The ArsTechnica OpenForum is down this weekend for maintenance, and in its place is a set of temporary boards. Needless to say, there’s a whole lot of goofy stuff happening, since people realize that this set of boards will be vaporizing in favor of the “real” board when it makes its appearance sometime today or tomorrow.
However, there are some pretty good posts, and I’m going to to my best to pull them out and archive them here. I’ll keep adding to this as I stumble on threads - it’ll be a shame to let teh silliness fade.
New Unit of hype measurement: the Jobs
Since I plan to attend Comdex this week (and my thread has been banished to the fourth page of Loungebox Room hell, thank you all very much) I got to thinking about Gates’ traditional keynote, and about the hype that will generate.
I’ve posited a new unit of hype measurement before on Slashdot, but I’ve decided I need a greater amount of peer review. I don’t feel that the Battlefront is objective enough for this kind of socioscientific inquiry.
I present to you: the Jobs.
As you all know, Steve Jobs exudes what is known as the Reality Distortion Field, or RDF. Jobs is an absolute; therefore, he always exudes an RDF with a Jobs value of 1. People who attended the G5 launch who sat in the front row might have been exposed to a potent dose of 790 milliJobs or so, while those near the back could have left after being exposed to 680 mJo, a testament to the potent power of Photoshop benchmarks and minimalistic PowerPoint slides.
It is possible to experience an RDF value of over 1 Jo; however, this has been postulated to be confined to those individuals who have enagaged Jobs in intercourse while receiving a roadmap update. No such individual has ever been found outside the laboratory, where scientists have been able to simulate such an experience using extracts of black turtleneck, G5 iMac concept designs, and other rarified elements.
What is not known is the effects, adverse or otherwise, of being exposed to prolonged doses of Jobs RDF radiation. Further research is required to determine whether field strength per unit distance is constant, or varies under certain conditions.
Early studies have shown that Bill Gates, for example, exudes a rather small RDF of 230 mJo or so. George W. Bush, however, propagates a field of 850 mJo ad above, especially in Southern states. Researchers at UC Berkeley have concluded that the RDF is in some way tied to manure, as individuals in the states where Bush’s RDF is strongest seem to wear shit-kickers on a frequent basis.
Further study, however, is required.
– lumiere
ATKINS Nutritional Approach! Who’s doing (done) it?
IIRC, Nerio did it and he had to finger himself in the ass because of it.
Now I’m not saying you’ll have to finger yourself in the ass, but Strom Thurmond does have a shrinking ray…
– euri
I’d kill everyone in here for a fucking burger and fries at this point.
– Semi On
The One has Merged with the Source, Reloading in Progress
System wide notice:
For the Next 48 hours, the Matrix will be offline as the Architect moves us over to Matrix 3.0. The Merovingian has graciously offered to ferry programs to a temporary holding area in the 01 mainframe while the restart progresses.
The following are a list of known bugs in Matrix 3.0;
There seems to be a green cast to everything. Hopefully this will be fixed in a later revision.
The new equation balancing system (choice.lib) introduced by the Intuitive Program is projected to have a failure rate of 1%
Tastee wheat 1.5 still doesn’t match Pre War accounts of tastee wheat. Therefore we will make tastee wheat taste like tacos, and tacos taste like everything else. Chicken may be used as the base taste in a later revision.
Programs Smith, Brown and Jones have been introduced as Agents of this system to help account for the 1% error rate that has been predicted.
End of File
– PhysicsGuy
Attention SamRulezTheWorld, please stop pinging your loopback address. Also, please stop merging “the one” with “the source”.
Thank you.
– Caffeine