Slashdot Mirror
Following April Fool's Day Around The World?
Here are some other questions that were submitted along the same vein:
David the Drunk asks: "Well this year, with people being much more comftable with the internet, the bogus stories were thick and heavy. I suspect my favorite is from The Age newspaper in Australia, citing The UK Guardian in an article of some humor claiming that Superman is communist and Batman should be a terrorist. Apart from the Slashdot postings (they don't count) what else was good. Pity the Age article is dated on the 2nd, but the Guardian article is from the 1st."
...and this one from mcdade: "Being Sunday and all it wasn't a good day to pull pranks on coworkers, but i'm sure some people have some good stories out there. Mine goes something like this:
A few years back I worked at a University for a small spin-off IT group put together to implement Lotus Notes across campus. So for april fools day, the developers wrote an email with a button to "optimize" your computer, telling people to click it. It would give a bunch of random terms and junk, run a percent meter then report to the user that the computer was optimize anywhere from 1 to 1000 percent (based on random number). It did absolutely nothing, besides report back to our db who had clicked it (and how many times, yes, people were clicking it multiple times to see if they could get bet optimization). Well those that figured out that this was a joke found it refreshing, those that didn't, well they complained to IT, who inturn went to the VP.
So we were all summoned to the VP's office, figuring we were on a death march, and it turned out that he found it funny and figured that people on campus should lighten up. He even told us a story about how his daughter and her friends really got him one year.
Time for everyone else to share."
For the record, all of the Ask Slashdot's that were posted during April Fool's stretch were all actually submitted to the bin, with the names changed to protect the victi-..er...guilt...I mean, innocent parties.
This story in the gaurdian is not a lie! It relates to marvel hiring a scottish comic writer(something Nico), who made his name writing alternative superhero stories for DC. These included Superman being found in russia in 1938, instead of Kansas and becoming a commie implement of war. He also portrayed Batman as being a terrorist. His new work at marvel has included beefing up the Hulk, to have tattoos and two pitbulls with him, and various other projects in an attempt to inject new life into some of their older formats. I say rock son, why not!
I did that once to. The bad thing, the NT admin on site see _ALL_ servers BSOD, flipped the fuck out and 'HARD_POWERED' then entire fucking room, routers, switches, other people's unix servers...
The admin thought their had been a massive electical discharge coming from the main circuits, cause _ALL_ devices (atleast all his servers) to go "hay wire"
He called _everyone_, even consults... Entire site down... hunderds of people called in at 2:00 in the morning...
Needless to say they found it quite humorous...they even gave me a _long vacation_ in fact I havn't been back their since (2 years ago)...
For one coworker, I *corrected* all of the critical english declarative verb forms to their opposites. As soon as she hit the space bar at the end of one of these words, is became isn't, was became wasn't, isn't became is, etc. I got her admin in on it too, so that when the victim asked me to look at her machine and I said, "I think you have a virus", her admin exclaimed "Yeah! That's JUST what they do!"
The only limit to your evil imagination on this one is that you can't match or substitute very long strings, but there is room for short sentences...
I saw that ad after the 'Files last night and even while it was running, I was going "HUH???" Then I looked at the website (thetruth.com) and I was stricken by the way that our attention can be grabbed like that - and then to point all that attention to a "dirty little secret." Katz, take note: the Internet IS making this a very different world. It's not all Shatner and sock puppets.
The worst April Fool's joke by far was on e2, mentioned a while back in slashdot.
The e2 gods write a Perl script to convert write-ups in to l33t-speak, or backwards, and that was funny.
Then they started playing with the buttons and the XP, and that was funny.
Then they created troll accounts, and turned the chatterbox in to an AOL chat-room which was funny. For about three minutes.
Then they pretended e2 had been rooted, and while it was a little funny, people started getting seriously panicked.
Then they started flaming/impersonating users' who had left the system(respected noders in one case), which wasn't funny.
And their trolling continued for fourteen hours. Which was not funny.
As a result, at least one furious noder has left, and the reputation of the e2 Gods has become, well, a little tarnished.
Granted, it's their database, etc., but it relys on noders, and it relys on noders respecting the power structure of e2. To quote a node on the subject: "Ack! You've lost the trust of the noders!"
Posted as AC because I have an acct. with the same nick on e2, and and the e2 Gods have already displayed more than a little bad judgement when nuking write-ups.
Go to lng.sourceforge.net
:)
Get LUNIX! (I'm not making this up.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This year was weak; Slashdot's attempts fell flat because, well, most were way too obvious (eg the Dalnet being bought by X has been done *every* year somewhere on the net). The online cartoonists didn't appear to band together this year to do much as they did in the prior two. Usenet posts that were in the 4/1 flavor were also too obvious.
I think that like how USENET and other parts of the web have suffered from the masses being introduced to it, so has the internet tradition of 4/1's. It's not some jokes were well planned, but the majority of what I saw was certainly not in the flavor of how it was done years ago.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The Observer (the UK Guardian's sister Sunday paper) had a story about a project to print harcopy versions of all the classic literature available on the Web, bind them into volumes, and lend them out from "Cyber-Libraries"...
