[humorix] Coming Soon To A Fridge Near You: Unix

[James Baughn <jbaughn@xxxxxxx>]

Coming Soon To A Fridge Near You: Unix
by Justin Morgan, justin [at] corfizz [dot] com
January 5, 2005

NEW JERSEY -- Much to the surprise of SCO and everybody else,
AT&T Bell Laboratories, the original creators of the Unix
operating system, announced today that they would be
returning to the scene of Unix innovation.

"In the past, we laughed at all of the commotion on the
sidelines," said an anonymous official at the Labs.  "But
now we think there's still life left in our creation, and we
want to try our hands at world domination too, you know."

But what about trying their feet? A recently patented design
sketch reveals just what they've been up to: Unix ported to
footwear.

"We thought to ourselves: 'What is the biggest advantage that
Unix holds over Windows?'" explained a Bell Labs
spokesperson.   "Everyone 'round the table said 'portability'
simultaneously. So we started off with a port to one of our
design engineer's shoes, and the test worked perfectly --
with no code rewrites."

Bell Labs may be celebrating their innovation, but some legal
observers are crying foul.  Said one lawyer who happened to
be available for comment, "What part of anti-trust settlement
do these people not understand?"

But the institution doesn't seem to care. "Unix will once
again be a household name," the spokesperson cheered.  "We
plan to port it to everything. You'll find Unix in your
tables and your chairs, your socks, your pencils and pens,
your coffee machine -- everywhere. All thanks to its famous
architecture-independent design."

The port-Unix-to-everything craze was started by the NetBSD
project in 1993. Porting it to more and more computer
architectures was progressively tedious, however, with only a
tiny subset of Slashdot posters having tested the Playstation
2 version of NetBSD.  Project leaders hope that ports of Unix
to more commonly-used domestic items will be far more
popular.

"I just can't wait to point at my fridge and say to someone,
'Of course it runs NetBSD'," said an anonymous user on an
Internet forum last year.

Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has
already started to port Unix to digital wristwatches.

"We've finally found the answer to the age-old question,
'What's the best thing since sliced bread?'," said a beaming
MIT technician.  "It's Unix on a watch."

The technician offered Humorix reporters an exclusive preview
of the technology in their specially-built lawsuit-proof
laboratory, but an initial logistics calculation showed that
signing all the necessary paperwork would take longer than
the mass-market distribution process for the new product.

"You only need a digital watch with two buttons as a
minimum," the technician told us.  "That's one for vi and one
for Emacs, of course."

A voice-recognition interface is planned for domestic items
running Unix, and researchers feel that one day everybody's
home will be Unix-enabled, and linked by a wireless network.

"You'll soon be able to walk into your living room, Telnet
into your remote control, and pass commands to your
television," the technician continued.  "I'm looking forward
to being able to pipe the QVC channel to /dev/null."

Of course, it wasn't long before Slashdot got wind of the
whole idea, and posters were demanding Linux ports. They
pointed to the kitchen sink version of Linux, developed in
June 2004 [1].  A flame war quickly erupted over which window
manager would be the standard for Linux/Unix-enabled domestic
items running X11.

"We think it depends on the architecture you port to," said
the MIT technician when we mentioned the flame war.  "Twm
might look great on some items of furniture, FVWM would
probably be a good choice when we port to cats, Enlightenment
would go well with Gothic architectures, and so on."

In response to the news, Microsoft resorted to typical FUD
tactics. "I shudder to think about all of the horrible
disasters that could occur if this technology is widely
adopted," ranted a Microsoft spokesdroid. "What if you lose
the root password to the fridge, or if somebody chmod's your
bed? What if a hacker pipes the output of your shredder to
the input of your sink, or the output of the stereo to the
input of the washing machine?  Oh the humanity!"


[1] http://humorix.org/articles/2004/06/kitchen-sink/



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