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Gates Comdex Keynote Shows Plans, Matrix Spoof

Posted by simoniker on from the he-knows-kung-fu dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to Eweek, Bill Gates' keynote speech at this year's Comdex showed Microsoft's 'focus on security, spam and [the] tablet PC', including a new version of its Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server, an extension of the SmartScreen Technology for spam prevention, and the next version of the Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system. But the showstopper was a filmed spoof of The Matrix (screencaps available here), with Gates and Steve Ballmer as Morpheus and Neo respectively, and including a jab at Linux."

5 of 803 comments (clear)

  1. first post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    haha

  2. vid clip by Robocrap · · Score: 0, Redundant

    vid clip at http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2003/1 1-16comdex2003.asp

    the que is at: 16:05

    enjoy.


    (or not)

    1. Re:vid clip by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant

      From 16:10 to a little after 21:00 there is a static image saying "Due to the proprietary nature of the content in our program, we must temporarily suspend the video and audio portion of our broadcast. Normal program will resume in a few moments."

      Is this the kind of instant control the DRM-enabled future will have??

  3. The Matrix spoof looks nice from the screenshots.. by SlashDotAgent · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Where can we get it?? B-)

  4. Re:If only your ideology had some basis in reality by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Actually, my 'record' in so far as I keep track of such things, is 138 days. Since it's a home network, if I leave, such as during an over the weekend vacation, I shut everything down. Now, an old win95 computer I used to use for email, that's had uptimes of more than 200 days (post 4billion microseconds patch, or whatever it was that caused it to crash every 40 days.) And that one is built off some pretty flakey hardware. Hell the case is permanently bent from when the earthquake knocked it off my desk. Randomly, that didn't seem to bother windows at all; I, however, was less than thrilled.

    I can believe linux as a commandline webserver probably does just rule all in low-end bang for buck. I still have fond memeories of my shell account back when I was in school. But it, aside from the fantastic beauty of KDE, is hardly a panacea that evangelists make it out to be. No, I did not take their proclimations literally, I expected them to be the exaggerations that walk hand in hand with ideology. But god, nautilus, what ass, the permissions and how they're handled, the seeming difficulty to come up with a 'run-as' ala windows and make it available to any application, to say nothing of a elegant and powerful find utility (and please save yourself the humiliation of bringing up the command line version).

    Certainly, I am surprised. At least as much by those touting linux's power and functionality, and their completely laughable claims, as by the fact that those preahcing of KDE's nearly unparalleled beauty were speaking the literal truth.

    To claims of uptime, I'm left to wonder, "Doing what?" I to could write a 'Hello world' program that repeated certainly millions, perhaps billions, and maybe even trillions of times before it failed unexpectedly. While it might allow me to make fantastic claims about the reliability of the programs I write, it would ultimately be trivial, both in acomplishment and ambition. Linux, of course, is no 'Hello World' and it's mildly insulting to imply it is; however, in that similar vein, windows 2000 is no linux.

    Ultimately, I'll press on with my little experiment. KDE does look that damn good. And with a little more work, it'll look even better. The greatest thing I'll likely take away is the appreciation for how ridiculously simple Microsoft made the fantastically tedious and unnecessarily difficult.