“We discovered a file making a clear reference to ‘Username unknown,’” the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, “and a blank user icon which therefore was... anonymous! D’you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can’t be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money.”
GUTEN TAG, Wii Gehts, Wednesday (NTN) — Sony has revealed that the Playstation Network security breach, which compromised 24.6 million credit cards, was entirely the work of evil hackers from Anonymous, and nothing to do with their own incompetence, honest.
"We discovered a file making a clear reference to 'Username unknown,'" the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, "and a blank user icon which therefore was anonymous. D'you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can't be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money."
The letter details the company’s actions over the past two weeks. It says Sony acted with "care and caution" in deciding how to act and how long it thought it could get away without telling anyone. "We did not want to cause confusion and cause customers to take unnecessary actions, such as stopping their credit card payments to us."
"We have suffered a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyberattack, which has led to people committing the heinous hate crime of jailbreaking their PS3s. In accordance with our campaign contributions, we ask that you impose the death penalty for such offenses."
The letter concluded that the breakin was quite definitely the work of Anonymous. "We were going to blame Al-Qaeda, but we figured after Monday that you probably wouldn't buy that."
“We discovered a file making a clear reference to ‘Username unknown,’” the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, “and a blank user icon which therefore was anonymous. D’you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can’t be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money.”
PROFESSOR JOBS' SCHOOL FOR GIFTED YOUNGSTERS, Shenzhen, Sunday (NTN) — In its annual supplier report, Apple has admitted that its Chinese factories have employed children to build its gadgets. "Ones with a particularly refined sense of aesthetics."
Apple revealed the sweatshop conditions inside the factories it uses. The child workers were found in a facility with high vaulted ceilings, elegantly crafted marble work benches and a classical quartet playing in the background in a corner of the floor. Young geniuses sat in their Aerons and levitated components into place with the powers of the mind, burning the famed Apple logo into the back of the assembled device with but a glance of terrifying but controlled power. Some lunches, with only an hour's break, would involve wines of less than ten years' vintage.
Competitors were outraged. "We are shocked, shocked to hear of Apple's ruthless exploitation of the chilll-drennn," said Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. "But then, what do you expect when they actually ask their suppliers about this stuff. Don't ask, don't tell! That's what made the 360 great!"
Apple's Chinese manufacturing facilities were the site of controversy last year when one young worker at Foxconn, who had teleported an iPhone home overnight, was found to have committed suicide by leaping from the top of the building, first breaking his own neck, and tearing out all his own fingernails on the way down. He was found with Apple logos carved into his back, obviously also self-inflicted. "A tragedy," said the report.
GUTEN TAG, Wii Gehts, Wednesday (NTN) — Sony has revealed that the Playstation Network security breach, which compromised 24.6 million credit cards, was entirely the work of evil hackers from Anonymous, and nothing to do with their own incompetence, honest.
"We discovered a file making a clear reference to 'Username unknown,'" the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, "and a blank user icon which therefore was anonymous. D'you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can't be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money."
The letter details the company’s actions over the past two weeks. It says Sony acted with "care and caution" in deciding how to act and how long it thought it could get away without telling anyone. "We did not want to cause confusion and cause customers to take unnecessary actions, such as stopping their credit card payments to us."
"We have suffered a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyberattack, which has led to people committing the heinous hate crime of jailbreaking their PS3s. In accordance with our campaign contributions, we ask that you impose the death penalty for such offenses."
The letter concluded that the breakin was quite definitely the work of Anonymous. "We were going to blame Al-Qaeda, but we figured after Monday that you probably wouldn't buy that."
THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, "Venereal Vista," based on the Unity Vista desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.
Unity is Canonical's response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.
"This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical's vision of the desktop," said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. "So we added a 'minimise' button too."
Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth's roadmap for Unity. "I woke up one day and thought, 'Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can't think of a better user experience.' We're not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way."
Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. "It'll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called 'phones' and run Android."
KENYA, Indonesia, Wednesday (WorldNetDaily) — Barack Obama's alleged long-form birth certificate has been declared fraudulent by the noble and patriotic "Birther" movement, who claim firm evidence that the President is insufficiently white.
