Bad dev jokes

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Korth
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Bad dev jokes

Post by Korth »

I always mix up halloween and xmas.
Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.

There's 10 kinds of people in the world.
Those who understand binary. And those who don't.

Three programmers walk into a bar.
Bartender: "Would you all like drinks?"
1st: "I don't know."
2nd: "I don't know."
3rd: "Yes."
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slickrcbd
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Re: Bad dev jokes

Post by slickrcbd »

Oh god, those are old. I first heard them over 25 years ago.
Yes, back when I was in junior high. Incidentally, back then I wanted to be a programmer. I didn't give up that dream until after my first year of college when I found I had little talent for GUIs and went with tech support and networking instead.
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Re: Bad dev jokes

Post by Korth »

Yeah, I was hoping to prompt people to volunteer something newer.

These jokes were already old and tired back in the IBM days. But it seems there's nothing better to replace them.
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Re: Bad dev jokes

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  1. This isn't entirely a joke, but a real incident that happened back in 2012.
    I had just completed upgrading the RAM on a bunch of CPUs and had 16 of them stacked up on a cart bringing it into the back room to be shipped off. I had a lidless open box with the old RAM DIMMs on top. Another tech was coming in the opposite direction with a stack of receipt printers to work on, but he was a bit too far over in the aisle and the corner of his cart hit my cart, causing the box of DIMMs to slide forward and tip over, spilling DIMMs all over the floor.

    I believe that is a good example of a memory dump caused by a stack collision error.

    !
  2. Some years back I was at my mother's cousin's annual New Years/Birthday/Wedding Anniversary (no joke, her husband's birthday is Dec 31, and they got married on that night back in '90). After dinner, they found the fire in the fireplace was dying, and she asked if I could put another log on the fire.
    Unfortunately, when I dropped it on the dying flames, it instead snuffed them out.

    I believe that constitutes a failed log-on attempt.

    !
  3. About 15 years ago, back when I was in my last year of school, I was given a laptop when the previous owner upgraded. A friend was interested in seeing the free laptop, and so I brought it over.
    He had a desk for writing, and a desk with computers on it. I went to put the laptop on the writing desk, but unbeknownst to either of us, his little brother had planned a prank on him. He had unscrewed the legs of the desk and precariously balanced them so you wouldn't know anything was wrong.
    When I put the laptop on the desktop, the legs collapsed with a loud CRASH!.

    So, does that mean that my laptop caused his desktop to crash, or did his desktop crash and bring my laptop down with it?
Actually, all these are real tales from my personal experience.
Last edited by slickrcbd on Sun Dec 03, 2017 11:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Korth
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Re: Bad dev jokes

Post by Korth »

A version of the failed logon attempt joke got some chuckles at work, thanx!

Apparently old Amiga computers would crash (BSoD-style) with a "Guru Meditating" error message.
Apparently the joke is that gurus meditate while chanting the mantra "om", computer shorthand for "out of memory".
A weak and very strained joke, but at least they tried.

I remember the ancient Macs (the only ones I ever used) would simply put a picture of a bomb on the screen.
It didn't take a degree in rocket surgery to figure out that meant something bad, lol, it was unintentionally pretty funny.
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Re: Bad dev jokes

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Well, if you want to that far back, here's one I made up back in grade school shortly after getting a PC Transporter card for my Apple IIGS and MS-DOS 3.30, then leaning the joys of IRQ [conflicts].

When my mother calls me to come to her and do something, is that a non-maskable IRQ on channel parents?

* * *
Way back when I was in junior high my best friend's mother had password protected her computer, but lost the password. She needed help to get access to some important files. I was a budding computer guru back then and was called in to help. Her son had a rough idea what to do, but couldn't find his 3.5" boot disk, and the other computers in the house were a Mac and one that used 5.25" disks while her computer used 3.5" disks.
So I came with a 3.5" disk to bypass the security and uninstall it. We talked about how we "hacked the system". Rather simple these days, but hey, you have to start somewhere and this was circa 1991, give or take a year (I'm almost certain it was '90 or '91).

My friend's little brother overhead us talking about hacking computers, and thought it would be cool to be a computer hacker too.
They had a disabled computer in the basement that needed a new video card (the machine in between the XT with 5.25" drives and the one we hacked), and my friend had a lead on somebody who might have a card he could use in another dead computer.
Well, his little brother (same one that pulled the desk prank about ~9 years later) who was around 5 or 6, give or take a year, took a carving knife and hacked that computer's internals to pieces. Then came up and proudly proclaimed he was "now a computer hacker too!".

No, we couldn't believe he did that either at the time. We've never let him forget it, although I haven't seen my friend's brother in many, many years. All of us have graduated college years ago.



