Hi -- My cousin asked me to give her some ideas for a SNL-style skit about, "The Software Group from Hell." I had a lot of fun complying. Unfortunately it seems easier to be funny exploiting stereotypes than challenging them. The Software Group from Hell (characters with descriptions and varying amounts of dialog) Game Boy He's on the 8715th level of UltraGigaQuake. Don't bother him; he's closing in on the world record level of 9217. He announces a new level every minute or so. Jason and Bob Two young punk programmers running through the office playing paintball, popping in between other vignettes to splatter one another or an innocent bystander. Jason wrote a program that is about to complete the company's big project, but Bob hacked into his computer and inserted a virus. Now the program runs so slowly that the answer only comes up a line at a time every few minutes. Each time a line comes up, people rush to his monitor and desperately copy it down before the screen goes black. The D.O.T. Daniel O. Torvalds, AKA "The Dot", erstwhile dot-bomb billionaire CEO, sits on the phone all day chasing deals and munching pizza while dropping jaded, world-weary asides and telling war stories about the 4 spectacularly successful startups he sold to AOL, Sony, Microsoft, and IBM. The other 11 including the latest were flops; so right now he is broke and crashing here. He is 22. The Autistic Savant (Model his mannerisms and speech on Dustin Hoffman's performance in "Rainman.") He is standing, wearing a head-mounted display and typing on a chording keyboard in his back pocket, complaining that his AI speech recognition program won't fit on a single CD anymore. "But a CD has 650 megabytes. How many lines of code is that?" "45,213,917 lines of code. 5,313,713 of them are 'if' statements. I like 'if' statements." "How did you have time to write that much code?" "Your keyboard is inefficient. I remapped my keys. Not Dvorak. Dvorak is optimized for English. My keyboard was optimized for C++. I don't use my keyboard any more. I put 7 switches on a round frame. 7 switches gives me 7 bits. I chord in ASCII." "Oh yes, ASCII. That stands for 'American Standard Code for Information Interchange', right?" "No, ASCII is what it produces. It's the ass-key. It's in my back pocket. Pretty soon I won't need my keyboard. It understands voice input. 'Computer, new program. File name helloworld dot c. Start of text. Sharp include less than stdio dot h greater than. New line. main open paren close paren. New line. Open brace. New line. Indent printf open paren double quote capitalized Hello capitalized World exclamation double quote close paren semicolon. New line. Close brace. End of program. Save file. Compile helloworld dot c. link helloworld. Run helloworld. Look, it runs." (passes head-mounted display and microphone to narrator, who puts it on.) "Cool! May I try one?" "Alright." "'Hello world!' Hey; how come it says, 'halo wart'? 'This is AI' How come it says, 'tease East rayon?' Why, it only works for you. It only recognizes autistic programmer voice input!" Dr. No (The supervisor; he has no idea what his people are doing, but gets a feeling of power by refusing all their requests, even the most reasonable.) The Cypherpunk (He's sitting at his computer wearing combat fatigues, a pistol, and ninja throwing stars) "I write codes. Nobody can break them" "I used the Data Encryption Standard once." "DES? I can break DES with a pocket calculator! I found the backdoor NSA put into it." "The National Security Agency? The really secret one?" "Yeah, or, 'No Such Agency', because for years they wouldn't admit it existed. At least that's what my buddy Osma says. I never know when he's kidding, though; he's such a clown." "I used RSA once, too." "RSA? I can break 512-bit RSA keys with the code cracker in my basement. You feel safe when you see that little closed lock icon in Netscape or Explorer, right? SSL encryption. I can break that puny little 128-bit SSL with my eyes closed. I've been collecting credit card numbers from Amazon for weeks. See? (he fans a huge stack of paper) I haven't used any of them, though. I have plenty of money from the code I sold my buddy Osma. It's a really cool code. Much better than RSA. Better than elliptic curve. Nobody can break it. Osma loved it. Get this; he put a note on the check, 'I used this to order the World Trade Center bombing.' What a clown, that Osma." "Osma? You mean Osama?" "Yeah, that's how he said it: Osama Been Loadin or something." "Holy shit! You sold a code to Osama bin Laden? We're gonna get killed!" (Agent #1 jumps out in shooter stance, pistol pointed at Cypherpunk) "Freeze! NSA!" (Agents #2, #3, etc., ditto) "Freeze! CIA!" "Freeze! FBI!" "Freeze! DEA!" "Freeze! ATF!" "Freeze! ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP!" (The agents disarm and handcuff Cypherpunk) Agent #1: "He's a terrorist!" Agent #2: "He's not an American, he's a friggin Ayrab! I'll bet his skin is really brown! (pulls out a handkerchief and scrubs Cypherpunk's face vigorously.) Agent #3" "A sand nigger!" (as they haul Cypherpunk away, he starts shouting) "You can't stop me! Information wants to be free! The unbreakable code function is modular exponent p over q to the .." (All the agents shoot Cypherpunk with their silenced weapons, and the one with the handkerchief cleans up the blood as they drag away his limp body. Two other agents take his computer. The last agent addresses the horrified software group, standing with their backs to the audience, ) "Let me show you something that will explain why this happened. Watch closely!" (he holds up a camera and flashes it at the audience with full _Men In Black_ schtick) "You just had a layoff. People received a generous severance package, but they won't be back." (he takes Cypherpunk's timecard from Dr. No and departs.) Jason: Oh look; a cool desk chair! (trundles it off) Dr. No: Post-Its! Take care! Howie Goodell -- Howie Goodell hgoodell@cs.uml.edu Pr SW Eng, WearLogic Sc.D. Cand HCI Res Grp CS Dept U Massachussets Lowell http://people.ne.mediaone.net/goodell/howie Dying is soooo 20th-century! http://www.cryonics.org