Gates Comdex Keynote Shows Plans, Matrix Spoof

An anonymous reader writes "According to Eweek, Bill Gates' keynote speech at this year's Comdex showed Microsoft's 'focus on security, spam and [the] tablet PC', including a new version of its Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server, an extension of the SmartScreen Technology for spam prevention, and the next version of the Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system. But the showstopper was a filmed spoof of The Matrix (screencaps available here), with Gates and Steve Ballmer as Morpheus and Neo respectively, and including a jab at Linux."

It all makes sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

Gates plans to trap humanity in his own MS Matrix. Of course, there will be bugs in the system allowing people like Neo to pop-up and hack in.

Still Better

[The_Rippa]

Hmm...still looks better than Revolutions.

If Microsoft built the matrix

[rf0]

Then the glitches would be a feature
Agent Smith would need to be updated ever 2 weeks to avoid the latest expolit which would allow Neo to destroy him
It would have to be rebooted every month to free up the memory leaks

Rus

Re:It all makes sense now

[Kethinov]

You don't need a godlike Neo to hack a pathetic Windows-based Matrix...

Hmmm...

[Bob Vila's Hammer]

I didn't know the Borg had a sense of humor.

I have...nothhing

[Fux the Penguin]

Seriously, I was planning to troll this topic or something, but...I've got nothing. It's just too lame. I mean, it's like trying to make fun of a clown by mocking his big floppy shoes or tiny car, stuffed with other clowns. It simply falls flat.

Really. I got nothing. Sorry. Make up your own jokes.

Man oh man!

[macshune]

What I wouldn't pay to be Ballmer's stunt double and accidentally pop Bill Gates in the nose!

And props to microsoft having the matrix run off of linux. Guess that makes sense. Can't have the matrix crashing because it feels like it! People's lives would be at stake!

Microsoft: Demonstrating through movie parodies that Linux is a better choice than Windows for system-critical environments

ASEJASLDGADADSG:LJSD!!@

[DAQ42]

Now that is just wrong.
Wrong I tell you.

So very, very wrong that I cannot begin to fathom just how craptastically crappy this crap is.

Imagine. Using a popular culture movie to debase your competition and promote your crappy vaporware. Where do I sign up for this crap? I want off your lists. All of them. And your parent company lists too. No, don't try and sell me your product by linking it to a popular movie reference, please. Let it stand on it's own merit. Oh, you say it's all smoke and mirrors and you don't have the features I want? Too bad, no money for you, bye now.

Grrr.

Ballmer as Neo?

[EmCeeHawking]

Gates and Steve Ballmer as Morpheus and Neo respectively

Um, I thought Ballmer was the fat one.

I can much more easily picture Morpheus dancing around the Zion cave shouting "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" ad naseum, than Neo.

Bad comparison

[T-Kir]

I mean come on!!! A more appropriate spoof would be that those two were the virus version Smith (crikey, I'm writing this now and listening to the Animatrix OST and Red Pill Blue Pill is on!!!)... yeah Longhorn would have to be the Matrix code, constraining humanity and the problem is choice: which MS don't want people to have.

Plus, the Matrix is due for a critical crash, hmm the parrallels are endless...

And starring the tablet PC...

[Nailer]

As Switch. One of the Nebuchadnezzar crew that got killed really early on the first movie and was promptly forgotten about forever.

Comdex?

[sulli]

Isn't that dying faster than *BSD?

Gates and Ballmer? Which one was Neo?

[u-235-sentinel]

I haven't seen it (yet) but doesn't Neo die in the movie :D

Which is Neo again? :D

What's wrong with this picture.

[FrostedWheat]

Neo: What is the Matrix?
Morpheus: Unfortunately no one can be told what the Matrix is.
Neo: Why?
Morpheus: My tablet PC just crashed.

Re:It all makes sense now

[Frymaster]

Gates plans to trap humanity in his own MS Matrix.

wrong. gates is smith! did you see the market share that guy had by the end of the series?

I can't wait...

[greenskyx]

For the part where Agent Linux burns Bills eyes out and then he finally can see all the Linux everywhere...

Re:If Microsoft built the matrix

[Verteiron]

Actually, that doesn't sound too different from the movie plot. Agent Smith obviously hadn't been patched because Neo exploited him immediately upon gaining Administrator access. And we learned that the Matrix must be "reloaded" periodically to fix the humans that "leak" from the main program...

