10. You mean 2.00000000 + 2.000000000 doesn't equal 3.999998456? 9. We felt sorry for all those competitors of ours who can't seem to sell anywhere near as many processors as we do. 8. Emulate THIS, Power PC! 7. Hey, look! We've got a built-in random number generator! (Quick, jack-up the price...) 6. The FDIV bug? That's nothing! Wait'll you see what happens when you try to run Windows 95! 5. We were trying to outfox AMD by tricking them into making a processor that works, thus rendering them incompatible! 4. Hey, buddy, we'd like to see YOU hook up 3.3 million transistors right the first time! 3. Actually, the whole thing's a documentation error. The manual mixed up the opcodes of FDIV with another instruction, FATRA - Floating Point Almost The Right Answer. 2. That's the way it's supposed to work. It's part of our new fuzzy logic support. 1. We don't care. We don't have to. We're INTEL!
An anonymous source in the Democratic Party has revealed that the sweeping landslide victory of the Republicans in November may have been due to an obscure bug in the Intel Pentium computer chip.
Upgrading the nationwide vote counting system to the latest technology was one of Vice-President Al Gore's "Reinventing Government" initiatives. This change was meant to reduce costs and streamline operations, however, the computer glitch may have cost the Whitehouse dearly.
A spokesman for the Democratic Party denied the rumor that several thousand Power-PC's had been purchased as part of a vote recount effort.
When questioned about the news Senator Bob Dole (r) commented that he believed the Intel Pentium chip was far better than anyone had thought. A short statement released by Newt Gingrich's office indicated that "the Democratic party has always sought to divide America and that this discovery of an FDIV bug in the Intel Chip was clear evidence of the moral decay of our society."
At a Motorola Plant in Austin, Texas Ross Perot told an angry crowd that according to his new calculations the deficit is actually 14 times larger than the government has been telling us. He praised his staff for staying up all night and performing the calculations by hand.
In late breaking news today legal briefs were filed in Chicago by former senator Dan Rostenkowski's attorneys which claimed that the irregularities at the House Bank and the House Post Office were actually due to Pentium chip calculation errors. Sources in Attorney General Janet Reno's office reveal a furious behind the scenes effort to reload the whitewater investigation spreadsheets in order to double check the results.
10) Intel couldn't afford to buy enough QT hardware in order to verify beyond
5 decimal places.
9) Actually did find the problem but didn't want to say anything because,
"We're shy."
8) Spent more time verifying QT hardware than Intel hardware.
7) Decided it was more important to verify all the obscure undocumented
opcodes that nobody knows about than it was to see if the math was
actually correct.
6) Figured if there were any problems with the chip could always fix it by
doing a slingshot around the sun and going back in time like in Star Trek.
5) Intel used a 486 PC to check the math on the Pentium emulator.
4) Money Intel spent for QT emulators actually went to buy hookers and
booze for Andy Grove.
3) Didn't do an exhaustive check of all the math functions. Got as far as
2 + 2 = 5 and figured that was good enough.
2) Pentium testing consisted mostly of playing tetris until a score of
100,000 was achieved.
1) There was an FPU in that thing?
I'm convinced that the Pentium problem has been a coverup from the very beginning and that Intel has prepared a sophisticated defense.
OK. The more you know about something's location, the less able you are able to predict it's behavior. So, by placing the "Intel Inside" stickers on their Pentium machines, Intel has put themselves into a good position to use a Heisenberg Defense -- claiming that by knowing for certain that the Pentium is inside the cpu case, you should have no way of predicting the behavior of the chip. The beauty of it is that since we are working on the order of 10^-34, Pentium users would never be able to investigate this claim.
Apologies for the mangled physics, I knew that there was a joke in there waiting to get out.
Intel stock was down 3.749999932 points today in heavy trading. (Original, and one joke Intel is not laughing at.)