Anyways, all those stories are true tales that happened to me. Well, maybe the last one happened to my friend while I happened to be there.
Unfortunately I've got over 30 witnesses to the failed logon attempt that have never let me forget it, especially when I'm around a fireplace with a dying fire. Worse, most of them are relatives via my mother.
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Re: Bad dev jokes

Post by KrazeeXXL »

Some funny anecdotes in here and well written ones, too. Gave me a good laugh @crash to desktop and memory dump caused by a stack collision error. haha :mrgreen:

I've some anecdotes as well. Although not that well written and probably not that funny, too.

1. to get into the BIOS of my 80286 with 8Mhz and 1 MB RAM, I had to run it without autoexec.bat and config.sys. After the entire booting cycle was complete, I had to press Control+Alt+Enter. It was nowhere documented (didn't have documents back then) and I found out by accident somehow (I was 12 y/o back then). Again, it was not in the beginning @post but really at the end of the entire boot cycle. And it didn't work when DOS was loaded. The entire thing started as one of my friends set up a BIOS password on his 386DX40 to lock it. I sat there with my old 80286 and tried to find out how to get into BIOS. Took me a really long time and I never forget how odd the way was to get there. I mean usually you get into BIOS @POST.

2. The father of my best friend brought a PC from work. It was meant for my best friend. Since it brought up some errors, I should examine it. The 4 of us sat there at the living room table. Best friend's dad, best friend and his older brother. These guys were mega excited because they've never seen an opened PC before. I was curious about what to find. And then I literally totally blew it.

So, I opened it up and saw the most dusty PC one can imagine. Well, what did 13 y/o me do? I inhaled as much as I could and then I blew the PC like some NES cartridge...

We sat there in one of the most ugly and big dust clouds imaginable. All coughing and laughing at the same time. Needless to say that I never did that again ;)

The PC was absolutely obsolete, too. It was an XT (8086) with some super old SIMMS in it. So, absolutely non-salvagable.

3. LAN-Party-time ca 1996/97

I invited my best friends over and the 4 or 5 of us sat in my room at my home. It was 16m² or something. We did this a couple of times, then word got around. I had my own bell back then and it rang non-stop. More people came, and more. At the end, we were over 20 people in this room (3/4 of my highschool class - even some girls). Lots of shoes in the floor and my dad made some pretty rad photos. I let the girls play some Duke Nukem 3D and so on. Fun times. I made all the cables myself (BNC with terminators).


4. no computer is alike: "the one in a dozen problem"

>When I was IT apprentice in hardware departement, I got a dozen identical laptops. I installed 11 of them without a problem. But the last one... There was some problem with the PCMCIA and its drivers. Every Laptop was exactly the same and I had to reinstall this b**** like 5 times. It gave me headaches. Somewhere, I found a different driver version and it worked "magically". Perhaps the PCMCIA was wrong labelled or something. Must've been something like this.

> Also in apprenticeship: To save some time during installation, I used "quick format". I've never done this before, because I always wanted to go "safe". Well, this time I didn't because I had much to do. All colleages did the same. All of us (a dozen people) had the exact same PC. Every component was the same. I installed this PC a couple of times before - never had a problem. Well, after quick format, it hang at around 28 minutes left. We went to lunch break because I thought it might resolve itself. Nooope. It still hang at the exact same point when I came back.

Imagine... the first and only time to use the darned quick format and then the installation didn't want to continue. What are the odds? I waited for another couple of minutes and then I reinstalled again - this time with formating the HDD normally.

5. another funny story:

I mocked one of my colleages because back in the 80286 days, he bought Cache for hundreds of bucks for his PC. According to him it didn't do ****. ;) He also had to make quite some effort to get the cache, too. A year or so ago, I wrote him a message about some genius hardware related offers. (he wanted to buy a new GPU and waited for VEGA). Well, he opened the mail and there's some nice picture of old 80286 cache in there. ;)

Well, he got even at the christmas party. He gave a gift to me and I unpacked it. Took me 10 minutes or so and at the end - what did I find? Yea, you probably figured. One of those cache chips ;)
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Re: Bad dev jokes

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I just had something happen today. I'm working part-time in the electronics department at Sam's Club to make ends meet as I've been laid off from my job.
The store manager was complaining about the Christmas music that Corporate had set up, and wished we could put something else on.
I'd noticed with my phone that I could potentially access the speaker system, and said it might be possible to use one of the display phones to hack into the speakers and stream an internet radio station.
He said he'd be grateful if we could do that, because he's so sick of Christmas music already (it's been going since Black Friday).
So, I found they hadn't changed the default password, got in, and put on a station with some good music.
Afterwards, the manager jokingly gave me one of the black hats the demo people use when serving liquor and said since I just hacked the system I should be wearing that instead of the [regulation] hat I had on.

Although I told him in this context I should be given a white hat, not a black one.
To my surprise, he did not understand and I had to explain black hat crackers vs white hat hackers. He said unfortunately they did not have any white hats, only black ones.

