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Gates Comdex Keynote Shows Plans, Matrix Spoof
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."
Gates plans to trap humanity in his own MS Matrix. Of course, there will be bugs in the system allowing people like Neo to pop-up and hack in.
Hmm...still looks better than Revolutions.
How many times can Bill get on stage, claim that "Microsoft is refocusing its effors into security", and be believable? I mean, they supposedly shifted all these resources into fixing the holes in Windows, and, well, we all know how well THAT went. Now we're supposed to roll over, forget about that, and say, "Oh, okay. He means it this time. I believe him."?
Then the glitches would be a feature
Agent Smith would need to be updated ever 2 weeks to avoid the latest expolit which would allow Neo to destroy him
It would have to be rebooted every month to free up the memory leaks
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I didn't know the Borg had a sense of humor.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
Now that is just wrong.
Wrong I tell you.
So very, very wrong that I cannot begin to fathom just how craptastically crappy this crap is.
Imagine. Using a popular culture movie to debase your competition and promote your crappy vaporware. Where do I sign up for this crap? I want off your lists. All of them. And your parent company lists too. No, don't try and sell me your product by linking it to a popular movie reference, please. Let it stand on it's own merit. Oh, you say it's all smoke and mirrors and you don't have the features I want? Too bad, no money for you, bye now.
Grrr.
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
Gates and Steve Ballmer as Morpheus and Neo respectively
Um, I thought Ballmer was the fat one.
I can much more easily picture Morpheus dancing around the Zion cave shouting "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" ad naseum, than Neo.
I mean come on!!! A more appropriate spoof would be that those two were the virus version Smith (crikey, I'm writing this now and listening to the Animatrix OST and Red Pill Blue Pill is on!!!)... yeah Longhorn would have to be the Matrix code, constraining humanity and the problem is choice: which MS don't want people to have.
Plus, the Matrix is due for a critical crash, hmm the parrallels are endless...
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
As Switch. One of the Nebuchadnezzar crew that got killed really early on the first movie and was promptly forgotten about forever.
Isn't that dying faster than *BSD?
sulli
RTFJ.
The Matrix spoof, and not about the business plan.
I haven't seen it (yet) but doesn't Neo die in the movie :D
:D
Which is Neo again?
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Neo: What is the Matrix?
Morpheus: Unfortunately no one can be told what the Matrix is.
Neo: Why?
Morpheus: My tablet PC just crashed.
Borland did this years ago
Borland Matrix spoof
So much for Microsoft inovation.
For the part where Agent Linux burns Bills eyes out and then he finally can see all the Linux everywhere...
The irony is that Linux still has a very small market share, but Billy's response to Linux in this spoof, by linking it to IBM, tends to make Linux even bigger than it is, and makes it look like it is more competition than it is yet.
As someone who has been in marketing for 20 years now, I know the best way to make your competition look small is ignore them in public, and sweat them in private. This is just petty crapola by Billy and Company, but it serves to make MS look bad, and Linux to look better by being the butt of a joke made by "the evil empire". I mean, the method they used to parody Linux is fine, even remotely humorous, but doesn't serve their marketing dept. very well.
Seriously, this may sound odd to some of you, but this is a fundamental marketing mistake, this is Marketing 201 stuff, not that advanced. This is typical of a company that thinks it is invincible, or thinks the competition can never catch up. Problem is, no one else believes this except Billy and Co.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
thank you bill for pusing the envelope.
2 1337 4 u!
It's interesting that they've positioned Linux as the Matrix (the establishment), and Microsoft as Neo/Morpheus (the underdogs/rebels). I'd have thought the reverse would be a more accurate analogy ...
pictures only
Mirror of the images
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Ah, kids today.
:)
Some of you may not be aware of this, but at one point (20-25 years ago) Microsoft was seen as the little guy, fighting against the big, powerful, market-dominating, innovation-stifling IBM. Remind anyone of a certain penguin?
Microsoft has turned into everything they used to be against (and sometimes worse). Kinda reminds me of what happens to revolutionaries in the political world. Let's just hope Linus' ego can be kept in check
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Gates plans to trap humanity in his own MS Matrix
;-)
You mean like that?
