Slashdot Mirror


Dell, Raymond Unveil 'One Smartwatch Per Child'; Icahn Erupts

An anonymous reader writes "As Dell's (DELL:NASDAQ GS) board reviews three competing proposals for taking the company private, including a $24.4 billion deal led by founder and CEO Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners, the company has announced it is entering the suddenly crowded smartwatch sweepstakes along with Apple, Google, and Samsung. The twist is that Dell's product will target the low end of the market — the extreme low end, in the words of CEO Dell, because 'that's where most of the world's customers are'. Dell's smartwatch, projected to cost just 19.99 USD ($319.99 before Dell's mail-in rebate) will allow children in developing countries to communicate via voice and text, collaborate on school activities, and perform native-to-English voice and text translations with the help of Dell's new ARM supercomputer. Dell says premium models will also perform translations in the reverse direction, i.e. English-to-native. Open Source advocate Eric S. Raymond, who joined Dell for the conference call, stated 'this is the beginning of what I call the Bazaar Wrist model of the mobile Internet. It'll be a battle of ideas against what I call the Office Tower Wrist model that Apple and Google will be selling.' Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who recently launched a rival bid for Dell, labeled the product an 'a pig in the poke' as well as a 'distraction and extreme waste of shareholder value', adding that his $7.44 Wal-Mart watch 'works just great for me and probably anyone else'."

34 comments

  1. This is getting fucking old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Guess I'm done with /. for today.

    1. Re:This is getting fucking old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      Guess I'm done with /. for today.

      Slashdot's a news aggregator. The only news worth mentioning on April Fool's Day is going to skew heavily towards the foolish. It's one day a year. Deal with it.

      Anyone with real breaking news in the tech field already knows better than to announce it today. I, for one, welcome our foolish overlords; their absence was sorely missed in 2012, and it's good to have them back.

    2. Re:This is getting fucking old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Instead of my normal /. time, I somehow just spent an hour reading up on various historical cyphers much better than ROT13...

    3. Re:This is getting fucking old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      so disgusted with the stupid 4/1 articles, you hung around til after supper? wtf.

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 01, @07:32PM

    4. Re:This is getting fucking old. by an+unsound+mind · · Score: 2

      At least omg ponies didn't get in the way of using the site.

      How to make your site entirely unusable for at least three days 101, from Slashdot. I'll be back in a week.

    5. Re:This is getting fucking old. by rmdingler · · Score: 1

      Linus patiently awaits the Great Pumpkin every year. People tune in Every Friggin' year to the news coverage of Puxatony Phil. Charlie Brown always kicks the football. It's April Fools and it's tradition..... just like giving Christmas gifts that make people as happy as receiving many presents you'd never purchase for yourself. "It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition." (credited to Henry James)

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

    6. Re:This is getting fucking old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How about I shoot my cock up your ass and unleash my squirmy tadpole friends within?

    7. Re:This is getting fucking old. by mister_playboy · · Score: 2

      Anyone with real breaking news in the tech field already knows better than to announce it today.

      The infamous Linux disabling PS3 update was released on April 1st... perhaps to get mileage out of the "nothing really happens today" attitude.

      --
      Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will
    8. Re:This is getting fucking old. by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      Luckily, April 1st fell on a bank/public holiday here in the UK, so I wasn't at work to suffer this irritation from slashdot.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    9. Re:This is getting fucking old. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hear hear brother! And as he whines " It's one day a year. Deal with it." I will gism up his nose so it stings.

    10. Re:This is getting fucking old. by bryan1945 · · Score: 1

      The sad thing is that this TFS makes as much sense as some non-ROT'd TFS's.

      --
      Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
  2. Rebate by sentientbeing · · Score: 1

    What the fuck is a mail in rebate?

    --

    ------
    beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
    1. Re:Rebate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's that thing where you mail them sufficient proof of purchase and they mail you back saying you didn't send sufficient proof of purchase.

  3. SPAM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    of the fried kind.

  4. Beating a dead horse by metalheadsunite · · Score: 2

    I thought I was bad at running a joke out too long. The humour on this ran out at about 8:30 this morning. A few stories of this would have been acceptable, not pages of it. It's like people posting all day on Facebook that they are pregnant; it's just not that funny.

