Category Archives: United States

Technology, United States

Microsoft releases Silverlight 2.0, nobody cares

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BOLGIAS 8 AND 9, Redmond, Sunday (NNGadget) — Microsoft today announced the release of version 2.0 of its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe’s Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.

NBC Silverlight fail“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.

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Finance, United States

Analysts: credit crunch caused by the poor

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PUNDITS’ CORNER, G.W. Bush Sewage Processing Plant, Friday (NNN) — Analysis of the global financial crisis reveals that the root cause is not stupendous bets on toxic deals, raw naked greed, cocaine-induced septicaemia, tertiary syphilis or mad cow disease amongst bankers. It’s because of all the poor people signing up for mortgages.

Daisy Duke, Black Widow of the Credit Crunch“It’s true that we got into trouble by bundling mortgage securities that only held their value and made profits so long as enough poor people signed on to get screwed,” said Dick Fold of Lehman Brothers. “But you just don’t understand the intense psychological pull poor people have on rich folks! They can make the world’s hardest, meanest, most ruthless CEOs, who’ve spent years honing the fine arts of profit-making, part with good money on a whim and hand it to a bunch of irresponsible, check-bouncing layabouts!”

America’s 499 billionaires controlled $1.4 trillion in assets, until the poor people caused the catastrophic market failures of the past month.

“It’s lending to minorities that did it,” said Neil Cavuto of Fox News. “You lend to those people, the country collapses. Fwoosh! I understand ACORN was involved in it, too. Which means it’s Obama’s fault. Unsurprisingly. I don’t really understand these ‘credit default swap’ things, but I can tell a bad credit risk just looking at him. Or her, of course — it’s Hillary’s fault too.”

“It ain’t that hard,” explained sub-prime mortgage defaulter Cletus J. Underclass. “Y’got mortgages, they make a stream o’ money. Y’kin call that stream an asset with a value. Y’bundle up them ‘assets.’ Y’bet on that there bundle bein’ good an’ ever’one payin’. Y’bet on that bet bein’ good. Y’sell that bet for trillions o’ bucks an’ make billions in bonuses. Ah spend mah money on Budweiser, NASCAR and good weed this month instead of the mortgage, mah buds do the same, the whole pile falls over, yer all fucked. And AH AIN’T SORRY! Fuck you and yer buds! New York assholes! Whoo-eee! Can’t wait to do it again next time! Y’all come back now!”

“Damn that Cletus and his siren call,” sobbed Fold. “If only he’d call me back.”

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Politics, Science, United States

Cheney discovered to have a heart

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TORCHWOOD THREE, Cardiff, Wednesday (NNN) — US Vice-President Dick Cheney is to receive treatment to correct an abnormal heart rhythm, his spokeswoman has said.

Dick Cheney, CyberwomanMarkets would have been shaken at the news that Mr Cheney possessed such an organ had they not been utterly exhausted already.

“During a visit with his mechanic this morning, it was discovered that the vice-president has internal organs similar to those of a human, including one organ that apparently pumps blood,” said his spokeswoman, Megan Mitchell.

“However, we have given him a large supply of cute puppies and fluffy bunnies to bite the heads off, rip apart with his bare hands and so on, and he is on his way to a full recovery.”

The vice-president has been treated for the condition before. In July 2007, he had what was meant to be the last stage of his complete cyberneticization and abolition of the last traces of puny “human” emotion.

“I only hope McCain makes it in on election day so we can finish cyberizing him as well,” said Mr Cheney. “We’ve already replaced his morals with a clockwork mouse mechanism remote-controlled by Karl and have a killer Stepford fembot shadowing him to keep him … on-message.”

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Technology, United States

Next Windows to be called “Windows”

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MORDOR, RedMonk, Tuesday (NNGadget) — In a triumph of marketing over marketing, the next version of Windows will be called “Windows.”

Windows 7“Nuts to you and your ‘Windows $NEXT_VERSION’ jokes,” said Microsoft CEO Steve “Trains Run On Time” Ballmer. “It’s Windows %NEXT_VERSION%, and fuck you! WordPad and Paint will kick your ass.”

Tentative names included Windows Blackcomb, Windows Vienna, WindOS X, Windex, Windows Steak and Blowjobs Edition!!! (which proved in beta testing to be Tofu and Long Querulous Discussion About Where Our Relationship Is Going Edition) and Windows 2007 2008 2009 2010.

A new line of advertisements, made on Apple Macintoshes, is set for 2009:

WINDOWS SE7EN. Overwhelming greed, lust for power, Mac envy, slothful performance, Aero pride, wrath against Samba, spectacular gluttony. WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

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

Finance, Technology, United Kingdom, United States

Grand Theft Auto: Wall Street released to controversy

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BELTWAY, Liberty City, Sunday (NNN) — The new Wall Street Wars version of controversial video game Grand Theft Auto will let players deal sub-prime mortgages to earn in-game cash.

GTA: Wall Street is a significant advance in game technology, bringing the famous Red Ring Of Death to Microsoft Excel and thus giving PC gamers the advantages long enjoyed by Xbox 360 gamers.

Wall StreetIn the end game, being run as a Live Multiplayer Weekend from Friday through to tomorrow, the final “boss” is the US Treasury. Defeating this character depends on the player’s posse putting enough game points into play to crash the whole game if they are killed. Success earns the player and his team a 700 billion point bonus.

