My similar tale involves a broken left shift key, a user who didn't touch-type and a password with a '!' in it. (It worked for me, but when he sat in the same seat to log in with the same password, he couldn't get in.)
-Luke On Jun 22, 2013, at 4:14 PM, Tom Limoncelli <[email protected]> wrote: > Have you heard about the keyboard that only worked when you were sitting down? > > http://netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/sec0510.html > or > http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VH59EeSTs7UJ:netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/sec0510.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us > > BEGIN QUOTE > That attitude is illustrated in an anecdote from IBM's Yorktown > Heights Research Center. A programmer had recently installed a new > workstation. All was fine when he was sitting down, but he couldn't > log in to the system when he was standing up. That behavior was one > hundred percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting and > never when standing. > > Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story. How could that > workstation know whether the poor guy was sitting or standing? Good > debuggers, though, know that there has to be a reason. Electrical > theories are the easiest to hypothesize. Was there a loose wire under > the carpet, or problems with static electricity? But electrical > problems are rarely one-hundred-percent consistent. An alert colleague > finally asked the right question: how did the programmer log in when > he was sitting and when he was standing? Hold your hands out and try > it yourself. > > The problem was in the keyboard: the tops of two keys were switched. > When the programmer was seated he was a touch typist and the problem > went unnoticed, but when he stood he was led astray by hunting and > pecking. With this hint and a convenient screwdriver, the expert > debugger swapped the two wandering keytops and all was well. > END QUOTE > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