$ EDIT tech-jokes.old : SUBSTITUTE /slide rule/Pentium/ ALL : SAVE tech-jokes.new : EXIT $
The December 6 Business Today section of the Dallas Morning News contained the following headline and Editor's Note:
"Pentium goof points up difficulty in design testing"
"Editor's Note: The Dallas Morning News is reprinting this story from page 1D of Monday's business section. Because of an error in using computer software, a number of proper names and some other words in Monday's story were incorrect."
For example, in Monday's story, "Intel" was spelled "Until." It appears that someone unfamiliar with the technical vocabulary of the article was turned loose with a spelling checker and uncorrector.
My husband told me this one:
There's been a lot of publicity recently over problems with the pentium chip.
If someone successfully prosecutes Intel over this will we finally see "Intel Inside"?
Q: Definition of optimist?
A: Pentium system builder soldering the CPU to the motherboard.
With all the reported problems of Pentium processors, perhaps Intel should adopt a new slogan (apologies to the makers of Ivory soap):
99.44% accurate, it floats();
NOT!
heard from a colleague:
Did you hear about the successor to RU-486?
It's called RU-Pentium. It prevents the embryo's cells from dividing correctly.
[RU-486 is a drug used for, among other things, causing abortions]
This ought to be a new advertising slogan for Pentium-based PCs:
``486-downgradeable!''
Q> How many Pentium designers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A> 1.99904274017, but that's close enough for non-technical people.
Q> What do you get when you cross a Pentium PC with a research grant?
A> A mad scientist.
Q> What's another name for the "Intel Inside" sticker they put on Pentiums?
A> Warning label.
Q> What do you call a series of FDIV instructions on a Pentium?
A> Successive approximations.
Q> Complete the following word analogy: Add is to Subtract as Multiply is to
Q> What algorithm did Intel use in the Pentium's floating point divider?
A> "Life is like a box of chocolates." (Source: F. Gump of Intel)
Q> Why didn't Intel call the Pentium the 586?
A> Because they added 486 and 100 on the first Pentium and got
585.999983605.
Q> According to Intel, the Pentium conforms to the IEEE standards 754 and
854 for floating point arithmetic. If you fly in aircraft designed
using a Pentium, what is the correct pronunciation of "IEEE"?
A> Aaaaaaaiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee!
TOP TEN NEW INTEL SLOGANS FOR THE PENTIUM
9.9999973251 It's a FLAW, Dammit, not a Bug 8.9999163362 It's Close Enough, We Say So 7.9999414610 Nearly 300 Correct Opcodes (you mean, 299.9999831538?) 6.9999831538 You Don't Need to Know What's Inside 5.9999835137 Redefining the PC--and Mathematics As Well 4.9999999021 We Fixed It, Really 3.9998245917 Division Considered Harmful 2.9991523619 Why Do You Think They Call It *Floating* Point? 1.9999103517 We're Looking for a Few Good Flaws 0.9999999998 The Errata Inside
Pentium -- The processor of choice for Orange County.
2001.34563647 Space Odyssey
This joke removed as per the request of the original writer, Lincoln Spector of PCWORLD.
Subject: You Have Violated My Copyright From: Lincoln Spector -- I noticed that you have the Pentium 2001 parody on your page. Please note that I wrote that work, I copyrighted it, I had it published in various PRINT publications. Within days of its initial publication last December in Bay Area Computer Currents, someone illegally scanned or typed it and posted it on the Net, without even the courtesy of keeping my byline. Up until now, your violation has been unintentional. However, if you continue to keep that post available, it will be a willful violation of copyright laws. Please remove the article immediately, and post a notice in its place giving me credit and requesting that no one pass that article on. Thank you, Lincoln Spector Senior Associate Editor, PC World Columnist, Computer Currents
ddern@world.std.com (Daniel P Dern)
On channel 423 of the Information SuperDuperHighway, coming soon to a virtual neighborhood near you:
'Twas the night before Christmas, And all over the 'Net, All the posts about Intel, Made everyone fret, The whiners were vocal, They wouldn't shut up, Complaining about Intel's, FDIV cover up, The engineers were nestled, All snug in their labs, Worrying about Intel's, Mistake in the fabs, They made up excuses, On how they're affected, They called up Intel, And were promptly rejected, And soon IBM jumped, Right into the fray, "We'll stop shipping Pentiums, As of later today." But their statement was just More political lies, Because they said the next day, "We're still shipping those dies!" But from where came this noise, And vindictive clatter, About a minor flaw, That should not have mattered, Well there was a math prof, Doing work in V A, He came to realize that, Divs shouldn't happen this way, So Prof. Nicely described, The bug that he found, It wasn't too long later, That news got around, Lots of people complained, Without reason or rhyme, Just because number five, Equalled four point nine nine, The media latched on, And rumors were spread, It took no time to proclaim, That Intel was dead, As I was reading more news, A thought came to me, Intel can't possibly die, They have a monopoly, So on Andy, on Craig, On Gordon and Vin, Make sure with P6, This doesn't happen again, As I logged off, I thought: "This debate is absurd." So I soon logged back in, And uttered these words, "There are too many issues, I refuse to take sides. Merry Christmas to all, And watch your divides."
From: dmp9@po.cwru.edu (David M. Pilasky)Apple Develops Patch in Response to Pentium Defect
CUPERTINO, Calif. (AP) -- Insiders say that Apple Computer has developed a Patch to the Macintosh operating system (the Mac OS) for Macintosh users with "Pentium-Envy," or "P-Envy," as it is commonly referred to in the trade. The patch will make the Motorola MC 680x0 chip or the newer IBM-Apple-Motorola PowerPC chip function just like a Pentium - including producing the "rare" floating point mathematical division errors.
Engineers at Apple began working in earnest on the Patch after word of the Pentium defect began to spread on the Internet several weeks ago.
In what has been described as a perfect emulation of Intel's Pentium processor, the patch seems to work correctly 99.9983657231% of the time.
IBM has obtained a pre-release version of the Patch, but has been unable to confirm the presence of any floating point errors. One engineer, refusing to be named, stated that, "The damned Patch doesn't seem to have a flaw in it - and we really looked."
Apple has refused comment, stating its long-standing policy of not commenting on unannounced products. However, company employees expect that Apple will guarantee replacement of defective Patches "only to those users who can demonstrate a need" to have their Mac run with the same rare math errors as the Real Thing.
In a related development, Apple is rumored to be putting stickers that say "Patch Inside" on all new shipments of Macintosh PowerPC computers. Shipment of the new computers containing the Patch has been delayed pending the resolution of compatability problems with Windows 96.
Having just seen ST: Generations today, I find myself wondering if Data's emotion chip might have been manufactured by Intel? I mean, considering the trouble it brought Lore (and everyone around him) and considering how often Data's emotions seemed inappropriate to the occasion, well...I just gotta wonder, that's all. Did anyone else see a model number on that chip in the movie?
:-)
The Top 11 Calculations Made On A Pentium That Desperately Need Recalculating With An Accurate Chip:
11. The calibration on the speedometer in the Ford Bronco. 10. The sales volume of The Bridges of Madison County. 9. Rush Limbaugh's collesterol count. 8. The amount of money it takes to buy the Timberwolves. 7. The winning lottery numbers. 6. The size of Roseanne's mouth. 5. The CBS fall schedule. 4. Whether Windows 95 should be renamed. 3. The number of people who believe that Anita Hill was telling the truth. 2. All the science used on the tv show Earth Two 1. The Voodoo Economics rehashed in the Republican Contract On America.
Have you heard about Intel's new salary plan for its workers?
You can pick up your paycheck every other Friday, but only if you can prove you really NEED it.
(now only applies to the Public Relations Department)