Re:Hmmm...

[ShadowDrake]

I never understood that about the Borg. Presumably they would have assimilated *some* marketing staff over the years, enabling them to come up with a better slogan than "Resistance is Futile"... perhaps "Assimilation makes you fresh and sexually appealing, while saving money on long distance!"

Re:It all makes sense now

[Mr Smidge]

Ooh, ooh.. is SCO the architect, creator of the Matrix?

Re:Oh the Irony

[Frymaster]

lets look at the ms track record in the innovation department.

• dos: bought
• nt: bought as vms
• powerpoint: bought
• excel: bought
• windows ui: liberally, uh, borrowed from apple
• word: it's a word processor for chrissake! that's innovative?
• ms bob: 100% microsoft's idea

  • thank you bill for pusing the envelope.

Re:If Microsoft built the matrix

[Anonymous Coward]

And Neo would have to pay the Oracle $60 up-front just to talk to her over the phone.

Matrix XP

[henni16]

Gates plans to trap humanity in his own MS Matrix

You mean like that [matrix-xp.com]? ;-)

Re:It all makes sense now

[mattjb0010]

As the little kid says, "there is no security".

Re:It all makes sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

Two boxes cracked in two years, that really is poor; it's disgusting that companies can get away with selling this rubbish. And it's all stolen from honest software houses like SCO, and then purposefully made insecure by Torvolds and his commie cronies, to undermine democracy.

Re:It all makes sense now

[huhmz]

wrong. gates is smith!

I can totally see it:
Bill Gates: Im...not...so...bad...,once...you...get...to...kno w...me...

Re:I have...nothhing

[Anonymous Coward]

At least you were original [penny-arcade.com]... oh, wait--nevermind. You were just another imitator. Please, world, I beg of you: bite styles wantonly and give credit never! That's the only way for culture to survive!

Re:Gates and Ballmer? Which one was Neo?

[Darth_brooks]

Wow, he's called "steve-o" ? The marketing / PR folks screwed the pooch a bit there.

Nothing like having one of your two most recognizable corporate officers sharing a name with a guy who's known for stapling his ball sack to his leg.
The other Steve-o [thesmokinggun.com]

Special Guest Star...

[D-Cypell]

Larry Elison as the Oracle!

10 bucks says

[SirSlud]

Next week, there'll be an article on how the company MS contracted to put this movie together did it with Apple iMovie or somesuch.

Re:Those who forget history...

[einer]

Uh. What? Microsoft has ALWAYS been an innovation-stifling, will fuck for money, back stabbing company. This whole thing started when Bill G got laughed out of the homebrew computer club for throwing a hissy fit over how people were copying his version of basic.

leather trenchcoat

[pyros]

All this time I thought it was that leather trenchcoat making Laurence Fishburne look so cool. I need a mental shower now to clean the image of Bill Gates in a long leather coat.

Re:Interesting choice of characters

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it wouldn't be totally faithful no matter how they did it. At least they got the part right where the Matrix/Linux won in the end....oh wait, their "spoof" probably left the ending off...

Re:It all makes sense now

[TwistedGreen]

Yeah, he was approaching 100% CPU usage, and init couldn't even stop him!

Now that's what I call a monopoly.

Little red pill, BIG BLUE PILL

[crashnbur]

So I guess Billy Boy is trying to tell us that Linux is harder to swallow. In either case, it's pretty obvious that Windows has emerged victorious on a technicality.

Other than that, I know some guys that would rather choke on a blue pill that size than go Windows.

Take the BIG BLUE pill

[Anonymous Coward]

Geddit?

Please don't make Clippy an agent

[GuyMannDude]

Gates plans to trap humanity in his own MS Matrix.

Let's just pray Agent Clippy doesn't learn how to copy himself!

GMD

And featuring Steve Jobs...

[crashnbur]

...as Agent Smith!

Re:If Microsoft built the matrix

[Evil Adrian]

If the matrix was built on a Linux platform, it would never work, because device drivers for human beings wouldn't exist.

Who the fsck...

[Anonymous Coward]

...are Neo and Morpheus?

