Any interesting IT trivia

Hi

I will start with this:

The word TWAIN is from Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" - "...and never the twain shall meet...", reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry "Technology Without An Interesting Name" continues to haunt the standard

Lee H

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EdTheLad

The Story of the PING Program

Quote: From my point of view PING is not an acronym standing for Packet InterNet Grouper, it's a sonar analogy.

Plantwiz

Lee H wrote: »

Hi

I will start with this:

The word TWAIN is from Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" - "...and never the twain shall meet...", reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry "Technology Without An Interesting Name" continues to haunt the standard

Lee H

Since Kipling was a little older then Samuel Clemens, credit may be due to Kipling. However, Samuel Clemens...aka Mark Twain, adopted the name 'twain' which had to do with how boatsman on the Mississippi would call out "by the mark twain".

Twain is old Greek referencing 'two' and so when a boatsman would call out 'by the mark twain' they meant the the mark on the rope was "2" phathoms and the boat would be safe to pass through.

Interesting regardless!

*** Clemens is actually older then Kipling. 1835 -1910 for Twain vs 1865 -1936 Kipling ***

WanBoy67

More tips than trivia but anywho

With XP in a workgroup you cannot see the hidden Administrator account. Open regedit to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList if the Administrator key is not there then add a new DWord key called Administrator with the value of 1. You can setup another account name with the value of 0 and then press CTRL+ALT+DEL on the welcome screen to login to the hidden account.

Open Task Manager, rightclick and End Process Tree for Explorer.exe if you have to restart your computer but don't really want to wait to do that.

You cannot create a folder called "Con"

Type "Bush hid the facts" in to an empty Notepad document and save it, re-open it

Type ".LOG" in notepad and save it, re-open it

Type "=rand(200,99)" in MS Word

Run OSK when you are too lazy to type!

In 3D Pinball type "hidden test" whilst in play, you can now use the mouse to move the pinball around, press R to increase your ranking

Open Freecell, start a new game, press SHIFT+CTRL+F10, click abort, move any card up
Also Select game -1 & -2

Use Asterisk Key or Snadboy Revelation to reveal hidden passwords

If you want to turn Windows File Protection off open regedit to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SFCDisable and change the value to 1. You can now delete all the files in C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache and your boot times will improve. But if you get malware your hosed as you have no system file backups.

When you go to Start Shutdown in XP hold the Shift key if you cannot see Hibernate. It must be enabled for it to work.

ladiesman217

Bill Gates Cake

Daniel333

Windows 3.2 only came out in Chinese.

tiersten

WanBoy67 wrote: »

You cannot create a folder called "Con"

This is a legacy from DOS days. You could access certain devices by accessing them as hidden device files. CON = Console. COM* = Serial port. LPT* = Parallel port. CLOCK$ = RTC. NUL = Bit bucket. PRN = Default printer. AUX = Aux port. A special case on DOS/9x Windows was that you could always access these devices at C:\DEV\. Even if this directory didn't exist it'd work. It wouldn't work however if you tried any other non existent directory.

WanBoy67 wrote: »

Type "Bush hid the facts" in to an empty Notepad document and save it, re-open it

This is actually a bug and not specific to Bush. The 4 3 3 4 sequence of words confused the check for whether it is a Unicode file or not.

Plantwiz

WanBoy67 wrote: »

More tips than trivia but anywho

...

Type ".LOG" in notepad and save it, re-open it

This has been fixed

Features of LOG and Time/Date Command in Notepad

Plantwiz

WanBoy67 wrote: »

More tips than trivia but anywho

Type "=rand(200,99)" in MS Word

.

And along those lines:

Here's one for Excell 2000. It's a bit tricky.

1: Open Excel.
2: In a blank worksheet, select "Save as" and choose "Save as web page".
3: Click on Publish and Add interactivity.
4: Save as any name you like.
5: Load in the page with MS Internet Explorer, Excel will appear in the webpage.
6: Go to row 2000 Column WC
7: Highlight all of row 2000 and press Tab to make column wc the active column.
8: Hold the keys Ctrl, Alt, Shift and click on the Office Icon.
9: Phew.. Use the arrow keys to drive your car.
The "0" key to drop paint slicks.
The spacebar to shoot.
The "H" key for headlights.
NOTE: you need DirectX for this to work

HOWEVER, these do not work in the latest versions of Office 2003, 2007 (and possible even XP) because all Easter Eggs had to be removed due to software being licensed to the military and everything was required to be disclosed.

But if you can find your old copy of Office 97....then...these should work!

Paperclip

My trivia is that there's a sysadmin day. System Administrator Appreciation Day

I am not a sysadmin (anymore) but I hope that my sysadmins like brownies.

tiersten

Plantwiz wrote: »

HOWEVER, these do not work in the latest versions of Office 2003, 2007 (and possible even XP) because all Easter Eggs had to be removed due to software being licensed to the military and everything was required to be disclosed.

It is part of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative which was implemented to fix the terrible security reputation of Microsoft products. It wasn't because of the military and having to disclose everything. If you're a big enough vendor or are certain types of institution then you've had access to source for years now.

WanBoy67

Plantwiz wrote: »

This has been fixed
Features of LOG and Time/Date Command in Notepad

Still works in XP though. Maybe it's a security hole we need them to fix after all these years... to the bat mobile!

tiersten

WanBoy67 wrote: »

Still works in XP though. Maybe it's a security hole we need them to fix after all these years... to the bat mobile!

The problem was that it didn't work properly in the Windows 3.0 Notepad. It is an extremely poorly documented feature of Notepad.

Bert McGert

Interesting IT trivia: There's no such thing as interesting IT trivia.

KGhaleon

Indeed

WanBoy67

tiersten wrote: »

It is an extremely poorly documented feature of Notepad.

Well Im sorry I'm going to have to correct you there. You just have to look in the Notepad help file, so it's not really that poorly documented.

But to my surprise there were 11 topics within notepad help. Sooo...

Interesting IT Trivia : There are 11 topics of help in notepad!

Pffft... who says there's no interesting trivia in IT?

Bert McGert

Bert McGert wrote: »

Interesting IT trivia: There's no such thing as interesting IT trivia.

WanBoy67 wrote: »

Pffft... who says there's no interesting trivia in IT?

I did.

tiersten

WanBoy67 wrote: »

Well Im sorry I'm going to have to correct you there. You just have to look in the Notepad help file, so it's not really that poorly documented.

Guess its just Vista. Skimming through the help doesn't show it.