On TV, "On The Record" had a topical pre-election piece about proposals to increase voter turnout by giving voters lottery tickets and free sherry just for turning up... also advertising on voting slips (Coca Cola ads were okayed, but a Wonderbra "Hello Voters" ad was supposedly vetoed)....
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As I remember, that was paid for by the folks doing it, not by Sun.
This is either the most elaborate, professional-looking prank Web site I've seen yet, or it's rather disquieting, to say the least. It gives new meaning to the name "Internet gag."
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Hey, if you're not eating six doughnuts a day, you aren't a Real Canadian!
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Same in Canada, except that the division is more supposedly along the lines of "essentials of living" versus "convienence food." It applies to a *lot* of things, beyond food.
What's most perturbing, though, is that it'd so damn illogical. Toilet paper: deemed essential and therefor not taxed. Tampons/pads: deemed *non*-essential, and taxed!!
It's fucking stupid.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Yeah, right! That's the clock that rolled over to 19100 last January.
Truth is the name of Florida's campaign to keep kids from smoking. They may have spread nationwide by now; their commercials are reportedly pretty effective.
Really, the best practical jokes/pranks are done when they are least expected. Not on April 1st. They would be funnier if they just popped up at random dates such as March 17th or maybe October 26th. Then people might actually believe more of them. Most of us know to be skeptical of anything out of the ordinary being announced on April 1st.
What?
He is already writing Ultimate X-Men, IIRC. However, as you state it seems like part of a Grant revamp of the X Continuity, which is convoluted to say the least.
I think Millar was picked up for the X gig on the strength of a 'Marvel Elseworlds' about a year ago, which was an alternate take on this and various other Marvel characters. This isn't Millar's first Marvel work though, you need to go back to Skrull Kill Krew co-written by Grant Morrison.
With Earth2, I think it was Frank Quitely's artwork that rounds it all off, it looks wonderful. I might be biased though, I used to live with a stone's throw of all of the aforementioned. That Grant Morrison is a weird looking guy...
Currently Millar is working on the ultraviolent Authority & Ultimate X-Men. That's a pretty elaborate April Fool.
Hopefully the editors will add updates to the front pages of each of these stories once they get stale, stating that they are AF gags. That way people using /. as a reference won't be fooled in, say, September, when they aren't expecting it.
What am I saying? This is /. after all.... Who in their right mind will use it for reference ? :-)
Truth is as strange as fiction, just with a less whimsical name?
Forcing comedy is like the government issuing an edict: "This material is intended to be funny. Under section 314(d) of the Lighthearted Material Act, under penalty of imprisonment, you are now required to laugh."
I will say, though, I enjoyed the Python/Perl merger. I still think it would be a good idea!!!
Whoa, flashback to reading Schroedinger's Cat...
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Hawaii, Guam, and all those other little islands in the Pacific Ocean.
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
No, not every article. The article about the keystroke capturing dongle was actually not an April Fools prank. There really are devices like this.
That's the problem with having so many April Fools stories. Legitimate stories don't get taken seriously.
Sunday Morning on CBC Radio, Michael Enright of CBC's This Morning program conducted an interview with Jimmy Carter regarding the softwood lumber dispute between Canada and the USA. He got really snippy quickly, and told Mr Carter to hurry up his answers, and called him a "washed-up peanut farmer from Hicksville". Mr Carter shot back that Enright himself was washed up, as he was once on the radio five days a week, not just on Sundays. Carter also expressed fear that "subsidized Canadian lumber producers will use two-by-fours to pound into submission U.S. border guards."
Of course, the whole thing was a joke, and Mr Carter's part was played by an actor. It was not really very funny. However, this little bit slipped past BOTH of Canada's national newspapers, and they reported it as real front-page news this Monday morning.
Now, THAT'S the mark of a successful April Fool's joke.
I don't seem to be able to load the Globe's article from their website, but I am not sure why.
It seems to have disappeared from their website while I was typing up this comment. Hmmm...
With that, what were some of the better April Fool's pranks that you've experienced (or helped to create)?
Anything Slashdot didn't do yesterday. That was god awful.
BilldaCat
This is an extract from a book called Apollo, The Race to the Moon which I'm currently reading
Chris Kraft's console in the Mercury Control Center included a screen showing a live television shot of the launch pad. During simulations, the Redstone or Atlas of course just sat there but the camera was nontheless always turned on. One day a controller names John Hatcher substituted a tape of a launch for the live picture. Hatcher synchronized the tape with the simulated countdown and waited for the moment of the pretend launch. As always during Mercury, Chris Kraft was the flight director. At T-0, as Kraft pushed the lever that started the clocks, the Redstone on the screen belched smoke and fire and lifted of the pad.
