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Yucks Digest V1 #9

Yucks Digest                Tue, 22 Jan 91       Volume 1 : Issue   9 

Today's Topics:
                            Administrivia
      Another modest suggestion: solving five problems at once.
                  But Pat, what if they were butch?
                                cutie
                 future globs (was "UNIX mindset...")
                        Gulf Crisis Explained
                             Iraqi humor
                      More THEY SAY/THEY MEAN...

The "Yucks" digest is a moderated list of the bizarre, the unusual, the
possibly insane, and the (usually) humorous.  It is issued on a
semi-regular basis, as the whim and time present themselves.

Back issues may be ftp'd from arthur.cs.purdue.edu from
the ~ftp/pub/spaf/yucks directory.  Material in archives
Mail.1--Mail.4 is not in digest format.

Submissions should be sent to spaf@cs.purdue.edu

**********************************************************************

Date: 22 January 1991
From: spaf
Subject: Administrivia
To: yucklings

Two things on the agenda ("well, wipe it off!"):

1)  I've given some long thought to the problem of some people wanting
"yucks" as individual postings, and others wanting the digest.  Less
than a half-dozen people really strongly prefer the separate postings,
according to my mail.  Furthermore, as I have to do some severe editing
to some of the pieces that go out to the list, I have decided to keep
this as a digest only.  Hey, you get it for free, so don't complain!
:-)

2) Many people find the Iraq jokes in this and previous (and
subsequent) issues to be in poor taste.  Maybe so.  Then again, so are
many of the things we sometimes find funny.  Undoubtedly, the situation
is tragic.  Some people cope with tragedy by being off the wall.  (If
you consider life itself as tragic, that explains the behavior of a few
of us).

I will continue to post Iraq-related jokes and stories if they seem
particularly inventive, odd, or funny.  I will do the same with items
about blacks, Jews, women, gays, Aggies, newfies, and black Jewish
lesbians taking correspondance course from Texas A&M at home in St.
Johns.  I will draw the line, however (albeit somewhat crookedly), at
jokes about bearded, overworked CS professors.  Those are generally too
strange to be funny.

------------------------------

Date: 21 Jan 91 17:21:57 GMT
From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan)
Subject: Another modest suggestion: solving five problems at once.
Newsgroups: alt.desert-shield,talk.bizarre,rec.humor

Problems to be solved:

1) The B52 pilots >really< want to make bombing runs on beautiful
   downtown Baghdad, but we've promised not to target ordnance on
   civilians.

2) The allies want to bring Iraq's economy to its knees.

3) The parachute manufacturers are going broke: far fewer than the
   expected number of allied pilots are using parachutes.

4) The US has an unemployment problem in the legal profession.

5) The US is having to go hat in hand to beg money for the war
   effort from its allies.

So...

I suggest we pack up our surplus lawyers in B52's, instead of
bombs, generously let them take all their law books and money with
them, fly them over Baghdad and drop them on Saddam's economy like
a ton of grit-in-the-gears bricks.

As a humanitarian gesture, we should let them bid for parachutes
before dropping them.

To keep the bidding spirited, we should arrange that there be one
fewer parachutes than lawyers per bombing run.

All proceeds to go to fund the war effort.

The effect of all the surviving lawyers on Iraq's economy should
be every bit as crippling as it has previously been on the US
economy.

------------------------------

Date: 22 Jan 91 05:23:57 GMT
From: tew2@ra.MsState.Edu (Tom White)
Subject: But Pat, what if they were butch?
Newsgroups: rec.humor

	Patricia Ireland, NOW's national vice president, has identified
the cause of the Gulf War.  Ms Ireland:

	``The Congress that authorized use of force is 95 percent male, 95
percent white and has no acknowledged lesbians. It is hardly a
representative body.''

				[quote from UPI wire story]

------------------------------

Date: 22 Jan 91 04:40:42 EST (Tue)
From: gatech!dscatl!lindsay (Lindsay Cleveland)
Subject: Bach Joke
To: gatech!purdue!spaf

Contributed by: ihps3!ihuxv!aark

Many people don't know that Johann Sebastian Bach, besides being
a famous organist and composer, was also the best organ builder
of his time.  His organs were beautifully crafted and sheer joy
to play.  It was universally agreed, though, that what really
set his organs apart from all the other organ builder's instruments
was the exquisite tonal beauty and variety of the stops on his
organs.  (For those who don't know, an organ stop is a single set
or rank of pipes that spans the whole keyboard.  A pipe organ
typically has many stops, each with a different tonal quality,
thus affording the organ great versatility in the way it sounds.)
Consequently, everyone wanted a Bach organ, and all the other
organ builders were being driven out of business.

The other organ builders tried and tried to learn Bach's secret
method for building such beautiful stops.  He refused to tell
it.  He was so jealous that he even refused to let the others
examine the pipes he made, fearing they would be able to
figure out his secret.  Desperate, the organ builders met to
try to figure out a way to get their hands on some of the stops.
Various suggestions were made and rejected.  Finally, one of
them got a brilliant idea.  "Why not announce a contest?" he
said.  "We'll give a prize to anyone who sends in two Bach stops!"

------------------------------

Date: 22 Jan 91 00:33:50 GMT
From: rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn)
Subject: future globs (was "UNIX mindset...")
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.unix.wizards

[ Dick Dunn manages to summarize the Unix philosophy and the current
state of Unix in this one article.  Obviously, a sick mind.
For Unix-neophytes, "globbing" means to expand wildcard characters
in file names.  --spaf]

roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes, in response to the glob wars:

> 	Given the move towards kernel bloat, I fear that one alternative we
> might see some day is moving file name globbing into the kernel.  "Let's
> let namei do it; namei does everything!"  Blech.

