KOOS!!!

(Or: He was in the right place at the right time)

This page is dedicated to the man who was able to correctly guess the meaning of DEU, a term I used a week or so ago on the Usenet newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery.

Koos Koos Koos Koos

Koos van den Hout's homepage.

Koos's cool .signature:

  Koos van den Hout,           Internetter, Unix freak and BBS SysOp at large
  koos@kzdoos.xs4all.nl (Home)        BBS Koos z'n Doos (+31-3402-36637 28k8)
  koos@pizza.hvu.nl (Work)  <-- finger -l for PGPkey    (+31-3402-56619 14k4)
  http://www.hvu.nl/~koos (WWW)    Looking for a license plate with "RFC 822"
  We are root. You will be assimilated. Resistance is useless. Clickety Click

The challange, posted in alt.sysadmin.recovery:

P.S.
  Fist person who can guess, in email, what DEU means will get a special
dedicated spot in my homepage. I'm serious, too.

I'd give the answer to that challange here, but I'm afraid it's a classified matter, for security reasons. :)

The Wrong Answers

Here are some of the various answers people gave me. All of them are wrong mind you, but most are pretty good.

Dumb-End User
Dead Evil User
Dumb Evil User
Dead European User
De-Evolved User
Dorky Egocentric User
Death-Eating User
Demented evil user
Demented equipment user
Demented Eris-Worshipping User

(etc.)

True Dedication

One individual actually wrote the following code to generate all possible meanings for DEU:

#!/bin/ksh
DICT=${2-/usr/lib/dict/words}
nawk '
/^[dD]/ { dwords[dcnt++] = $1 }
/^[eE]/ { ewords[ecnt++] = $1 }
/^[uU]/ { uwords[ucnt++] = $1 }
END {
   srand();
   for ( i = 0; i < TRIES; i++ ) {
     di = int(rand() * dcnt);
     ei = int(rand() * ecnt);
     ui = int(rand() * ucnt);
     print dwords[di], ewords[ei], uwords[ui]
    }
}' TRIES=${1:-20} $DICT

Which, when ran printed "Bill The Cat Eats Mushrooms!" 500 times on my terminal and then ordered a pizza and did a shutdown -HIP-HOP

But, I couldn't turn down this plea:

Here's a routine for generating combinations. Can I have a not-so-special dedicated spot on your homepage ? Walter Roberson roberson@Ibd.nrc.ca

Happy now, Walter? :)

But wait, he wasn't the only one! Then there's poor old Tim Skirvin, who nearly lost his sanity by guessing dozens of times and never getting it write.
It's ok Tim, we can't all be as God-like as Koos. :)

Honorable Mention

Ken Sallot gets an honorable mention. Ken knew the answer (though tragically his response arrived after Koos's did). Of course Ken would, as he used to work with the originator of the phrase, one Bryan Slatner.

For this, Ken gets a free tribble, with a lifetime supply of food. Have fun Ken! Don't call us, :)

Last Modified: April 28th, 1997

Jeff The Riffer aka Jeff Mercer / riffer@afn.org