Cluelessly yours,
Mal the Elder

Re:Oh the Irony

[s20451]

Linux: A clone [hypermart.net] of Minix, itself a clone of UNIX.

UNIX: A rough implementation [livinginternet.com] of Multics, written expressly so that Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie could port a game called Space Travel to old, cheap hardware.

Who's got new ideas now?

Linux vs Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win."
-Gandhi

So what stage are we at now?

Operator: Operator.

[daytona]

Moerphus: I want Windows. Lots of Windows.

Daytona

Linux Kernel Error

[sharph]

Oh, yeah. I hate those LINUX Kernel Errors that pop up all the time... Who wrote that into Gnome anyway?

Re:Linux vs Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

So what stage are we at now?

The usual 2. ???

Re:It all makes sense now

[fishbonez]

Agent Gates: I hate this place. This GNU. This open source. This license, whatever you want to call it. I can't stand it any longer. It's the free software, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your GPL. And every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.

Re:It all makes sense now

[lplatypus]

Damn, the layers to this movie just keep peeling back like an onion!

You know, not everybody likes onions. Cake! Everybody loves cakes! Cakes have layers.

Re:Gates and Ballmer? Which one was Neo?

[Pseudonym]

No, Neo dies in the new Harry Potter book. Hope this helps.

Re:Ballmer as Neo?

[sharkey]

I can much more easily picture Morpheus dancing around the Zion cave shouting "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" ad naseum, than Neo.

No kidding. Neo'd be jumping around yelling, "Woah......Woah......Woah." Developers IS a multi-syllable word, after all.

Re:It all makes sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else everybody likes? Parfaits. Have you ever met a person, you say, "Let's get some parfait," they say, "No, I don't like no parfait"?

And so on...

Re:Those who forget history...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of you may not be aware of this, but at one point (20-25 years ago) Microsoft was seen as the little guy, fighting against the big, powerful, market-dominating, innovation-stifling IBM. Remind anyone of a certain penguin?

Reminds me of Anakin Skywalker...

Re:If Microsoft built the matrix

[JimR]

If the matrix was built on a Linux platform, it would never work, because device drivers for human beings wouldn't exist.

... and we wouldn't all be enslaved while the evil machines suck the life out of us. Hmmm. I'm actually beginning to see why The Matrix is like Microsoft's business model.

Re:Please don't make Clippy an agent

[LearnToSpell]

Voila! [shacknet.nu]

Re:It all makes sense now

[BorgCopyeditor]

Gates plans to trap humanity in his own MS Matrix.

NSMatrix is a class used for creating groups of NSCells that work together in various ways.

So ... he's planning to trap humanity in cells that work together ... like ... like, radio buttons?!

I still don't get it.

Re:How many times...

[nite_warrior]

Actually not, at my work, they just installed a win2k3 server for testing, the first thing the server did was to get infected with welchia worm... do you call that secure?? it didn't even gave the guy the time to apply the patch before getting the worm

"We need bugs...

[ctrl-alt-elite]

...lots of bugs."

Re:It all makes sense now

[DataPath]

Actually, I think ol' Bill looks eerily like Cigarette Smoking Man from X-Files, with those glasses. I think a counter-spoof against Microsoft would be quite in order. The MS-SCO connection, aliens trying to undermine society and technology by force-feeding the world substandard software with draconian EULAs.

Re:Comdex?

[vsprintf]

Isn't that dying faster than *BSD?

We hope so. We sent one of our middle-management types there hoping it would be contagious.

Horse suppository...

[Lodragandraoidh]

From the Dissociated Press:

(DP)After regaining my composure, I realized their take on the Matrix was all wrong. The horse suppository sized pill was mis-marked, should have been the Windows pill. It should have gone in the other end, after Balmer, timidly pointing to the small Linux pill, finally submits - smiling and whistling a show tune.
- Vin Dozier, Las Vegas

This was just feeding dog food to the dogs - nothing more, nothing less.

Re:Streaming Video Links

[lobsterGun]

I think I speak for more people when I say,"Who gives a shit?"

SCO the Architect?

[NotAnAol]

No, but they're sueing, claiming that the Architect, and therefore The Matrix, contains millions of lines of SCO code. (has SCO ever written any code?)

Re:What's wrong with this picture.

