Slashdot Mirror
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."?
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
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.
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.
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!
Actually, that doesn't sound too different from the movie plot. Agent Smith obviously hadn't been patched because Neo exploited him immediately upon gaining Administrator access. And we learned that the Matrix must be "reloaded" periodically to fix the humans that "leak" from the main program...
End of lesson. You may press the button.
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.
And Neo would have to pay the Oracle $60 up-front just to talk to her over the phone.
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!
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.
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.
If the matrix was built on a Linux platform, it would never work, because device drivers for human beings wouldn't exist.
evil adrian
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?
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.
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
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.