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The Lounge War Stories Data Centre meets Vacuum Cleaner Post 303014244 by Don Cragun on Thursday 8th of March 2018 04:25:31 AM
Old 03-08-2018
Many years ago, while I was working at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on adding POSIX-conformance into SunOS 4.1, I was making changes to the OS and utilities during the day and running complete builds of the system overnight (starting a build just before I left work in the evening). This worked fine for several weeks until one Monday night when the system died at about 8:30pm killing the build-in-progress. There was no core dump, no indication of any hardware problems, and restarting the build when I got to work Tuesday morning completed normally (taking a little over three hours to complete).

The same thing happened the next three days in a row, with the system always dying sometime between 8:20pm and 8:40pm.

I decided to stay at work late Friday evening to see if I could figure out what was causing the crashes. I went to the bathroom at about 7pm so I would be sure that I could be at my computer by 7:15pm and would be able to stay there until I found out why my computer was dying every night. When I got back to my office five minutes later, I found that my computer had been unplugged by a member of the cleaning crew so he could plug in the vacuum cleaner they used to clean the hallway and offices where my office was located. (The way my office was arranged left a power strip close to the hallway while other offices in my area had their power strips in less accessible locations.) I unplugged the sweeper, plugged my computer back in, and waited for the cleaning guy to come back to my office.

I found out that:
  1. the cleaning crew comes in an hour and a half earlier on Friday that they did Monday through Thursday,
  2. they got a new vacuum cleaner on Monday with a cord that wouldn't reach from the plugs in the conference room to the other end of the building, and
  3. unplugging a computer is inconsequential to a janitor if doing so allows him to sweep the carpets at the end of the hallway.
 

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ARITHMETIC(6)							 BSD Games Manual						     ARITHMETIC(6)

NAME
arithmetic -- quiz on simple arithmetic SYNOPSIS
arithmetic [-o +-x/] [-r range] DESCRIPTION
arithmetic asks you to solve problems in simple arithmetic. Each question must be answered correctly before going on to the next. After every 20 problems, it prints the score so far and the time taken. You can quit at any time by typing the interrupt or end-of-file character. The options are as follows: -o By default, arithmetic asks questions on addition of numbers from 0 to 10, and corresponding subtraction. By supplying one or more of the characters +-x/, you can ask for problems in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, respectively. If you give one of these characters more than once, that kind of problem will be asked correspondingly more often. -r If a range is supplied, arithmetic selects the numbers in its problems in the following way. For addition and multiplication, the numbers to be added or multiplied are between 0 and range, inclusive. For subtraction and division, both the required result and the number to divide by or subtract will be between 0 and range. (Of course, arithmetic will not ask you to divide by 0.) The default range is 10. When you get a problem wrong, arithmetic will remember the numbers involved, and will tend to select those numbers more often than others, in problems of the same sort. Eventually it will forgive and forget. arithmetic cannot be persuaded to tell you the right answer. You must work it out for yourself. DIAGNOSTICS
``What?'' if you get a question wrong. ``Right!'' if you get it right. ``Please type a number.'' if arithmetic doesn't understand what you typed. SEE ALSO
bc(1), dc(1) BSD
May 31, 1993 BSD
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