This would give you time until the teacher would get to grading (and opening) the file at which point you’d hopefully have finished.
Learning not to procrastinate as much turned out to be the better life skill.
So if file 1 is a bitstring, you don't modify the bits to produce file 2, then file 2 has the same bitstring and will be processed the same as file 1.
You can never be certain wherever the damage was caused by bitrot or a person screwing with the file, but certain patterns are very unlikely to occur naturally so a reasonable guess is at least somewhat possible
Benjamin : Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire : Are you listening?
Benjamin : Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire : Metadata.
(also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork)
"The Windows NT NTFS can support forks (and so can be a file server for Mac files), the native feature providing that support is called an alternate data stream."
Frankly I’m amazed computers were trusted by anybody back then. Imagine if iCloud randomly corrupted 1 in 100 photos.
I had one important project (I don‘t remember anymore which one it was), so I put it on THREE 3,5‘‘ disks, one after each other.
All three were unreadable by the time I arrived. I was devastated.
(note I had heard stories about rotating current brakes ruining disks so I took care not to go by rail, must have been something else)
Putting the disks back in the original drive and they probably would have been readable.
It was around midnight, I was done and hit save. I had an external monitor, and for no particular reason, decided to move it around during the save. It was big and heavy, and while moving it I accidentally hit the power switch of the PC.
Powering off the machine during disk write destroyed everything. I couldn't believe it, I stared at the machine for a while.
Then I spent the rest of the night recreating the document from memory, while making frequent copies on different disks.
It was a horrible moment that I remember vividly, but it taught me a valuable lesson. I never again lost any file for lack of appropriate backup.
1.44 MB pretty much fits in my head.
But “infinite” storage over 15 years now? How would I even audit that?
That the size of a zipped plain text bible.
There are some people that knows the bible by heart, and I suppose if you work with it a lot, you have a general idea of the order of all things, and what's going on in each part without having to know the exact words. Like an essay you've been working on for months.
So seems about right.
Maybe it's time for a new metric: 1 floppy is what you can hold. More is too much.
I can memorize so many docs and API, but there is a threshold for a project size above which I cannot hold the entire code base in my head.
We weren't even sending email on a public server, we were just using email on the local compsci server. Checking our messages with pine/alpine. The excuses didn't make any sense... but....
Most servers add a "Received" line to the MIME contents with some SMTP info, and you can't fool the timestamp inside that.
The funny thing is, on the real internet with SMTP (so, not in your case but commonly), that's actually true; I once worked at a company that sent a massive amount of email to customers with our own postfix clusters, and it turns out things like "MX was down for a few hours" or "customer's email system rate limited us" - or rarely even "our servers are overloaded and trickling mail out" - are real things and sometimes emails do get held up for hours or days.
Now, I'm on the other side of it. My spouse is a teacher and I get to see the base tactics that some students try to pull off and the hair-pulling toll that hundreds of these paper cuts inflict on teachers when they have to chase down students.
Faculty gives compassionate consideration and everyone moves on. Used to infuriate me.
After Christmas at the annual party he announced the total death toll (it was like 80 people and 50 pets for a staff of 120), and presented the person with the most fake death a funeral basket of flowers and summer sausage.
The guy was notorious, the dude didn’t realize that managers spoke to each other. His poor grandmother “died” about 8 times, just in one year.
Then any technical issues just get awarded a zero, but it doesn't matter because 'it won't affect your grade anyway'.
She spoke of someone else submitting three pieces of artwork for a job or college app, but the person only included two pieces of art in the envelope. A letter was also included, which suggested the third piece was on the outside of the envelope. On the outside was a stamp, which was hand-made but good enough to get the package delivered.
As I think about it today, I doubt that would get you a job or access to college, but it’s an interesting story. And, it was impressionable enough that I’m recalling it 30 years later.
Edit - i believe I'm thinking of J. S. G. Boggs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._G._Boggs He didn't actually try to pass his bills as money, they had clear indicators that they weren't real (like being one-sided), and he'd trade them for the equivalent amount in goods and services as a performance art.
(It's just not something I think about very often, and only now do I realize how useless my knowledge is! I could speculate based on the flux of high-energy particles and the layout and energies involved in various storage media. I would expect the energies on non-volatile storage to be much higher than volatile storage, and so for bit flips to be rare. I would expect flips to be singular, and not come in groups - but if they did it would be temporal, not spatial - something like a solar flare. The interesting flips would be the least likely ones, where the serialization code is running. The threat-model here is the relatively large memory region consisting of the union of something like [cpu, kernel, jvm, thread, bytecode]. That's quite a surface area, and while it's fun to speculate about what a bit flip could do at various interesting points, but I assume for simplicity they all just crash your code. (I wonder how often random bit flips are why restarting software is unreasonably effective at fixing problems - or is it just an epidemic of thoughtless race conditions as I've always assumed?)
(I. E. hit save, create email , attach the file, does not work. Must close PowerPoint first).
I imagine other usability issues exist which are similarly much more frequent than cosmic rays.
Teaching others to do this, even classmates teachers knew I wasn't friends with, meant that there wasn't a pattern for them to see and so they never suspected we were faking it. They just assumed "it's just a thing that happens sometimes".
I can't help but wonder, how much more time did you spent on all of this, since you would presumably still need to do the assignment?
And yes, I did have to do it eventually, but this helped stretch the deadline by a week or so, which is quite nice when you get like 4 assignments dumped on you in the same month (because god forbid the teachers work together and make us an evenly-loaded schedule).
The doc in OpenOffice that I had made had the most basic formatting, just headings, a table of contents, paragraphs and the required double line spacing. Certainly no columns of any kind.
After that I switched to PDF submissions for every module where they would be accepted.
Did not actually attach the graphic, knowing that the message wouldn’t be checked until EOD.
Sent the completed version the next morning with a “whoops”.
No doubt the kids will find a way, they have practically infinite time.
Well, technically, docx are zip, but they didn't exist back then.