Say Hello to CockBand

Steve sipped his magic water, brow furrowed, listening with his head cocked to the side to the blather the record execs across the table were vomiting at him. The barfing had been ongoing for the better part of three hours, and Steve was bored. As he set his water bottle down, his mind meandered from the meeting to more interesting things. Dammit, Steve thought, this is my boardroom. It's about time they heard my speech!

Beside Steve in his stupor sat none other than Phil Schiller, mulleted and wearing his typical denim button-down, and John Rubenstein who was wearing a blue polo, collar-up, with iPod headphones snaking up over his hairy chest and pouring out the front of his collar. Not only was John the Senior Vice President of the iPod division, he was also a member.

As the meeting droned on, Phil noted the glazed look in John and Steve's eyes. Without moving a muscle, Phil fiddled with something underneath the table and a random burst of music exploded from John's neck. Before John could look down, however, the music stopped. Steve hadn't noticed and Phil looked over at John and smirked. John wondered when Phil had managed to take his Shuffle.

Clearing his throat, Steve rose from his chair, interrupting the record executives across from him. They looked up at Steve's blue-jeaned form, surprised. They watched as Steve strutted to the corner of the room and grabbed a new bottle of water out of a mini-fridge, uncapped it, and took a sip. He looked around him at all the expectant eyes, like baby birds held captive in a nest, and smiled.

"I have a little something to share with you today," Steve said, the fire coming back to his eyes. "We all do, in fact, and we're really excited to present this special Stevenote with you today."

Phil looked over to John and rolled his eyes. Having endured one too many Stevenotes, he wasn't what could be called very excited in the least. Stultified was probably a better term for what Phil was experiencing at the moment. John too had witnessed several private mini-keynotes where Steve Jobs had paraded around a boardroom and drove a point relentlessly home for hours on end.

Phil and John shrugged, helpless, and turned to Steve. At least it wasn't record company rhetoric.

"Gentlemen, today we stand here over two years after Apple and the recording industry made downloading music easy and legal," Steve began, not missing a beat. "And in two years we've grown in a really impressive way, and we've got some really impressive numbers to show you."

Without a word, Steve yanked a small device that looked like a black iPod Shuffle out of his pocket and clicked a button. Silently, metal armor appeared from the walls and covered the windows. The lights dimmed behind them, and a solid metal panel slid shut with a sucking sound over the doorway. One wall was lit by an unseen projector and down-tempo electronica started playing softly in the background.

The record executives looked around, frenzied, not sure what had just happened. Some grabbed for papers and shoved them into briefcases while others swung around in their chairs feeling for something to grab onto. They began muttering, asking one another what was going on, nerves on edge. One exec took his mobile phone out and opened it. He looked hysterical in the dim light.

"You'll see that your mobile phone's signal is jammed in here, as are all other means of external communication. Bluetooth and WiFi don't work, and the Ethernet cables to your laptops have been cut," Steve said to the executives. "You're all alone in here. All alone with just me, Phil, John, and the numbers."

Phil and John shook their heads in dismay.

Steve wasted no time in barraging the executives in an ejaculation of numbers. Tracks available through the iTunes music store: 500 million. Projected iPod sales for September quarter '05: 7.1 million. New countries the iTunes music store was available to in '05: 7. The list went on and on, the execs — as well as John and Phil — were wide-eyed and sweat-faced, drowning in the numerical overbalance.

After what seemed like years, but was actually only about sixty minutes, Steve stopped to sip his magic water and leaned on the opposite end of the board table, projector light casting charts and graphs across his chest. He pushed his glasses up onto his nose and smiled, making eye contact with the scared and helpless executives now willing to agree to almost anything just to be able to leave their prison.

"So, as you can see, the iTunes and iPod platform continues to grow at a fantastic rate. We're number one by a huge gap, and we still haven't tapped some countries' markets yet. And we're always adding better value to the platform as well. The Shuffle is selling like hotcakes, we're about to launch iTunes 5 with support for music videos, and —" Steve paused here for dramatic effect, looking around for good measure.

"And we're about to launch a totally new way to rock your cock off!" Steve shouted, smiling.

At this, John and Phil stood up and walked, wordlessly, heads down, toward the back of the room and began rummaging around in the dark. Steve joined them, their three forms busy as the room stood silent, almost painfully so, as the record execs hardly dared to breathe. There was a metal clink and a muttered curse from Phil as the fumbling stopped, and the three figures in the darkness rose.