The lever wasn't connected to anything that could have conceivably have launched a rocket but the sight was too compellingly realistic to be discounted. "Look at that!" Kraft yelled in dismay to Kranz, who was sitting beside him at the assistant flight directors console. "Did you see that?!" Kraft cried again, pointing insistently at the screen.
Ok, One April Fools joke was funny, but then we started getting a bit out of hand, in my opinion, when like every story on slashdot was an A.F. joke *sigh* hehehe
It used to work this way in France: a reduced tax on foodstuffs, but normal tax on restaurant meals; so (for example) a Big Mac would not cost the same on a plate or in a paper bag.
-- Colin
That's why you need a Tivo!
load "linux",8,1
Yes, the Concorde is perhaps a case of regional one-up-manship subsidized by oppressive British and French governments. If all the common people ever gain power back within Britain and France, there'll surely be serious hell to pay: new gibbets and new guillotines, that's the order of that year! How long can people put up with such high taxes, poor services, declining economies? When will all you poor sods have had enough of it? Class system, my fuckin ass! Obsolete! When's _your_ revolution, suckahs?
Okay, maybe that was a bit over the top, but you get my drift. Socialism doesn't work! It devolves into statism. Read Hegel, pay attention! Try real democratic capitalism.
Reaching beyond the bounds of Earth, however, is a worthy endeavor, not at all to be confused with subsidizing a couple dozen people with more money than sense per trip across the Atlantic supersonic, mainly for the glamour / cachet of merely having done it, a few thousand times (less the unfortunate losses). Bunch of self-important rich assholes, that's all. Exploring space is a very worthwhile endeavor, though. We can have no higher ambition than to get off this little rock eventually, if we're really going to survive long term. Explore and grow, or die. That's the imperative for intelligent species, which we may be approaching. The jury's still out, but I have to hope we're worthy.
And the Moon missions were the highlight of our many thousands of years of evolution. It is tawdry and tragic that they were cut short by a stupid little losing war (Vietnam costs killed NASA's funding). That a space program still exists at all is simply a reflection that scientists still have some voice in politics, and that some politicians are not the dolts we assume (and are right about, mostly). It is an imperative that we continue to expolore, and to question. The alternative is stagnation and a host of concomitant evils you can barely imagine. You won't want to live on an Earth that gave up on exploring science, and space. That's the threatened Armageddon, last days, everyone dies!
I reject your major views, in the strongest terms. If we have no surplus for science, for space exploration, then we are just animals, and we will die and fade away, forever.
"Mmm hmm..."
"Well, I sort of stopped taking the pill a few weeks ago."
"<Stammer>"
Unfortunately the train arrived at my stop and I couldn't stay to hear whether she was messing with him or not.
I woke up sunday morning and someone had set all my clocks 1 hour back.
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spoo
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I then walked out of the bathroom yelling, "Heather, I think it went in too far!"
She was not amused...
Rader
hehehehe - everytime I hear a truth ad, I find myself having an overwhelming urge to smake another cigarette. Maybe i'm just sick and twisted.
slashdot username - at - email.domain.name
This BBC article lists some april fools from around the world.
It includes a excellent Russioan one where a news program reported that the government was to make April the 1st a National holiday to reduce inefficiences resulting from dealing with April Fools jokes. The story was, of course, a Joke.
EZ
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
That one had me worried for a while.
We pulled a good on my boss there. Me and the other Linux admin in our office spent the last few months cooking this one up.
.procmailrc that would redirect all of his incoming email through redneck.pl (and keep originals copied safely elsewhere) A root cron job was setup to swap this with his real .procmailrc at midnight april 1, and move them back at midnight april 3 (we wanted to make sure we got him on a workday too ;-> ) It worked wonderfully, I got a call this morning from the boss laughing hysterically asking me to please turn it off now.
We filtered all of his incoming email through a redneck filter we wrote in Perl. That is we translated all of his incoming mail from english to redneck english (ie 'computer' becomes 'new-fangled-computatin device' etc...)
What we did was write a little perl script that contained about 30 substitutions from english to redneck. We then wrote a
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
The official Star Wars site has news on the upcoming Episode V, tentatively titled "The Empire Strikes Back". There's a still of the new movie, but these things are just so gosh darn hard to make out on these monochrome monitors.
Oh, also, Lucas announced that he WILL make episodes 7, 8, and 9. CNN has the story. Like a friend of mine found out, you should probably read ALL of this article before you start celebrating.
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
That one had me believing too. I was fixing to freak out over it, until I reliezed what day it was and how good of a prank that'd be.
It's funny, the jokes about AOL accquiring things (like DalNet one or GAIM) are the ones that sound the most plausible. I'm not sure if it's because even mentioning AOL kills brain cells (aka it infects my brain to make it like an AOL user), or if it's because it's so easy to see AOL/Time Warner accquiring things left and right.
Here in Florida prepared foods are taxed, others are not. If you buy a pre-made burrito (Taco Belch, grocer deli) - taxed, buy the makings and do it yourself - not taxed.
