[Ti] [OT] humor from slashdot

[Chris Olson]

On Oct 14, 2004, at 9:40 AM, John Griffin wrote:

> I would be very surprised if the editors of MacMinute would be taken 
> in by such a ruse. I am sure they verified that such a program exists 
> before publishing the article.

Oh, for Pete's sake.  What about the technical issues?

The G4 has 32x 32-bit integer registers, each of which can hold an 
arithmetic or logical operand, an index value, or an address.  The 
pentum has 12 32-bit integer, index and address registers with 
different restrictions on what can be done in each register.  The 
PowerPC has 32x 64-bit floating point registers -- x86 has 8.  AltiVec 
adds another 32x 128-bit vector registers which can do 8x16, 16x8, 
32x4, 64x2 or 128-bit operations.  Executing PowerPC instuctions on an 
x86 processor, while not impossible, can not be done at any reasonable 
speed unless you're using one of those top secret, over-clocked 25 GHz 
x86 cpu's.  And we'd know if somebody is using one of those because of 
the cloud of vapor that would be rising from the liquid nitrogen 
cooling plant that it takes to run it.

There's an old addage: Believe nothing of what you hear, and only half 
of what you see.

This outfit put out a press release that states in the first sentence:
"Maui, HI (DATE) MXS today announced the immediate availability of 
CherryOS software."

Take a look at their website.  They're collecting people's personal 
information under the guise of "pre-ordering" CherryOS.  They claim 
they're going to send you an email where you can download the "trial" 
version when it's released, and get payment instructions to the full 
version.  All they need to collect is an email address then, right?  
Maybe a name to go with it.

The company has ignored both my phone calls and email inquiries.  I 
emailed the guy who wrote the blog.  This guy is a reporter 
(supposedly) and even his reply is pretty suspicious.  Here's his 
response (non-edited) pasted below when I asked him how he downloaded 
vaporware:

"arben sent me a link before pulling it down, and as for the eula. 
they're of sketchy legal merit. besides, it's for reporting puroposes. 
i'm testing it for a story. i have no intention of keeping/using it 
afterwards. we're reporters, we take pride in bending the rules."

So now we have a product that was announced for immediate release, for 
which some kid blogger got hold of a download link (that's now been 
pulled).

Uhmmmm......  Sure.   You betcha....

vaporware: /vay'pr-weir/ n. Products announced far in advanceof any 
release (which may or may not actually take place).
--
Chris