All posts by David Gerard

Microsoft fires Jerry Seinfeld

MORDOR, RedMonk, Thursday (NNGadget) — The Microsoft Vista advertisements starring Bill Gates as Colonel Sanders and Jerry Seinfeld as a washed-up 1990s sitcom star have been terminated.

The ads are nevertheless anticipated to win many advertising industry awards and look good on the creators’ resumés. Vista has sold over 140 million copies worldwide, with many of those actually being installed and activated rather than replaced with XP.

Bill Gates with pie“The idea of the ads was to get people talking,” said Waggener Edestrom marketing marketer Frank Shaw. “‘Vista: An operating system about nothing.’ The original plan was to work our way back through the comedic genius of history. Bob Hope, W.C. Fields, all the way back to Aristophanes. Ya rly.”

Shaw denied Microsoft was un-“hep” and not part of the “happening scene.” “I think the overwhelming computer press and blogosphere response demonstrates their total success. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, as we keep telling the client. Look at the huge successes of the antitrust trial and stacking ISO for OOXML. Everyone knows their name and what they’re about!”

Microsoft will be moving to “phase two” of the ads tomorrow. “They’ll be spectacular. Completely object-oriented, database file system, better security, no legacy stuff, WordPad, Paint.” The new commercials will use a comedic structure suggested by consultant Bill Hicks:

“Vista’s slow, it’s fat, my software doesn’t work, I can’t get drivers, the User Access Control’s a pain in the ass and my network grinds to a crawl when I play an mp3! What do you call that?”

“… The Aristocrats!”

Apple, Inc. shares were up 5% in early trading.

Nick Clegg promises Lib Dems hearts’ desires

THE FAERY CASTLE, Bournemouth, Wednesday (NNN) — Nick Clegg says the Liberal Democrats are on the way to power in his first conference speech as party leader.

“I can’t tell you every step on the road,” he said, taking a hit from his crack pipe, “but I can tell you where we’re headed: GOVERNMENT!”

Nick Clegg and crack pipeHe said they were the only party with “big, bold ideas for the country. New Labour is a zombie goverment and the Tories are arrogant. David Cameron is just a cuddly Tony Blair Lite hand puppet,” said the cuddly David Cameron Lite hand puppet.

The party had spent many hours debating the finer details of its “progressive and redistributive” tax package, just as if it had a hope in hell of implementing it.

“We must stay firm to Liberal Democrat values,” he said. “We must promise fluffy social liberalism whilst feathering our nests in every council and European Parliament seat we get. We can carry these values forward to Westminster.”

He also made a point of recommending stronger regulation of the banking sector, along with supporting the sky being blue and the sun rising in the east.

The Lib Dems have also come under fire over their plan to cold call 250,000 marginal voters with an automated message to get feedback on Mr Clegg’s key policy promises. “Calling people by voice robot at dinner time when Coronation Street is on will be the key way of getting people on our side and enhancing our public image,” he said. “I think the voters will be keen to show their appreciation.”

The party was in a better position than ever before, he said. “I have been to the Arctic and secured Father Christmas’ firm backing. With his support and that of the Easter Bunny and the contemporary militant Tooth Fairy jihadist movement, nothing is out of our reach. Join us now and feed the Liberals!”

A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the good laugh had been most welcome.

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Windows $NEXT_VERSION will floor all comers

Guest post by Mary-Jo Enderle

BORG CUBE, RedMonk, Tuesday (NNGadget) — I have seen the future: Windows $NEXT_VERSION Milestone $MOCKUP.

The Seventh Circle of WindowsI 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.

Your house is still worthless

THE HOUSING MARKET, Upstairs Flat Behind The Fish Renderer’s, Monday (NNN) — The house price crash has affected homes at all levels, says freelance itinerant labour force reservist Foul Ole Bob, of Cardboard City.

Satellite bum“My box was appreciating at ten thousand quid a week last year. Now it’s worth 50p. My life savings gone up in credit crunch!” said Bob. “Mister Foul, if you please, thank you.”

Jason Scum, of Wrongmove and Bastard, concurs. “I was selling looogshury boxes, seven foot by four foot, 150K this time last year. Sky dish and broadband fitted! All mod cons, luvverly neighbours, ex-cellunt views. A snip at 200K. You couldn’t spare a fiver for a line of coke, could you? I’m givin’ you my valuable time,” he said, waving his handful of Big Issue as random passing house owners threw what tomatoes they could spare at him.

