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Microsoft in Peru, Living Room
Two pieces of Microsoft news today. tfofurn writes "According to this AP quickie and this Reuters story, both on Yahoo, Microsoft is donating 'about $550,000 in money, software and consulting services to the Peruvian government for educational and "e-government" initiatives' to Peru. The AP story mentions the conflict of this with Edgar Villanueva's proposal to have the government use only open source software. Villanueva (/. interview), you may recall, wrote a famous letter to MS Peru a few months ago." And many people have submitted stories about Windows XP Media Center, coming this winter to a living room near you.
I walked in on my parents once when they were having a(n AP) quickie.
-- Scientist: You aren't going to leave me here, are you? Boagh! Thump...
Recently, Microsoft announced "Digital Ink," a handwriting-recognition technology that many compare to Apple's InkWell, both respectively set to debut in the next major revisions of Windows and Mac OS X. As whenever similar technologies pop up at Microsoft, Apple Mac zealots ask a few questions: Was Microsoft's Digital Ink developed in-house at Microsoft? Was it bought from a third-party? Grabbed from a sub-licensor?
The answer is that Digital Ink came directly from Apple. But the story behind how Microsoft was able to so simply buy InkWell and rename it for use in Windows is a tale of moral depravity and sordid carnal desperation that few are privy to-- until today! Read on to discover how Microsoft came to own yet another key Apple technology in the most sordid of political maneuverings.
It all began in the late 1970s. Steve Jobs, after a night of smoking marijuana and tripping on "acid" (lysergic acid diethylamide), conceived of a way to interact with computers using only the mind. Well-known at Stanford for his telekinetic abilities, such as making entire fields of grass sway with but a thought, Steve wanted to move the "mouse" and "menu" (bizarre, alien concepts to anyone outside of his clique of 2600 hackers and EE alcoholics) with nothing but the power of his mind. Of course his compatriots, peaceful, bearded Steve Wozniak and the illegally immigrated Avie Tevanian, dismissed the idea as yet another episode of harmless drug-induced rambling.
In 2002, 26 years after his messianic user interface vision, Steve Jobs was hard at work in the deepest part of Apple's labs, personally overseeing secret user interface experimentation. It turns out that Steve had never forgotten about his psychedelic user-interface dream and was tirelessly attempting to realize it 30 miles beneath Cupertino, CA. Down here, in his "dungeon," the attempts to connect silicon to carbon were in full force and without regard to their subjects.
Some men had industrial-grade alligator clamps attached to their nipples and testicles which were randomly jolted with millions of volts of electricity in order to stimulate their brains. Other men had deadly mixtures of cocaine and heroin ("eight-balls") injected into their penises while being forced to watch gay porn. Another group endured horrible procedures in which their own arms, legs, and scrotums were replaced with those of gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. One smaller group were forced to smoke opium eight hours a day alternately being whipped and beaten until they managed to move the cursor a pixel or two with just their poppy-addled minds. The most successes, however, had come from Steve's own bizarre device dubbed "handJobs."
handJobs was a series of wires and electro-sensitive pads placed on the fingertips that allowed one to manipulate elements of the Mac OS GUI with simple motions. Steve Jobs, being telekinetic from years of tripping acid, wielded it more powerfully than anyone else in his RD dungeon. In fact, so powerful was his mind that he like to hook the wires and pads up to his own penis and controlled his Power Mac by means of pelvic thrusts and lude gyrations of his hairy penis and scrotum.
Bill Gates, on a visit to the Apple Campus, accidentally stumbled onto handJobs in a moment that would change UI in computing forever. Feeling that he simply owned the Apple Campus as he did the rest of the world, Mr. Gates walked into Steve Jobs's private office without knocking. Steve was in the middle of "making love" to thin air, pants in a puddle at his ankles, hands on hips, thrusting his engorged member at the monitor! He had decided to take his latest revision of the device to his office to test out when Mr. Gates had walked in on him! Gates knew what he liked and liked what he saw, and began immediately bargaining with Jobs.
By the end of the day, Jobs had created a new technology agreement with Gates. Apple would begin partnering with Microsoft on alternative input technologies, and by late June MS would announce "Digital Ink" for Windows. In reality Digital Ink was a front, and both it and InkWell for Mac OS were place-holders for what handJobs would eventually become. Until handJobs was ready, however, the masses would be fed OCR capabilities from the operating system. Before the ink on the contract was signed, however, Jobs had finagled Gates into receiving a "technology preview" of handJobs, with Jobs attempting to control Gate's breathing with nothing but his leathery scrotal sack, using Gates's chin as a "touch pad."
Now you know the immoral, homo-erotic history behind InkWell, Digital Ink, and the next generation of OCR and handwriting-recogntion. I hope that Apple Macintosh zealots everywhere think about this before they blindly evangelize their operating system of choice, inadvertently infecting the minds of the masses with years of sweating gay RD and "bleeding edge" (of anus) techno-faggotry.
Did you folks see that screenshot of the "simple interface"? That thing looks more like the menus on my parents' satellite TV service than a computer interface. Note the preinstalled categories ("My TV," "My Music," etc.), as if "My Documents" and "My Computer" weren't bad enough.
Also, did anybody else catch the marketroid jargon in the puffy-poo press release at microsoft.com? Wow, how many times can they use the word "freedom" in six column inches anyway? This from the same company who's pushing Palladium.
And what was that about a computer going from being "a tool for productivity" (ok, if you say so) to being "a device capable of entertainment, communications and so much more." I don't like either term in that zero-sum equation. (Can't we just define computers as tools or something and leave "productivity" [whatever that's supposed to mean, really] out of it?) It's a little agendist for my taste, and all of that agenda is (natch) Microsoft. (Pardon me for stating the obvious.)
I hate to lapse into darkly paranoid hypotheses here, but is this yet another multitentacled strategy to turn the Internet into TV with fewer moving parts? I don't think I like either term in that zero-sum equation, either...especially since I happen to like being able to create my own content (and look at whatever I want whenever I want), and I mostly quit doing TV years ago.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Why can't M$ just label things without the ridiculous personal identifier? Perhaps instead we could have the "Bob Dole" effect:
Bob Dole's Pictures
Bob Dole's Videos
Bob Dole's Music
Bob Dole's Documents
Bob Dole's Erectile Disfunction
[sic]
At up to 3 lbs per bird per day a flock of geese camped out on your yard make a disgusting mess.
I think we should rent a helicopter and spread birdseed.