Some might find this a bit amusing, me being presented with a black hat.
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Re: Bad dev jokes

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KrazeeXXL wrote: Mon Dec 04, 2017 1:49 pm 1. to get into the BIOS of my 80286 with 8Mhz and 1 MB RAM, I had to run it without autoexec.bat and config.sys. After the entire booting cycle was complete, I had to press Control+Alt+Enter. It was nowhere documented (didn't have documents back then) and I found out by accident somehow (I was 12 y/o back then). Again, it was not in the beginning @post but really at the end of the entire boot cycle. And it didn't work when DOS was loaded. The entire thing started as one of my friends set up a BIOS password on his 386DX40 to lock it. I sat there with my old 80286 and tried to find out how to get into BIOS. Took me a really long time and I never forget how odd the way was to get there. I mean usually you get into BIOS @POST.
Hmm, somebody gave me an old laptop with CGA graphics back in '96. It was totally obsolete, but something happened to it and it stopped working. Everybody agreed it looked like the BIOS was messed up, but nobody could figure out how to access it. I would not get internet access at home for another year and a half, and the internet did not have the tech support resources it did today. I wonder if you had to do something odd like that.
Too bad I got rid of it years ago.
2. The father of my best friend brought a PC from work. It was meant for my best friend. Since it brought up some errors, I should examine it. The 4 of us sat there at the living room table. Best friend's dad, best friend and his older brother. These guys were mega excited because they've never seen an opened PC before. I was curious about what to find. And then I literally totally blew it.

So, I opened it up and saw the most dusty PC one can imagine. Well, what did 13 y/o me do? I inhaled as much as I could and then I blew the PC like some NES cartridge...

We sat there in one of the most ugly and big dust clouds imaginable. All coughing and laughing at the same time. Needless to say that I never did that again ;)
Cheer up, I did the exact same thing with my Apple IIGS at age 11 when I went to upgrade the RAM from 512K to 768K. My mother threw a fit at the dust cloud I made in the kitchen as I chose to install the RAM on the kitchen table. I still remember her screaming about how there is food in here.
Funny thing, I continued to do upgrades and maintenance at the kitchen table as long as I lived with her.
The PC was absolutely obsolete, too. It was an XT (8086) with some super old SIMMS in it. So, absolutely non-salvagable.
I'm surprised that it had SIMMs in it. I thought the XT used DRAMs or whatever you called the predecessor to SIMMs (IIRC I think there were quite a few before things standardized on SIMMs as different brands used different things, much like laptop power supplies today). I'm positive that the XT predated SIMMs.
4. no computer is alike: "the one in a dozen problem"

>When I was IT apprentice in hardware departement, I got a dozen identical laptops. I installed 11 of them without a problem. But the last one... There was some problem with the PCMCIA and its drivers. Every Laptop was exactly the same and I had to reinstall this b**** like 5 times. It gave me headaches. Somewhere, I found a different driver version and it worked "magically". Perhaps the PCMCIA was wrong labelled or something. Must've been something like this.
Probably a different firmware version. I've encountered stuff like that before where the same make and model but different firmware version requires a different driver version.
It drives us nuts.
> Also in apprenticeship: To save some time during installation, I used "quick format". I've never done this before, because I always wanted to go "safe". Well, this time I didn't because I had much to do. All colleages did the same. All of us (a dozen people) had the exact same PC. Every component was the same. I installed this PC a couple of times before - never had a problem. Well, after quick format, it hang at around 28 minutes left. We went to lunch break because I thought it might resolve itself. Nooope. It still hang at the exact same point when I came back.

Imagine... the first and only time to use the darned quick format and then the installation didn't want to continue. What are the odds? I waited for another couple of minutes and then I reinstalled again - this time with formating the HDD normally.
Well, if it was a brand new hard drive, then the odds were REALLY good of quick formatting not working.
If you were doing an upgrade over an existing install, and changing from Linux to FAT?? or NTFS or vice versa, again the odds are pretty good of it failing.

If you were say upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 a quick format should be just fine 99.99% of the time. Only if the HD is old and might have some bad sectors might it not be Ok.

The reason is that a new hard drive has no formatting at all. Quick format isn't really formatting, it is simply making everything on the disk as deleted. Hence why MS-DOS 5 & 6 had an unformat command that worked included with the OS (why they dropped it along with undelete with Windows 95 I will never understand, given how useful they were).
Unformat only worked with quickformat.

When changing OS, it had to redo the formatting, hence why a quick format on a drive formatted for Linux/Unix will fail, and IIRC trying the same with FAT32->NTFS will also fail. It's been over a decade since I've tried, so the last one might be wrong.
5. another funny story:

A year or so ago, I wrote him a message about some genius hardware related offers. (he wanted to buy a new GPU and waited for VEGA).
Ok, I'm probably showing my age. I misread the above as "buy a new GPU and waited for VESA".
Fits with the 286 you were talking about.
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