"I've seen a few Photoshops in my time," said immigrant Birther and world's oldest emo kid Orly Taitz. "I can tell from a few of the pixels. They're nowhere near light enough."
Donald Trump, the next Sarah Palin, takes credit for provoking the release of this initial documentation of the mysterious Obama, and has now asked if Obama's college transcript is all that, and something about basketball as the President's favourite pastime. Betting pools are now forming on when Trump will allude to watermelon and fried chicken.
Birthers are routinely outraged at suggestions that blatant racism is at the heart of their disquiet with Obama's landslide victory in the 2008 presidential election. So it's really worth saying it to them, every time.
The Birther movement was originally started by Party Unity My Ass, a group of disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters during the 2008 Democratic primary. They note that Obama has, on his track record so far, been a first-class Republican president.
Mr Obama said it was "the most significant achievement to date in our nation's effort to defeat the hydra. We can all rest safe now."
A US official said the hydra's head had been buried at sea, to prevent the grave becoming a shrine. "But trust us — we got the actual hydra, all right. You know how good we are with getting this stuff right."
World leaders expressed their relief at the hydra having been utterly and completely stopped by cutting its main head off, except those party poopers at Hamas who dared suggest there were people who might be annoyed.
For many, the bigger question is whether, in the longer run, the hydra's organisation can survive. "The absolutely final and complete really truly killing of the hydra puts the group on a path of decline that will be difficult to reverse," said the President.
"I suddenly feel much better about America and no longer have any thoughts of revenge whatsoever," said one Afghan teenager whose entire family had been killed as collateral damage by a US bomb. "U-S-A! U-S-A! Coca-Cola! Fox News!"
US citizens are encouraged to apply to hold official celebratory street parties, under the close supervision of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transport Safety Administration, so that their freedoms may stay protected.
"Mission accomplished!" said Accounts Receivable at Halliburton.
Desperate to stay competitive against iPhone and Android mobile devices, Microsoft has released a two-pound lump of actual cow faeces that they claim constitutes a phone.
Windows Phone 7, in development for several years, strips the mobile telephone down to its fundamental essence: futility, annoyance, malfunction, inconvenience and a socially unacceptable odour. Confounding analyst expectations, the turd is in fact shined.
US mobile carriers hailed the turd as the perfect physical complement to their world-famous customer service. "This powerful product will promote our growth!" said John Harrobin of Verizon Wireless. "We're marketing them as edible."
"We think we can really work the brand equity," said Steve Ballmer, modelling the optional shoulder-length rubber gloves. "Everyone works with our stuff all day every day. They know who Microsoft is and what we do."
"How about making our customers actually swallow our bullshit physically?" said John Harrobin. "Windows Phone 7 was my idea."
THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, "Venereal Vista," entred around the Unity desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.
The Unity desktop is Canonical's response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.
"This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical's vision of the desktop," said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. "So we added a 'minimise' button too."
Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth's roadmap for Unity. "I woke up one day and thought, 'Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it,' I can't think of a better user experience.' We're not quite there yet, but Unity gets you a lot of the way."
Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. "It'll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called 'phones' and run Android."
.. for a truly free and open smartphone. One where no personal data was collected and sent to the maker or third party without explicit consent. One where you wouldn't need to wonder about "what else" the app you were using was doing. One where you could freely decide for yourself which OS to run. One where you were free to recompile any app for performance or security reasons. One that gave anybody the freedom to code an app in any language they saw fit.
The Free Software Foundation (NASDAQ: RMS) has announced the Free Software alternative to the evil, DRM-infested, locked-down, defective-by-design iPhone: the GNUPhone.
The key technical innovation of the GNUPhone is that it is completely operated from the command line. "What could be more intuitive than a bash prompt?" said seventeen-year-old Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy. "The ultimate one-dimensional desktop! Just type dial voice +1-555-1212 --ntwk verizon --prot cdma2000 --ssh-version 2 -a -l -q -9 -b -k -K 14 -x and away you go! Simple and obvious!"
The phone will also serve as a versatile personal media player. "I can play any.au file or H.120 video with a single shell command! The iPod could never measure up to this powerful ease of use." Video is rendered into ASCII art with aalib. "If blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups were good enough for 1970s minicomputer operators, they're good enough for you. Respect your elders."
