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2005 Foot In Mouth Awards
jollyroger1210 writes "Wired is running a story on the 2005 Foot In Mouth Awards." From the article: "Tech execs say the darndest things. And so do shuffling presidents, and disgraced scientists, and Wikipedia fakers. It's time to relive 2005's biggest spoken gaffes."
"I know what I don't know, and to this day I don't know technology and I don't know accounting and finance."
-- Bernie Ebbers, ex-CEO of WorldCom
I'm going to sacrafice some karma for this, but I truly don't care.
First of all, who cares if Slashdot posts it a little late?
Honestly, Some of us do not visit 'digg' or any of that crap. Why? Becasue it's full of little children who have no idea what they're talking about.
So if it was posted there first, who cares? No one, except for you and the other 'anti-slashdot' kids. If you're so enthralled in the fact that 'digg' posts it first then, guess what? Go there and read digg.
I, personally, am going to stay here at slashdot. Why? Because I can actually get smarter by reading some posts. I just got more ignorant trying to decrypt the aol-leet-speek-kid posts at Digg.
Slashdot may have it's share of problems, but it also has some great minds that read it and contribute.
Sony's only on there once.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Screwing it would scratch the screen. Don't screw it.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
this guy http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/23/15 13203&tid=141&tid=158&tid=3&tid=106
We're talking about the biggest spoken gaffes in 2005, not 2004. Both of your links are dated in 2004.
You know, the "Apple iTunes phone" is made by Motorola, and actually was the subject of that quote. The Nano and the ROKR (like the RAZR, but with iTunes compatibility) were released around the same time, and the quote is basically saying, "Screw the Nano. Get a ROKR and you can have your iTunes songs and a phone all in the same unit." Of course, the ROKR is sucking pretty bad, and the Nano has been insanely popular. Thus, foot in mouth.
Well said! Regular readers all know that Slashdot, editorially, is fairly mediocre. Awful editing and spelling, frequent duplicate posts, and so on. But it's the moderation system and comments that make it shine. Where else can you read astrophysicists discuss the latest astronomy finding, or professional engineers dissecting the latest technology invention? Thanks to moderation, the best posts rise to the top.
The one time I visited Digg, I found the comments worthless.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Chair-to-the-wall has won Number Two!
"'I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google.'"
-Steve Ballmer
Excellent.
"Well, considering the Mororola RAZR phone is one of the hottest-selling out there"
I don't think you have a clue as to what is a hot-selling phone. I work in a phone store (by all means I think we're representative of Queensland, Australia) and we struggled to get our only Motorola V300 RAZR out the door.
Motorola is complete crap and have been for years. They're just not a serious competitor against far better offerings from Nokia and other manufacturers.
The "640K should be enough for everybody" quote was made by an IBM official. The first IBM PC had the CGA or MGA graphics at memory address 0xB0000 or 0xB8000. The EGA card which was introduced with the IBM AT in 1984 had its memory at 0xA0000, limiting system memory to 640K. The quote was made in response to accusations that IBM needlessly limited system memory to 640 K by putting it at 0xA0000 when it could also have used 0xD0000 or higher.
It has nothing to do with Microsoft. MS-DOS would use up to 768 K without problems if you didn't have an EGA or VGA card.
I have mod points, but there's no option for +3 Guilt Trip. Really - it's fine. The World forgives you.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
"Walk this way, talk this wa-ay."
-- Intel chairman Craig Barrett
The most embarrassing executive antics of the year came early in 2005, as a tone-deaf, stiff white guy stepped up to the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show and joined Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler in a duet.
Watching the video, I was amused trying to determine who was actually the older white guy...
The whole demo with the crazy kids is pretty awkward too. Tyler gives a little speech to the audience... *shudder*
Man, get over it. Like the Swift Boat Vets, the Dan Rather story is more a case of corruption and blog bullying than anything else, it's definitely not "a return to truth in journalism", or whatever you may think it is. They decided what they wanted to say, shoved their fingers in their ears and screamed "it's fake" until someone noticed.
It was more about PR cleanup than fact checking. The question is not "is this legit?", but "how can we manipulate belief"? They had people discussing how to tear it down within 10 or 15 minutes of its first airing. The qualifications of the people discussing the matter? Well, it's a memo. You could ask people in print manufacturing, or forensics. You could ask an army desk jockey. You could even ask any secretary old enough to have used one of those typewriters. Instead, it was freepers, marketing people, PR, politicians, newscasters, paid political operatives(bloggers!), and the like. Oh, and a few computer guys. Most weren't even born yet in the era of that typewriter or Bush's service.