Nope. According to netcraft:
The site www.tabletpctalk.com is running Apache/1.3.20 Sun Cobalt (Unix) Chili!Soft-ASP/3.6.2 mod_ssl/2.8.4 OpenSSL/0.9.6b mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.0.6 mod_auth_pam_external/0.1 FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_perl/1.25 on Linux.
0x0D 0x0A
At least you were original... oh, wait--nevermind. You were just another imitator. Please, world, I beg of you: bite styles wantonly and give credit never! That's the only way for culture to survive!
Wow, he's called "steve-o" ? The marketing / PR folks screwed the pooch a bit there.
Nothing like having one of your two most recognizable corporate officers sharing a name with a guy who's known for stapling his ball sack to his leg.
The other Steve-o
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Larry Elison as the Oracle!
For those of you too lazy to cut and paste the address, here is a link.
Next week, there'll be an article on how the company MS contracted to put this movie together did it with Apple iMovie or somesuch.
"Old man yells at systemd"
All this time I thought it was that leather trenchcoat making Laurence Fishburne look so cool. I need a mental shower now to clean the image of Bill Gates in a long leather coat.
Courtesy of the Rejected Post Machine
2003-11-17 08:56:08 Comdex 2003 Opens with Bill Gates Talking Security (articles,comdex) (rejected)
Bill Gates delivered a keynote speech on Sunday evening to open COMDEX, as he has done for the last 20 years. Interesting parts of his security-heavy speech include Microsoft's research budget, with Gates saying that this year Microsoft 'will spend $6.8 billion in R&D, that's double what we spent five years ago;' admitting that tools which scan for stack or buffer overruns and other security problems 'are tools that we're not applying in our development process;' that security is 'certainly the largest thing that we're doing;' but waffled on security/patch management with this statement: 'Now, to really provide security, the software has to be kept up to date and the software updates have to be clearly partitioned so that things that are just optional and new features are kept separate from the hopefully increasingly rare updates that relate to security issues that have really thoroughly been checked to make sure they won't cause any regression.' Gates continued on about Trustworthy Computing, security, spam, firewalls, policy controls, XML, 'Seamless Computing' and the long-delayed Longhorn. There was also a parody of the Matrix starring Bill Gates as Morpheus and Steve Ballmer as Neo, with the Matrix represented by Linux-selling IBM consultants and the Real World as Windows-based. You can read the full text of Bill Gates' speech from COMDEX (with demos from three other Microsofties) or view the entire presentation online (56kbps low | 100 kbps med | 300 kbps high) for the next week. A warning though: the speech is over an hour long.
Other than that, I know some guys that would rather choke on a blue pill that size than go Windows.
If you're referring to the size of the pills, I thought that was pretty funny, having the tiny red pill be windows, and the gigantic blue pill be IBM/linux. It's a joke on IBM of course, a play on "Big Blue"
0x0D 0x0A
If Linux is the Matrix, and Windows is the rebel humans fighting back... would Slashdot be the Merovingian, the supreme trafficker of information hoping to know all that it can and in the mean time falling short of disguising its favoring Linux?
Geddit?
Gates plans to trap humanity in his own MS Matrix.
Let's just pray Agent Clippy doesn't learn how to copy himself!
GMD
watch this
...as Agent Smith!
Of all the things that money can buy, a personality isn't one of them.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
God, that was a funny film.
Linux: A clone of Minix, itself a clone of UNIX.
UNIX: A rough implementation of Multics, written expressly so that Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie could port a game called Space Travel to old, cheap hardware.
Who's got new ideas now?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win."
-Gandhi
So what stage are we at now?
Moerphus: I want Windows. Lots of Windows.
Daytona
Oh, yeah. I hate those LINUX Kernel Errors that pop up all the time... Who wrote that into Gnome anyway?
Gladly, as long as we look at the ones that matter: ROOT exploits (or those that can escalate to root.
Don't confuse every announce bug report or errata that comes along as a real-world usable root exploit under Linux.
The Linux community is VERY quick to release a patch if there is even the REMOTE POSSIBILITY of a root exploit. 9 times out of 10 they are theoretical and they're just being cautios by patching it.
Macro$haft on the other hand only releases a patch after an exploit (almost always the equivelant of root, with complete control over the system) has been in the wild for months and they can't hide it any longer.
You simply can NOT compare exploits by number and think that it means anything. You MUST compare by the damage done and the number of compromised systems, and M$ gets its arse kicked every day.
