This is the Very Big and Honorific Boot of His Bootness the Mindroller (VBAHBOHBTMtm) Lou Gerstner. It has the miraculous property of moving at the speed of a very fast, copper-layered snail, with groovy interconnects. Now, Lou, where is your boot? Or is it as mythical as the legendary slim client you told us about at Comdex/Fall, too...Oh, and by the way, we found out where David Winn is...
The Greatly Good and very Honorific Doctor Mindroller Eckhard Pfeiffer never really liked Intel. But despite intense provocation, he always managed to keep his hat on...Here we see the chairman of DigiComDem, and, by the way, The Register's Man of the Tier, orienting himself as the channel churns...
The Extremely Honourable and very much still CEO Mindroller Jeremiah Sanders III left Santa Clara and found his way to a complex in Oregon. But Tom Dunlap did not have time to see him, tied up as he is in legal issue. This did not phase Jerry Sanders III. Instead he got many minions to attempt to convince an editor of The Register that Ethernet could never work over radio. Trouble was, the minions could not hear the voice of J.S. III because of the strange Intel mask he was still wearing...
The Register is copyright © 1998 Situation Publishing. All rights reserved.
Use the back key on your browser to return to the previous page...
Bootnotes
At The Register, we take no mindrollers
To Birmingham - and the Network Telecom show - where
the boys and girls attempted to persuade your staffers that the numbers
were up over last year. Would that were so. A very nice lass from a stand
very close to Microsoft told us at 1 pm that this time last year,
she hadn't managed lunch until 4.15 pm. The Organisers - all five of
them - remained silent when we attempted to quiz them....
We found ourselves in a strange situation. There was a geezer
from Intel, a geezer from IBM and a geezerette from Dell, all chatting together
as if they'd never heard of Satanism. We asked one of them a question, to which
she replied: "A source close to Dell told me this." We didn't realise
until it was too late that what she meant was there was an HP geezer
sitting next to her....
And so we took time out to visit the famous NetFinity
truck from Big Blue. IBM knows how to run a show. Instead of paying some
fantastically expensive price to have a stand built, it just rolls a great
big juggernaut through the door, complete with NetFinity Xeon servers (where
is the copper guys?) and can then roll it out, to the next destination
off some motorway in the UK, somewhere. Compaq was very impressed. One
senior exec was heard to whisper: "What a great idea, we should have done that". What
he didn't realise was that next year at Network Telecom, Railtrack will allow
his train, complete with 30 hacks, to shunt right into the station...
Birmingham NEC is full of rabbits. On our way from the IBM bus
we caught (Number 13, via Tavistock Square), we saw a rabbit run across the
road. We made a mock attempt to shoot it, and then someone in a power suit
turned round and said: "Don't shoot it, it's only a dumb animal". Gives a whole
new meaning to virtual private networks, we thought...And then the NetFinity
truck crushed it...
The IBM spin doctor was very cross when Romania beat his
English team. Ha, ha, we thought. Very uncharitable of us. The Celtic fringe
was roundly thrashed the night after by a team from Morocco. Servers us right...
A little bird tells The Register that
contractors at Intel have an X added to their first
name. So you might have, for example, Andrew X. As Intel
is such a major employer, it is therefore more than
possible that Malcolm X and Michael X are out there and
kicking butt at the chip giant.
Is Hyundai taking unilateral action and defying South Korean president
Kim's instructions to restructure? If his action in driving 500 cattle
across the parallel into North Korea yesterday is anything to go by,
yes. The Korea Herald adds its own spin to the story by revealing on its
business pages that 3M has just released a series of sprays that protect
leather. "Chung has come with cows which he prepared with warm brotherly
love," said the North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). As The Register
knows from our visits to the South of the peninsula, the motorways are
jet plane ready, while helicopters buzz around constantly. How did the
cows cross the parallel, exactly?
Catastrophe at The Register.
We're already short staffed while channel
specialist Drew Cullen circles the, er, Channel in a boatload of
dealers, just out of range of DCS1800 coverage, and now this. "STATE OF
WISCONSIN IN COURT OF APPEALS... Plaintiff-Appellant v. JOHN A. LETTICE,
Defendant-Respondent." Unbeknownst to himself, Register staffer John
Lettice appears to have been had up in Wisconsin on two charges of first
degree sexual assault. (Sexual assault? With our deadlines? Get real...)
Perplexed Lettice, who says he must have been asleep at the time, and
it's "John A C Lettice" anyway, notes nervously that his appeal for a
retrial was granted, and is anxiously scanning the Web for dates...
The Register's IT decision-making processes wobbled
somewhat as we mulled over Compaq's takeover of Digital. Think of those
flash Digital notebooks, then think of those Compaq notebooks. So yes, IBM
it was then. And we seem to have been proved right, if Dow Jones news wires
estimation of the Compaqization of Digital is to be believed. Digital PC
Brand to Dissolve Gradually, it says here. Suppose that means Compaq has
found even cheaper manufacturing capacity.
HP's latest bid for most tedious and impenetrable press release
in the galaxy begins as follows: HP Expands Fusion Imaging to
Include Harmonic Fusion for Technically Difficult Patients; $25,000 Upgrade
to be Given to SONOS 5500 System Owners. Outstanding - we won't trouble you
with the rest.
Bill is hurt by The Economist, because his old
sweethearts have been saying nasty things about him (see news). So hurt, in
fact, that he's written a long whinge for The Economist. We're
perplexed by it - not by the whinge itself, but by the way the Web pages
behave. We did this about half a dozen times, so you try it and see if you
get paranoid too. Hop to here,
select the text, press Control/C. Pop into Microsoft Word and press
Control/V. Now, what we get is nothing pasted into Word, so obviously
Control/C is disabled. But in addition, we can't get back into Internet
Explorer -- it's crashed. This happens every time, and our theory is that
The Economist's ultra-protectionist Webbies have found some way to
integrate their site features into our local software and bomb it. This had
better be accidental, you punks. Special Ts & Cs obviously apply for His
Billness, as we hunted out the site copyright notice and it says: You are
permitted to print or download extracts from this material for your personal
use only. But only sometimes, apparently. The Bill whinge prints out fine,
by the way, so the point of the entire exercise remains opaque, particularly
as it has an Economist copyright notice at the end.
Journalists at the Wall Street Journal have a weird
idea of Arthurian myth and fable. Its story this morning about
the demise of Somerset - reported here many
months ago - described it as the place where King Arthur
and the Knights of the Round Table launched their quest
for the Holy Grail. Odd, that. When we read Mallory, various
places were mentioned - Camelot and Tintagel for example. Did
Guinevere, for example, go to the Somerset counselling centre
when she ran into some marital difficulties with King and
Lancelot? We think not. Mindrolling...
Psion Dacom's sales manager solemnly promised us a week ago that
he'd tell us yeah or neah about a scoop story we wanna run real soon
now. "I'll call
you Friday," he said. Mindrolling...
| Back to the Top |