The Newspaper Shop -- April fool edition

[walktalker]

Walter Hewlett dumped from HP board
Hewlett-Packard said Monday that it will not renominate Walter Hewlett to its board of directors. As first reported by CNET News.com, HP chose not to nominate Hewlett, who late last year launched a proxy fight opposing the company's planned acquisition of Compaq Computer. In a statement, HP said that the decision of its board not to nominate Hewlett is "based on his ongoing adversarial relationship with the company, as evidenced by his recent litigation against HP, as well as concerns about his lack of candor and issues of trust."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-872260.html

Hungry man in supermarket deli counter nightmare
Single man Paul Humphrey revealed today how he returned from the supermarket on Saturday with over £50 of food that he doesn't know what to do with and is probably going to have to throw out in a couple of weeks. Mr Humphrey, 33, was amazed when his weekly shopping bill totalled £73.22 as opposed to his normal expenditure of around £30. Nevertheless, he paid and returned home with his purchases.
http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk/200...ungry-man.html

Golden-oldie worms top the hit list
Two computer worms found last summer topped the charts in March, highlighting the difficulty of eliminating the more successful digital pests from the Internet. Data furnished by e-mail service provider MessageLabs placed the SirCam virus, which hit the Internet last August, at the top of its list of hostile attachments. MessageLabs intercepts such attachments for its clients.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-872974.html

Easter Bunny retires after family tragedy
The Easter Bunny has retired from the business after a long and prosperous reign as the number 1 chocolate delivering animal. His retirement came very shortly after police released information that 3 of Mr. Bunny’s 5258 children were taken hostage and shot in the head. 150 more of Mr. Bunny’s children were killed recently after Mrs. Bunny forgot to take them to the doctors for their mixamatosis jabs.
http://www.laughsend.com/news/index.cfm?storyID=675

Anti-Unix site powered by Unix
A Web site sponsored by Microsoft and Unisys as a way to steer big companies away from the Unix operating system is itself powered by Unix software. The site, dubbed "We have the way out," runs on Web servers powered by FreeBSD, an open-source version of Unix, along with the Unix-based Web server Apache, according to Netcraft, which tracks Web site information. Both pieces of software compete with Microsoft's Windows operating system. The Microsoft/Unisys site solicits names and contact information in exchange for research reports on data center trends.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-872304.html

The two faces of Flash
Flash is having growing pains. Installed on more than 96 percent of PCs connected to the Internet, Macromedia's Flash player has become the de facto standard for running Web page animations, which in turn are generally created by Flash-conversant tools. But now Macromedia is lobbying for designers and Web-application developers to create entire pages in Flash, a position the company will push this week at FlashForward 2002, a developers conference starting Tuesday in San Francisco.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-872163.html

US military scrap bomb graffiti
The US Air Force is to scrap the tradition of writing messages on bombs, we can reveal. The move — which will save an estimated $80 million a year — comes in response to a secret report indicating that the procedure is "a complete waste of time" given that the intended recipients "rarely have time to read the message". The US first started the practice during WWII with simple slogans such as "Suck on this Tojo!"
http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk/200...b-message.html

Are Easter eggs bloatware?
Easter eggs -- hidden code in software applications -- have been around for a long time. But these days they seem to be multiplying. From their origins as simple hidden commands such as the once-obscure Ctrl-Alt-Delete, which was embraced by the public after publication in a magazine, Easter eggs are now everywhere. Gamers have long been familiar with Easter eggs, and many of the latest applications contain them: Adobe Photoshop and Quark Xpress have relatively simple Easter eggs, while Microsoft has gone a little further with Excel in which a driving game replaces the flight over a 3D landscape that was hidden within Excel 97.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-872327.html

Small Webcasters campaign for survival
From his garage in the shadow of California's Sierra Nevada mountains, Bill Goldsmith mixes an eclectic stream of music for about 70,000 people a month -- at least for now. Goldsmith is the DJ and owner of RadioParadise, as well as a longtime staffer for KPIG, one of the first radio stations on the Internet. He's one of the earliest figures in an independent Web radio scene that's thriving despite the failure of many ambitious corporate Webcasting ventures.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-872765.html

Russian firm battles copyright law
A federal judge on Monday heard arguments in a high-profile criminal copyright case that pits U.S. prosecutors against a Russian company accused of hacking Adobe Systems' e-book encryption technology. ElcomSoft stands charged with promoting technology to circumvent anti-copying protections, a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The case is among the first major tests of the criminal provisions of the law.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-872891.html