The KDE project will be bringing its next-generation KDE 4 desktop to the GNUPhone. "you can flip, twirl, dice, blend, fold, spindle and mutilate your terminal windows to your heart's content," said developer Aaron Seigo. "look at that cool effect! any complaint that basic functions don't actually work is ignorant of the intrinsic beauty of the plasma api and is just more fud spread by haters like stevie ray vaughan-nichols and novell corporation."
Actual successful voice calls are expected by 2013 to 2014. Regulatory approval is proving problematic in the corrupt, corporate-captured US environment. "The FCC said that if we dared switch on this, uh, 'piece of shit' in a built-up area in its present form, they'd break all our fingers with a fourteen-pound cluebat," said Nerdboy. "They're obviously shilling for Apple, Nokia and Microsoft."
The second version of the GNUPhone will run EMACS on the HURD kernel and be operated by writing eLisp macros on the fly. "It's the clearest, most elegant and natural operating environment anyone could conceive of," said Nerdboy. "Really, we're not out to destroy Apple; that will just be a completely unintentional side effect."
"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."
The Foundation hopes to pit Symbian against Windows Mobile, which Nokia has replaced Symbian with. "There's no way it can compete against our superior features, like WAP browsing, infrared connect to your laptop and, of course, the serial port." It also hopes to set the stage for a march on the USA. "The Americans will fall before our superior engineering! Psion worked on the ZX81, you know."
There are currently about 330 million Symbian devices in the world, at least fifteen of whose owners can actually use the web browser without wanting to throw the phone through a window and just get an iPhone. "Just think," said Berkin, "now anyone can improve their phone! Well, they could if Nokia made phones the user could flash. But still!"
Accenture issued a press release about how Symbian was welcomed by free software advocates and other aging hippies. "Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian," said Eben Moglen, "to hack on it, and to write applications for it. This could be even bigger than the Amiga."
"3D technology has been the next big thing for only the last sixty years and is readily available on television, movies and video games. It offers amazing improvements over ordinary moving images: darkness, muddier colours, blurriness, headaches from watching for more than twenty minutes and slower action sequences so the viewer doesn’t throw up.
In video games, the Nintendo 3DS has been a huge hit with tens or even hundreds of end users, some of whom have left the 3D on for a whole day before switching it off forever. 3D on a phone has been heralded by manufacturers, mobile operators, the entertainment industry, the technical press, optometrists drumming up business and everyone else except the actual consumer."
That there is not and never has been a credible threat from China on this. That the entire purpose of the cyberwar hype is to generate juicy defense contracts selling snake oil to the government. Your taxes at work.
I remember most of these, particularly the last couple of paragraphs, for every Windows version since 3.0. They've been touting Bill's dream of the "database file system" how long?
I tried it on a low-end laptop with four Core 2 Duo chips and only 8 gig of memory, and trust me: $NEXT_VERSION is shaping up to be one heck of a product.
WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their "distros" full of all sorts of useless shovelware like "FireFox" and "OpenOffice" and, haha, "GIMP"! — the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved Ribbon user interface from Office $HATED_VERSION is now part of WordPad and Paint!
The controversial Digital Rights Management system in $CURRENT_VERSION has been worked over, with user-downloadable "tilt bits," which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, and the beta nearly took my finger off, but of course that's only if you want to play premium content. The Blu-Ray of Battlefield Earth was unbelievable on this operating system.
A public beta should be released by the end of this year. There's just no way that Steve "Trains Run On Time" Ballmer will miss the Christmas deadline. The final release should leave the midnight queues on $CURRENT_VERSION release day — the street riots, the water cannons, the rubber bullets — in the shade.
I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they're finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF.
Also, there'll be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome!
I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.
US military officials have condemned the latest document release by Wikileaks as "potentially fatal to our credibility" and leading to 15,000 more officials spending time with their families than previously thought.
"The faltering forces of hacker infidels," said the Pentagon's Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, "cannot just enter an army and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege! There are only two Wikileaks tanks in the city!"