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satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
ThinkGeek (I think (hope)) has a nice April Fools page up right now. Up for sale are peices from Mir, caffeinated meatloaf, an Atari 2600, a set of black boxes and a Cisco 1000 (a dog).
SYSOP ('sih-sop) n.: the guy laughing at your typing.
Especially ironic is the fact that the ad was paid for with Tobacco industry money (TheTruth is funded by the Americain Heritage Foundation, that was set up as part of the settlement between the Tobacco industry and the States in 98).
Teeheehee Oops!
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Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Damn, that's some serious tax... Here in Maryland (eastern U.S.) the rate is 5%, and the highest state sales tax I'm aware of in the U.S. is 8.25%.
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Lets not forget Comcast's smoldering Fiber optic cable in College Park, MD leaving 30,000 w/o the tube and being forced instead to stare at Slashdot all day...
One of my coworkers at a previous job, grabbed a screen capture, of our Network Monitioring Machine. It was running What's Up Gold in full screen mode. Anyway this joker got the image into adobe or paint shop pro, or some image manipulator and changed all the green icons on the image red. The way we'd have WuG set up was Green was all clear, red was all services down on that device.
Then he set it up with ACDSEE I believe with another image that just stated: April Fools! and set the images to repeat every 30 seconds or so. WuG was still monitoring in the background so he didn't jepordize any services or anything. If an Alarm went off it would have been taken care of.
Anyway the CEO was walking one of his suit friends around the office around 8:30 that morning, giving his usual drawl, "And around this corner we have our Network Monitoring Machine. As you will see if everything is red we have a major issue...." At that point he walked around the corner and nearly died, until the screen changed to April Fools. Someone still had to explain to him that at no time was the network actually fully down. That the person who set up the prank didn't down the whole network just to get the image etc..
Runestar
The best way to get someone with a mac is an INIT called Gravity Mouse. At random times it will cause the pointer to drop down to the bottom of the screen. I had a co-worker going nuts with that one for a week before one the techs figured out what was going on.
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
There was a cute message sent out about the computer club (YUCC) at my former university being shut down:
m eatloaf.html) and have embezzled all of our funds to support their addiction.
Dear YUCC members,
It is my sad duty to tell you that after the 2000-2001 academic year YUCC will cease to exist.
During the past year we have had our share of problems. The venture that the YUCC executives had invested heavily in, spatulaXchange.com, has died a gruesome death at the hand of current economic conditions. Not only that, but several of our executives have become addicted to caffinated meatloaf (http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/things/looflirpa/
Likewise, discussions with the computer science department for funding ended when department chair Prof. Jenkins said "You have no chance to survive make your time. Ha ha ha" and faded from our view screen.
What is left of YUCC will be sold to AOL, since they own everything else and we will be auctioning off the patents that we received on hamster-powered computers that is so desperately needed in second world countries such as Elbonia.
On a personal note, I would like to thank everyone for their continued support - especially my agent Brian Eno and the good folks at RedMeat. YUCC will surely live on in each any every one of our hearts.
Sincerely,
Alex Anglin
YUCC President.
...I announced that I was closing down my site. It is a pretty popular tropical fish discussion board, and at midnight I put up a completely serious announcement that replaced the main page with this page. People started panicking at once. Some good information on how they felt can be seen on this BBS thread.
I had planeed this out since mid-February and only a few other people (most not associated with the site) knew about it. I think it's pretty funny given the current dot-com climate.
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Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
here is our AF article. I got plenty of emails from people saying how good it was and a few from people wanting more info on it. :)
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James Hromadka
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
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Because, believe it or not, tax dollars actually come back to citizens in the form of services. The more socialist the system, the better off the poor are, and the worse off the rich.
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There was a good one a few years back on PlanetQuake, where they'd redirected the site to a mirror on geocities, with a news item that they couldn't pay the hosting bills any more. It was very funny, especially with all the popups etc. Geocites must have taken an extra hammering that day :P.
I bet my next month's paycheck, that everybody in Alaska appreciated the extra dose of humor. :)
Riiiggghhhhht.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Jesus Christ...why don't you move?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Well all *NIX and NT boxes are working on "seconds since an early unix box started" i.e. Midnight 1st January 1970 UTC.
POSIX routines easily convert this to local time, GMT, or UTC.
UTC being "Universal TIme Co-ordinated" which is basicaly the same as GMT but with "leap" seconds inserted on a more regular schedule.
So much as I like "SWATCH" watches "Internet Time" remains one of the prime examples of companies trying to leap on to the "DotCom" bandwagon with totaly unrelated products. If you really want to know how "un-wired" SWATCH is go to there web site and try finding some technical information on one of thier telephones.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Forgive me for asking, but being an American and educated in my American public school system, I must ask:
What in the hell is west of Alaska???
Sadly, this thinking is so true to some here in the US...
where you visit someone with a mac and wait till they leave the room. Then, grab a copy of the Shutdown program and drop it inside their Startup folder.