Controversy surrounds a download available on the net called “Hot Latte,” which is said to unlock secret insider trading scenes. However, the final edition of the game is unlikely to feature explicit criminality, sticking only to the socially-sanctioned variety.

Dan Houser, chief of game developer Rockstar, said: “Our games are intended as entertainment and relaxation for mature adults, not children. GARÇON! MORE COKE AND HOOKERS OVER HERE! CHOP CHOP, S’IL VOUS PLAÎT MATE! We are of course very happy to continue to work with all responsible bodies on these matters, as previously.” He then proceeded to snort an entire gram in one hit.

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Health, Science, United States

Genetically modified food is a “taste sensation”

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THE LAB, Borg Cube, Tuesday (NotScientist) — Dedicated Monsanto geneticists, working for the good of humanity and a badly-written space filler in the newspapers, have produced a fabulous array of valuable new cash crops with 100% all-natural artificial flavors that developing countries can grow to pay the interest on their ludicrous debts to the International Monetary Fund.

Cylon Number Six“Bananas that taste like banana flavoring!” said Cylon Number Six of Monsanto Public Relations. “Strawberries that taste like strawberry flavoring! Brewed coffee that tastes like instant! I was really disappointed the time I ate a strawberry as a kid, it didn’t taste anything like strawberry flavor. Now your kids will never have to suffer the same way.”

The wholly natural artificial flavoring builds on examples from nature: bacon with the magical taste of bacon, Quorn with the magical taste of Quorn and Budweiser with the magical taste of urine. The latter example also produces urine with the magical taste of Budweiser.

Some flavors for specialist niches were not a success. “Ice cream that tastes like vanilla dental dams turned out too gritty for the lesbian market, probably because no-one actually uses them.” Authentic™ ManJuice™ chewing gum for the gay market was considered too “outré” at this time, as no-one could actually bring themselves to use the word “tasteless.”

The company looks forward to continuing to feed the world at very reasonable rates on heavily patented non-breeding seed. “Without us, the poor would starve. Starve, you hear? Naturally grown Big Macs with the magical taste of a New Jersey chemical vat will save the world. Anyone who hates Monsanto hates humanity and probably turns tortoises upside-down in the desert,” said Six, nibbling on a Red Dye No. 1 fruit fresh off the vine. “We do what we must because we can.”

Technology, United States

Free Software Foundation announces GNUPhone

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DEFINED FREEDOM, Gnuisance, Monday (NNGadget) — The Free Software Foundation (NASDAQ: RMS) has announced the Free Software alternative to the evil, DRM-infested, locked-down, defective-by-design iPhone: the GNUPhone.

The key technical innovation of the GNUPhone is that it is completely operated from the command line. “What could be more intuitive than a bash prompt?” said seventeen-year-old Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy. “The ultimate one-dimensional desktop! Just type dial voice +1-555-1212 --ntwk verizon --prot cdma2000 --ssh-version 2 -a -l -q -9 -b -k -K 14 -x and away you go! Simple and obvious!”

GNUPhoneThe phone will also serve as a versatile personal media player. “I can play any .au file or H.120 video with a single shell command! The iPod could never measure up to this powerful ease of use.” Video is rendered into ASCII art with aalib. “If blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups were good enough for 1970s minicomputer operators, they’re good enough for you. Respect your elders.”

The KDE project will be bringing its next-generation KDE 4 desktop to the GNUPhone. “you can flip, twirl, dice, blend, fold, spindle and mutilate your terminal windows to your heart’s content,” said developer Aaron Seigo. “look at that cool effect! any complaint that basic functions don’t actually work is ignorant of the intrinsic beauty of the plasma api and is just more fud spread by haters like stevie ray vaughan-nichols and novell corporation.”

Actual successful voice calls are expected by 2011 to 2012. Regulatory approval is proving problematic in the corrupt, corporate-captured US environment. “The FCC said that if we dared switch on this, uh, ‘piece of shit’ in a built-up area in its present form, they’d break all our fingers with a fourteen-pound cluebat,” said Nerdboy. “They’re obviously shilling for Apple, Nokia and Microsoft.”

The second version of the GNUPhone will run EMACS on the HURD kernel and be operated by writing eLisp macros on the fly. “It’s the clearest, most elegant and natural operating environment anyone could conceive of,” said Nerdboy. “Really, we’re not out to destroy Apple; that will just be a completely unintentional side effect.”

Entertainment, Technology, United States

Apple declares: “OK, we’re evil”

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CUPERTINO, Transylvania, Friday — After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil™ as a corporate policy.

Evil Steve Jobs“Fuck it,” said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, “we’re evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You’ll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It’s shiny and it’s pretty and it’s cool and it works. It’s not like you’ll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!”

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. “Our evil is better than anyone’s evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where’s your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We’ve worked hard on our evil! Our Zune’s as evil as an iPod any day! I won’t let my kids use a lesser evil! We’re going to do an ad about that! I’ll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole.”

“Of course, we’re still not evil,” said Sergey Brin of Google. “You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it’s not like you’re going to use Windows Live Search. Ha! Ha! I’m sorry, that’s my ‘spreading good cheer’ laugh. Really.”

Media, Technology, United States

Microsoft fires Jerry Seinfeld

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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.

Technology, United States

Windows $NEXT_VERSION will floor all comers

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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.