Plus, namei is undoubtedly the single most hacked-over piece of code in the
entire kernel!  It was already battered ten years ago.

Nowadays, it's more complicated than that.  First, we'll need a System V
kernel globbing interface and a BSD globbing interface.  There will be new
system calls for this--setglbent() and getglbent() for Sys V, setfilename-
globbing() and getfilenameglobbing() for BSD.  Of course, they'll have
different arguments, and BSD will modify namei-globbing only for the
current process, while SysV will modify it for an entire glob-group (a
new conceptual grouping of processes).

Then, V.4 will have to provide for both mechanisms.  The selection of
globbing will be based on the file system types, a kernel examination of
the process's PATH variable, and the endian-ness of the processor in use. 
Next, we'll need POSIX globbing, which will be almost like both but not
entirely compatible with either, with switches to enable more-nearly-BSD-
like and more-nearly-SysV-like behavior.

AIX will provide its own extended globbing mechanism, promising support for
BSD and POSIX globbing in a future release, anticipating OSF/3 globbing,
and also providing for eventual user-specified globbing via callback from
namei() to user code.  The first release will fail to glob a single '*'
correctly, although it will be 26% faster than any other globbing as
measured on DhryGlob 0.0.3.

A little-known patent on file name wild card expansion will be discovered
to have been granted to a now-bankrupt Oregon software company, in an
obscure paragraph of a patent originally intended for selecting add-ons to
hamburgers in a fast-food point-of-sale terminal.  The patent will have
been sold to a California paper company which consists only of lawyers,
and which will immediately start filing look-and-feel lawsuits to any
vendor which won't pay a royalty of $0.005 per globbed name.

In response, FSF will issue a dire warning about the consequences of
proprietary globbing.  Buttons saying "Keep Your Lawyers off My Globs"
will appear at the June 1991 USENIX.  An extended globbing mechanism will
be built into the next release of emacs.

OSF will announce that it has studied existing globbing mechanisms and
found them to be inadequate.  Thus, it will issue an RFT for distributed,
open, architecture-neutral globbing mechanisms which also protect vendors'
proprietary investments in unexpanded file names.  The globbing technology
will be selected by an entirely open and fair evaluation process from all
submissions received, provided only that the submitter is a large multi-
national OSF corporate member with annual revenues exceeding $10^9.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 21 Jan 91 11:24:14 -0600
From: chk@rice.edu
Subject: How it all fits
To: spaf

Maybe this isn't as funny if you haven't read _Foucault's Pendulum_ by
Umberto Eco, but I thought it was hilarious...

Originally-From: Cesar A Quiroz <quiroz>

Readers familiar with the workings of the Occult, who have despaired
of finding rational explanation for events of recent times, will no
doubt draw comfort and enlightenment from the following quotation,
extracted from today's NY Times (p. E2, lower half right):

    ``We have a lot of computers,'' said Lieut. Gen. Charles A.
    Horner, General Schwarzkopf's air commander in the gulf,...

    General Horner relies on a special computer, called the Tactical
    Expert Mission Planner, or Templar.

And you thought it was the oil...  I suppress mention to "achieving
domination of the air" and other such clues of the presence of hands
adept at the handling of the Four Elements.

Proceed with caution and at your own risk.

------------------------------

Date: 20 Jan 91 23:07:00 GMT
From: opto!glen
Subject: Iraqi humor
Newsgroups: rec.humor

		* * * * TECHNOLOGY UPDATE * * * *

	    MOTOROLA EDGED OUT IN FABRICATION TECHNOLOGY
  	    ____________________________________________
          FOR VLSI (VERY LARGE-SCALE INTEGRATION) CIRCUITS
	  ________________________________________________

	Austin, TX - Recognition for the greatest expertise in
the fabrication of physically large integrated circuits is generally
accorded to Motorola's Austin-based Solid State Devices group.
Although some low volume and special application integrated circuits
by other manufacturers exhibit larger physical dimensions, Motorola
handily beats all others in the field of "mass produced" chips,
having several standard items which are fabricated on a single,
continuous, silicon crystal base of 420 mils by 420 mils.

	Industry talk is that this distinction will be lost within
the next few weeks as the 327th Strategic Bomb Wing of the U.S. Air
Force releases plans to produce a single, continuous silicon crystal
measuring 2,200 kilometers by 2,200 kilometers. Refusing to reveal
specifics of the project, Air Force press officer, Major Robert
Dugan, did acknowledge that the crystal would probably be produced 
using "existing technology" and that it would be produced at the 
Air Force's Middle-East Test Facility (METF).

	Motorola spokesmen were unavailable for comment.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 21 Jan 91 19:01:24 CST
From: Peter da Silva <peter@taronga.hackercorp.com>
Subject: More THEY SAY/THEY MEAN...
To: spaf

Here are some more:	[Referring to item in last digest --spaf]

X is a perfectly good window system.
-- I didn't pay for my own computer hardware.

Emacs is the best editor available.
-- I didn't pay for my own computer hardware.

VI is the best editor available.
-- How did you know I went to Berkeley?

OpenLook is better than Motif.
-- I work for Sun and/or AT&T.

Motif is better than Open Look.
-- I work for IBM/DEC/whatever...

NeWS is the best window system available.
-- I used to work for Sun.

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End of Yucks Digest
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