GRASS MUD HORSE, Tiananmen, Tuesday (NNN) — BT, Britain's biggest broadband supplier, has thoughtfully averted complete congestion of the Internet by throttling all use of the Internet on its cheapest broadband package.
Customers on the I Can't Believe It's Eight Megabits package have all Internet data flow cut off entirely under its "fair use" clause during "peak periods," defined as being between the hours of 12:00 midnight and 11:59pm. "However," said a customer service telephone voice menu, "the connection itself runs at the full eight megabits. That we guarantee absolutely."
BT has recently sold the technology to China, where it was put into operation toda, blocking Twitter, Blogger, Microsoft Bob Hope and the live webcam of the coffee pot at Cambridge University. "We will not put up with the drop in productivity social networking sites cause," said a spokesrivercrab. "After the terrible onslaught of blue screens at the Olympics, we will stop at nothing to protect patriotic citizens from the influence of Microsoft. And they love us for it. Just find one who doesn't!"
"Besides," said the BT phone menu, "we're still better than Virgin. A high bar to aim for, I know. You get so much better fail whales over a phone line than a cable."
Controversy has erupted over incandescent light bulbs being phased out to be replaced with horrible expensive yellow things that look like robot marital aids.
The switch to compact fluorescent lamps is expected to save households two-thirds of their monthly income, singlehandedly save the world from climate change and bring about world peace, harmony and a top 10 chart not filled with rubbish.
However, many people find the low-energy bulbs ugly, slow to warm up and much more expensive, and the harsher light they give off akin to that of a police cell or McDonald's. Their rapid flicker contains coded messages designed to hypnotise independent-minded citizens and turn them into gibberish-spouting socialist cultists. The bulbs are made entirely of mercury, polonium and ebola. Scientists have proven that Hitler used low-energy bulbs for illumination when writing Mein Kampf, and paedophiles prefer internet images of dear innocent children taken under their unforgiving glare.
The Daily Mail has come out strongly against the compact fluorescents. "British cowed by tin pot marxists maddest flights from reality political class bizarre gesture Bliar take away liberty march on Westminster revolt against Europe IF YOU LIKE IT SO MUCH WHY DON'T YOU LIVE THERE." To this end, the paper is giving away five thousand incandescent bulbs free!!! when you spend a pound calling an 0900 number.
"We can't be having this com-pack fluoro Euro rubbish," said Brenda Busybody, 77 (IQ) of East Cheam. "They just don't have the same warm glow to them. It's so cold this week! We need more gas lamps and burning torches, they go well with the pitchforks."
We spent lots of time listening to you, except when you told us how much MSN Search^W^W Live Search^W^W Kumo sucked ’cause you're just wrong about that, to learn which buzzwordy Web 2.0 thingies you use search for today. Finding a webpage that has anything to do with the search terms you entered is so passé, dahling.
So today we're introducing a new kind of search, that goes beyond traditional search engines that do tedious things like find stuff, to instead help you make faster, more informed decisions. (Windows 7 is peachy keen, by the way.) We think of Bob Hope as a Decision Engine. We've sued Stephen Wolfram into atomic dust using our patents on FAT and Mono, co-opted the Wolfram Alpha engine and swapped Mathematica for Visual Basic and Wolfram's brain for the exhumed corpse of Bob Hope.
So why did we pick Bob Hope as the new core of our search? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product: optimized for the Internet. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world.
And just look at these results!
What do we want? Braaains. When do we want them? Braaains. What do I need to run Windows 7? Braaains. What's Bill Gates got that means you should buy everything you can from the company he founded? Braaains. What's the final proof of Steve Ballmer's equal genius to Steve Jobs? Vistaaa.
This is something new, something improved! You need to try it! It'll give so much more betterer results than that other search engine we can't name because Steve will wedge another chair up our butts! Please, come and try our new and improved service! FOR GOD'S SAKE TRY THE DAMN SERVICE. OR THE PUPPY GETS IT. We're Microsoft. We're serious as a heart attack on this one.
After a minor shipping delay, flying cars have arrived for all. As of today, all major cities also feature moving pavements and weather control and commuter flights to the Moon will be commencing tomorrow.