No, Neo dies in the new Harry Potter book. Hope this helps.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
This is a sign of weakness that they do this. I wonder how much money and time they wasted on this but apparently after seeing that fictional Linux kernel error, probably not much.
This guy is way out there
The linux pill's huge, but you can chop it up into tiny pieces and just swallow what you want. The Windows pill, however, is a suppository and makes you gain 300 lbs in a few days.
You are looking at everything big picture. Great, but the devil is in the details. Saying that microsoft isn't an innovator is like saying that berkley doesn't do Physics. Its the small gradual improvements that make great ideas into great products.
Oh and you forgot about IE. Copied from Mosaic.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Maybe they aren't considering Linux a serious threat yet, but rather maneuvering to gain the appearance of a competitive marketplace. I will bet in another year or so they'll really start to bemoan Linux and how its tearing the market away from them, all the while working carefully to make sure that it is never taken seriously enough to gain dominance. Seems like a fine strategy. Let [submit 3rd world market here] convert to Linux, their poor, rich governments will continue to use what they believe to be the worlds most productive (and aggressively none compatible) OS.
;-)
Even as I write this in Mozilla I spell check it with Word.
Microsoft more then just about anyone needs to get the word out about Linux right now. Will it bite them in the ass? We sure as hell are working on it.
Quack, quack.
Please mod parent back down to normal. He has a highly misleading view of history that has been modded up to +3.
Misleading item #1: "Linux is a clone of Minux, itself a clone of Unix". Completely incorrect, although seemingly-plausible to newbies due to the historical association of these things.
I evaluated Minix back when it was hot stuff, and I rejected it precisely because it was not a clone of Unix. It was a toy version of Unix. If it had been a good clone, I would have used it, no problem.
A few years later, I evaluated Linux. It was not a toy version of either Minix nor Unix, it was a true clone of Unix. So I started using it.
Now, ok, Linux was a true clone of Unix back then, this much is true (although not quite what the poster said), and hence yes, Linux back then was not a new idea.
But so what? The point is that it was a FREELY AVAILABLE, OPEN SOURCE clone of Unix -- which is exactly what millions of us were waiting for. Minix wasn't real Unix...BSD was, but wasn't freely available back then...Linux was a god send.
Misleading item #2: "UNIX: A rough implementation of Multics, written expressly so that Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie could port a game called Space Travel to old, cheap hardware."
No, Unix is not any kind of version of Multics, that is just plain wrong. Sure, it borrowed a few ideas; the Unix authors were involved in authoring Multics, so surely that is no surprise. But "a version of"? No. Wrong. Completely wrong.
As for "Written so that...Space Travel..." could run on some platform? Sure, that's part of the history...so what? The question is, what did they come up with as a result?
The parent post is a cynical, distorted view of history that is grinding an axe to achieve an agenda. Please mod it back down to a normal +1 opinion. It is NOT insightful nor informative.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
...lots of bugs."
As someone who has been in marketing for 20 years now
Over the last 20 years, Bill Gates has amassed a fortune of around $50B by building a company that has about $50B in cash.
But I'm sure you know way more than him about marketing and such.....
Do you have ESP?
Because Debian holds itself responsible for all of the packages that comprise the distribution, which by now has already exceeded the 10000 (ten thousand) packages mark, whereas Microsoft is only responsible for the security of its own barebones operating system and whichever other products it sells, like its Office suice.
From the Dissociated Press:
(DP)After regaining my composure, I realized their take on the Matrix was all wrong. The horse suppository sized pill was mis-marked, should have been the Windows pill. It should have gone in the other end, after Balmer, timidly pointing to the small Linux pill, finally submits - smiling and whistling a show tune.
- Vin Dozier, Las Vegas
This was just feeding dog food to the dogs - nothing more, nothing less.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
No, but they're sueing, claiming that the Architect, and therefore The Matrix, contains millions of lines of SCO code. (has SCO ever written any code?)
Note that so far noone seems to have made any serious comment on the presentation. Just a lot of jokes. What MS says is just not taken serious here. Does that matter? Nope.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
And while we're playing at "famous compromises", we can't forget the Microsoft corporate compromises either. Not that I would want to mimic your smug tone nor intrude on your own zealotry.