Me? I work in printing. The family business is printing, and my father was in computer repair for decades. My childhood was spent with inky fingers, learning programming or fixing hardware. So, I know both areas pretty well, and I didn't buy it. The really clever thing is that the real point of the matter was "did Bush fulfill obligations?" not the placement of a fucking letter or apostrophe. Kudos on making sure the voting public avoided that question and discussed decades old typewriters instead.
It's an exercise in the efficiency of the conservative political machine. You're not even discussing the topic at hand. You're discussing 2004 in a "let's remember 2005" comments section. We should both be modded for being offtopic. And you should learn that you can't reuse calenders.
"Mr. Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop -- I think a more realistic title should be 'the $100 gadget.'"
-- Intel chairman Craig Barrett
Who is getting the foot in the mouth here? Mr. Negroponte?
The human race is artificial intelligence created using object orientated programming.
Motorola is complete crap and have been for years. They're just not a serious competitor against far better offerings from Nokia and other manufacturers.
e pub?sectionId=840:
Well, according to http://products.consumerguide.com/reviews/browse.
Top Rated Mobile/Cell Phones
* Motorola EV-DO E815 CDMA Mobile Phone Review
* Nokia 3220 GMS Mobile Telephone Review
* LG Verizon Wireless VX7000 CDMA Mobile Phone Review
* Samsung SGH-e315 GSM Mobile Phone Review
* Motorola RAZR V3 GSM Mobile Phone Review
Motorola takes the #1 and #5 spots. That's 2/5 of the top 5 rated mobile phones. No other company takes more than one spot. So... What again?
My page.
Digg for the headlines. Slashdot for the commentary.
Yeah, Digg's comments are pretty worthless, but I think it has to do more with how it's commenting system is set up more than the reader base. Slashcode, for all its flaws, has a really nice system to sort, write, and moderate comments. Meanwhile, Digg doesn't even have threads, making each comment more of an island than part of a discussion. And anyone who knows who the koolaidguy is knows that Digg's moderation needs some work.
In any case, its nice to see Slashdot finally have some competition.
vi ~/.emacs
He actually said F-asterisk-asterisk-asterisk but when typing it out it's much easier to use *
Yeah, I'll get right on that.
Seriously, why is printing "f**k" so difficult? I'm from Europe and I really can't understand you Americans.
:). I guess you made a similar mistake as someone in America who would try to imagine Paris from the "Amelie" movie - it just depicts a nonexistent culture of a nonexistent city in a nonexistent country.
I'm from Europe too and I think I have an explanation. We tend to learn American English primary from American popular culture - movies, song lyrics, comics, video games etc. That's why we think that the f-word is so common in everyday usage of American English - we imagine this country as populated mostly by hip handsome mobsters, private detectives in trench coats, muscular tatooed Afroamerican cocaine dealers able to rhyme everything with "mothafucka", bespectacled mad computer geniuses etc. When I set my foot for the first time on LAX, the biggest surprise for me was that actually everyone I met seemed to be nice and gentle, totally unlike what I have imagined from "Grand Theft Auto" or "Blade Runner"
LOL, awwwww...THANK YOU!
In case people haven't realised yet: THE ITUNES PHONE IS MADE BY MOTOROLA AND THE "TWO PHONES" IN THE PARENT POST ARE THE SAME PHONE
Sorry about the CAPS, but it seems incredible that noone seems to have paid heed to the corrections posted.
And to think you're currently being rated as insightful.
It's a mindset thing. Americans are taught from birth that it is wrong (and possibly sinful) to say certain words. My mother still cringes when I say 'fuck' and I've said it a LOT.
To me, it's just a word. Like 'blimey'. Nobody screams bloody murder when you say 'blimey', and yet it's used in the same way.
Or let's look at replacement words... 'Frack' and 'frell' are a couple scifi replacements for 'fuck'. They are extremely obvious what they are, and yet nobody cares if they are said.
There are even other, more obvious words... Shit and crap are EXACTLY the same thing. Why is one a 'cuss word' and the other merely another word for excrement?
This bothered me for a few years and I spent those years cursing like a sailor. With reasonable people, it made no difference at all. But lately, it's gotten boring and I've decided to try to keep it to a minimum, mainly for something to do while I'm speaking. (Speech is boring and can use a lot of livening-up.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I've seen a nice one. In place of the banner killed by adblock:
"The site won't survive without money from ads. Switch off that adblock, please."
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
"Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" -- Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG's global digital business division The music giant responds in an NPR interview to complaints that anti-copying technology on some of its CDs creates serious security vulnerabilities in computers
Once upon a time a student writing a paper on Communism for a class on fascism and totalitarianism told his professor that he had been visited by agents of Homeland Security because he had placed a request for Chairman Mao's Little Red Book through the inter-library loan program.
y /12-05/12-17-05/a09lo650.htm
y /12-05/12-24-05/a01lo719.htm
Agents' visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior
http://www.southcoasttoday.com.nyud.net:8090/dail
There's just one little thing the student didn't count on...