Like a heart attack, arena lights blinded the room in a rainbow. Fog machines blasted their vapor into the air as power chords rang out, pummeling the ear drums of the executives, throwing them into chaos. It was like being at a concert, only much scarier. Steve, John, and Phil jumped up on the board table as, silhouetted by the lights and fog. The power chords stopped and all was still, save for some lingering fog.

Atop the boardroom table the three Apple executives stood transformed into rock gods. The last fingers of smoke eddied around their bodies, stark naked save for a weird series of electrodes and wires attached to their hairy penises and scrotums. The wires led back behind the three of them into the darkness. The record executives' mouths were agape. No one said a word; no one dared to breathe.

"We're proud to announce our new companion for GarageBand," Steve said, detaching the small control device from somewhere between his buttocks. "We're revolutionizing the way you can integrate an electric guitar and your Mac," he continued. He then pressed the button on his control pad, and the wall was lit by the image of a new iApp, complete with tuning dials and spectrographs. "Say hello to CockBand."

All eyes studied the screen intently, drinking in the new application's implications for the music industry. A slight draft blew through the room and John and Phil shifted their weight from one foot to another as the record execs' mouths slowly closed. Steve continued smiling, naked as a pioneer after a mountain-stream bath, as he replaced his control pad back into his butt-crack.

"The neat thing about CockBand is that it allows you to play guitar without actually having a guitar," Steve said, eyes sweeping over his captive audience. "Anyone can play guitar into their Mac so long as they have a penis and two testicles," Steve went on, his smile growing more and more leering with every word. "Thanks to a new Apple technology we like to call handJobs."

The record executives look to one another as if to ask if Mr. Jobs was being serious.

"handJobs started off as a way to control your Mac's desktop with a series of lewd pelvic thrusts and gyrations thanks to these special electrodes that attach to your penis and balls," Steve said, cradling his nut-sack in his hand to show the electrical attachments. "One day we were thinking of how to improve on GarageBand. We replaced the studio, how can we replace the instruments?"

Excited murmurs ran through the execs as the idea began to take hold on their heads. Phil's package was receding into his abdomen and he wished the air conditioning unit wouldn't run. He shivered slightly and accidentally played a minor chord. Steve strutted to the other end of the table, his jiggling cock and fun-bag producing strumming sounds from speakers around the room.

"So where handJobs was a way to replace both the mouse and InkWell paradigms, we found it to be a really neat way to implement a band without the hassle of instruments," Steve said. "We have support for lead, rhythm, and bass guitars, and we're testing support for violin, cello, and bass now. You can play drums on your thighs and eventually we'll support woodwind instruments as well."

"And now," Steve said, cupping his cock and balls in his hand. "I'll give you a proper demonstration."

Steve reached around and hit a button on the remote in his butt and a drum track started playing. Bopping his head, Steve began playing chords along with the beat, fingers strumming over his penis. He wind-milled a few times, Townsend-style, and then went into an incredibly fast solo à la Van Halen. He came to a screeching finale and started playing power chords while strutting about on the board table.

"Hey look at me!" Steve shouted, dancing around stroking his penis. "I'm playing guitar with my wiener!"

The record executives looked back and forth at one another, shrugged, then turned to Steve and stood up, thunderously applauding. A few whistles and cheers could be heard, and several execs stood on chairs and clapped above their heads. Steve grinned back at his audience. The spectrograph in CockBand came to life as Steve hit a few more power chords for good measure. The paradigm shift was beginning.

"Hey, Steve, can we put our clothes back on?" Phil asked, hugging himself and shaking. John stood next to him hunched over, teeth chattering, covering his genitals.

"Yeah, sure guys, we did it. We won't be seeing any iTunes Music Store track price hikes any time soon. These guys are going to be months figuring out what CockBand and handJobs mean!" Steve shouted back.

Phil and John slinked down off the table and into the back room, diving for their clothes. Steve turned back to the record execs, who were now all standing in their seats, jumping up and down, pumping their fists in the air. Steve hit another chord and they all went wild. He continued playing chord after chord, then went into another solo. The execs swayed lighters in the air, shouting for more.

CockBand had arrived, another industry-shaping hit for Steve Jobs and Apple Computer, Inc.