Earth President Barack Obama welcomed the representatives of the Galactic Brotherhood to Washington, assuring them that the many wars on Earth were now to be conducted entirely by robots, though the robots would be carefully monitored and pulled out of battle and granted citizenship the moment they achieved sentience. He also offered the galactics free access to Google, with only the requirement for tasteful contextually-attuned text advertising to be imprinted on their DNA.
The reactionary forces of the twentieth-century United States finally conceded defeat and shut down the Five-Year Plan Tractor Plants of Detroit, where ridiculous oversized transport was bashed together by semi-literate peasants between fifths of vodka from the nerve gas factory next door, and the Five-Year Plan Software Plants of Redmond, where ridiculous oversized operating systems were bashed together by semi-numerate fresh graduates between fifths of Red Bull. The record and movie company back catalogues have been placed into the public domain for the preservation of human culture and the comic-book capitalists of Wall Street have been sent to calming, soothing, humanistic re-education facilities. "We'll teach them to love again," said Mr Obama.
Robot housecleaners are now universally available at quite reasonable prices. The robot companion for your child, designed to say "I LOVE YOU" while the child hits it repeatedly, was an early release for Christmas 2007. The new model features the voice of Justin Fletcher from CBeebies and is designed for parents to hit repeatedly.
Future innovations for the century include the rise of the Great Old Ones from their eternal sleep to take back the Earth and consume the souls of all humanity, first driving them slowly insane. The citizenry is being prepared for this eventuality using repeated broadcasts of In The Night Garden.
Typing this on an Advent 4211 (rebranded MSI Wind) running Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix. I can type with ten fingers on it and the screen is just large enough. Love this thing.
Their ad companies run a complete Mac production line?
Really, ad companies are people MS should listen to when spending hundreds of millions of dollars. They know as much more about advertising than MS as MS knows much more about software than they do. So this shit is the ad company suffering a stupid rich client.
Windows 7 betas have been greeted with remarkable positive press. "Of course," says Ballmer, "the betas preview the 'champagne and hookers' edition, which would be way too much for netbooks and explode users' brains. Imagine thinking those little things are computers! So we're releasing what we call Windows 7 Dumbass Edition(tm). It lets you log in and look at the shiny. Even Spider Solitaire has the ribbon toolbar! And you can buy an upgrade to the version that runs programs! It lets you do that!"
Dumbass Edition(tm) comes with pre-installed viruses to make the computer part of the Storm, Conficker and FBI botnets. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
I fear the actual future of mainstream journalism is with us in the form of tech journalism: blatant cheap whoring that doesn't even try to pretend to be honest any more. Of course, many would call this a difference of degree rather than kind.
Rupert Murdoch, speaking out on the news business, stated today that "the Internet free access model is clearly malfunctioning, as I don't make enough money from it. We have to educate people that free doesn't work, particularly for us."
Media commentators fear for the future of investigative journalism. "How can we hold governments' feet to the fire without money to pay our great reporters? Where would you get your recycled wire feeds, your Garfield cartoons?" Publishers hold that it is natural for readers to pay what advertisers once did, just as cows have to make up the difference out of their own pockets when the price of milk falls.
Newspapers have suffered badly since the collapse of their previous business model of selling readers to advertisers on a local monopoly basis. The replacement models appear to involve phlogiston, caloric and luminiferous aether.
Publishers have also explored the notion of getting Google to pay its "fair share" for so parasitically leading people to newspapers' websites. The Wikimedia Foundation promptly started billing journalists for their reprints from Wikipedia. "We feel this is completely unfair," said Tom Curley of the Associated Press, "as real news stories spring forth from the heads of accredited reporters in an immaculate creation from nothingness. My preciousss." Maurice Jarre was unavailable for comment.
A computer worm that spreads through low security networks, memory sticks, and PCs without the latest security updates is posing a growing threat to users blitheringly stupid enough to still think Windows is not ridiculously and unfixably insecure by design.
Despite many years' warnings that Microsoft regards security as a marketing problem and has only ever done the absolute minimum it can get away with, millions of users who click on any rubbish they see in the hope of pictures of female tennis stars having wardrobe malfunctions still fail to believe that taking Windows out on the Internet is like standing bent over in the street in downtown Gomorrah, naked, arse greased up and carrying a flashing neon sign saying "COME AND GET IT."
Microsoft cannot believe people have not applied the patch for the problem, just because they keep trying to use Windows Genuine Advantage to break legally-bought systems. "Don't they trust us?" asked marketing marketer Steve Ballmer.