    1. Re:Beating a dead horse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Someone needs to get a sense of humor... Have you tried removing that 12 foot long treated 4X4 from your rectum?

  5. Goodbye slashdot by thomastheo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Goodbye Slashdot, Hello Arstechnica!

    1. Re:Goodbye slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Arstechnica is garbage as well, you know.

    2. Re:Goodbye slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No kidding - this is what I needed to finally push me away from slashdot for good.

    3. Re:Goodbye slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thanks for the heads up. I'm sick of this Slashdot bullshit too.
       
      Kiss my ass, Dice Holdings, Inc!!!!

    4. Re:Goodbye slashdot by rmdingler · · Score: 2

      Dice Holdings' reports from the field indicate some early success from "Operation Cull the Priggish".

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

  6. April Fools by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Typically annoying April Fools jokes are disabled around noonish.

    Don't mind annoying your userbase now that it is so small Slashdot?

  7. ok screw slashdot today by Osgeld · · Score: 1

    I have not been on all day, and this is the "joke" they presented?

    yea I am not going to click though a days worth of stories, then click a dumbass link, just to read a summary of something I only MIGHT be interested in.

    A gag story or 12 ok ha ha, its only 1 day, this isnt even worth peoples time to come here

    c-ya tomorrow, sure I wont miss apple hate, nasa worship, bitcoins and pi's for today

  8. Not bothering to read anything today... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not bothering to read anything today... not worth my time. Barely worth my time to type this.

    1. Re:Not bothering to read anything today... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just like every other day on slashdot latley

    2. Re:Not bothering to read anything today... by sleigher · · Score: 1

      The end was here even before Taco left unfortunately. Once he bailed I check the headlines occasionally but... meh

      --
      All points of time and space are connected.
  9. Still waiting... by ackthpt · · Score: 1

    For Chester Gould's heirs to come in and sue smart watch makers for ripping off his idea for Two-Way Wrist Computer.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  10. Just a suggestion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I'm really nowhere near the "I'm never reading slashdot AGAIN!" levels of butthurt that some other readers apparently suffer from, but you editors should know by now that sometimes the April Fools' Day plans are a complete bust, and when that happens you should really, really consider aborting them. Who wants to be the guy who keeps repeating a joke that was never funny?

    Also, the odds of you ever topping "OMG! Ponies!!!!!!!!!" are pretty much nil, and you could factor that in to your future April 1st plans.

    1. Re:Just a suggestion by teaserX · · Score: 1

      A rerun of "OMG! Ponies!!!!!!!!!" would have been much better than this.

      --
      We really need your help
      http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
    2. Re:Just a suggestion by Lumpy · · Score: 1

      They cant, They utterly broke the theming system in slashcode years ago in their attempt to "clean it up".

      OMG Ponies will never ever return.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    3. Re:Just a suggestion by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      Who wants to be the guy who keeps repeating a joke that was never funny?

      Are you kidding? Slashdot is the homepage of the guy who keeps repeating a joke that was never funny.

      E.g. Hot Grits, Bluescreen, Throwing Chairs, etc.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  11. Fucking stupid by Franky+Baby · · Score: 0

    Thanks for filling my RSS feed full of stupid spam, Slashdot. I guess this is the kind of stupid shit we've come to expect from Dice lately.

  12. Talk about overdoing it. by Ilsundal · · Score: 1

    Errr, this is madness. What I used to love about the old April Fools /. way of doing it, is they would mix up real stories that seemed questionable, with APril Fools ones, and you always second guessed the story. This current way, errrr, why boter using the page at all? %90 of them aren't even remotely funny or believable.

    --
    "True refinement seeks simplicity."
  13. It's not 1 day, it's 45 hours by ferret4 · · Score: 1

    From the first minutes in Auckland to the last in Anchorage, the English-speaking Internet has to put up with 45 hours of idiots posting lame fake news.

    Plus, of course, it hangs around for days afterwards in 'popular' and 'latest' lists until the articles finally bubble under the real news.