I can't help think that it might be more useful to play a short recording saying something like "The CPU fan is failing. The CPU fan has failed."
On the other hand, this is undeniably awesome, and would perhaps make people feel a bit better about having to repair their computer (I know that it would make me feel better).
With innovations like this, I might even shed a tear when the host lays itself down to die, rather than hammering the keyboard in futile rage.
One night after I turned the volume up for a particularly quiet movie I fell asleep and let folding@home go. I woke up a couple minutes later with my subwoofer rattling the entire room and my roommates knocking on my door to make sure the place wasn't falling apart.
Although after the first minute you might be tempted to just yank the power cord out.
Krrfhrhfhfbhorg. Krrfhrhfhfbhord.It was grainy, but not only was the speech intelligible, the music wasn't overly painful (i.e. it was grainy, but only a bit more than a bad record).
I'm not sure what "It's a Small World" says. Definitely not, "Your voltage is out of spec".
In Windows XP, if you open Windows Explorer and have the search sidebar active, there's a little animated yellow dog sitting there below the search form. He's originally from Microsoft Bob, and he's there as your 'agent' to search your filesystem. The animation goes through a full cycle about every 90 seconds, and in part of it the dog pants twice. A sound is played through your speakers.
This confuses and infuriates people: http://ask.metafilter.com/38461/ http://ask.metafilter.com/51844/ http://ask.metafilter.com/52427/ http://ask.metafilter.com/65029/ http://ask.metafilter.com/70851/
I actually had a little music player written in VBS that used it. For those who know enough about VBS to wonder how on earth you could access a DLL from it, someone else made an OCX marked 'safe for scripting' that did that by writing out assembly code and then calling it via some hack. And you could even store the OCX inside the script by abusing more crazy bugs that let you open a file in binary mode (though you had to store the OCX as a horrible "string" constant).
Oh, and we're not done with the Rube Goldberg contraption yet. It was actually executed not by Windows itself, but via some proprietary company testing tool that used VBS to script itself. I blame severe boredom for causing me to do things in such an absurd way. I didn't think of using it for an alarm, though.
Incidentally, the only piece I ever wrote for it was one of Chopin's Etudes. I don't think I can find that piece any more, but it would be something like this (but the piece had only one note at a time):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tude_Op._10,_No._4_%28Cho...
With this, we might actually misdiagnose complaints from our customers..! Who would have thought?
I printed out but subsequently lost, and haven't been able to find anywhere - there was an article about Kraft cheese inserted into a floppy drive. It was meant as a joke, and wasn't public... but I wish I hadn't lost it. (IIRC, the basic advice was "don't do this"...)