"Wireless : LAN
Rich
Rich
Rich
Rich
As the above poster said, there is already a ubiquitous global time, UTC which is pretty much the same as GMT. Why would you need anything else? The French tried to introduce metric time after their revolution and it failed.
Two things I would like to see change in the time systems we use though. 1)Daylight Savings. If you want an extra hour of sunlight in the evenings, just get up an hour earlier and 2)Lose the AM/PM thing. military time makes much more sense.
Rich
Rich
Rich
I am 99% sure this is an April Fools joke, and if it isn't, well, life if going to start sucking:0 401.lunar.html
http://www.npr.org/programs/watc/features/2001/01
Basically, Weekend All Things Considered ran this story about a company called LunarCorp projecting ads on the moon with a laser. Except LunarCorp is the former name of a GE bone density company, and *no one* else had the story.
_sig_ is away
Of course, if you live in the States and don't want to deal with sales tax, move to Oregon or one of the other states that doesn't have one (I can't believe I'm saying this). The trade-off is that you'll have to pay higher income tax (9%, practically flat-rate in Oregon) and probably higher property taxes as well (end-of-quarter clearance sales can get pretty extreme).
When I travel out of state it's embarassing, 'cause I'll do a double take at the price paid, stop, and say, "I live in Oregon." The clerk will always smile and nod...
...When in doubt, think for yourself.
at about 2:30, i noticed my computer was an hour ahead of my watch and clock. freaked out, i reset my computer clock to the "correct" time and told myself i'd do a thorough virus check when i went to sleep. at about 5:00, (slee-what?) i noticed my VCR was now an hour ahead. ... I was really freaked out. I looked at my watch, which read about 1:24a. oh, boy. I then figured out that it was no joke, but rather daylight savings time. oh, and my watch battery crapped out and reset at about 3:36.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Because, believe it or not, tax dollars actually come back to citizens in the form of services. The more socialist the system, the better off the poor are, and the worse off the rich.
Except that those goverment services are usually very inefficient, bourocratic and sometimes corrupt. A much better way to re-distribute the generated wealth of a country would be for that country to pay dividends to his taxpayers.
If you think of it, the wealth of a country is not produced by rich people (who pay higher taxes), nor by corporations (who usually do not pay much taxes), nor by poor people, nor by the middle class; but by them all as a whole. And nobody can argue that the working poor are lazier or make less of an effort than the CEO of a rich corporation. So the best way to benefit the poor would be trough a divided payable to every taxpayer regardless of income.
Then yes, higher taxes would benefit the poor and the services in a country could be run by private entrerprise in an efficient manner.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
*offtopic*
haha, cool... got to go fetch my c64 at my parents place after work and try it out
It's clever, because people think of claims, not denials, as being the usual April Fools day fodder.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
The newspaper I work for, ran a story about taxation on food services. Basically, if you eat at the restaurant, the tax is 24% if you decide to take it with you, its' 12%. This has the funne effect that when you order a latte grande mocca etc. etc. with a lid, it's 12% tax. Without a lid it's 24% tax. 79% of the people taking the poll on sunday voted "April fool?" in a web poll...
It wasn't!
I did this one last year.
I was working at a large company in their web development group. They had a small server farm that the web group used for testing new stuff and for new development. I was not really in charge of the farm, but people would always come and bug me when they needed help with it. The servers were almost entirely NT.
SysInternals has this really spiffy NT screensaver that looks like the WinNT BSOD, along with a fake reboot, which will then go into a fake disk check, which finds fake errors, and repeats. So, the night before, I wrote a little script that made the BSOD screensaver the default on all of the servers.
The next morning, people kept coming to my cube and...
PERSON: All the servers crashed!!!!
ME: Really? (clickity clickity) I can still ping them. Are you sure they're dead?
PERSON: They look dead. I'll go look again.
Minutes later...
PERSON: Really! All of them! BSOD!
ME: ROFL
I caught 3 different people that morning.
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
My favorite joke, although not on April fools, was one I pulled on my former roommate. He had a habit of sleeping in all day long, and then staying up all night to play UT. A semester of this got to be a little too much. To rememdy the situation, I hooked up a webcam in my room that shot at his bed. I had that stream to sleepy.resnet.myschool.edu, and then wrote some cgi to call my room, ring twice, and hang up when a visitor to the page clicked a button. I logged 175 phone calls the first day!
April Fool's is not on April 1st everywhere in the world. It many countries it is called "innocent's day" which is on December 28th. And I am sure that other countries celebrate it on different days. So for some of these people, reading these odd news on April 1st makes absolutely no sense and it may take them a while to realize that they are not for real.
maybe it was good ole april 1 being on a sunday, but i never really got into the spirit of things this year. i really love it when april 1 falls on a friday, you can spend a week at work sizing which coworkers to really nail. when it's on the weekend i'm usually too busy catching up on sleep to get off any serious plans.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
Thank you! I'm so glad it's over. Ever time I came to slashdot on 4/1 I felt like I was in 5th grade again - horrible corney jokes that not even the dumbest readers could completely believe.
