Tag: Fun
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Bulwer-Lytton
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Andrew Orlowski
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A Microsoft employee has won the Oscar of bad prose – and no, he isn’t even a weblogger. Every year the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest honors the best attempts to parody bad fiction. It’s judged by Professor Scott Rice at San Jose State University in California, and is now in its 22nd year. It’s an impressive…
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Are you trying to be funny? If so check [ ] this box
by
Andrew Orlowski
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The return of the irony tag After ten years of the net, few amongst us have yet to realize that computer networks can be a lousy communication medium. Against all the good things that we’ve gained – such as the disappearance of physical distance, traversed by very slow moving postal workers – we must stack…
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MIT invents computer that runs away
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Andrew Orlowski
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MIT has taken the unfriendly computer interface to its natural conclusion: and created a computer that runs away from you. We’ve all had experiences with user interface elements that run away from us: toolbars in Windows, or the drive icons on the Mac OS X desktop, for example. But “Clocky” goes all the way –…
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‘We must now embrace the tele-phone’ – dotcom pundit
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Andrew Orlowski
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A year ago Intel demonstrated a small contraption that allows people to talk to each other – even if they’re not in the same room, without using wires or string. At the time we saw no possible use for such a device. Dogs, as we know, love fetching sticks – but this seemed to be…
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Hungover CNET wakes up next to MP3.com
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Andrew Orlowski
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What a night out that was. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time… On Friday morning CNET woke up to find it was sharing a bed with MP3.com, and couldn’t quite recollect how the pair of them had got there. We’ve all had nights like this, but yesterday CNET staffers were…
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“This MS Antitrust story was created by a computer program”
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Andrew Orlowski
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Google’s News service is remarkable: and the most astonishing thing about it is that it is generated automatically. ” The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program,” says a note at the foot of each page. But why stop there? Why not use Perl scripts to generate…