[ale] OT: Pranks are out

[aaron]

On Friday 06 January 2006 23:41, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> Messing with xhost to allow nefarious access then run xroach of another
> grad student screen. howl with laughter.

[snip]

I used to entertain my "Puckish" side in a similar way.

I customized and helped admin the small network of Amiga's at the Atlanta 
College of Art, back when they were still the most capable and affordable 
choice for creating computer art and animation. The networking was DecNet 
based peer to peer that included facilities for remotely running both Shell 
and Arexx macro commands. Insects from the Amiga port of XRoach were 
frequently popping up and running for cover on the Workbench screens of 
unsuspecting students, 

It was all good fun, but one particularly cocky student earned themselves a 
meaner version of the prank:  When I found them in lab one evening, intently 
focused on the final stages of a DeluxePaint project, I started up a second 
instance of the DPaint program on their machine. The screen for the new 
instance popped up as the front screen, creating the appearance that all 
their work had just inexplicably and instantly vanished. After a moment of 
flustered panic, they decided to reload their last saved file and start over 
from there, only to have their work "vanish" again as I started up a third 
instance of DPaint.  From there they decided to give up and try a different 
machine, only to be further confused at uncovering their original working 
screen as they started closing down the instances of the program. They might 
have actually figured out what was happening if they had bothered to show up 
for the class on Amiga's multitasking and multi screen environment features. 
Would that all the arrogance of the world could be so justly handled. ;-)

peace
aaron