Slashdot Mirror
April Fools Wrap Up
Thanks for the usual April Fools Day flame- every year people fall for it.
It never ceases to amaze me how angry and venomous, yet utterly clueless
a few people can be despite the blatant obviousness of the joke.
Lastly, jfengel sent us the annual April Fools RFC: RFC3251 describes "Electricity over IP" and RFC3252 on "Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport" reformulates IP to work over XML."
S:Dear CmdrTaco, I was wondering if you couldE EEEEEEEEEE EE!
T:What's the best High Tech Toilet?
S:AAAaaaahhh That hurt, please stop! I was just wondering if
T:Do programming languages affect your Sexual Performance?
S:AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHH! Did I do something wrong? I jus
T:IP replaced Avian Carriers! It's funny, get it!
S:AAHCGH gurgle, moan. Pleash, stop the pain, I can
T:AOL is buying up useless Blog sites! I'm important! Get it?
S:AAAAAAGH! No more! Kill me now, someone, please kill m
T:Google is ranking with pigeons! Get it? Pigeons?
S:AGAHAGHAGHAGAHGa gurgle. whimper. AHGHH I'll give you anything. I'll stop plea
T:Slashdot's advertisers have demanded that we run stupid stories!
S:Ok! Ok! You fiend, I'll never troll again, please, you can have whateve
T:Mac OsX is l33t!
S:AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIEEEGGGH! No! No! Please just break my knees! Please, no don't..
T:Check out this Debian Rootkit!
S:AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE
S:(silence)
T:Yo, Hemos, did we kill all of 'em?
H:Ya, but better post a few more to make sure.
T:nVidia and AMD are gonna merge! Get it? MERGE.
S:(silence)
Cowboy Neal: I feel a great disturbance in the force, as if thousands of Slashdot posters
just comitted suicide. Get it? The Force?
...ya wanna turn on anonymous posting again?
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Does this mean Wil Wheaton won't be in Enterprise?? Damn!
or is this some April Fools day joke?
*runs away in dispair*
The picture speaks for itself.
(CmdrTaco seen far right.)
The majority of the flaming during the day wasn't just for the 'slashdot' april fools post. It was because you posted so goddamn many april fools jokes in a row that it was annoying as hell. Yeah, that's great, the occational one is nice. maybe a 'wrap up' like a quickies or something. but not EVERY DAMN POST. Your marketing change, that was okay, and if you hadn't done any other april fools day posts, it might have truely fooled some more effectively. as it was, it was just dumb.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Otherwise all of CmdrTaco's stories would be at -1 after today from his karma being beaten to the ground for all the troll stories that were posted today.
Interestingly, I noticed one story (about the retiring carrier pigeons) that was a true story posted today. Any others?
Mmmm.. Donuts
"Thanks for the usual April Fools Day flame- every year people fall for it. It never ceases to amaze me how angry and venomous, yet utterly clueless a few people can be despite the blatant obviousness of the joke."
/. today. Somebody needs a lesson in humour. It won't be from me either because today's beating of a dead horse has bored me to tears.
They were repetive, unimaginative and unfunny. The best jokes are subtle - making it blatantly obvious makes it extremely unfunny. That is why you were flamed.
The BBC documentary way back in B&W TV days about spaghetti growing on trees is/was funny because it was original and completely unexpected. Unlike anything seen on
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Today, every story you posted was fake. There was no subtly. In addition, there was little originality; most of what's posted has been done already in one form or another. One subtle 4-1 joke, such as the advertized story of the day at /. , would have been good. Having a Slashback with a summary of 4-1 jokes around the web including the Google one and the Debian one would have been a nice evening wrapup. But having every single story for a 24hr period as fake is not funny, particularly *if* certain real stories happened today (I didn't see any, so consider yourself lucky).
Next time, take it easy. Make it subtle and find something that you *know* will get a humor-filled response by those that don't read the story, and you'll get much fewer flames and many more smiles.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Ohhh... fuck you.
For crying out loud, you people are fucking addicted to this place and all you can do is bitch about it. I like it better when it was just for Malda's personal amusement, I don't give a fuck about the shareholders and he shouldn't either. If he starts running the site with nothing but the shareholders in mind then everything that makes the site worthwhile will vanish. So a hearty FUCKOFF to you, maybe if Malda ignored the shareholders clamoring for money more often we'd go back to getting amusing stories about lego robots dismantling other lego robots with glow in the dark magnetic nerf guns.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The key thing you forget is that a joke needs to be funny. What was funny about disabling AC posts (something slashdot has defended vehemently in the past was basically thrown in the garbage today.) What's so funny about turning a service that people now pay for into a day-long shitfest of fake, dubiously humorous stories? A few here and there peppered throughout the day is one thing, but it was a nonstop barrage of crap today. So, yes, you got flamed for it. You deserved to.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
...the fake stories weren't too far from the usual sort of stuff you see here on a daily basis.
