Microsoft today announced the release of version 5 of its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.
"We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My options are underwater, my resumé's a car crash, Google won't call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man. The walking dead."
Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.
"But it's got DRM!" cried Guthrie. "Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back! We'll put porn on it! Free porn!"
Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.
In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie's own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.
No, they've taken a local copy, they're not hot-loading. WMF was not consulted in any way before they did this, and I believe the only outstanding issue is the perception that WMF has anything to do with this. But I'm sure this will be straightened out in short order.
They are deliberately seeking out uncurious and deliberately ignorant people to work for them, as being uncurious and maintaining deliberate ignorance is considered a sign of loyalty.
When you deliberately avoid the best and brightest because you don't trust them to be loyal to you, and deliberately make your institutions stupid, you are a dead country walking.
I am particularly annoyed as Amazon basically solved the nuisance of present buying for me last year. This year I'm going to have to actually think. Gah!
It was a headline story in this morning's Metro (a freesheet read by approximately everyone in London going to work on the tube): people boycotting Amazon for kicking Wikileaks off.
Possibly not the best meme to have propagating when people are attempting to one-click their Christmas shopping.
You should be extremely careful what you wish for: Democrats were expressing similar sentiments when Ronald Reagan put himself up for the Republican nomination in 1980.
"Because - and you might want to write this down and keep it somewhere safe - the key thing that has undermined the safety of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is them firing their big fucking guns at Iraqis and Afghans."
The government still owns most of it in one way or another. Large chunks of desert are Aboriginal tribal land.
You want a house for $20? I can't find the link, but there were economically collapsing small towns pretty much giving away somewhere to live. The catch being, you were expected to actually live there.
There's basically five cities in Australia, with long stretches of fuck-all between them.
(I'm living in London. One-third the area of Perth, five times the population. Wide open spaces or Ankh-Morpork? The grass is always browner.)
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 Mobile 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 Mobile 7 was my idea."
Beleaguered Internet advertising phirm Phorm is hitting back at critics with StopPhoulPlay.com, in an attempt to lure Internet activists into herniating from laughter.
"It is clear that the campaign against Phorm originates in the sinister manipulations of Alex Hanff and Marcus Williamson," said Kent Ertegun, CEO of Phorm, "who have used mind control lasers and the killer robot armies of the Open Rights Group and FIPR to deceive millions of Britons into a Communistic fervor of hatred against the engines of the free market and customer demand, the salesmen and marketers, the true creators and enablers of objective value."
The website, designed in Microsoft Word, uses the infallible public relations format so successfully put into play by the ReligiousFreedomWatch.org site of the Church of Scientology, an upstanding community institution of similarly flawless repute. StopPhoulPlay.com reveals how:
At the age of five, Hanff REFUSED to share his crayons with the little girl next to him, saying she was "poopy" and would only draw a picture to be used against him.
At age twelve, Williamson accepted MONEY from his mother to buy sweets, but not to tell schoolmates in case they wanted some.
Hanff and Williamson may have attempted to access POTENTIALLY ILLEGAL images blocked by the Internet Watch Foundation.
Hanff and Williamson have used WIKIPEDIA at least once in their lives.
Hanff and Williamson INVADED POLAND in 1939.
"Given the persistence with which they propagate incorrect information, we cannot rule out the possibility that a competitor is involved," he said. "The competitor goes under the name 'reality.' Needless to say, we have no tolerance for an entity of such limited possibilities.
"These people are privacy pirates — people who steal privacy online, off the coast of Somalia. With Internet guns! And drugs! And child pornography!"
Mr Hanff and Mr Williamson said they were unsure whether to sue Phorm into atomic dust for gross defamation or just to let them continue with their infallible public relations work. Phorm shares have dropped from 405p to being rated a "serious infection risk" by the World Health Organization.
"Java Vista" was my precise thought too. This split appears to be a desperate attempt not to have Java 7 fall down a hole.
We're currently on Java 5, which was EOLed last November. I wanted to go to Java 7, and our stuff all works on it, but... it was supposed to be out around now.
So we're going with Java 6. Which may never be EOLed at this rate.
Our devs have Windows PCs but the internal dev chain is Solaris. This means that if they do stuff that isn't cross-platform, it just doesn't work. In practice, this works out well and is fine with everyone.
Solution: make a "test" server that is Unix (and is automatically updated from CruiseControl or whatever). Commits don't count until they work on the test server. Works for us.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't see them ever beating 8.04 "Hairy Hardon."
Microsoft today announced the release of version 5 of its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.
"We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My options are underwater, my resumé's a car crash, Google won't call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man. The walking dead."
Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.
"But it's got DRM!" cried Guthrie. "Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back! We'll put porn on it! Free porn! "
Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.
In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie's own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.
No, they've taken a local copy, they're not hot-loading. WMF was not consulted in any way before they did this, and I believe the only outstanding issue is the perception that WMF has anything to do with this. But I'm sure this will be straightened out in short order.
U-S-A! U-S-A!
Of course, you're absolutely right. It's the sort of thinking that will only see the US government advance.
