The "bill sux" Intel hoax disclosed: The original image came from this book cover at http://www.amazon.com/covers/0/69/102/125/0691021252.l.gif
My spies tell me that the "Bill Sux" graffiti is a hoax.
A new Rumor Mill
http://www.ntk.net , once again new on Friday:
"If there were no profit to be made from dealing in software, then it would not be as attractive to criminals" - Microsoft's anti-piracy manager, DAVID GREGORY ...legal counsel advises me to rephrase that
Susie Bright complains in Salon Magazine that because of Viagra now all those trophy wives will have to have sex .
API - Time Magazine reports an interesting case of high-tech graffiti. It seems that a couple of Intel engineers working on the design of a recent version of the Pentium microprocessor included a message that describes their feelings about Bill Gates, president of Microsoft, a good corporate pal of Intel's. When a portion of the Pentium chip is examined under a powerful scanning electron microscope, the phrase "bill sux" is clearly visible, etched into the surface of the chip. The "flaw" in the chip was only discovered by accident well after the chip was released into the market, too late for Intel to prevent the chip from being used in the manufacture of tens of thousands of PCs. Intel says that both engineers responsible were former employees of Motorola, makers of the chips that are the heart of the Apple Macintosh. Both engineers have since been fired by Intel. Full picture on http://www.idt.mdh.se/kpt/billsux.jpg
A new mouthorgan this morning, talking about polyamory (again).
Blue laws are alive and well in the US. Shop owners in New York City have lost a decision which would allow them to stay in business while new zoning laws are under appeal.
Aaack! Something seems to have gone terribly wrong! There should be days of stuff here! Oh well, it'll rebuild over the next couple, maybe I'll try to copy some stuff up from the archives.
From http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/bs/22/rentschler.html
Some men tell us we must be patient and persuasive; that we must be womanly. My friends, what is a man's idea of womanliness? Is it to have a manner which pleases him -- quiet, deferential, submissive, approaching him as a subject does a master. He wants no self-assertion on our part, no defiance, no vehement arraignment of him as a robber and a criminal ... while every right achieved by the oppressed has been wrung from tyrants by force; while the darkest page on human history is the outrages on women -- shall men tell us to be patient, persuasive, womanly?
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1870.
A standard response to all those pesky problem reports .
Salon laughs at The Next World War, and rightfully so. From their review it sounds like it replays all the tired clichs of the "info war".
And I think somehow Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet yesterday, it's got new strips.
Marylaine talks about the VH-1 100 greatest rock musicians poll, and of course I missed Need To Know on Friday.
If you haven't been keeping up with the evil genii at User Friendly , it might be a good time to drop back over to the cartoon about the staff of an ISP. Strictly fiction, so I've heard. And also in the comics world, new installments in Helen .
A new Topping the News from Pat Califia
Microsoft products bring us closer to world peace: By know I'm sure you've all seen the US Navy unconvincingly trying to blame the failure of the new smart ship on something other than the OS (which happens to be Windows NT) http://www.gcn.com/gcn/1998/July13/cov2.htm
Phil Specter: "The difference between the Spice Girls and a porno film is that the porno film has better music."
A new Rumor Mill
Well, I guess Excite's getting a good ad out of these updates. Electronic theatre last night, as usual Loren Carpenter's demonstration of humans in the hive mind was awesome (the audience is divided into two halfs which votes on which direction to move a controller playing "pong", for instance).
No real "wow" technology, some interesting talks on art. More in a bit, now for some free Excite advertising...:
Free web-based email, Forever, From anywhere! http://www.mailexcite.com
Greetings from alternately sunny and cloudy Florida. SIGGRAPH has started, although only at the course level, and as usual most of those seem to begin at the "This is a pixel" level. No loud thumping techno yet, and just a few clips from various movies and tests to illustrate technique.
More as I run across it.
Free web-based email, Forever, From anywhere! http://www.mailexcite.com
I may add some more stuff today, but I'm off to SIGGRAPH , so any updates to these pages for the next week are gonna be a surprise to me, too. If you're one of the few people to whom I've revealed the key in an off-hand manner (and you know who you are), feel free, NEWWWSBOY is pretty stable (and maybe on the airplane I can finish the docs so I can release it when I get back).
Remember Marylaine on Monday, Mouth Organ on Thursday, and get out and enjoy the sunshine a bit, hey?
Susie Bright on outdoor sex in Salon.
Friday, so Need To Know hits the web.