General George Casey has denied that the United States "turned a blind eye" to prisoner abuse. "Our policy all along has been to use our military might to encourage the already peace-loving security forces to be agents of cosmic love and beauty. Whenever a prisoner was treated with crystals and aromatherapy in a more robust manner than would be acceptable to our dolphin brethren, we were sure to report it up both the local chain of command and the one that means anything. Then we sat down together and did serious thinking about how we could be more excellent to one another. Toke, dude?"
The festering scoundrel Julian Assange was lambasted last night on CNN for his reprehensible personal life and clearly unbalanced and unAmerican mental state, which are much more newsworthy than the release of more accurate documentation than any war has ever had in history.
"I remain opposed to the warq," said President Barack Obama, "and so too to documentation of the so-called war. We harshly condemn the release of information on this terrible alleged event. We will bring the document leakers to military justice and teach them to love again."
In the UK, Nick Clegg suggested someone might want to possibly look into this matter a little bit, assuming it was all right with Dave of course.
The web apps were standards-compliant. The Windows apps were carefully written to work in XP but break in Vista, yes. This is inelegant, but not as inelegant as Vista.
And Canonical has been around for a few years and is backed by a rogue billionaire who doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want. "I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year! You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year I'll have to close this place in sixty years."
In one place of work, we managed to get Firefox added to the new standard build by the simple expedient of writing lots of in-house web apps that didn't work in IE. (The tool used by about 20 people every day they worked there, which was broken in IE for six months with no-one noticing...)
Slashdot Mirror
“We discovered a file making a clear reference to ‘Username unknown,’” the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, “and a blank user icon which therefore was ... anonymous! D’you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can’t be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money.”
GUTEN TAG, Wii Gehts, Wednesday (NTN) — Sony has revealed that the Playstation Network security breach, which compromised 24.6 million credit cards, was entirely the work of evil hackers from Anonymous, and nothing to do with their own incompetence, honest.
"We discovered a file making a clear reference to 'Username unknown,'" the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, "and a blank user icon which therefore was anonymous. D'you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can't be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money."
The letter details the company’s actions over the past two weeks. It says Sony acted with "care and caution" in deciding how to act and how long it thought it could get away without telling anyone. "We did not want to cause confusion and cause customers to take unnecessary actions, such as stopping their credit card payments to us."
"We have suffered a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyberattack, which has led to people committing the heinous hate crime of jailbreaking their PS3s. In accordance with our campaign contributions, we ask that you impose the death penalty for such offenses."
The letter concluded that the breakin was quite definitely the work of Anonymous. "We were going to blame Al-Qaeda, but we figured after Monday that you probably wouldn't buy that."
“We discovered a file making a clear reference to ‘Username unknown,’” the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, “and a blank user icon which therefore was anonymous. D’you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can’t be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money.”
PROFESSOR JOBS' SCHOOL FOR GIFTED YOUNGSTERS, Shenzhen, Sunday (NTN) — In its annual supplier report, Apple has admitted that its Chinese factories have employed children to build its gadgets. "Ones with a particularly refined sense of aesthetics."
Apple revealed the sweatshop conditions inside the factories it uses. The child workers were found in a facility with high vaulted ceilings, elegantly crafted marble work benches and a classical quartet playing in the background in a corner of the floor. Young geniuses sat in their Aerons and levitated components into place with the powers of the mind, burning the famed Apple logo into the back of the assembled device with but a glance of terrifying but controlled power. Some lunches, with only an hour's break, would involve wines of less than ten years' vintage.
Competitors were outraged. "We are shocked, shocked to hear of Apple's ruthless exploitation of the chilll-drennn," said Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. "But then, what do you expect when they actually ask their suppliers about this stuff. Don't ask, don't tell! That's what made the 360 great!"
Apple's Chinese manufacturing facilities were the site of controversy last year when one young worker at Foxconn, who had teleported an iPhone home overnight, was found to have committed suicide by leaping from the top of the building, first breaking his own neck, and tearing out all his own fingernails on the way down. He was found with Apple logos carved into his back, obviously also self-inflicted. "A tragedy," said the report.