After a decade-long housing boom, credit is all but unavailable. “Let’s just check yer Experian report … Failed to pay back little Johnny Turd that shilling in 1968? Ooh,” said ex-bank manager Dick Fold of Lehman Brothers, inhaling through his teeth, “’s gonna cost ya, guv. Not sure I can spare you that can of Super now, fag end or no.”

Overseas property sales in such highly desirable locations as North India, the Mongolian deserts and the Siberian tundra have also suffered, despite incredibly tempting Tube ads with four-colour photos of villas surrounded by trees. “I just don’t understand it,” said Scum, sucking from his bottle of meths.

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iTunes breaks Vista: Linux to blame

BODDY MANSION, Hill House, Thursday (NNGadget) — iTunes 8, released with the new iPods on Tuesday, causes Blue Screens of Death on Windows Vista. Apple and Microsoft enthusiasts quickly fell to heated message board discussion of which company was to blame — but equally quickly fingered the culprit.

Zune HQ iPod amnesty bin“It’s Linux. Gotta be,” said Xbox Zune (name legally changed from Bill Softie). “It’s the only suspect that fits the facts!”

The Suspect, Weapon and Location cards revealed were Linux, in the Basement, with the Emacs Macro. But the motivation remained unclear.

“Yes, it was us,” said seventeen-year-old Debian maintainer Hiram Nerdboy. “And we’re proud.” A faint ammoniated cat piss odour came forth as Nerdboy ranted his confession. “Your effete desktops are a drain on the minds of millions! Mental resources they could use to learn simple tools like Lisp and Haskell! Is time actually cubical in nature? Your 3D desktops and games and shallow interfaces hide the true power, elegance and beauty of the command line! One Dimensional Desktop, with infinite compactified dimensions hidden inside like string theory — intuitive and obvious! I wrote an Emacs macro that plays one of my Ogg Vorbis sound files any time I like! How is iTunes easier than that? 4 simultaneous 24 hour Days within only 1 rotation of 4 quadrant Earth! Educated evil and stupid! LINUX SHALL TRIUMPH! … I’m sorry, I meant GNU/LINUX SHALL TRIUMPH! Sorry, Richard. Sorry. Sorry.

“Geez, dude,” commented Mac user and first-day iPhone buyer Arty Phagge, “get a girlfriend. You’ll feel better,” he said, sipping his latte before his appointment to touch up his Apple logo tattoo.

In a completely unrelated incident, a red Converse-clad daemon and a blowfish, carrying a flag, were earlier seen leaving Apple’s Cupertino secure facility, snickering.

Reiss: Science lessons should tackle Easter Bunny

DO-AS-YOU-PLEASE, Faraway Tree, Friday (NNN) — The Easter Bunny should be discussed in school science lessons rather than dismissed, says Professor Michael Reiss, director of education at the Royal Society and of infiltration at the Discovery Institute.

The Creation of Dawkins“If pupils have strongly-held family beliefs about the Easter Bunny, such ideas should be explored,” he said. “Easterbunnyism, Fatherchristmasism or the contemporary militant Tooth Fairy jihadist movement are best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view. This is more valuable than simply banging on about ‘reality.’ Reality-based thinking is vastly overrated and certainly won’t prepare children for a career in the City or in government.”

Rev Prof Reiss, a biologist and Church of England minister, estimates that about one in 10 children is from a family which instructs its children in the Tooth Fairy theory of dentistry. “Obviously, these are from the stratum of society with more spare 50p pieces.”

Simon Underdown of Oxford Brookes University disagreed. “With so much to be crammed into science lessons, it is not a worthwhile use of time to include lessons on Easterbunnyism. We have monthly standardised testing to coach pupils on.”

The Royal Society quickly put out a statement affirming that it is opposed to such concepts being taught as science. Professor Richard Dawkins is working on a children’s text on useful ways to quickly construct street-corner gallows and burning stakes for rehabilitation of the religious.

Disney’s “Babe” a huge heartland hit

VARIETY, Lack Of, Friday (N! News) — A tight Karl Rove script makes a hit of the Mouse’s new dramedy Babe, a Fox co-production, helmed by Ron Howard and starring Britney Spears. It’s done whammo box office in the Bible Belt in its first two weeks, despite a panning from Gotham critics.

Sarah “Babe” SpearsThe fairy-tale pitch — a moose-shooting PTA hockey mom becomes President — is played slickly, with a pretty but tough heroine who starts in small-town Wasilla, Alaska and makes it to the top with down-home determination, religion and integrity intact.