QNX to Support Intel Macs

I work for a company that uses QNX, a real-time Unix-like operating system for embedded devices such as car computers, phones, medical equipment, and air traffic monitoring systems. I personally use QNX to develop QNX apps, as there's a self-hosted version of QNX for Intel that developers can download for free. It's essentially a free desktop operating system, as only the development kit is pay-for.

We work with several QNX engineers from time to time and on their last trip in they showed us a preview of the next major upgrade to the system, QNX 6.4. Like its predecessors it ran on Intel, and they said this update will take advantage of Intel's new processor architecture as well as a few new platforms. When I pressed them about it, they said they were 99% certain that QNX 6.4 would run on Apple's new Intel Macintosh.

I asked him the how and when, and he said that Apple's new Macs are going to be very PC-like, and if they can run a stock install of Windows, QNX won't have any problem supporting them either. He said Apple promised the first Intel Macs in the second half of '06, which is when QNX 6.4 would be released. He also said that QNX has at least one Developer Transition Kit that QNX 6.3 runs just fine on.

Things are looking exciting as Apple will instantly have a handful of good operating systems to run on its new Intel hardware. QNX is a good addition, and I wanted to make sure the word got out. We weren't under NDA and the QNX guys said to go ahead and tell anyone we wanted, and that an announcement was forthcoming soon anyway. So there's at least one embedded real-time Unix-like system for new Intel Macs.

Why Slashdot Fired Michael

January 31st, 2005, was the last day that Michael Sims, Nazi editor of Slashdot, ever posted a story or indeed was ever heard from again. But what happened that day to Michael Sims? Did his embroilment in the Censorware.org conspiracy finally catch up with him? Or was he involved in a violent, and ultimately fatal, lovers' spat with his partner Jamie McCarthy? The truth, as we'll see, is much more perverse than fiction.

On New Year's Eve of 2004, the entire Slashdot staff was throwing a party to celebrate another year of Linux propaganda, homosexual recruitment, and the profits that their Microsoft ad banners had raked in for them. Eric Raymond, Emad, Roblimo, Hemos, Taco, Jamie, and Alan Cox all planned to rape Richard Stallman later in the night. Michael had shown up late, however, and was let in on the plans after they were made.

As it turned out, Jamie was to be leading the charge against the Free Software Foundation's founder and would be the first to penetrate Stallman's hairy unwashed ass. Michael, however, was jealous of this and made secret plans to thwart their nefarious venture of homosexual rape. The event was planned for zero hours, right as the ball dropped. But Michael had other ideas.

Michael suggested they all toast their plan with Jägermeister, Eric Raymond's drink of choice that was in heavy supply that night, and the rest of the partygoers followed. While everyone downed their first shot, Michael slipped into the VA Software office's break-room, grabbing the syringe Raymond used to inject Rob Malda's semen with on the way. Michael leered at the case of Jägermeister, needle in hand.

Minutes later, Michael reappeared in the conference room with more Jäger, ready for more shots. Over the next couple of hours they indulged in several drinking and party games, spurred on by Michael, as they drank bottle after bottle of the dark brown herbal liquor. If one were to pay special attention to Michael, however, they would note that Michael drank much less than anyone else and only from his own bottle.

Emad and Roblimo were involved in a powerful sixty-nine cheered on by Hemos and Alan whose bent geek penises throbbed near Emad's head and Roblimo's bloated ass, waiting for an opportunity. Moaning, Emad diverted his wet mouth from Roblimo's butthole and took down Hemos and Alan's cocks in quick succession. Hearing the wet, sloppy commotion behind him, Roblimo lost control and glunked all over Emad's chest.

Across the room near the podium, Eric Raymond was man-handling Rob, jamming a handgun down the back of his pants and asking him if he remembered their special night in Holland. Rob was giggling like a school girl and squirmed with all his might against the cold steel. Eric rained a shower of Jäger over Rob's head which Rob greedily tongued up even as Eric's skinny red penis entered his ass cheeks, probing for the brown prize.

The conference room was awash in gay cum and chaos, Michael noted happily as he surveyed the carnage around him. Emad had now teamed up with Alan and Hemos to rape Roblimo's ass as Rob was being pistol-whipped to orgasm by Eric, all oblivious to the massive amounts of Rohypnol they were ingesting as they drank the Jägermeister Michael had given them. It wouldn't be much longer before the drug took effect.

