Funny, or just cruel?

[Hextic]

A friend of mine wrote a quick program that ticks down for 20 seconds to what it says is the "end of this comp." It of course does not actually do anything, but he gave it the icon and name of an average Internet Explorer link, and put it on the school computer's desktop. I would like to know, is this funny or just cruel?

[Mr.White]

I vote the third option.

"retarded"

[enCode]

No harm, no foul. I'd love to see the reaction on the poor kids face that try's to use the link.

[TheCotMan]

It is ancient in computer-time. From PC-DOS/MS-DOS, people would play a joke on peers to replace their prompt with "Press any key to format disk" after a clear screen call. Similar things were done on *NIX systems and in DCL on vaxen. I am sure this was even done prior to the 1980's.

The most cruel of "jokes" was to modify a user's remote login script when they left their shell open and unattended.

My choice was this:
echo "You left your shell open in the public blah-lab. If I was evil, you might be missing things, or things may have been done in your account as you."

Others who were cruel would add a logout/exit so they could not log in interactively unless they ftp this file off, edit to fix, and then ftp the file back.

Then, there are those people who were evil, who would actually do destructive things.

I am sure this kind of thing predates the mid 80's too.

...is this funny or just cruel?

No. Just old.

[Floydr47]

If it caused no harm it was funny. What a sad world this would be without a little humor to break up the boredom and tedium of everyday tasks.

[AlxRogan]

It is ancient in computer-time. From PC-DOS/MS-DOS, people would play a joke on peers to replace their prompt with "Press any key to format disk" after a clear screen call.

<synapse firing>After picking up a copy of DOS for Dummies, 1st Ed. and going through the ANSI codes exercises, I made a perfect likeness of the Norton Disk Doctor format screen and replaced a friends boot disk with it. The autoexec.bat made the menu appear, but after a pause selected the Format option and went through thrashing the disk while showing a progress bar. Oh the swearing that ensued.</synapse firing>

Agreed on the old comment.

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
--Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 NIV

[TheCotMan]

...Oh the swearing that ensued

Heh. :-)

This is one of those cases where even a skilled user could be fooled. Yours is more hacker-like than any of the other pranks posted in this thread so far.

...After the swearing was over, did the user iterate over a list of people upon which they were going to try this?

Agreed on the old comment.

Yep, but it can still work...

I freaked out myself about 6 years ago. I had "fortune" installed and called on interactive login. I just finished booting, and after I logged in I saw:
Kernel panic: unable to find /
$
that scared me for a second. I removed fortune from the interactive login scripts after that.

[AlxRogan]

Yes, soon thereafter it was all the rage in the local User's Group.

I recently got back in the habit of using fortune in my login scripts, and I still get a start when I see an Oops or Kernel Panic message, I feel that it keeps me on my toes.

[ch0l0man]

It was much funnier to change 95/98 to load progman.exe instead explorer.exe.

[KeLviN]

yeah. a third option is despratly needed.....

[TheCotMan]

It was much funnier to change 95/98 to load progman.exe instead explorer.exe.

For windows, another prank was to take a snapshot of the desktop, modify the bitmap to eliminate everything except a background color and an empty toolbar/start button. Then, save this as the default wallpaper, and move the toolbar/start menu to the top, and enable "auto-hide"

Amazing. People see the "Start" button, but it does not seem to work. Changes in the resolution show the prank for what it is, as does control-ESC for those who know keyboard shortcuts.

This falls into the category of "old, lame and not clever" but after people see it they want to try it on their "friends."

One that is just annoying is to set the colors for all items to be the same. Background, text, menu, everything. Recent versions of windows probably have safeguards against this, but windows 95 did not. (Worse than lame: annoying and still old thing.)

What makes all of these annoying or lame? They are just DoS to users.

[Krytycal]

I voted for option 3 too.

The desktop prank is hilarious by the way.

[big chopper]

MS BASIC Antics

Back in the day (and I'm talking WAY BACK in the day) when we used to write industrial control software in BASIC, I would create a RAM image of the interpreter, change the error messages to include vulgarities, and save the image back to disk and distribute.

I was younger then--was funny at the time.
--bc.

[TheCotMan]

I was younger then--was funny at the time.

Yes, we had a run of this too. People would use sector editors and modify data on disks for common "OS" error messages with MS-DOS:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)uck?

There were others, but that is one I remember.

[astcell]

I remember the fun I'd have if I editing the "Prompt $p$g" to other options in the autoexec.bat file.