Sorry about that, heres the right one Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Excellent! This will give me a chance to try out my latest invention - these pressure pills. opens a bottle and a giant pill falls out Fry: Are you crazy? I cant swallow that! Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Well, then good news! It's a suppository! I seem to have a detour from my brain to my mouth/keyboard. The message gets fiddled with in transit :p
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
The difference is that UNIX and Linux developers generally don't claim to be innovating. Instead, they implement tried-and-true, open standards.
Microsoft claims they are innovating. That's how they are marketing their stuff. That's how they see themselves. And, worse yet, they are reinventing the bad ideas.
It's hard to come up with anything new in operating systems. Just about anything has been tried and suggested before. The only thing that distinguishes different people and projects is how well they know the past and how honest they are about it.
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.
But I totally get Ballmer as Neo - you've seen his matrix training film.
Carthago delenda est!
I haven't seen the full flick (just some still shots) but I think this does end up being some simple marketing strategy.
.. poke fun at it, associate it with evil & lock in with IBM, etc..
;)
Microsoft can't simply ignore Linux. If they don't satisfy current customers curiousity with their own statements regarding the competition, the customers will go out and do their own research. Doing a head-to-head comparison doesn't work very well.. so what are they going to do? Tout that Windows is more secure? more reliable? more portable? more accessible? less bloated? cheaper?
MS has tried spewing FUD. They tried to prove that MS solutions are superior to others via paid studies. They forced OEMs and distribution channels to NOT pre-install Linux or even OS-free computer systems. There is loose evidence that Microsoft helps fund companies and other organizations that try to fight or otherwise dimish the impact FOSS has.
Those tactics didn't work. So now they are effectively trying to dismiss Linux
I dont think it will work. Every day the FOSS movement grows stronger. More developers, more users, more contributors, more projects, more rollouts, larger announcements, new uses, etc.. Microsoft knows that the single biggest problem with software is it is easily duplicated (one of the reasons why they got into software in the first place).. However, that same trait that made Microsoft the huge corporation it now is will be, I believe, the same trait that will either completely change Microsoft as we know it or slowly destroy Microsoft as a company.
In anycase, its fun to sit back and watch.
Yep. The origional Fluffy Bunny rant. You can still find mirrors of the origional defaced page (complete with cute graphics and the above rant). The rant itself shows up in Slashdot archives and Google Groups often enough.
I don't get it.
Microsoft represents the ragtag rebel alliance trying to save the majority sheeples from the all-powerful IBM-Linux Matrix?
Never mind remedial security courses for Microsoft programmers. Their ad-men need remedial courses in film interpretation and allegory.
Or someone needs to take their copies of 1984 away. I'm pretty sure that an ad campaign on freeing people from the Linux monopoly is a bit too unsubtle for, well, for anyone.
Aside: I'm still ambivalent about the Matrix. You would be too, if you had taught introductory philosophy courses at Carnegie Mellon. Three-quarters of the geeks in my course had signed up for philosophy because they thought it was just like the Matrix.
I don't mind if I never hear another Descartes/Wachowski comparison again. Especially if I never hear that Descartes would be better with more explosions and slo-mo bullets.
Phiwum's law: anyone that names an obvious law after himself and then puts it in his own sig is just pathetic.
Most people here seem to hate that spoof, and it seems just because it's MicroSoft making fun out of Linux.
I really hate MicroSoft, and I really love Linux. But I have to admit that this spoof has style. I mean, it's normal for MicroSoft to bash Linux, but this time they're doing it with style, and I find it very funny.
It's not good to take everything serious, and while I really hate MS, billg and Monkeyboy this spoof really is funny, IMHO. It's childish to say it's bad just because it's MS bashing Linux. If it were Linus and Alan Cox doing that very same video, bashing MicroSoft, everyone would praise it as the best piece of humor in IT ever...
Continuing on the Matrix theme, how about "Everything that has a begining, has an end." Sounds good for the new microsoft slogan.
This is spoiler ...
... :)
don't read if you havent see Matrix Revolution !!!!
Will the end of Gates 'Neo' will be the same as Neo in matrix revolutions ? Will he surrender and asking peace treatment to Linux ? and will Gates 'die' in peace like Neo in Matrix ?
If like that, then Linux rock
./me --G--