Another half-hour into the night, Eric paused from raping Taco's mouth and sodomizing his anus with his Glock, short of breath. His head swam and he looked at his bottle of Jägermeister. I can usually down six of these babies, thought Eric, wondering why he was now farting uncontrollably. Rob's nose wrinkled as Eric's rectum expelled another gallon of aerosolized feces into the air. Stooping, Eric held on to the podium for support.

Across the way, Emad pulled his tiny Iranian dick out from between Alan and Hemos's in Roblimo's ass and doubled over. Alan and Hemos continued pounding Roblimo's purple, swollen anus even as Emad began vomiting all over their cocks, thinking it a move on Emad's part to spice things up. Roblimo passed out again for the fourth time that night, but as Hemos slapped him, he failed to wake up.

With Emad vomiting even more violently now, Hemos wondered what was going on. He held a hand to his head as he began forgetting why he was balls-deep in some old man's ass. Alan began hiccuping, which led to uneven strokes and finally a quick orgasm which was quickly washed away by more of Emad's vomit. Nausea rose in Alan's throat as the scents of semen, man-ass, sweat, and vomit overcame him.

Michael was smiling from the corner chair at the table when the telecom beeped. He quickly left the conference room and headed toward the VA Software compound's front doors to let RMS in. As he rounded the last corner, however, Michael almost dropped his bottle of untainted Jäger when he saw that Stallman was not alone. Standing next to him was the CEO of VA Software, Larry Augustin.

His mind racing a thousand miles a minute, Michael feigned a security malfunction when he tried to open the door, leaving Stallman and Augustin stranded outside in the cold. Waving Michael off, Larry Augustin was about to get a slim-jim when he stopped, staring, right behind Michael. There, crawling on the ground, was Rob Malda in his familiar green-and-white plaid shirt, covered in chunks of semen, blood, and feces.

Rob Malda looked up at Augustin and feebly reached out to him before vomiting on the cold tile floor and passing out with a squish in his own sick. Larry and Richard's faces were masks of horror and disgust, and they wasted no time in forcing open the doors. Larry disabled the alarms while Richard checked Rob's pulse. As Richard loosened Rob's collar, Larry turned to Michae, gglaring, and shouted, "What the Hell happened here tonight?"

The conference room was a mess. Feces covered the wall and in some places even the ceiling. The carpet was soaked with blood, semen, diarrhea, and vomit in a stew so unimaginable that the room was later bulldozed instead of being professionally cleaned. On the dry erase board, someone had gotten creative and drawn erect, ejaculating penises in their own poo. And behind the podium lay Eric Raymond, sleeping fitfully.

At the other end of the room, Emad was curled into fetal position surrounded by a lake of vomit and curdling shit, both trailing from his soiled form — nothing new to him. Hemos and Alan laid moaning next to one another, limp dicks in one another's slimy hands. Behind them Roblimo's morose form breathed shallowly, ass in the air where he had passed out earlier. He farted in his sleep as Larry Augustin looked on, mouth agape.

Next week, Larry Augustin held a special meeting with the Slashdot staff. Emad, Jamie, Roblimo, Rob, and Hemos all seated themselves and the meeting began. Eric Raymond also showed, though everyone there seemed a little perplexed. Their party had gotten messy but no one remembered how. Eric wanted especially hard to remember, he thought as he patted his stomach, which still gurgled painfully.

Early in the wee hours of January 1st, 2005, Larry watched as sickened paramedics loaded VA employee after VA employee into the backs of ambulances and raced them to the hospital. They were treated for dehydration and were all given stomach pumps, enemas, and several rounds of antibiotics. They were also tested for drugs and the results were more than a little surprising. Michael, however, had been the only one to test negative.

Hour after hour went by in the VA board-room as each one of the partygoer related their experience. Roblimo, now wheelchair-bound, took the mic and shared his experience that mirrored everyone else's: After his first few toasts of Jägermeister, he remembered nothing save waking up a day later in the hospital, tubes and wires trailing from his bruised body. Roblimo was suffering from a rectal prolapse.

It was decided by a unanimous vote that Michael Sims was to be fired with due haste, as he had drugged the entire Slashdot staff in an attempt to rape them. Unfortunately, due haste took about three-and-a-half weeks so the shareholders could approve the move. Their reaction to the story removed any doubt about Michael's fate and the motion was carried unanimously. Michael was terminated January 31st, 2005.