Other stars include the chantoosie’s sister Jamie Lynn as the heroine’s daughter and Russian chopsocky hero Vlad Putin as the final villain.

The flick was greenlighted as a rush production by the GOP shingle prexy John McCain, expected to leave some time in the next four years, originally as second feature to so-so sequel Scrooge McBush. “Plot doesn’t matter. It’s all about heart.”

Babe opened big but rival distribs are dubious about its legs. “We don’t think it’ll even make it to November,” said Obamamania! studio DNC. “It can’t. Can it?”

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Danielle Lloyd opens celebrity sex tape consultancy

PAGE 3, Channel 5, Tuesday (N! News) — A-list Z-lister Danielle Lloyd, famous as that one who got kicked off Celeb Big Brother with Jade Goody and shagged them footballers and got her norks out and what was the other thing? has opened a leaked celebrity sex tape production consultancy.

Danielle Lloyd“You have to make people care. Lighting, camera, sound, plot, distribution, publicity, not looking like some sort of tart, making sure you talk propah like …”

A recently leaked video shows Ms Lloyd naked, looking at and talking directly to a camera she was completely unaware of at the time. “That was never deliberate!” she said, speaking to the Daily Tits. “Phone cameras are rubbish. And that was two boob jobs ago. I just can’t believe anyone would stoop so low as to film me behind my back.” Ms Lloyd is “desperate” to stop the release of the tape to the Internet, which fans can help alert her to by comparing any alleged Lloyd nude footage to the samples available on daniellelloyd.com for £5.99 a download.

Ms Lloyd recently visited America, interviewing local official stalker candidates with the Daily Tits team and getting a “spiritual” tattoo down the back of her neck in Hebrew lettering reading “Idiot Gentile Bimbo.” She also got engaged to her boyfriend, DJ Sarcastik, and modelled her fabulous new diamond in several sets of thong bikini shots.

Ms Lloyd has also come out strongly against drugs. “They make you stupid, innit.” She recently appeared in her seventeenth celebrity nude calendar this year to support rehabilitation for chronic bottled tan snorters.

Microsoft releases eight critical new security holes

BOLGIAS 8 AND 9, Redmond, Tuesday (NNGadget) — After what was expected to be an unusually quiet Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released eight patches for applications with an insufficient number of security holes.

Insulty the Office Persistent“Our market is the enterprise,” said Microsoft security marketer Jonathan Ness. “Information technology professionals know that Windows is the greatest IT job creation scheme in history. Without Patch Tuesday, there’s no reason for the experienced IT worker to spend his time hiding out in the server room watching progress bars and getting over his hangover. Also, you can’t tell people a virus ate their mail, you actually have to get it back for them.”

The updates include “critical” patches to Windows Media Player visualisations, Zune player software, that really cute dinosaur cursor and Age Of Empires II. The exploits opened by these patches allow a malicious user to take webcam pictures of your pimply butt, steal your pizza delivery and have sex with your girlfriend. The exploits have already been marketed to the Dark Security market by Microsoft Russia.

“Windows 7 won’t be vulnerable!” added Ness. “Did we mention how fantastic Windows 7 will be? Also, Vista’s pretty good! Really! The London Stock Exchange was probably still on XP!”

Several faintly cat-piss-smelling Linux users pointed and laughed in a nerdy bray at the news and a much larger number of annoying Mac users showed off their new model iPod Nanos.

Large Hardon Collider could corrupt civilisation

INUÉNDEAUX, Switzerland, Tuesday (NNN) — The Large Hardon Collider, to be turned on tomorrow, is designed to pump various types of hardon up to huge energies before banging them together. However, many concerned citizens without the personal experience or understanding of what hardons do worry at the idea of the large hardons being sucked deep into a black hole.

Large Hardon Black HoleThe device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they clash and spray matter in all directions. “It’s nothing that cosmic rays don’t do all the time all over the place,” reassured a particularly buff scientist. “It’s perfectly right and natural.”

Low-energy hardon physics and the temperature dependence of hardon production are well understood, as is the process of a hardon smoothly entering the nucleus. But some question what may happen at greater, hotter energies.

Church leaders have come out at the device. “They’re the same polarity!” said Pope Palpatine XVI. The Church worries that strange matter may recruit normal matter and turn it strange.

The Large Hardon Collider was to launch in May, but this has been delayed until mid-September. “I’m so sorry,” stammered a scientist, “this has never happened to us before.”