I've got to throw in a "yeah, what he said!" here.
/. readers), but I consider /. to be a news site. I come here for IT/geek news. Normally my attitude is if its important in the world of computing, it will be on /..
/. was the only one who wasted space with April Fools stories. Maybe /. just couldn't find any real stories today. But at the same time c|net, who /. seems to sometimes take great pains to point out its better than, managed to find a whole list of stories for today.
/. as THE geek news site.
Maybe I'm too old to understand (I'm 40, which probably makes me older than 95% of
Of all the sites I consider "news" sites, I noticed that
One was funny. Two was okay. Three was excessive. Ten was totally friggin stupid and a waste of time, and makes me want to re-evaluate my opinion of
And all of them were so lame and obvious that anyone who thought they were real stories should be forced to turn in their geek club decoder rings and go away.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
It never ceases to amaze me how pompous and self-righteous, yet utterly clueless posters can be despite the blatant lameness of their posts.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
...is wondering whether what the news was that was _not_ getting reported on Slashdot because its powers that be were busy running one joke story after another. I read Slashdot for many reasons--wasting time is probably the chief reason, but another reason is that I'm genuinely curious to know what important events are going down in the high-tech world, and what people think about them. I was hoping, for example, that there'd be an item about the HP-Compaq merger and HP's decision to kick Walter Hewlett off the board, but no--I guess reporting fake stories about Linus Torvalds quitting and Google using pigeons to rank their pages was more important. Hey, I've got an idea--instead of wasting everyone's time, why not post an item linking to several of these gag stories (you know, like a Slashback post) and then get on with the real news. The world doesn't grind to a stop because it's the first of April.
Not just a brief item either. They did a whole half-hour segment on the "news", including interviews with Reagan administration staffers (not actors or impressionists, real staffers who were in on the joke) and with "acting provincial Governor-General" Bruce Babbitt. Really over the top stuff. I've always wondered why it never raised more of a fuss than it did.
The world's gotten so flakey these days, it's getting increasingly hard to tell the difference. Or to say much of anything except "so it goes". Let's face it, the digital protection legislation would have been an April Fools joke 3 years ago. You guys are getting too much competition from the real world.
Does anyone remember the first year all of the major geek-sites got together for a April Fool's joke? I barely remember what happened (AKA: This account maybe somewhat off from what really happened). I think Segfault annouced that Microsoft was bascially shutting them down through legal action. So Freshmeat (I think) and Slashdot played along. I couldn't believe it, because they pratically fooled everyone. They lead up to it over the course of a week or so. Quite funny and original.
How is it that real news, the "Stuff that matters", as it were, seems to completely dry up on April 1? What real, interesting stories were eschewed to bring us all this "fun" April Fools entertainment? Where is the News?
Hint: read the HTML source of that link. Things will be clearer. The CVS $Id$ is a bit of a giveaway as well :)
After getting chocked up with /. nonsense and other similar stuff today, I decided to give up and use my computer for some playing. I wanted to play some oldie, so I reinstalled Master of Orion 2. A few turns into the game, I read into the turn summary:
Citizens demand a stadium. (There is no stadium building in MOO2, so I was puzzled). And more cream of celery soup. I stared for a while at the screen, and then laughed.
Still unsure if this was some 4/1 joke, I checked google and found a page saying that there's actually that easter egg in the game that shows that message.
That was the only thing today that left me with the jaw open. I hope there are still some places where I will be off guard on next April Fools... Slashdot hasn't one of them for a long while.
What's really not funny about today is how little a sense of humor most slashdot readers have. Maybe you didn't think the stories were funny, and sure, some of them weren't, but that doesn't mean you should yell and scream at Taco and the rest. If you're so worried about tech news that you can't go a whole day without it, you've got issues.
Thanks for the usual April Fools Day flame- every year people fall for it. It never ceases to amaze me how angry and venomous, yet utterly clueless a few people can be despite the blatant obviousness of the joke.
Ohhhh, I see. You posted one April Fool's story after another, abondaoning all subtlety and thus destroying all the humor intentionally? You did it just so you could sit back and watch people flame you?
Internet culture has a word for people like you. The word is "troll."
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The worst -- and funniest -- abuse of the clueless is AOLiza. Take the oldest and lamest online shrink, hook it up to a well-known message system, and you will laugh until you have trouble breathing.
God, I'm cruel and arrogant...
Would you like me to:
* Fuck the spelling up
* Post this multiple times as different people
* Add a stupid opinionated comment at the end
* Forget to close a HTML tag
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent