OT (was Re: [CentOS] CentOS Folding at home team breaks through)

[Chris Mauritz]

Sharon Kimble wrote:
> Congratulations to all members of the team for contributing towards breaking 
> through the 2,000 place barrier. In the overall team rankings we are now in 
> position 1885! Considering how 'young' the team is in terms of how long its 
> been going thats a stupendous achievement! Well done all!
>
> From now on we can watch our teams ranking on 
> http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_list.php?s=&p=19, although we 
> haven't yet appearred on their score sheet.
>   

This reminds me of an incident about 6 or 7 years ago at a former 
employer.  The office had about 200 desktop computers that we'd ordered 
en masse from Dell.  They were whatever the fastest processor was at the 
time (probably P3-1ghz or somesuch) with a 1-2gigs of RAM since most of 
them were destined for people doing desktop publishing tasks with piggy 
graphics.  So one day our Windows guru decides that it would be 3l33+ to 
install hidden copies of some distributed computing client on every 
desktop in the office and send all the results to his team.  I think it 
was one of the early RC5 cracking clients.  When someone would complain 
about their system being sluggish, he'd just disable the client on that 
machine to avoid any questions and tell the user he'd "repaired the 
registry" or somesuch.  A few weeks go by and I start getting complaints 
from various department heads (all of which had computers that the 
prankster didn't fondle for fear of getting fired) that their people 
were all having "computer trouble".  The prankster happened to be out 
sick that day.  One of my unix/networking guys got pressed into service 
to go figure it out.  It seems as though the clients had auto-downloaded 
a software update and some bug caused the updated version to wake up in 
"gobble every cycle" mode.  The culprit showed up to work the next day 
and apologized.  HR wanted to fire the guy.  I offered him a 3 month 
"demotion" to first level desktop support and then a return to his old 
job, which he accepted.  About 3 weeks later, he quit and went to work 
for Intel on the west coast...who fired him about 6 months later for a 
similar stunt.  So just make sure you've got permission to heat up those 
desktop toasters before you fire up those clients.  8-)

Cheers,