So now you know why Michael Sims hasn't posted any new stories to Slashdot since January. Let it be a warning to you, gentle reader, of what evil lurks in the hearts of psychotic Linux zealots and Nazi propagandists. Since then the boys at Slashdot have been able to laugh it off, but consider their depraved anus-games. You might not be so lucky were Michael Sims to happen to you. You have been warned.

My First Month With QNX

Last month, I downloaded and installed QNX Momentics Development Suite 6.3, which is a full QNX Neutrino install for Intel with a temporary license for the commercial Momentics Development Suite that lasts for a month. After working with it for the last several weeks, I have some impressions of the system, both good and bad, that I'd like to share. But let's begin at the beginning, as they say, and go from there.

I was ready to boot and install QNX within an hour of first navigating to the product evaluation program page. Downloading the 500+ MB ISO file is a cinch, including the sign-up that gets your 30-day Momentics license sent to you. After that it's all just burning the image to disc. My license email came before the ISO was finished transferring and the burning went without incident.

Installing QNX was even simpler than downloading it. One thing fans of non-Windows operating systems will note, though, is the lack of a partition utility. The QNX installer is pretty obtuse, allowing you a choice of the whole disk or some fraction of it. This means you should have the disk pre-partitioned before you install QNX. In my case, I was taking the whole disk so the above was moot.

The actual install took about 10 minutes from boot to reboot and the only pause was when I had to enter my Momentics license. As an interesting note, if you choose not to enter your license the rest of the system still starts and runs, and only the Momentics suite is disabled. From what I saw in the installer, it's not even installed without the license. Effectively, QNX distributes a free real-time Unix-like operating system!

Booting was fast, less than 20 seconds. One can use QNX in text-only mode as well as in Proton, QNX's windowing system. Proton's integration with the rest of the system is almost as tight as the Windows or Mac OS X GUI, though it's not as polished. The GUI starts by default, where one enters root with no password to log on. From there you can make your own user account, which I recommend.

After logging into my own account I explored the system. The Proton system uses a panel at the right side of the screen as well as a dock at the bottom. The dock at the bottom is pretty standard, with a Start-like menu and minimized windows; the panel at right is where one can find links to programs, workspaces, and system performance monitors that give real-time feedback on processor, memory, and network usage.

QNX's applications all run very well and work seamlessly with the rest of the system. I really have no complaints. They even have a port of FireFox running as fast as ever for standards-compliant browsing. QNX's file manager is quick and gives an accurate view of the file system, and their software manager easily beats anything Linux has to offer. And everything launched in under five seconds.

My first real disappointment began when I opened the terminal and began playing with the command line. A lot of standard utilities are there, like uname, but a lot are also missing like the ever-important top and du. There's also no sudo and their version of ps is woefully out of date. If QNX wants to make a serious desktop platform, they ought sync their userland with a popular Linux or with FreeBSD as Apple does.

Another area that underwhelmed me was performance. The test system used for this article was a 3.6 GHz Pentium4 with HyperThreading turned on, 1GB RAM, and large 200GB hard drive. Performance felt identical on the second system I installed it on, a 450 MHz Pentium II with 128MB RAM. Windows XP was several times faster on this same hardware, as were several Linux distros, FreeBSD 5.4, and Zeta 1.0.

When I investigated why QNX would perform so slowly, I found — thanks to several users in various QNX forums — that QNX scheduling is much different from a typical desktop system due to its real-time nature. While real-time means that there's a guaranteed response time, this doesn't necessarily ensure lightning-quick desktop responsiveness. I'd recommend QNX allow switching between a few different scheduling schemes.

Support is another front that's confusing. A service pack was released a year after 6.3 was launched, but there's no word on whether there's another service pack in the coming. Launching the software manager is the best a user will get, and with only one service pack, the user feels left in limbo. Understandably, paying users get great support, but more updates for the software itself would be appropriate.

Overall, I give QNX 6.3 three-and-a-half stars out of five. It's stable and does not crash, installs quickly, and is easy to sit down and start using daily. Its unpredictable desktop performance, lack of a rich Unix userland, and simplistic installer are all places the developers at QNX Software Systems would be wise to focus on for the next version, however. Until then it's not quite ready for prime-time.