| RHF Joke Archives | 
The Intel Pentium bug is a fit subject for on-line humor, and we've
gotten several jokes submitted. In keeping with the usual r.h.f.
ratio, I rejected 94.9999999523 percent of them.
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Subject: The Intel FDIV Excuses
From: israel@extol.sj.unisys.com
Top Ten Intel Excuses
---------------------
10. You mean 2.00000000 + 2.000000000 doesn't equal 3.999998456?
9. We felt sorry for all those competitors of ours who can't seem
to sell anywhere near as many processors as we do.
8. Emulate THIS, Power PC!
7. Hey, look! We've got a built-in random number generator!
(Quick, jack-up the price...)
6. The FDIV bug? That's nothing! Wait'll you see what happens
when you try to run Windows 95!
5. We were trying to outfox AMD by tricking them into making a
processor that works, thus rendering them incompatible!
4. Hey, buddy, we'd like to see YOU hook up 3.3 million transistors
right the first time!
3. Actually, the whole thing's a documentation error. The manual
mixed up the opcodes of FDIV with another instruction, FATRA -
Floating Point Almost The Right Answer.
2. That's the way it's supposed to work. It's part of our new
fuzzy logic support.
1. We don't care. We don't have to. We're INTEL!
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From: laniege@eng.auburn.edu (__Glenn Lanier__)
Subject: 2 more Intel Insiders
November Election results may be due to Intel Pentium bug :-)
An anonymous source in the Democratic Party has revealed that the sweeping
landslide victory of the Republicans in November may have been due to an
obscure bug in the Intel Pentium computer chip.
Upgrading the nationwide vote counting system to the latest technology was
one of Vice-President Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" initiatives. This
change was meant to reduce costs and streamline operations, however, the
computer glitch may have cost the Whitehouse dearly.
A spokesman for the Democratic Party denied the rumor that several thousand
Power-PC's had been purchased as part of a vote recount effort.
When questioned about the news Senator Bob Dole (r) commented that he
believed the Intel Pentium chip was far better than anyone had thought. A
short statement released by Newt Gingrich's office indicated that "the
Democratic party has always sought to divide America and that this discovery
of an FDIV bug in the Intel Chip was clear evidence of the moral decay of our
society."
At a Motorola Plant in Austin, Texas Ross Perot told an angry crowd that
according to his new calculations the deficit is actually 14 times larger
than the government has been telling us. He praised his staff for staying
up all night and performing the calculations by hand.
In late breaking news today legal briefs were filed in Chicago by former
senator Dan Rostenkowski's attorneys which claimed that the irregularities at
the House Bank and the House Post Office were actually due to Pentium chip
calculation errors. Sources in Attorney General Janet Reno's office reveal
a furious behind the scenes effort to reload the whitewater investigation
spreadsheets in order to double check the results.
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Top Ten Excuses Why QT Emulation Didn't Find the Pentium FPU Bug
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10) Intel couldn't afford to buy enough QT hardware in order to verify beyond
5 decimal places.
9) Actually did find the problem but didn't want to say anything because,
"We're shy."
8) Spent more time verifying QT hardware than Intel hardware.
7) Decided it was more important to verify all the obscure undocumented
opcodes that nobody knows about than it was to see if the math was
actually correct.
6) Figured if there were any problems with the chip could always fix it by
doing a slingshot around the sun and going back in time like in Star Trek.
5) Intel used a 486 PC to check the math on the Pentium emulator.
4) Money Intel spent for QT emulators actually went to buy hookers and
booze for Andy Grove.
3) Didn't do an exhaustive check of all the math functions. Got as far as
2 + 2 = 5 and figured that was good enough.
2) Pentium testing consisted mostly of playing tetris until a score of
100,000 was achieved.
1) There was an FPU in that thing?
| Glenn Lanier II Preferred: laniege@eng.auburn.edu |
| 04 CS Alternate: laniege@mail.auburn.edu |
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Subject: Intel's Pentium defense revealed
From: ckolar@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Christopher G. Kolar)
Keywords: topical, smirk, computers, original
This came to me late last night while warming a bottle for baby.
I'm convinced that the Pentium problem has been a coverup from the very
beginning and that Intel has prepared a sophisticated defense.
OK. The more you know about something's location, the less able you are
able to predict it's behavior. So, by placing the "Intel Inside" stickers
on their Pentium machines, Intel has put themselves into a good position
to use a Heisenberg Defense -- claiming that by knowing for certain that
the Pentium is inside the cpu case, you should have no way of predicting
the behavior of the chip. The beauty of it is that since we are working
on the order of 10^-34, Pentium users would never be able to investigate
this claim.
Apologies for the mangled physics, I knew that there was a joke in there
waiting to get out.
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From: brad@looking.clarinet.com (Brad Templeton)
Keywords: topical, smirk, computers, original
Intel stock was down 3.749999932 points today in heavy trading.
(Original, and one joke Intel is not laughing at.)
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Subject: Recycling, Courtesy of Intel
From: CSGLASS@minna.acc.iit.edu (Michael Glass)
$ EDIT tech-jokes.old
: SUBSTITUTE /slide rule/Pentium/ ALL
: SAVE tech-jokes.new
: EXIT
$
-- Michael Glass, Ill. Inst. of Technology
csglass@iitvax.iit.edu
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Subject: Is Software as Hard as Hardware?
From: dodson@wagner.convex.com (Dave Dodson)
Keywords: topical, smirk, computers, typoes
The December 6 Business Today section of the Dallas Morning News
contained the following headline and Editor's Note:
"Pentium goof points up difficulty in design testing"
"Editor's Note: The Dallas Morning News is reprinting this story from
page 1D of Monday's business section. Because of an error in using
computer software, a number of proper names and some other words in
Monday's story were incorrect."
For example, in Monday's story, "Intel" was spelled "Until." It appears
that someone unfamiliar with the technical vocabulary of the article was
turned loose with a spelling checker and uncorrector.
--
Dave Dodson dodson@convex.com
Convex Computer Corporation Richardson, Texas (214) 497-4234
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Subject: Truth in an old saying?
From: hlr@aber.ac.uk (Haze)
My husband told me this one:
There's been a lot of publicity recently over problems with the
pentium chip.
If someone successfully prosecutes Intel over this will we finally
see "Intel Inside"?
Hazel Davey (hlr@aber.ac.uk)
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Subject: Optimism
From: gnb@bby.com.au (Gregory Bond)
Keywords: original
Q: Definition of optimist?
A: Pentium system builder soldering the CPU to the motherboard.
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Subject: Fun and Games with Intel.
From: keating@cig.mot.com (Edward Keating)
Keywords: original
Original reuse of an old commercial, by keating@cig.mot.com
With all the reported problems of Pentium processors, perhaps Intel
should adopt a new slogan (apologies to the makers of Ivory soap):
99.44% accurate, it floats();
NOT!
(From the "Rest" of RHF)
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