Public libraries to test digital service
An experiment in digital publishing will take a step forward this week, with six regional library systems scheduled to begin testing online research services from start-up Ebrary. The service, dubbed Ebrarian, lets people read articles and books online for free but charges them to copy text or print pages. The company said it has thousands of titles from more than 100 publishers. Among the topics offered are history, classics, business, economics, technology, education and social sciences.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-872719.html

The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business
In a perfect world, a list like this would not exist. In a perfect world, businesses would be run with the utmost integrity and competence. But ours is, alas, an imperfect world, and if we must live in one where Enron, Geraldo Rivera, and Cottonelle Fresh Rollwipes exist, the least we can do is catalog the absurdities.
http://www.business2.com/articles/ma...,38604,00.html

Warner Japan adding CD copy protection
Warner Music Japan, a division of AOL Time Warner's record company, Warner Music Group, plans to add copyright protection to one CD title possibly later this year as part of the label's ongoing trials to limit digital distribution of its songs.
The CD, which has yet to be named, will join two titles in Warner Music's European division that will be shipped with copy protection embedded in the disc. This type of technology prevents CDs from being recorded, or "ripped," onto a consumer's hard drive, which could allow songs to be traded through file-swapping networks such as Morpheus, Kazaa and LimeWire.
Warner Music Japan, a division of AOL Time Warner's record company, Warner Music Group, plans to add copyright protection to one CD title possibly later this year as part of the label's ongoing trials to limit digital distribution of its songs. The CD, which has yet to be named, will join two titles in Warner Music's European division that will be shipped with copy protection embedded in the disc. This type of technology prevents CDs from being recorded, or "ripped," onto a consumer's hard drive, which could allow songs to be traded through file-swapping networks such as Morpheus, Kazaa and LimeWire.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-872475.html?tag=cd_mh

MusicNet names execs to carry its tune
MusicNet, the embattled online music service spearheaded by RealNetworks and supported by three major record labels, has appointed several executives to help shape its direction. MusicNet named analyst Mark Mooradian, formerly of Jupiter Media Metrix, as its senior director of strategic planning and business development. Mooradian will be responsible for expanding MusicNet's distribution relationships beyond its current deals with financial partners RealNetworks and AOL Time Warner's America Online unit.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-872373.html?tag=cd_mh

Waterlogged Camera Turns Magic
Want to teach old technology new tricks? Pray for a random disaster. Farrell Eaves' camera was a perfectly ordinary Nikon CoolPix 990 until he accidentally knocked it into a pond last summer. Now it's a magic camera. After the accident, Eaves spent weeks broiling, baking and blow-drying the camera ... but it still sloshed. So he decided to see what a soggy Nikon could do, and soon discovered the resurrected camera was creating curious effects in each image.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,51205,00.html

Making Clots 'Round the Clock
A healthy supply of human platelets, the clot-forming cells that prevent a person from bleeding to death, should be a staple in any hospital. But supplies of platelets are tricky to store and have to be discarded after five days. Medical centers are always conscious of keeping their platelet supply full. A method is being developed to freeze-dry platelet units that can extend their shelf life up to a year.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,51216,00.html

Hackers, Viruses Fuel Security Market, Not 9-11
Businesses beefing up network-security measures these days still worry more about viruses and the antics of renegade hackers than international terrorists, according to a new report from In-Stat/MDR. A survey by the technology market research firm suggests that attacks on the U.S. by terrorists last fall had little impact on the network security concerns of most businesses.
http://www.washtech.com/news/netarch/15935-1.html

Spam explosion: whoppers extra mayo extra pickles suspected
During the three last days, 45 females blondes were found dead after they all bought a whopper before chatting over the internet. In what can be considered a blow to the cheese-and-spam threads industry, the inspectors linked the unexplained explosions to their bad diets. "It's a catastrophe" told a Burger King manager, "that our whoppers cannot be mixed with insignificant thread posting from office."
http://www.napsterites.net/undergrou...read&forumid=2

[TankGirl]

Now how can I know which were real news and which were just April Fools?

Thanks again WT sweetie, here's a fractal easter egg to you...

- tg

[StereoDeluxe]

Originally posted by walktalker
Spam explosion: whoppers extra mayo extra pickles suspected
During the three last days, 45 females blondes were found dead after they all bought a whopper before chatting over the internet. In what can be considered a blow to the cheese-and-spam threads industry, the inspectors linked the unexplained explosions to their bad diets. "It's a catastrophe" told a Burger King manager, "that our whoppers cannot be mixed with insignificant thread posting from office."
http://www.napsterites.net/undergrou...read&forumid=2