GUTEN TAG, Wii Gehts, Wednesday (NTN) — Sony has revealed that the Playstation Network security breach, which compromised 24.6 million credit cards, was entirely the work of evil hackers from Anonymous, and nothing to do with their own incompetence, honest.
"We discovered a file making a clear reference to 'Username unknown,'" the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, "and a blank user icon which therefore was anonymous. D'you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can't be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money."
The letter details the company’s actions over the past two weeks. It says Sony acted with "care and caution" in deciding how to act and how long it thought it could get away without telling anyone. "We did not want to cause confusion and cause customers to take unnecessary actions, such as stopping their credit card payments to us."
"We have suffered a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyberattack, which has led to people committing the heinous hate crime of jailbreaking their PS3s. In accordance with our campaign contributions, we ask that you impose the death penalty for such offenses."
The letter concluded that the breakin was quite definitely the work of Anonymous. "We were going to blame Al-Qaeda, but we figured after Monday that you probably wouldn't buy that."
How to fix the stupid new 11.04 scrollbars:
sudo -s
then
apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80overlayscrollbars
echo "export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0" >
then log out and back in.
"I took the initiative in funding the creation of Vint Cerf and Jon Postel" - Martin Luther Gore
THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, "Venereal Vista," based on the Unity Vista desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.
Unity is Canonical's response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.
"This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical's vision of the desktop," said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. "So we added a 'minimise' button too."
Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth's roadmap for Unity. "I woke up one day and thought, 'Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can't think of a better user experience.' We're not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way."
Picture: Unity is made of arse.
Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. "It'll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called 'phones' and run Android."
"Martin Luther King invented the Internet." - Al Gore
"People believe any quote they read on the internet if it fits their preconceived notions." - Martin Luther King
KENYA, Indonesia, Wednesday (WorldNetDaily) — Barack Obama's alleged long-form birth certificate has been declared fraudulent by the noble and patriotic "Birther" movement, who claim firm evidence that the President is insufficiently white.
"I've seen a few Photoshops in my time," said immigrant Birther and world's oldest emo kid Orly Taitz. "I can tell from a few of the pixels. They're nowhere near light enough."
Donald Trump, the next Sarah Palin, takes credit for provoking the release of this initial documentation of the mysterious Obama, and has now asked if Obama's college transcript is all that, and something about basketball as the President's favourite pastime. Betting pools are now forming on when Trump will allude to watermelon and fried chicken.
Birthers are routinely outraged at suggestions that blatant racism is at the heart of their disquiet with Obama's landslide victory in the 2008 presidential election. So it's really worth saying it to them, every time.
The Birther movement was originally started by Party Unity My Ass, a group of disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters during the 2008 Democratic primary. They note that Obama has, on his track record so far, been a first-class Republican president.
CHRISTIANABAD, Pakistan, Monday (NTN) — President Barack Obama has announced that the hydra has been conclusively beheaded by US forces in Pakistan.
Mr Obama said it was "the most significant achievement to date in our nation's effort to defeat the hydra. We can all rest safe now."
A US official said the hydra's head had been buried at sea, to prevent the grave becoming a shrine. "But trust us — we got the actual hydra, all right. You know how good we are with getting this stuff right."
World leaders expressed their relief at the hydra having been utterly and completely stopped by cutting its main head off, except those party poopers at Hamas who dared suggest there were people who might be annoyed.
For many, the bigger question is whether, in the longer run, the hydra's organisation can survive. "The absolutely final and complete really truly killing of the hydra puts the group on a path of decline that will be difficult to reverse," said the President.
"I suddenly feel much better about America and no longer have any thoughts of revenge whatsoever," said one Afghan teenager whose entire family had been killed as collateral damage by a US bomb. "U-S-A! U-S-A! Coca-Cola! Fox News!"
US citizens are encouraged to apply to hold official celebratory street parties, under the close supervision of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transport Safety Administration, so that their freedoms may stay protected.
"Mission accomplished!" said Accounts Receivable at Halliburton.
Desperate to stay competitive against iPhone and Android mobile devices, Microsoft has released a two-pound lump of actual cow faeces that they claim constitutes a phone.