Ecactly. I pulled a great one on one of my buddies who still lives up in the Bay Area (I moved down to LA for school). Being a EE student with two computers and a bookshelf of computer books and Rush CD's, I get as much action as a one-legged midget leper (but my friend up north doesn't know that). He's been very frustrated lately with his own problems hooking up with women, so I told him that some girl who I'd mentioned to him before had offered me (wink, wink) "favors" in exchange for tutoring her in math.
He believed it completely, since he had no way of knowing otherwise... He went ballistic, especially when I said, "APRIL FOOLS DAY SUCKER!"
/.'s April Fool's would have been far more effective if the stories had been even somewhat believeable (or extremely unverify-able).
Even more fascinating, some news from Microsoft about "Upgrading your computer's operating system".
User Friendly, a hilarious internet comic strip, had a practical joke played on the cartoonist by the techies who run the site. They had uploaded photographs showing one of his main characters being abducted while requesting a ransom from his recent IPO funds.
Basically the banks web site was going to have an online ATM that printed money, so that really lazy people didn't have to go to the hole in the wall.
Money coming out of your printer .... I wonder how many people would have tried it - I know I would have :-)
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
load "linux",8,1
Has anyone ported linux to a VIC20/C64/C128/C128D?
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
On a related note, I think a lot of people seem to have missed that the tradition was originally to play pranks on other people in the morning, and let them in on it in the afternoon; there seem to be practical jokes going the full 24 hours in some quarters, these days...
god knows it's expensive to make this wreck fly nowadays
Because one Concorde had a fatal accident (because a part fell of a crappy old DC-10 onto the runway), does not make it a wreck!
We Brits are proud to have a hand in the only Supersonic passenger airline, and the day they stop Concorde we may as well shut up the Commonwealth and elect a president!
Anyway: what was the Pilot wearing when Concorde crashed?
Blazer and flares
It many countries it is called "innocent's day"
The definition of "innocent's day" on slashdot should be updated to read:
Innocent's Day: the first time a newcomer clicks on the g0atse link from behind his corporate websweeper proxy"
Doh!!
BBC runs a science show weekly called "Tommorows World" which shows many new technologies and future technologies in development. One time about 10 years ago it was broadcast on April 1st.
They went on to explain that one of the technologies in the show was bogus - so you were concentrating on guessing which one it was.
At the end of the show they broadcast these buttons on screen and said "Ok now touch your TV set to select the article from tonights show that you think was the April Fools joke".
I often wonder how many people went over to their TV's and touched the screen to select their choice.
Hey wait, I got a 53 on that test..... -JEW
"Gravity cannot be held accountable for people falling in love." -Einstein
The largest newspaper in Sweden did a story about an island paradise in the Adriatic Sea. Complete with pics of palm trees and white sand beaches. The claimed it was freqented by the likes of Eminem, Madonna, and Tom Cruise. At the end of the story they gave a web address. http://www.nowhere.nu
My page.
So far I've received 50,000 hits and dozens of emails and have been interviewed by the paper about the repercussions of their joke...
TheAngryArmadillo
Or if you're really good, you hide NO April Fools pranks among a list of *true* news items that all look like they aren't.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"So is it a joke or not?!?
"Well, your story seems very compelling, Mr. Jackass, I mean, uh, Simpson. So I'll just type it up on my invisible typewriter. Dum dee dum dum." -- Chief Wiggum
Forgive my grammatically horrendous sentence structure. I should have said "It goes on to say that people will pay $.25 for each download, WHICH will only be available on one's hard drive for 48 hours, at which point the person has to pay again." I didn't mean to imply that the PEOPLE are, in fact, on hard drives. I can hear my high school English teachers crying.
It goes on to say that people will pay $.25 for each download and will only be available on your hard drive for 48 hours, at which point you pay again. I especially like the part where it says that when you sign up, you'll be sent a "coin recognition box" that connects to your USB port, thus requiring you to pay cash: "It even takes Canadian coins."
I had a pretty good chuckle.
Its OK, really, it will come again I promis.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
http://www.compaq.co.nz/u2u/
:)
Well I thought it was funny. They took out a full page full colour ad in a national newspaper advertising the product
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
They carried a story which said that there was a new box, which can be put onto your telephone, and which will download all the webpages onto your hard drive, so that you can browse offline. and then it went ahead to say that it uses some kind of latest wireless technology that there is no telephone bill for you ;-)
sadly, the link is gone with time...
.. like here in Norway where 71% percent believed that the rediculous tax proposal, made by our biggest party (Arbeiderpartiet), was a joke. Our biggest newspaper, Verdens Gang, chose to put it up big on page 3 on April 1st, and I think it was the best joke of them all, the joke was on all those who thought "hey, you're not fooling me, it's april 1st today", because the proposal is real. On the other hand our government is a complete joke, but that goes for 364 more days of the year too....