Millions of smug Mac users and the four hundred smug Linux users pointed and laughed, having long given up trying to convince their Windows-using friends to see sense. "There's a reason the Unix system on Mac OS X is called Darwin," said appallingly smug Mac user Arty Phagge.
"It can't be stupid if everyone else runs it," said Windows user Joe Beleaguered, who had lost all his email, business files, MP3s and porn again. "Macs cost more than Windows PCs."
"Yes," said Phagge. "Yes, they do."
Ubuntu Linux developer Hiram Nerdboy frantically tried to get our attention about something or other, but we can't say we care.
It was a fresh install. Yeah, you'd probably get decent performance with 2GB or more of memory - this was the 32-bit Build 7100 on 1GB, and that's definitely the least memory I'd want to have to run Windows 7 in.
We ran 7100 for about a week. The hard disk literally never stopped rattling. The tester eventually gave up on it because (1) it reliably crashed whenever the Flash video player for BBC iPlayer was made full-screen (presumably a defective video driver) and (2) she got a dual 1GHz Mirrors G4 with 1.75GB memory and Mac OS X 10.5 and a 22" Cinema Display free:-D
Cygwin does crontabs very nicely to do all sorts of Unixy things. It's a fantastic way to make a Windows box halfway sanely usable. Particularly if you set up sshd.
Keep in mind that most criminals, particularly petty thieves and burglars, are dumb. They're crooks because they're not competent to make a living not being one. Intelligence and, more importantly, general competence are the exception.
Slashdot Mirror
GRASS MUD HORSE, Tiananmen, Tuesday (NNN) — BT, Britain's biggest broadband supplier, has thoughtfully averted complete congestion of the Internet by throttling all use of the Internet on its cheapest broadband package.
Customers on the I Can't Believe It's Eight Megabits package have all Internet data flow cut off entirely under its "fair use" clause during "peak periods," defined as being between the hours of 12:00 midnight and 11:59pm. "However," said a customer service telephone voice menu, "the connection itself runs at the full eight megabits. That we guarantee absolutely."
BT has recently sold the technology to China, where it was put into operation toda, blocking Twitter, Blogger, Microsoft Bob Hope and the live webcam of the coffee pot at Cambridge University. "We will not put up with the drop in productivity social networking sites cause," said a spokesrivercrab. "After the terrible onslaught of blue screens at the Olympics, we will stop at nothing to protect patriotic citizens from the influence of Microsoft. And they love us for it. Just find one who doesn't!"
"Besides," said the BT phone menu, "we're still better than Virgin. A high bar to aim for, I know. You get so much better fail whales over a phone line than a cable."
Controversy has erupted over incandescent light bulbs being phased out to be replaced with horrible expensive yellow things that look like robot marital aids.
The switch to compact fluorescent lamps is expected to save households two-thirds of their monthly income, singlehandedly save the world from climate change and bring about world peace, harmony and a top 10 chart not filled with rubbish.
However, many people find the low-energy bulbs ugly, slow to warm up and much more expensive, and the harsher light they give off akin to that of a police cell or McDonald's. Their rapid flicker contains coded messages designed to hypnotise independent-minded citizens and turn them into gibberish-spouting socialist cultists. The bulbs are made entirely of mercury, polonium and ebola. Scientists have proven that Hitler used low-energy bulbs for illumination when writing Mein Kampf, and paedophiles prefer internet images of dear innocent children taken under their unforgiving glare.
The Daily Mail has come out strongly against the compact fluorescents. "British cowed by tin pot marxists maddest flights from reality political class bizarre gesture Bliar take away liberty march on Westminster revolt against Europe IF YOU LIKE IT SO MUCH WHY DON'T YOU LIVE THERE." To this end, the paper is giving away five thousand incandescent bulbs free!!! when you spend a pound calling an 0900 number.
"We can't be having this com-pack fluoro Euro rubbish," said Brenda Busybody, 77 (IQ) of East Cheam. "They just don't have the same warm glow to them. It's so cold this week! We need more gas lamps and burning torches, they go well with the pitchforks."
This morning, our dear leader Steve Ballmer is unveiling our completely new search service, unrelated to anything we at Microsoft have ever done before: Bob Hope.
