Re: What evil things have you done in the past?

[Mark McDougall <markm@vl.com.au>]

John B. Matthews wrote:

> In a Fortran class, we were given canned JCL headers on punched cards 
> that limited the runtime level and CPU allocation to values appropriate 
> to our tyro skills. While that was useful for debugging, I needed 
> something more for molecular orbital calculations. Fortunately, the 
> (enormous) JCL reference manual was chained to a counter in the computer 
> center. I don't think tweaking JCL was evil, but I do recall having to 
> resist the lure of greed:-)

Whilst I can't claim any credit, a classmate of mine saw nothing wrong
with giving himself and a few of us a bit more CPU time.

It was 1st year, and we had to run some statistical package on a
honeywell timesharing system. The way our JCL was setup, it would take
about 8 hours for our jobs to run. The aforementioned classmate grabbed
the JCL manual and after changing a few characters we had our jobs
running almost immediately. So in 30 mins we had our assignments done -
whilst everyone else in our year spent a few days of twice-daily visits
to the lab to check on their jobs and make a few changes.

A few years later we were remotely connecting to computers in the
computer lab which had been "shut down" for the day - to make things
fair for all - whilst lecturers and tutors interactively marked the
major group assignments.

Not exactly capital offenses I know...

Regards,

-- 
Mark McDougall, Engineer
Virtual Logic Pty Ltd, <http://www.vl.com.au>
21-25 King St, Rockdale, 2216
Ph: +612-9599-3255 Fax: +612-9599-3266