More soft porn parody , the obvious one, too the tune of John Cougar's "Jack and Diane"...
A new Rumor Mill , product pitches described as keynotes at Internet World.
I'll be gone to SIGGRAPH in Orlando next week, probably with limited 'net access. So while I'll try to send updates, I don't promise anything. Full report when I get back and decompress, I expect lots of loud techno and cool eye candy.
I'm sorry, it's like watching a train wreck. But the media hype surrounding that http://www.ourfirsttime.com/ publicity stunt is so much fun. Tish Williams' column in Upside is a fun read:
"Before 18 days of Internet scrutiny are up, Mike will have run off with the night cashier at Tastee Freeze, and Diane will gain her first lesbian experience with her consoling best friend."
A new Mouth Organ , lambasting the new Jane magazine. Seems like shooting fish in a barrel, to me. So here's a question: Can anyone out there imagine a media outlet that pays for itself that doesn't have to suck up to advertisers and therefore not try to draw its consumers down into rampant consumption? I haven't figured out a model for this, yet.
If you're into debates about filtering software, there's an article in Salon Magazine about the Scientology filter , provided to Scientology members. The "think for yourself" religion (isn't that an oxymoron to begin with?) asks that members:
"agree to use the specific Internet Filter Program that CSI has provided to you which allows you freedom to view other sites on Dianetics, Scientology or its principals without threat of accessing sites deemed to be using the Marks or Works in an unauthorized fashion or deemed to be improper or discreditable to the Scientology religion."
Sig file of the day:
Merijn Broeren | Running Windows NT as a server because it's easy Rover & Newton | to use is like hiring Miss America to run your Lunatech Research | payroll because she's cute.
Someone's got a cool page up on the Bug's Life Mall Tour
Media spoofing can be fun. For instance, check out this gem: Ocean Fund International Hires Stephen Michael Cohen to Run Sex.com . Continuing from the press release as published in CNN:
ROAD TOWN, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, July 15 /PRNewswire/-- Ocean Fund International, a British Virgin Island International Corporation announces today the appointment of Stephen Michael Cohen at a record salary of 17,000,000.00 a year and $100,000,000 in stock options to run its' wholly owned subsidiaries SEX .COM and Sand Man Internacional in Tijuana, Mexico.
Ummmm... 17 million what? Pesetas? One hundred million in stock options? Gimme a break, perhaps "stock options valued at...", but I didn't see any ticker symbols anywhere in it. It'll be fun to see how far this one goes.
A coworker mentioned that Steve Jobs was able to wander through the Bug's Life mall show at the Pleasanton mall unrecognized, but this? Time magazine reports that he was denied entrance to Mac World by a security guard who noticed that he didn't have a badge...
Somehow Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet got dropped from yesterday.
Cloning Jesus Christ from DNA samples found on the shroud of Turin? That and more in Topping the News at the Spectator site.
Pat Califia has a new Quickies , among other things mentioning that U.S. District Judge Gene Carter found the 1996 law faux child porn unconstitutional, and Carol Queen a new Queen On-line on the HIV scare in the porn industry at Good Vibrations.
It's time for more Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet .
Marylaine's My Word's Worth this morning on summer reading.
If there's anyone you'd expect to luck into a couple of million bucks, it's Mark Pesce, but the poor guy doesn't seem to be much on coherent thoughts. His piece in Salon today bears that out:
Hardly a single graphics-heavy blockbuster has been produced without Softimage
And then he goes on to talk about "the look" of Softimage as a primarily visual thing.
A new NETFUTURE .
It's funny that I should find your NETFUTURE newsletter now, when I'm hitting my head against the overwhelming emptiness of my career connecting people with computers. I find here eloquent expression of what have been formless and nagging doubts .... So what is a person to do when all her skills are tied to computers? Start over at McDonalds?
-- Joan Cole
Perhaps a good portion of our enjoyment comes with the challenge of trying something new. One of the things that amazed me nearly 15 years ago was the evolution of programming techniques on a signle platform; the difference between the first Apple ][ games and the last ones was huge. Now those of us intrigued by software can't possibly keep up with what hardware is doing every year. When much of the new has been discovered is the challenge gone? I think there's still unknown territory, but I see glimmerings of the borders occasionally.
"It's one of those recurring nightmares. You're supposed to be giving a MACWORLD NEW YORK keynote but you haven't got anything to announce, your wife is due to give birth any minute - AND YOU'RE STILL CEO OF APPLE!!" --- So begins this week's Need To Know .
