Ameranthropoides loysi, if I recall correctly. Originally thought to be the sole specimen of the first species of ape discovered in the Americas, now more commonly reckoned to be a Spider Monkey Of Unusual Size.
It does spell out a possible trend in O'Reilly covers though - the use of cryptozoological animals on the cover of books for mythological products. Maybe Bigfoot on the cover of "High Availability Computing With Windows NT"...
Better yet, three injunctions, each in a different legal system, all manage to come into place within hours of each other?
If this does get confirmed as an April Fool, it'll be interesting to see if there's any sort of backlash against the sites concerned - a lot of people seem to have got quite worked up over this threat of legal action, and probably won't take it very well if it turns out to be a hoax.
I don't think I've ever tired of April 1st so quickly as I have this year. I guess it's inevitable that a news site like Slashdot will tend to concentrate the effect, but I think I've seen more fake news today than the real stuff. Most of it hasn't been very convincing, either - or maybe it's just that after the 15th fake story of the day, they become easier to spot. Limpest so far is the monitor cover one on ZDNet, where I didn't even need to read the damn thing to figure out it was fake. Then again, it's on ZDNet, so that's no great surprise.
Not really - Red Dwarf VIII started airing in the UK in mid-February. My local PBS station here in Milwaukee will start airing Red Dwarf VIII on the 28th, same day as Futurama, and not much more than a month later.
To be honest, I don't think there's that many pro-MS trolls active, just a few very industrious ones. A lot of the pro-MS flamage that's appearing has a lot more in common than I'd expect - tendency to flip letters in the word "products", a keyboard with an "l" key that sticks, and lots of statements designed not so much to highlight what few strengths NT has, but to push the right buttons on Slashdot users (i.e. if I was to post a comment defending NT, I probably wouldn't focus on stability or web server performance. However, if I wanted to drive people into a frenzy, I'd post one saying my NT box had been up for years and was a really really great web server). The first two suggest a lot of this is just one person, the last suggests they're more interesting in rattling people's cages than actually making a point.
Just to contribute something to the discussion - a place I used to work recently replaced the senile old SGI I'd set up as their mail and web server, largely because their sysadmin was more familiar with NT than Unix and he'd been rather dependent on staying in contact with me after I left to keep it going. This machine was around 4/5 years old, not exactly a speed demon, yet stayed up for months on end and the only unplanned e-mail/web downtime we ever had was an hour one weekend when the power supply blew up and I had to cannibalize another machine.
It was replaced by a dual Pentium II 350MHz box with 256Mb running NT4 and Back Office. For two weeks, anyway. The Unix box is now handling the e-mail again because the NT box couldn't cope and, I am told, crashed daily during the time it was in service.
Slashdot Mirror
Ameranthropoides loysi, if I recall correctly. Originally thought to be the sole specimen of the first species of ape discovered in the Americas, now more commonly reckoned to be a Spider Monkey Of Unusual Size.
It does spell out a possible trend in O'Reilly covers though - the use of cryptozoological animals on the cover of books for mythological products. Maybe Bigfoot on the cover of "High Availability Computing With Windows NT"...
Al
Better yet, three injunctions, each in a different legal system, all manage to come into place within hours of each other?
If this does get confirmed as an April Fool, it'll be interesting to see if there's any sort of backlash against the sites concerned - a lot of people seem to have got quite worked up over this threat of legal action, and probably won't take it very well if it turns out to be a hoax.
I don't think I've ever tired of April 1st so quickly as I have this year. I guess it's inevitable that a news site like Slashdot will tend to concentrate the effect, but I think I've seen more fake news today than the real stuff. Most of it hasn't been very convincing, either - or maybe it's just that after the 15th fake story of the day, they become easier to spot. Limpest so far is the monitor cover one on ZDNet, where I didn't even need to read the damn thing to figure out it was fake. Then again, it's on ZDNet, so that's no great surprise.
There's a new one today - "IP Over Avian Carriers With Quality Of Service", RFC 2549.
Also RFC 2550, which addresses the Y10K problem.
Not really - Red Dwarf VIII started airing in the UK in mid-February. My local PBS station here in Milwaukee will start airing Red Dwarf VIII on the 28th, same day as Futurama, and not much more than a month later.
To be honest, I don't think there's that many pro-MS trolls active, just a few very industrious ones. A lot of the pro-MS flamage that's appearing has a lot more in common than I'd expect - tendency to flip letters in the word "products", a keyboard with an "l" key that sticks, and lots of statements designed not so much to highlight what few strengths NT has, but to push the right buttons on Slashdot users (i.e. if I was to post a comment defending NT, I probably wouldn't focus on stability or web server performance. However, if I wanted to drive people into a frenzy, I'd post one saying my NT box had been up for years and was a really really great web server). The first two suggest a lot of this is just one person, the last suggests they're more interesting in rattling people's cages than actually making a point.
Just to contribute something to the discussion - a place I used to work recently replaced the senile old SGI I'd set up as their mail and web server, largely because their sysadmin was more familiar with NT than Unix and he'd been rather dependent on staying in contact with me after I left to keep it going. This machine was around 4/5 years old, not exactly a speed demon, yet stayed up for months on end and the only unplanned e-mail/web downtime we ever had was an hour one weekend when the power supply blew up and I had to cannibalize another machine.
It was replaced by a dual Pentium II 350MHz box with 256Mb running NT4 and Back Office. For two weeks, anyway. The Unix box is now handling the e-mail again because the NT box couldn't cope and, I am told, crashed daily during the time it was in service.