We spent lots of time listening to you, except when you told us how much MSN Search^W^W Live Search^W^W Kumo sucked ’cause you're just wrong about that, to learn which buzzwordy Web 2.0 thingies you use search for today. Finding a webpage that has anything to do with the search terms you entered is so passé, dahling.
So today we're introducing a new kind of search, that goes beyond traditional search engines that do tedious things like find stuff, to instead help you make faster, more informed decisions. (Windows 7 is peachy keen, by the way.) We think of Bob Hope as a Decision Engine. We've sued Stephen Wolfram into atomic dust using our patents on FAT and Mono, co-opted the Wolfram Alpha engine and swapped Mathematica for Visual Basic and Wolfram's brain for the exhumed corpse of Bob Hope.
So why did we pick Bob Hope as the new core of our search? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product: optimized for the Internet. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world.
And just look at these results!
What do we want?
Braaains.
When do we want them?
Braaains.
What do I need to run Windows 7?
Braaains.
What's Bill Gates got that means you should buy everything you can from the company he founded?
Braaains.
What's the final proof of Steve Ballmer's equal genius to Steve Jobs?
Vistaaa.
This is something new, something improved! You need to try it! It'll give so much more betterer results than that other search engine we can't name because Steve will wedge another chair up our butts! Please, come and try our new and improved service! FOR GOD'S SAKE TRY THE DAMN SERVICE. OR THE PUPPY GETS IT. We're Microsoft. We're serious as a heart attack on this one.
Wikipedia is of course exempt from Godwin's Law, for one very good reason.
I think it's because OSDN likes page hits.
After a minor shipping delay, flying cars have arrived for all. As of today, all major cities also feature moving pavements and weather control and commuter flights to the Moon will be commencing tomorrow.
Earth President Barack Obama welcomed the representatives of the Galactic Brotherhood to Washington, assuring them that the many wars on Earth were now to be conducted entirely by robots, though the robots would be carefully monitored and pulled out of battle and granted citizenship the moment they achieved sentience. He also offered the galactics free access to Google, with only the requirement for tasteful contextually-attuned text advertising to be imprinted on their DNA.
The reactionary forces of the twentieth-century United States finally conceded defeat and shut down the Five-Year Plan Tractor Plants of Detroit, where ridiculous oversized transport was bashed together by semi-literate peasants between fifths of vodka from the nerve gas factory next door, and the Five-Year Plan Software Plants of Redmond, where ridiculous oversized operating systems were bashed together by semi-numerate fresh graduates between fifths of Red Bull. The record and movie company back catalogues have been placed into the public domain for the preservation of human culture and the comic-book capitalists of Wall Street have been sent to calming, soothing, humanistic re-education facilities. "We'll teach them to love again," said Mr Obama.
Robot housecleaners are now universally available at quite reasonable prices. The robot companion for your child, designed to say "I LOVE YOU" while the child hits it repeatedly, was an early release for Christmas 2007. The new model features the voice of Justin Fletcher from CBeebies and is designed for parents to hit repeatedly.
Future innovations for the century include the rise of the Great Old Ones from their eternal sleep to take back the Earth and consume the souls of all humanity, first driving them slowly insane. The citizenry is being prepared for this eventuality using repeated broadcasts of In The Night Garden.
+1
You might, however, be able to adapt LUnix to it!
Typing this on an Advent 4211 (rebranded MSI Wind) running Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix. I can type with ten fingers on it and the screen is just large enough. Love this thing.
Their ad companies run a complete Mac production line?
Really, ad companies are people MS should listen to when spending hundreds of millions of dollars. They know as much more about advertising than MS as MS knows much more about software than they do. So this shit is the ad company suffering a stupid rich client.
VLC.
I wonder if Windows 7 somehow disables VLC.
Windows 7 wants to be KDE 4 when it grows up. Bob, on the other hand, evolved into GNOME.
Windows 7 betas have been greeted with remarkable positive press. "Of course," says Ballmer, "the betas preview the 'champagne and hookers' edition, which would be way too much for netbooks and explode users' brains. Imagine thinking those little things are computers! So we're releasing what we call Windows 7 Dumbass Edition(tm). It lets you log in and look at the shiny. Even Spider Solitaire has the ribbon toolbar! And you can buy an upgrade to the version that runs programs! It lets you do that!"