Windows Phone 7, in development for several years, strips the mobile telephone down to its fundamental essence: futility, annoyance, malfunction, inconvenience and a socially unacceptable odour. Confounding analyst expectations, the turd is in fact shined.
US mobile carriers hailed the turd as the perfect physical complement to their world-famous customer service. "This powerful product will promote our growth!" said John Harrobin of Verizon Wireless. "We're marketing them as edible."
"We think we can really work the brand equity," said Steve Ballmer, modelling the optional shoulder-length rubber gloves. "Everyone works with our stuff all day every day. They know who Microsoft is and what we do."
"How about making our customers actually swallow our bullshit physically?" said John Harrobin. "Windows Phone 7 was my idea."
THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, "Venereal Vista," entred around the Unity desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.
The Unity desktop is Canonical's response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.
"This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical's vision of the desktop," said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. "So we added a 'minimise' button too."
Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth's roadmap for Unity. "I woke up one day and thought, 'Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it,' I can't think of a better user experience.' We're not quite there yet, but Unity gets you a lot of the way."
Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. "It'll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called 'phones' and run Android."
Photo: A load of arse.
.. for a truly free and open smartphone. One where no personal data was collected and sent to the maker or third party without explicit consent. One where you wouldn't need to wonder about "what else" the app you were using was doing. One where you could freely decide for yourself which OS to run. One where you were free to recompile any app for performance or security reasons. One that gave anybody the freedom to code an app in any language they saw fit.
The Free Software Foundation (NASDAQ: RMS) has announced the Free Software alternative to the evil, DRM-infested, locked-down, defective-by-design iPhone: the GNUPhone.
The key technical innovation of the GNUPhone is that it is completely operated from the command line. "What could be more intuitive than a bash prompt?" said seventeen-year-old Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy. "The ultimate one-dimensional desktop! Just type dial voice +1-555-1212 --ntwk verizon --prot cdma2000 --ssh-version 2 -a -l -q -9 -b -k -K 14 -x and away you go! Simple and obvious!"
The phone will also serve as a versatile personal media player. "I can play any .au file or H.120 video with a single shell command! The iPod could never measure up to this powerful ease of use." Video is rendered into ASCII art with aalib. "If blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups were good enough for 1970s minicomputer operators, they're good enough for you. Respect your elders."
The KDE project will be bringing its next-generation KDE 4 desktop to the GNUPhone. "you can flip, twirl, dice, blend, fold, spindle and mutilate your terminal windows to your heart's content," said developer Aaron Seigo. "look at that cool effect! any complaint that basic functions don't actually work is ignorant of the intrinsic beauty of the plasma api and is just more fud spread by haters like stevie ray vaughan-nichols and novell corporation."
Actual successful voice calls are expected by 2013 to 2014. Regulatory approval is proving problematic in the corrupt, corporate-captured US environment. "The FCC said that if we dared switch on this, uh, 'piece of shit' in a built-up area in its present form, they'd break all our fingers with a fourteen-pound cluebat," said Nerdboy. "They're obviously shilling for Apple, Nokia and Microsoft."
The second version of the GNUPhone will run EMACS on the HURD kernel and be operated by writing eLisp macros on the fly. "It's the clearest, most elegant and natural operating environment anyone could conceive of," said Nerdboy. "Really, we're not out to destroy Apple; that will just be a completely unintentional side effect."
Nokia, through Accenture, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS a "community project", putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight.
"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."
The Foundation hopes to pit Symbian against Windows Mobile, which Nokia has replaced Symbian with. "There's no way it can compete against our superior features, like WAP browsing, infrared connect to your laptop and, of course, the serial port." It also hopes to set the stage for a march on the USA. "The Americans will fall before our superior engineering! Psion worked on the ZX81, you know."
There are currently about 330 million Symbian devices in the world, at least fifteen of whose owners can actually use the web browser without wanting to throw the phone through a window and just get an iPhone. "Just think," said Berkin, "now anyone can improve their phone! Well, they could if Nokia made phones the user could flash. But still!"
Accenture issued a press release about how Symbian was welcomed by free software advocates and other aging hippies. "Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian," said Eben Moglen, "to hack on it, and to write applications for it. This could be even bigger than the Amiga."