Sometimes professors do not take things at face value, sometimes they actually do some research and they check things, they ask questions, and sometimes they notice inconsistencies.
They're smart like that. They really are. That's why professors are professors and why students are students, and why small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri are small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. But I digress...
Anyhow, to make a long story short, this student's professor asked some questions. This student's professor noticed some inconsistencies in the student's story. This student's professor asked the student's parents some questions. This student's professor found more inconsistencies in the student's story. This student's professor did even more checking.
In the end this student's professor found that not a single thing that the student had told him could be verified. The professor confronted his student who tearfully admitted that the story of being visited by agents of Homeland Security was a complete fabrication.
Federal agent's visit was a hoax
http://www.southcoasttoday.com.nyud.net:8090/dail
This student's cobbled up story which had caused news articles and editorials to be written, which had caused much heated discussion on the Internet, in the end was unravelled and shot to pieces because the student's professor had not taken it at face value and had asked questions until he got at the truth of the matter.
Now, you may ask, who put their foot in their mouth in this story? Well, I'll tell you. Many people on the discussion board where you now read this very post put their feet in their mouths by spewing intemperate comments as a result of uncritically accepting the statements of a liar as the truth. I'd say that's a pretty good foot in the mouth story and a pretty good cautionary tale as well.
"Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
-- Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG's global digital business division
sounds like:
"Most people don't even know what AIDS is, so why should they care about it?"
I helped developing a operating system kernel back in my university years and we also had this limit and that's because of the 386 memory management. We had to remap all the memory twice, one half to be accessed by programs and the other half to be accessed by the operating system in a root level (sorry, it was over 10 years ago, I don't really remember the details of why it was really needed). Since the 386 can address up to 4Gb of memory, half of this is 2Gb. Don't blame Bill Gates this time, blame Intel. (By the way, is there anyone there who knows Linux well enough to tell us if it also has this limit or something like that?)
So say we all
or this one... "Brownie You're doing a heck of a job."
"I'm a uniter, not a divider", "yellow cake uranium", "we will catch bin laden dead or alive", "weapons of mass destruction", "I will appoint a moderate to the supreme court", etc. Or my personal favorite, although not quite as quotable to those with low attention spans, is this new one; "To say `unchecked power' basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the president, which I strongly reject...".
Grow the fuck up, you loser. I couldn't give two shits where the President sticks his dick. Even if it's a fat girl. Unless he wants to put it in one of my orifices, it's none of my business. Like the OJ trials, I was one of the very few that never watched nor cared to waste my time watching something so stupid.
Also, it was four years ago, so you might as well be talking about Carter being afraid of a bunny rabbit, Nixon being a crook, JFK cheating on his wife, or George Washington and his wooden teeth. It's ancient history. But I guess talking about someone's sex life and their genitals is going to be the defining cultural event for your entire life. Maybe all of American History!
I know we're not talking about things you can giggle over anymore, but it's because they're fucking important!
But he was talking about the ROKR, not the RAZR.
Some just don't get it. USA, where sex with one person is more important than war with another country.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I agree. "Proper use of english: Episode 12", will clarify everything about the subject.
VStrider.
Without a DOUBT was, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
My favorite gaffe of 2005 had to be the non-story about Google and Sun "teaming up on OpenOffice." Remember how Slashdot reported that Sun and Google were "planning Web Office" and how hundreds of posts celebrated the "fact" that a buggy office suite would be rewritten in JavaScript? In the end all that came of that deal is that Google would bundle its toolbar with the wholly-unrelated JRE download -- an asinine bundling that if it involved any other two companies (cough) would have led to mass denouncement among the alpha geeks.
For more information, click here.
We should put the media up for an award for their Katrina coverage. The Cat 4 huricane that was really a cat 3, the higher percentage of white people (over general population) who died versus black, the lack of mass murders in the shelters.... I could go on and on.
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
His "I'm there with you" speech to workers who were lucky to take a single thousand a month didn't exactly have the intended affect, and he resigned a month later.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
They didn't include the "2 standards are better than 1" comment from the Microsoft guy in the Massachusetts case. That was my my favorite.
Let's be nice, some of us like Steven Tyler...
Acts like Hitler with his absolutism and vyings for complete control... thinks like a baboon with his lack of understanding and unintelligent arguements/commentary.
However, you're still limited to 4GB of addressable memory per process.
I wonder if that is enough to run MS Office.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy