SlashNOT

Michael writes: Red Hat has released Enterprise Linux this week, fulfilling SlashNot’s prediction published in September of 2002 and cleverly disguised as a parody.

“We at SlashNot are humble about our precognition“, said SlashNot cofounder Michael, “but we do like to brag when we’re right.” While the new product is designed to be a true Enterprise-class platform, as we predicted, the current version does not appear to include the sound effects or “warp” kernel mentioned in Matthew’s original article. We’re sure these are planned for the next release.

Matthew writes: Executives at the California headquarters of RedHat Linux have been stumped by the behavior of coders in the Desktop Environment division. New coders brought in to assist in the migration to KDE have the original Enlightenment coders going very rapidly in circles.

“At first, we had Enlightenment, and that was it. We had a few apps, we were happy. Everything was pretty. People liked looking at us, but admittedly we didn’t do much.”

“When the executives finally decided that they had to introduce the K Desktop Environment or start loosing ground to other distributions, hired six KDE coders and introduced them to the cubicles.

“It wasn’t long before the KDE coders had the Enlightment coders off on a tangent in an attempt to migrate to some mythical place. They’ve been going in circles for weeks now, not even stopping for cokes. It’s weird, and we don’t really know when it’s going to end. We’ve lost complete control.

Matthew writes: A spokesman has announced that the programmer formerly known as Linus Torvalds has changed His name simply to “The Creator“. The name change comes along with numerous statements from The Creator appear to indicate that he may be taking a more active role in the Linux community.

“The Creator would like all of the Linux faithful to understand that this name change is not going to impact the name of Linux, which shall remain as it is, and which shall be called holy, and shall be called first amongst operating systems.”

Along with the name change, The Creator’s spokesperson, Simon Ben Kosiba, announced that pronouns referring to The Creator should be capitalized.

Matthew writes: Linus Torvalds has reached a settlement in a series of coordinated class-action lawsuits from competitors who alleged the company violated the state’s antitrust and unfair competition laws.

The lawsuits were brought by Novell, Sun, HP, IBM, Microsoft, SCO, QNX, and Group Bull. The plaintiffs contend that their versions of UNIX have been completely marginalized by Linux which has grown faster than any other operating system in its adoption rate in the last three years and threatens to displace all other commercial versions of UNIX. The plaintiffs also contend that offering the product at no cost is a violation of fair trade practices. A recent survey shows that more than 70% of UNIX installations now run Linux, and another 12% run FreeBSD.

The settlement, which is subject to court approval, benefits consumers and businesses that downloaded or purchased distributions of the Linux operating system, between August 25, 1991 and January 1, 2003 for use in California.

To settle the antitrust case and without admitting guilt, Mr. Torvalds will issue vouchers for free downloads of Linux from various distributors’ websites. The vouchers can be used to download any distribution of Linux at no cost.

“This settlement allows us to focus on the future and building great software, and avoids the cost and uncertainty of a lengthy trial,” said Linus.

Matthew writes: A new high velocity virus has emerged that targets non-Microsoft systems. Details are sketchy at this point, but the GnuPublic.license (or GPL for short) virus is apparently a Trojan horse–it masquerades as “free” software which users download and use, which then somehow infects the rest of the software they use.

This virus then apparently infects derivative software—software that has been written using the original GPL infected source code.

According to Microsoft, this virus is spreading so quickly that it threatens to undermine the Windows platform even though it doesn’t infect any Microsoft products. Apparently, the viral GPL software is so virulent that it can completely replace all Microsoft software on a computer. Microsoft has responded with an innoculating counter-measure called “shared source”, but will not release the antidote without a non-disclosure agreement.

UPDATE: Some recent posts indicate that this virus is the first transgenic virus to cross from computers to humans. Apparently, once a person’s computer becomes infected by the GPL, the idea of the GPL infects the user’s brain, causing them to prefer open-source software.

Reinhard Gantar writes:

Santa Cruz, CA. Yesterday a large flying object landed on Thompson Square in Santa Cruz. The passengers identified themselves as ambassadors from Zulu IV, an earth-like planet in a small solar system in Sagittarius, and they ceremoniously passed a gift for president Bush (an elaborately braid-knitted pullover made of nano-carbon fibers) with the words “I’m Klatuu. This is a gift for your president.”

After the ceremony, they turned to business, inquiring to meet Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum and Richard Stallman. As they explained in a press conference, the people of Zulu IV is plagued by an evil emperor who is also the CEO of the only manufacturer of software and has been consistently abusing his monopoly power in order to enslave the planet’s populace for more than two-hundred wardoks (about 700 earth-years).

“We can’t bear no more” said Hm, the spokes-person of Zulu IVs delegation. “The blackmailing, the taxes, the suppression, the deportations, the licenses, the protocol pollution, the blue screens of death squads… we will put an end to all that, but we have to empower our people with software they can control themselves. We need Linux, gcc, python, mySQL and sendmail to overthrow the ancient regime.”

Larry Wall, creator of the perl programming language, volunteered as abductee in order to teach the good use of perl on Zulu IV. Hm politely rejected the offer, explaining, that their alphabet has not enough characters to handle perl-code gracefully.

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.”

Matthew writes: The troubles encountered by LindowsOS, a version of Linux that includes a default WINE configuration which allows users to run some Windows applications natively in Linux, are not over. Lindows recently prevailed in the suit brought against them by Microsoft for somehow infringing on Microsoft’s non-trademark Windows, but remains a target for intellectual property owners.
Actor Delroy Lindo, whose films include Ransom and Cider House Rules, has sued the troubled distribution for infringing on the name of the operating system he personally developed for the Psion Organizer II in 1990 and which he called “Lindo’s OS”. Unlike the Microsoft suit, LindowsOS is clearly similar to the name of Mr. Lindo’s operating system, and Mr. Lindo was successful in trademarking the name in both the UK and the US. There is speculation that Mr. Lindo’s inability to successfully market the operating system had a lot to do with his decision to become an actor.
Claiming that the infringement significantly damages the market value of his operating system, Mr. Lindo is asking for 750,000 in damages or a role in Guy Ritchie’s next film.

Squid writes: Inspired by the Xbox Linux Project, who successfully turned a 200-dollar game console into a 200-dollar Linux computer, a group of intrepid Belgian hackers have most of the Linux kernel running on an Atari 2600. “Not all potential Linux users can afford an Xbox,” said project leader Jean-Paul Lejeune. “Now, using only an Atari 2600, mouse, keyboard, hard drive, RAM, circuit board, EPROM burner, PIC programmer, and some duct tape, you can get Linux up and running in just a few days.”

The team still has much work ahead. So far, 2600 Linux can boot LILO, load most of the kernel, and core dump. The video display works, but currently shows Space Invaders graphics instead of text. The next build is slated to include the keyboard interface and the first eight letters of the character set.

Captain Shenanigan writes: Chad joins Germany, Argentina, Peru, and China in considering Linux and open source application software as a less expensive alternative to the Microsoft Windows platform and Office software suite.

Steve Ballmer immediately flew to N’Djamena (The capitol city of Chad, if you were wondering) in a desperate last-minute bid to convince their legislature not to pass legislation requiring open-source software for governmental use. Read the rest of this entry »