I don't want to seem anti-American at all. So let me just declare:
U-S-A! U-S-A!`
OK, let's say something nice about America ...
"Selecting for the uncurious and deliberately ignorant will ensure continued world domination."
Is that enough? Oh, I forgot:
"U-S-A! U-S-A!"
There, never say I don't do anything for you. Special relationship, don't you know!
They are deliberately seeking out uncurious and deliberately ignorant people to work for them, as being uncurious and maintaining deliberate ignorance is considered a sign of loyalty.
When you deliberately avoid the best and brightest because you don't trust them to be loyal to you, and deliberately make your institutions stupid, you are a dead country walking.
You can say that, but I have two teenagers and a three year old demanding SHINY THINGS.
It was as crowded as usual on the Victoria Line this morning.
Mind you, the office was pretty empty as quite a lot of people here come in by train.
It's shit, but it's shit literally everyone on their way into work reads.
The UK market. This was front-page this morning for everyone in London who goes to work by the Underground.
"Both of those things [i]require secrecy[/i]. Both of those things [i]require confidential communication[/i]."
I can tell you've been cutting and pasting this text by the incorrect markup syntax.
I am particularly annoyed as Amazon basically solved the nuisance of present buying for me last year. This year I'm going to have to actually think. Gah!
It was a headline story in this morning's Metro (a freesheet read by approximately everyone in London going to work on the tube): people boycotting Amazon for kicking Wikileaks off.
Possibly not the best meme to have propagating when people are attempting to one-click their Christmas shopping.
"In the first big leak, the names of actual informants was leaked and it was reported one later died and a few disappeared."
Citation needed. And if you can provide evidence for this, I bet the DoD would really like to have it too, 'cos they think the number's zero.
You should be extremely careful what you wish for: Democrats were expressing similar sentiments when Ronald Reagan put himself up for the Republican nomination in 1980.
From the Daily Mash:
UNMANNED WIKILEAKS DRONE DESTROYS AFGHAN VILLAGE
"Because - and you might want to write this down and keep it somewhere safe - the key thing that has undermined the safety of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is them firing their big fucking guns at Iraqis and Afghans."
Gosh, it's a good thing that the mysterious source of these DDoS attacks isn't targeting an organisation led by someone with tremendous technical chops who knows every dirty trick you can do with computers on a network and knows how to defend and preempt them. Or anything.
Yes, the rest are actually worse. The only readable news outlet is Crikey.
The government still owns most of it in one way or another. Large chunks of desert are Aboriginal tribal land.
You want a house for $20? I can't find the link, but there were economically collapsing small towns pretty much giving away somewhere to live. The catch being, you were expected to actually live there.
There's basically five cities in Australia, with long stretches of fuck-all between them.
(I'm living in London. One-third the area of Perth, five times the population. Wide open spaces or Ankh-Morpork? The grass is always browner.)
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 Mobile 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 Mobile 7 was my idea."
Picture: Steve Ballmer overjoyed at Windows phone sales figures.
Beleaguered Internet advertising phirm Phorm is hitting back at critics with StopPhoulPlay.com, in an attempt to lure Internet activists into herniating from laughter.
"It is clear that the campaign against Phorm originates in the sinister manipulations of Alex Hanff and Marcus Williamson," said Kent Ertegun, CEO of Phorm, "who have used mind control lasers and the killer robot armies of the Open Rights Group and FIPR to deceive millions of Britons into a Communistic fervor of hatred against the engines of the free market and customer demand, the salesmen and marketers, the true creators and enablers of objective value."
The website, designed in Microsoft Word, uses the infallible public relations format so successfully put into play by the ReligiousFreedomWatch.org site of the Church of Scientology, an upstanding community institution of similarly flawless repute. StopPhoulPlay.com reveals how:
"Given the persistence with which they propagate incorrect information, we cannot rule out the possibility that a competitor is involved," he said. "The competitor goes under the name 'reality.' Needless to say, we have no tolerance for an entity of such limited possibilities.
"These people are privacy pirates — people who steal privacy online, off the coast of Somalia. With Internet guns! And drugs! And child pornography!"
Mr Hanff and Mr Williamson said they were unsure whether to sue Phorm into atomic dust for gross defamation or just to let them continue with their infallible public relations work. Phorm shares have dropped from 405p to being rated a "serious infection risk" by the World Health Organization.
Picture: Targeted just for you.
Daily Mash: People Who Know How To Fucking Park On Brink Of Extinction
"Java Vista" was my precise thought too. This split appears to be a desperate attempt not to have Java 7 fall down a hole.
We're currently on Java 5, which was EOLed last November. I wanted to go to Java 7, and our stuff all works on it, but ... it was supposed to be out around now.
So we're going with Java 6. Which may never be EOLed at this rate.
Our devs have Windows PCs but the internal dev chain is Solaris. This means that if they do stuff that isn't cross-platform, it just doesn't work. In practice, this works out well and is fine with everyone.
Solution: make a "test" server that is Unix (and is automatically updated from CruiseControl or whatever). Commits don't count until they work on the test server. Works for us.