Dumbass Edition(tm) comes with pre-installed viruses to make the computer part of the Storm, Conficker and FBI botnets. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
I fear the actual future of mainstream journalism is with us in the form of tech journalism: blatant cheap whoring that doesn't even try to pretend to be honest any more. Of course, many would call this a difference of degree rather than kind.
Rupert Murdoch, speaking out on the news business, stated today that "the Internet free access model is clearly malfunctioning, as I don't make enough money from it. We have to educate people that free doesn't work, particularly for us."
Media commentators fear for the future of investigative journalism. "How can we hold governments' feet to the fire without money to pay our great reporters? Where would you get your recycled wire feeds, your Garfield cartoons?" Publishers hold that it is natural for readers to pay what advertisers once did, just as cows have to make up the difference out of their own pockets when the price of milk falls.
Newspapers have suffered badly since the collapse of their previous business model of selling readers to advertisers on a local monopoly basis. The replacement models appear to involve phlogiston, caloric and luminiferous aether.
Publishers have also explored the notion of getting Google to pay its "fair share" for so parasitically leading people to newspapers' websites. The Wikimedia Foundation promptly started billing journalists for their reprints from Wikipedia. "We feel this is completely unfair," said Tom Curley of the Associated Press, "as real news stories spring forth from the heads of accredited reporters in an immaculate creation from nothingness. My preciousss." Maurice Jarre was unavailable for comment.
Yeah, McAfee is a complete arse. It's the company's laptop, so it's the company's AV ;-) There's a reason it mostly lives in Linux.
512MB works well IME - I'd put 256MB as the "desktop only" level. But yeah, 1GB on XP is highly usable.
(256MB is also about the "desktop only" level for KDE and GNOME - 512MB practical minimum, 768GB for any comfort and 1GB is very nice thank you.)
All Hot! All Ready! All Infected!
A computer worm that spreads through low security networks, memory sticks, and PCs without the latest security updates is posing a growing threat to users blitheringly stupid enough to still think Windows is not ridiculously and unfixably insecure by design.
Despite many years' warnings that Microsoft regards security as a marketing problem and has only ever done the absolute minimum it can get away with, millions of users who click on any rubbish they see in the hope of pictures of female tennis stars having wardrobe malfunctions still fail to believe that taking Windows out on the Internet is like standing bent over in the street in downtown Gomorrah, naked, arse greased up and carrying a flashing neon sign saying "COME AND GET IT."
Microsoft cannot believe people have not applied the patch for the problem, just because they keep trying to use Windows Genuine Advantage to break legally-bought systems. "Don't they trust us?" asked marketing marketer Steve Ballmer.
Millions of smug Mac users and the four hundred smug Linux users pointed and laughed, having long given up trying to convince their Windows-using friends to see sense. "There's a reason the Unix system on Mac OS X is called Darwin," said appallingly smug Mac user Arty Phagge.
"It can't be stupid if everyone else runs it," said Windows user Joe Beleaguered, who had lost all his email, business files, MP3s and porn again. "Macs cost more than Windows PCs."
"Yes," said Phagge. "Yes, they do."
Ubuntu Linux developer Hiram Nerdboy frantically tried to get our attention about something or other, but we can't say we care.
If that were the case, they'd have posted the numbers. Particularly considering Microsoft's big problem is getting people off XP, not off Vista.
It was a fresh install. Yeah, you'd probably get decent performance with 2GB or more of memory - this was the 32-bit Build 7100 on 1GB, and that's definitely the least memory I'd want to have to run Windows 7 in.
We ran 7100 for about a week. The hard disk literally never stopped rattling. The tester eventually gave up on it because (1) it reliably crashed whenever the Flash video player for BBC iPlayer was made full-screen (presumably a defective video driver) and (2) she got a dual 1GHz Mirrors G4 with 1.75GB memory and Mac OS X 10.5 and a 22" Cinema Display free :-D
I await you quoting the bit that does XP benchmarks as well.
Cygwin does crontabs very nicely to do all sorts of Unixy things. It's a fantastic way to make a Windows box halfway sanely usable. Particularly if you set up sshd.
Keep in mind that most criminals, particularly petty thieves and burglars, are dumb. They're crooks because they're not competent to make a living not being one. Intelligence and, more importantly, general competence are the exception.