April Fool's Day Roundup

It might be a holiday for most of us today, but for tech companies, April Fool's is the day when they work overtime to send weird press releases. So far we have seen Google Maps help users find Waldo, and Google Australia rethink its brand name (to Googz). T-Mobile has revivedthe Sidekick as the world's first smart shoe phone. Google has also added a feature to its file manager app Files Go that detects bad jokes from your phone. Snapchat has finally found a way to make fun of Facebook. Languages learning app Duolingo has launched a range of craft beers. Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus has launched a cryptocurrency. Some more here. What's your favorite prank so far today?

Comments

Thank You

[DatbeDank]

For not wasting my time posting otherwise bad joke summaries of fake stories on the front page today.

Re:Thank You

[quantaman]

I dunno, I miss when April Fools Day was Slashdot Shitpost Day. Yes, it meant Slashdot was entirely useless for a day, but it helped build a sense of community. There's a lot of dumb things about Slashdot that I end up missing, like coverage of anime or video games that no one cares about. Things that made it seem more like a site for nerds and not this weird corporate pseudo-open source thing it's become. The loss of incredibly stupid April Fools pranks doesn't help.

I agree, Slashdot is usually my first site of the day and as such were the one site who had a chance of actually getting me with a story before I clued into the calendar.

But the greatest Slashdot April Fools was the OMG Ponies theme from.... holy crap 12 years ago!

Re:Thank You

[apoc.famine]

OMG Ponies!

That's still my first reaction to April fool's day on the internet every year.

While many other sites have tried shitposting like that over the years, I've found few anywhere near as successful as that one was. It was so fucking annoying and traumatizing. Unbelievable we remember one day from 12 years ago that wasn't some monumental event in our lives.

Or, maybe it was.....says a lot about our history with this site, eh?

Re:Thank You

[magarity]

OMG Ponies!

It was so fucking annoying and traumatizing.

What are you babbling about? It was so awesome I used a plugin to view this site like that for years until the compatibility problems became too much to keep up.

Re:Thank You

[AmiMoJo]

April 1st is the one day when people pause to consider if things they read on the internet are true. If only they would do that for the other 364...

Re:Thank You

[I'm New Around Here]

I almost got fired from a project because of that RFC. Or, rather, my reference of that RFC with my official uploads for one day's work. It also involved photos of a squirrel, which I viewed as a network disrupter.

Re:Thank You

[tlhIngan]

It's Easter. It's the clash of the religious versus the pranksters. After all, Easter is one of those holy days in Christianity.

Easter hasn't fallen on April 1 since 1956, and it will again in 2029 and 2040, after which it won't until 2108.

You sure that was a joke?

[drew_kime]

Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus has launched a cryptocurrency.

DogeCoin was started a joke, but has a current market cap of $340 Million.

Kodi Rebrands Itself

[Macgruder]

https://kodi.tv/article/kodi-n...

"As such, starting today, we are officially changing our name back to XBMC.

But we're not stopping there. We've had a good long run being a multi-platform system, but at the end of the day covering six or more platforms has become far too much of a stress. Android support alone taxes our resources in a way no volunteer development team can ever reasonably be expected to handle. And all the other platforms just makes this worse. So, in an executive decision that we believe the entire community will support, we at Team XBMC have decided to fully embrace our roots.

Starting today, we would like to announce that we are exclusively supporting only the Xbox One"

Corsair's take on cryptocurrency is better!

[Misagon]

Corsair on Youtube: Stop GPU abuse. #GPURESCUE

The Chinese have the best one

[edxwelch]

The Chinese "Heavenly Palace" space station due to smash into the Earth within the next few hours. The ultimate April fools prank!

Re: Easter

[I'm New Around Here]

Ah, but before you use a few examples to decry atheists, bear in mind that as a group we have no shared philosophy. I have nothing in common with Pol Pot despite agreeing that there is no god.

Christian philosophy is that there is a God, that everyone should worship it and non-believers should be converted or punished either in life of an eternal hell.

You should take your own advice. There are Christian groups that only agree on Jesus being the son of God. Nearly all other aspects of their systems are at odds with each other. I know Christians who do not believe in Hell, which actually the Pope apparently just said as well, according to Yahoo News.

Re:Trump kind of killed April Fools...

[I'm New Around Here]

It's funny how your butt still hurts 18 months after Hillary was defeated by the most hated man in America.

Re:Easter

[Oswald McWeany]

It's fitting that April Fool's and Easter are on the same day. The resurrection has got to be the greatest April Fool's joke ever.

Christianity being an anti-sex death cult is one big joke. And considering the harm that Christians have caused this country - especially the Evangelical kooks - it's a very cruel joke. All based upon a fairy tale.

A lot of America's earliest settlers came from the British isles- Scandinavia and Europe. If Christianity hadn't existed and those people still believed in the Norse Gods and/or old Celtic Gods Americans might be having human sacrifices made even today- or at least throughout a lot of her history she would have. With that in mind, Christianity can't be too bad by comparison.

/ Agnostic... no horse in the race.