SPILL, Aisle 2, Thursday (NNN) — Supermarket giant Tesco plans to establish itself as a major force in the broadband Internet market with Tesco Value Internet, setting itself up as a rival to to BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk.

“It’ll be hard work,” said Tesco Telecoms head Lance Batchelor, “but we have the customer service and engineering excellence ready to equal the market frontrunners. For ten quid a month, you can have internet and phone that cut out at random, customer service from a call centre in Uzbekistan — second-line support will actually have an English vocabulary of over twenty phrases, learnt phonetically! — and random viruses being uploaded to your computer. Even if it’s a Mac.”

The company will sell customers a “cheap and cheerful” modem, in white with red and blue accents, hard-wired to their account. Connection speed will be 16 megabits, with a bandwidth cap of 32 megabits. The basic plan will include “full access to all Internet sites,” particularly those that pay Tesco for access. Web search with Microsoft Bing! is free, web search that finds things will be an extra five pounds. The Sainsbury’s shopping site is anticipated to remain inexplicably nonfunctional at all times on all plans.

Not to be outdone, Asda and LiDL have announced their own broadband offerings. The Asda Smart Price Modem will have flashing white and green lights with electric bits placed inside at random. The LiDL modem will, quite literally, be a block of German-made cheese with wires in.

Waitrose sneered at their competitors’ plans, unveiling their own £40/month offering that connects using a superior piece of tank-like stainless steel design that finds your favoured MP3s and porn for you and pre-sorts them for your convenience.

THAWTELESS, West London, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release later this month of Ubuntu Linux 9.10, “Karmic Koala,” to men.

Project founder Mark Shuttleworth explained that “this stuff is difficult to explain to girls” and thought they’d have gotten the hint when he called 8.04 “Hairy Hardon.” “Worrying about sexism in open source just detracts from the battle for Linux. So we’ve put the tits back into the default desktop. And arses.”

Crime-fighting geek Shuttleworth, who dresses as a billiionaire playboy by night, swore that plenty of women liked him lots and that he obviously wasn’t unable to get laid or anything, having gotten seriously rich in the dot-com era, not to mention having gone into space. “Chicks dig that stuff. Trust me, I’ve met lots of girls. More than five!”

Canonical Community Manager Jono Bacon echoed this sentiment on his blog. “We just don’t understand how come women are 15% of all computer programmers but only 1% of open source programmers. It must be a bit complicated for them. That’s why I’ve written this spontaneous blog post, completely unrelated to anything my boss may or may not have said, on all the fantastically talented women in free software, even if none of them seem to work much on Ubuntu any more. Also, I’m absolutely confident that saying I’m in a computer geek heavy metal band will get me lots of chicks too, even if their pretty little heads can’t understand Linux.”

A special women’s edition of Ubuntu 9.10 will be released on a bright pink CD. “It doubles as a makeup mirror!” said Shuttleworth.

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