament BOFH - a lot of smiting, a lot of
    LARTing, all the good stuff".

Chris "Saundo" Saunderson
%

    So I'm waiting around after hours here at BFC, because we've got a
    bad 4mm DAT drive attached to the file server in our lab, and the
    daily and weekly backups are therefore suspect. Also the disk drives
    are making that sound which says, "I'm a happy drive. I'm a cheerful
    drive. I'm smiling at you because I'm grinding my spindles into
    microscopic dust and there's not a single thing you can do about it.
    I'm going to fail. I'm going to do it soon. Or later. I'm not
    telling. Probably soon, because I've been chatting with the DAT
    drive two hops up the SCSI chain, and he tells me that he's been
    ill, so if I fail *now*, you'll have no recent backups. That's why
    I'm happy. I'm in control. I want a goat. And candles. Black ones.
    Pray, human. Pray that I'm in a good mood. PRAY, DAMMIT, ON YOUR
    KNEES, YOU LIMACEOUS BIT OF MEATWARE!"

    I digress.

Carl Jacobs
%

    I find that anthropomorphism really doesn't help me deal with
    hardware all that much, because it lends a certain attitude of
    disdain to what would otherwise be a mere malfunction. 

Carl Jacobs
%

    NASA uses Windows? Oh great. If Apollo 13 went off course today the
    manual would just tell them to open the airlock, flush the
    astronauts out, and re-install new ones. 

Kibo
%

    Sanity is like money; you should just have enough to get by. Any
    more and you turn into a freak. 

rone