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Rick Mercer goes down to various locations in the US and asks really dumb questions of people on the streets and even University students and profs. For example:
AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NY. On Canadians' care for the elderly: "We demand that the Government of Canada discourage the Canadian tradition of placing senior citizens on northern ice flows, leaving them to perish."
One of the funniest was George W. Bush. Its not on the page, but Bush had said previously that he would never again be confused on the leader of a country. Rick had him accepting an endorsement from Prime Minister Poutine. For those of you who don't know, poutine is fries, gravy, and cheese.Some of us don't have the time to wade through the bullshit to get the real information they use every day. Oh shit - I forgot that the web was pure entertainment.
Oh yeah. Some of us think articles ABOUT April Fool's Day are even more ridiculous.
But then again, there's enough crap around on a daily basis why the hell am I complaining?? :-)
But nobody recalls the 'concordski' (not its real name), the russian equivalent that apparently out performed the anglo/french version.
Apparently consipracy theorists state that during an airshow to show it off some military plane was hiding in the clouds and managed to bring it down.
You also forgot to note that the crappy DC-10 was from a US company
Red Herring went to a lot of trouble to do theirs, even setting up a site for Dutch 'company' WaterNet, who purported to have the answer to the (impending) problem of bandwidth bottleneck: using the plumbing system to transport data. I bought it (even overlooking the DRIP acronym used to describe the 'research' project) right up until their description of the "client-side nozzle." It wasn't until several hours later that I remembered that the plumbing system is grounded and can't carry a current!
--parking_god
Brandishing Dangerous Logic
The UK Guardian article about Superman being redrawn a communist etc was not an April Fool, seeing as it was published on March 20:
3 ,4 154912,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,427
That and the fact that the Guardian doesn't publish on Sundays (as April 1 was this year).
One of the spotlights on MIT's homepage linked to this News Office piece. In addition, a "Lucky" button, a la Google was added next to the "Go" button for the search box. It linked to a close reading of the B.S. song of that name.
Re:mote Induction's contribution to Global Disinformation Day:
A review of the 'Prvjict Mir' 10" EP by 'Etomer'
The last cosmonauts on the station placed contact mics and transimitters at strategic locations around the station before it headed earthwards...
The first ten copies come packaged with Mir Debris.
The worrying thing is, I'm pretty sure there will be a good number of noiseniks around the world saying "the sounds of a dying space station? hell fuck yeah!!"
Kenny
www.remoteinduction.com
More than once I've seen customers get really angry at the people at newsstands or convenience stores, because the customer is convinced that the cashier must be mistaken about the sales tax. They inevitably say "I could go buy one out on the street for 75 cents -- and you're telling me it's 81 cents in here? You idiot!" I've tried to tell them to blame their legislators rather than the poor schmuck working the counter, who's just following the stupid law, but my pleas have always fallen on deaf ears.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
This morning as Senators assembled in the chamber, somebody yelled out "April Fools!" and John McCain burst into tears. He knew at once what had happened. A vast conspiracy of 100 senators and 400+ house members worked dilligently to keep him in the dark, all the while adding amendments to ensure the bill's unconstitutionality (i.e. harmlessness).
The full story can be found here.
Actually, Cuba's health service is a /lot/ better than Europe or the States. And they seem happy. At least, they haven't been willing to overthrow the rulers.
I'm too sexy for you.
A company called "truth" (no joke) ran an ad on several major networks (quicktime movie here) with a "tobacco industry spokesperson" on it, saying that every cigarette had been recalled due to "health concerns" and that cigarettes would not be back on the shelves until there were absolutely no health risks..."because if there's two things the tobacco industry cares about, it's your health, and your trust. Thank you." The ad then flashed "april fool's" and the URL.
-- NOTICE TO BULK E-MAILERS: Pursuant to US Code, Title 47, Chapter 5, Subchapter II, 227, spam me and die.
Did anybody channel surfing happen past the Discovery Channel yesterday? Or maybe it was the Learning Channel... Any way, they were broacasting some shows upside down and claiming it was a technical difficulty. Every few minutes they would scroll an important looking message along the bottom explaining it and suggesting that you turn you TV upside down or something. As the show progressed the suggestions got more and more outlandish. At one point they recommended that you stand on your head and bark like a dog. I love it when big corporations get in on the fun. Who remembers what Taco Bell did a few years ago? I remember that it was damn funny, but I don't remember exactly what it was.
http://www.cnn.com@sci-tech@3630071112/new_010401/ alert/breaking_news.html
OK, yes, I'm related to this one ...
- Jodiamonds
...was the message on Slashdot migrating to FreeBSD. I mean - c'mon, who would fall for such a thing? lol!
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
I was in IRC on Sunday morning, and decided it would be a good idea to post an April Fools to iMacLinux.net. Well, there was one there, and it was sooooooooo obvious, so i replied to it and gave it away. The news item has since been removed. LOL!! I`m an admin, too... always watch out for your own kind...
My other car is first.
I don't know how many people fell for it, but I found it mildly amusing :-)
.signature: Command not found
Or the daily show for that matter. What do they do? Tell real news?
