Talk:1168: tar

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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I thought the title text would be "tar --help" 123.202.19.132 06:59, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

The comic is about the difficulty of the tar program options.

Even if his life depended on it and after years of usage, Bob/Randall could not come up with the right parameters without looking them up. So a situation is shown, where Bob's life depends on coming up with the right parameters:

  • It shows an atomic warhead
  • It has a user interface, which requests any valid tar command
  • If it is not entered on the first try within 10s, the bomb is not disarmed and potentially explodes on the spot

Randall has come up with a situation, where the unix guy Bob can be the hero by knowing tar parameters. This is a pipe dream of a geek; nobody cares IRL, if you know tar parameters on the first try.

It is hilarious, that

  • the bomb says in full detail the rules including that you should not cheat and it probably has no means to check whether you cheated. This is no game, but feels like one. In war and love every means is allowed - even cheating; it would also be self-defense for disarming the bomb; Bob and his colleagues are not even considering to cheat.
  • the user has root access to the bomb, shown by the bomb as ~#, the tilde is the home directory, the # signifies super-user rights; even if the available programs prevent the bomb from being shutdown or disabled by a nonintended way, normally no root access is given for users of linux devices during normal usage; and disarming the bomb with official rules is normal usage of a bomb; a root prompt should not be necessary, if the bomb software is designed and configured well; possibly the unix prompt is a simulation for entering an answer
  • Bob shurely needs more than 10s to come. So the bomb will have announced that questions, which require unix knowledge will follow - or has already asked other Unix questions; perhaps after 10s without entering anything a new question comes up
  • this bomb can be disarmed with "common knowledge"

Small notes:

  • The screen looks to be really grayscale (esp. the inverted "TEN") - not just because of the comic; it has at least 3 colors (black, white, tar gray); it could be that the "TEN" is updated dynamically and is thus inverted
  • The comic is quite black: The screen and the bomb; Randall seldomly uses solid black areas; the bomb is a gloomy topic so it is black like "tar" (pun)

Sebastian --178.26.121.97 07:24, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

I think there is a visual double pun in this strip: the bomb disarmed by a tar command is a reference to the tarbombs, but it also looks like the Tsar Bomb(a). --Koveras (talk) 08:24, 1 February 2013 (UTC)