SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Perceiving Linux as a growing threat, and with no serious strategy to cope with technologies that can’t be purchased, Bill Gates has challenged Linus Torvalds to a winner-take-all street fight. Dubbed “The Battle in Seattle”, both contestants have agreed that the looser will shut down development of their operating system. The fight, to be held in the P1 parking garage of building 36 at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, will be simulcast via streaming video from MSNBC and Sourceforge.

A noticeably beefier Gates announced the fight from the home page of his personal website: “He’s got no effective attack against my Access Control List defense, assuming that I’m patched up to date of course. He’ll be in a kernel panic by round two.” Gates has been training and hot fixing in anticipation for the match, and now weighs in at 134 lbs.

Torvalds, weighing in at 125 lbs., held a news conference to respond to the challenge: “I’m going to remote root hack his backdoors. I’ll overrun every buffer he’s got. His threading model is inefficient, his memory allocation is weak, and his protection model has holes you could drive a truck through. That geek’s kernel is no match for mine.”