Greg's SPR

This is one of many jokes and humorous articles I collected, mainly from USENET and similar sources in the early to mid 1990s. They're really not very interesting nowadays.

From adagio!unido!Germany.EU.net!news.netmbx.de!zrz.tu-berlin.de!math.fu-berlin.de!Sirius.dfn.de!ira.uka.de!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!destroyer!gumby!yale!mintaka.lcs.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!news Thu Jul 23 10:17:32 MST 1992 Article: 26253 of alt.folklore.computers Path: adagio!unido!Germany.EU.net!news.netmbx.de!zrz.tu-berlin.de!math.fu-berlin.de!Sirius.dfn.de!ira.uka.de!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!destroyer!gumby!yale!mintaka.lcs.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!news From: scs@adam.mit.edu (Steve Summit) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: "See Figure 1." Message-ID: <1992Jul21.181348.11582@athena.mit.edu> Date: 21 Jul 92 18:13:48 GMT Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Reply-To: scs@adam.mit.edu Organization: none, at the moment Lines: 90 Nntp-Posting-Host: adam.mit.edu Status: RO Here's an old gem that deserves re-posting. My copy is dated June, 1986; I have no idea how long it's been around or who wrote it. (The author, if out there, should certainly step forward and take credit.) Among my associates who have seen this, the phrase "See Figure 1" became instant jargon. Is anyone else using it? ----------------------------------------------------------------- Please stop submitting SPR's. This is our system. We designed it, we built it, and we use it more than you do. If there are some features you think might be missing, or if the system isn't as effective as you think it could be, TOUGH! Give it back, we don't need you. See Figure 1. Forget about your silly problem; let's take a look at some of the features of our operating system. 1) Options. We've got lots of them. So many in fact, that you need two strong people to carry the documentation around. So many that it will be a cold day in hell before half of them are used. So many that you are probably not going to do your work right anyway. However, the number of options isn't all that important, because we picked some interesting values for the options and called them ... 2) Defaults. We put a lot of thought into our defaults. We like them. If we didn't, we would have made something else be the default. So keep your cotton-pickin' hands off our defaults. Don't touch. Consider them mandatory. "Mandatory defaults" has a nice ring to it. If you change them and your system crashes, tough. See Figure 1. 3) Language Processors. They work just fine. They take in source, and often produce object files as a reward for your efforts. You don't like the code? Too bad! You can even try to call operating system services from them. For any that you can't, use the assembler like we do. We spoke to the language processor developers about this, and they think a lot like we do. They said, "See Figure 1". 4) Debuggers. We've got debuggers, one we support and one we use. You shouldn't make mistakes anyway, it is a waste of time. We don't want to hear anything about debuggers; we're not interested. See Figure 1. 5) Error Logging. Ignore it. Why give yourself an ulcer? You don't want to give us the machine to get the problem fixed and we probably can't do it anyway. Oh, and if something breaks between 17:00 and 18:00 or 9:30 and 10:30 or 11:30 and 13:30 or 14:30 and 15:30, don't waste your time calling us; we're out. See Figure 1. 6) Command Language. We designed it ourselves, it's perfect. We like it so much we put our name on it. In fact we're so happy with it, we designed it once for each of our operating systems. We even try to keep it the same from release to release, though sometimes we blow it. See Figure 1. 7) Real Time Performance. We got it. Who else could have done such a good job? So the system seems sluggish with all those priority 18 processes? No problem, just make them priority 1. Anyway, realtime isn't important anymore like it used to be. We changed our group's name to get rid of the word realtime. We told all our realtime users to see Figure 1 a long time ago. In conclusion, stuff your SPR. Love our system or leave it, but don't complain. --------------------------------- ! _ ! ! { } ! ! | | ! ! | | ! ! .-.! !.-. ! ! .-! ! ! !.-. ! ! ! ! ! ; ! ! \ ; ! ! \ ; ! ! ! : ! ! ! | ! ! | | ! ! ! !_______________________________! Figure 1. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The above was re-posted, but was *not* written, by Steve Summit scs@adam.mit.edu