[_Sprocket_]

Neo: What is the Matrix?
Morpheus: Unfortunately no one can be told what the Matrix is.

Apparently, the Matrix is a later revision of .Net.

they get you to laugh at them

[SmallFurryCreature]

they get you to laugh at them. Remember the nazi's are now just a movie bad guy. Soviet russia is a slashdot joke and as for Gandhis enemy the british empire. Well. Just watch the news.

Note that so far noone seems to have made any serious comment on the presentation. Just a lot of jokes. What MS says is just not taken serious here. Does that matter? Nope.

Pot. Kettle. Zealot.

[_Sprocket_]

Nope, it should be as simple as gaining root on an unpatched Lunix box, like it happened to open source icons SourceForge and VIA a coupla years ago. Remember?

And while we're playing at "famous compromises", we can't forget the Microsoft corporate compromises [theregister.co.uk] either. Not that I would want to mimic your smug tone nor intrude on your own zealotry.

Re:My god, who would want to eat that massive pill

[Vilim]

Sorry about that, heres the right one Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Excellent! This will give me a chance to try out my latest invention - these pressure pills. opens a bottle and a giant pill falls out Fry: Are you crazy? I cant swallow that! Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Well, then good news! It's a suppository! I seem to have a detour from my brain to my mouth/keyboard. The message gets fiddled with in transit :p

Ballmer in the Matrix

[runlvl0]

But the showstopper was a filmed spoof of The Matrix (screencaps available here), with Gates and Steve Ballmer as Morpheus and Neo respectively, and including a jab at Linux.

But I totally get Ballmer as Neo - you've seen his matrix training film. [detonate.net]

Re:Pot. Kettle. Zealot.

[Anonymous Coward]

The site's "shell server" was compromised May 22 after a SourceForge employee logged on to an outside Internet service provider that had already been taken over by the intruder, said Pat McGovern, site director of SourceForge.net. When the staff member logged on to SourceForge remotely, the intruder captured the password.

Well some of that is true, I mean I did trojan ssh but I did it about 5 months ago, so kudos to the admin you sir are awesome..

"What happened was the (ISP) was compromised and had not known it," McGovern said, adding that the site's administrator quickly noticed the intruder and shut systems down. "Basically we had to go through and rebuild the machine, and then we checked the log file of everyone who used the machine."

hrm I guess that could also be considered true, if by true you mean, finding out every box on your network is owned 5 months after the fact and only due to my own boredom that consisted of me ircing it infront of the admin, by the way good job of auditing your network, wait thats just too much sarcasm for one sentence..

After the attack, VA removed the shell service until workers could reinstall the software and data on the server. The shell server allowed SourceForge members to type commands into the system remotely. On Thursday, the company posted an alert that the shell server couldn't be used because of an "unscheduled maintenance event."

It also allowed me to sniff my way onto apache.org and sourceforge webserver and leave all sorts of goodies in the code..

In this case, they only got into a shell server," McGovern said.

Hey, theres no disputing that, I mean.. wait.. Whats this I'm defacing ?

The company also decided to shut down its "compile farm," a collection of computers running different operating systems on which SourceForge developers can test their software.

Why would they shut down other boxes, if only the shell server was hacked ?

Although illicit modifications to the programming projects are a concern, McGovern said the intruder didn't get that far.
oh come now, you're just being silly..

Its ok thought I dont blame you guys, I mean atleast you admited to being schooled, thats more then I can say for akamai, but thats a different story all together.. But never the less, I'd like to thank valinux.. apache.. akamai and ofcourse exodus without their poor security and refusal to make security breaches known to the public I wouldnt be sitting atop a mountain of roots and oodles of proprietary software.. This is the fluffy bunny signing of.. beep..

-fluffy@#blackpanthers on efnet (the scourge of efnet)

Re:With Linux as the Matrix theres fair market...

[boots@work]

No, he's New Here [slashdot.org].

Re:It all makes sense now

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

And Zeros also, damned binary world.

[Spoiller] will the end same ?

[GundamFreedom]

This is spoiler ...
don't read if you havent see Matrix Revolution !!!!

Will the end of Gates 'Neo' will be the same as Neo in matrix revolutions ? Will he surrender and asking peace treatment to Linux ? and will Gates 'die' in peace like Neo in Matrix ?

If like that, then Linux rock ... :)