They understand that 3D is shit.
"3D technology has been the next big thing for only the last sixty years and is readily available on television, movies and video games. It offers amazing improvements over ordinary moving images: darkness, muddier colours, blurriness, headaches from watching for more than twenty minutes and slower action sequences so the viewer doesn’t throw up.
In video games, the Nintendo 3DS has been a huge hit with tens or even hundreds of end users, some of whom have left the 3D on for a whole day before switching it off forever. 3D on a phone has been heralded by manufacturers, mobile operators, the entertainment industry, the technical press, optometrists drumming up business and everyone else except the actual consumer."
The cyberwar hype exists to sell juicy defense contracts to supply snake oil. That's it. That's the whole "threat".
That there is not and never has been a credible threat from China on this. That the entire purpose of the cyberwar hype is to generate juicy defense contracts selling snake oil to the government. Your taxes at work.
I remember most of these, particularly the last couple of paragraphs, for every Windows version since 3.0. They've been touting Bill's dream of the "database file system" how long?
Guest post by Mary-Jo Enderle
I have seen the future: Windows $NEXT_VERSION Milestone $MOCKUP.
I tried it on a low-end laptop with four Core 2 Duo chips and only 8 gig of memory, and trust me: $NEXT_VERSION is shaping up to be one heck of a product.
WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their "distros" full of all sorts of useless shovelware like "FireFox" and "OpenOffice" and, haha, "GIMP"! — the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved Ribbon user interface from Office $HATED_VERSION is now part of WordPad and Paint!
The controversial Digital Rights Management system in $CURRENT_VERSION has been worked over, with user-downloadable "tilt bits," which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, and the beta nearly took my finger off, but of course that's only if you want to play premium content. The Blu-Ray of Battlefield Earth was unbelievable on this operating system.
A public beta should be released by the end of this year. There's just no way that Steve "Trains Run On Time" Ballmer will miss the Christmas deadline. The final release should leave the midnight queues on $CURRENT_VERSION release day — the street riots, the water cannons, the rubber bullets — in the shade.
I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they're finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF.
Also, there'll be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome!
I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.
US military officials have condemned the latest document release by Wikileaks as "potentially fatal to our credibility" and leading to 15,000 more officials spending time with their families than previously thought.
"The faltering forces of hacker infidels," said the Pentagon's Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, "cannot just enter an army and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege! There are only two Wikileaks tanks in the city!"
General George Casey has denied that the United States "turned a blind eye" to prisoner abuse. "Our policy all along has been to use our military might to encourage the already peace-loving security forces to be agents of cosmic love and beauty. Whenever a prisoner was treated with crystals and aromatherapy in a more robust manner than would be acceptable to our dolphin brethren, we were sure to report it up both the local chain of command and the one that means anything. Then we sat down together and did serious thinking about how we could be more excellent to one another. Toke, dude?"
The festering scoundrel Julian Assange was lambasted last night on CNN for his reprehensible personal life and clearly unbalanced and unAmerican mental state, which are much more newsworthy than the release of more accurate documentation than any war has ever had in history.
"I remain opposed to the warq," said President Barack Obama, "and so too to documentation of the so-called war. We harshly condemn the release of information on this terrible alleged event. We will bring the document leakers to military justice and teach them to love again."
In the UK, Nick Clegg suggested someone might want to possibly look into this matter a little bit, assuming it was all right with Dave of course.
The web apps were standards-compliant. The Windows apps were carefully written to work in XP but break in Vista, yes. This is inelegant, but not as inelegant as Vista.
Ubuntu is desktop-focused and does a server version; RHEL is server-focused and will also work on a desktop.
Ubuntu does things like One Hundred Paper Cuts to reduce the annoying little shit.
And Canonical has been around for a few years and is backed by a rogue billionaire who doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want. "I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year! You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year I'll have to close this place in sixty years."
In one place of work, we managed to get Firefox added to the new standard build by the simple expedient of writing lots of in-house web apps that didn't work in IE. (The tool used by about 20 people every day they worked there, which was broken in IE for six months with no-one noticing ...)
This is also the same way we kept Vista at bay.