-Nuke the moon
I even heard that a bunch of billionaires rented a Concord (and god knows it's expensive to make this wreck fly nowadays) round the world to make it last longer...
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
It's like Chairface Chippendale all over again! The moon would be cool if it had a big CHA in it. If you don't know what I'm talking about you need to watch more episodes of The Tick.
//FIXME: Bad
It's normal for one fool story to be buried amoungst a host of real stores on April 1st. Slash-Dot seems to have only one real News story buried amoungst a host of April fools.
My only problem is I can't figure out which is the real story :)
Okay, last night, I went to set my alarm clock, started switching through the radio stations, and I found something strange. One channel was giving warnings to keep all of your lights on until further notice, because "man-shaped shadows" were destroying the neighborhood and killing everyone in sight. It was strange how much work they put in to this: Eyewitness accounts of the creatures, reporters claiming that they were being "horribly mutilated" by these "god-forsaken freaks of nature". It was even complete with SFX such as screaming, roaring, and sounds of carnage. Very good April Fool's Joke!
Right on target! :-)
Guess he/she didn't think about that one.
They have made some really good things those Swiss.
120 chars is not enough!
I wrote a small redirect script in Perl, that redirected web visitors to a random language at Altavista's Babelfish. Unfortunately, being in tech support, I created work for myself with e-mails like: Help!! I logged on to the internet this morning, and everything is in spanish! I can't get it to stop! HELP!
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
I've actually caught many people aside from the typical April fools pranks. Using obfuscated URL's I've spoofed everything from Slashdot, ABCnews, Napster, CNET, Republican National Committe, and others.
Aside from the typical Slashdotter, or other geek for that matter, I've managed to fool many people into thinking these some of the things were real.
So slashdot went a little overboard for one day... So what?! Its one day out of the year where anyone can be silly just as you were when you were a kid telling someone his shoe was untied then yelling APRIL FOOLS! Get a grip and stop bitching if April fools pranks offended you, its one day out of the year, and no one was hurt by it. (well maybe someone precious ego)
360 degrees of Karma
FuckedCompany.com getting hacked by idealab! employees angry at the beating and ridicule their company has taken on Fucked Company's news and message boards.
Classic!
...Internet Time!
see Swatch homepage for more details
I hardly find this to be stuff that matters.
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!" - a dog
The April fools joke that Jos Verstappen played on Juan Montoya.
The whole idea of an April fool's prank is to hide it among other *true* news items and make it so *nearly* credible that people will get caught out. The Slashdot "editors" couldn't have shown what a childish bunch of idiots they are any better if they'd *tried*. So, to show how funny you guys are and what a wonderful sense of humour you have you decide that you're gonna give us a special gift : on April 1st *every* *single* article on /. for the last 48 hrs has been utter tripe.
And now here you are just rubbing it in : "Haha ! by playing on the time zones we can extend April 1st to a 48 hours day, haha ! We rule !"
Now you've got a year to go away and figure what makes an April fool's joke *good*. It's gonna be hard but 364 days may just be enough.
Get clue or grow up.
ircII EPIC4-1.0 was released on april fools day. Teh fact that it was april fools day and the release number is 1.0... well I assume it's a real release, and am using it now. If it's a joke, well I guess I am a person who fell for it. Just feeling very paranoid at the moment :-)
And it seems Sun has a sense of humour (and the budget) to pull stuff like "This year the wall between Scott and Bernie's office was removed to make a lovely 15 yard dog leg right golf hole. Complete with elevated tee and green. The green is protected by two sand traps and yes there is a small pond. It is completely turfed and a golf cart sits out front with a bumper sticker reading. "Honk if you are a Sun VP". (More here.)
nt
God spoke to me
Stay away from the computer and set up a good meatspace prank instead. They're far better.
--
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
--
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house"
-George Carlin
Why yhe hell would I want to have my daytime in the dark, so its more convenient to you?
My ape left "happy face" footprints all over the place, as can be seen in the official site forum.
:-)
I even reported it to EA as a bug.
Wolfox
I made a mandatory IQ Test for all current and new users followed by an official sounding letter explaining how the mudding environment is affected not only by the system and staff but also by their mudding peers. So, I justified deleting any accounts of people that scored less than 60 on the IQ Test (the questions were real too).
Then, I added a paragraph saying that their IQ is determined by the time consumed in taking the test and the correctness of the answers. (Keep in mind, everyone scripts.. so there were a ton of scripts just chilling in the Polls and Questionnaires section. ) And their personal score was a [53].
Oh man. You should have seen the emails I got. Some people have more than one account.. and they got the same message for each account.. you'd think they'd figure out that everyone got a 53 right? NO.
I logged onto the system later, and this guy was being a total prick (about something else). So I suspended his ass. And someone asked what happened and I told them that the guy got a 52 on his IQ Test. Then the other moron goes, "oh damn.. that coulda been me.. I got a 53!"
I rest my case. Mud kills brain cells.