Dell, Raymond Unveil 'One Smartwatch Per Child'; Icahn Erupts 34
An anonymous reader writes "As Dell's (DELL:NASDAQ GS) board reviews three competing proposals for taking the company private, including a $24.4 billion deal led by founder and CEO Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners, the company has announced it is entering the suddenly crowded smartwatch sweepstakes along with Apple, Google, and Samsung. The twist is that Dell's product will target the low end of the market — the extreme low end, in the words of CEO Dell, because 'that's where most of the world's customers are'. Dell's smartwatch, projected to cost just 19.99 USD ($319.99 before Dell's mail-in rebate) will allow children in developing countries to communicate via voice and text, collaborate on school activities, and perform native-to-English voice and text translations with the help of Dell's new ARM supercomputer. Dell says premium models will also perform translations in the reverse direction, i.e. English-to-native. Open Source advocate Eric S. Raymond, who joined Dell for the conference call, stated 'this is the beginning of what I call the Bazaar Wrist model of the mobile Internet. It'll be a battle of ideas against what I call the Office Tower Wrist model that Apple and Google will be selling.' Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who recently launched a rival bid for Dell, labeled the product an 'a pig in the poke' as well as a 'distraction and extreme waste of shareholder value', adding that his $7.44 Wal-Mart watch 'works just great for me and probably anyone else'."
This is getting fucking old. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot's a news aggregator. The only news worth mentioning on April Fool's Day is going to skew heavily towards the foolish. It's one day a year. Deal with it.
Anyone with real breaking news in the tech field already knows better than to announce it today. I, for one, welcome our foolish overlords; their absence was sorely missed in 2012, and it's good to have them back.
It's not 1 day, it's 45 hours (Score:1)
From the first minutes in Auckland to the last in Anchorage, the English-speaking Internet has to put up with 45 hours of idiots posting lame fake news [scoop.it].
Plus, of course, it hangs around for days afterwards in 'popular' and 'latest' lists until the articles finally bubble under the real news.
Re: (Score:3)
Anyone with real breaking news in the tech field already knows better than to announce it today.
The infamous Linux disabling PS3 update was released on April 1st... perhaps to get mileage out of the "nothing really happens today" attitude.
Re: (Score:3)
At least omg ponies didn't get in the way of using the site.
How to make your site entirely unusable for at least three days 101, from Slashdot. I'll be back in a week.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The sad thing is that this TFS makes as much sense as some non-ROT'd TFS's.
Rebate (Score:2)
Re:Rebate (Score:4, Funny)
That's that thing where you mail them sufficient proof of purchase and they mail you back saying you didn't send sufficient proof of purchase.
Beating a dead horse (Score:2)
Goodbye slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
ok screw slashdot today (Score:2)
I have not been on all day, and this is the "joke" they presented?
yea I am not going to click though a days worth of stories, then click a dumbass link, just to read a summary of something I only MIGHT be interested in.
A gag story or 12 ok ha ha, its only 1 day, this isnt even worth peoples time to come here
c-ya tomorrow, sure I wont miss apple hate, nasa worship, bitcoins and pi's for today
Re: (Score:2)
Still waiting... (Score:2)
For Chester Gould's heirs to come in and sue smart watch makers for ripping off his idea for Two-Way Wrist Computer.
Just a suggestion (Score:1)
I'm really nowhere near the "I'm never reading slashdot AGAIN!" levels of butthurt that some other readers apparently suffer from, but you editors should know by now that sometimes the April Fools' Day plans are a complete bust, and when that happens you should really, really consider aborting them. Who wants to be the guy who keeps repeating a joke that was never funny?
Also, the odds of you ever topping "OMG! Ponies!!!!!!!!!" are pretty much nil, and you could factor that in to your future April 1st plans.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They cant, They utterly broke the theming system in slashcode years ago in their attempt to "clean it up".
OMG Ponies will never ever return.
Re: (Score:1)
Who wants to be the guy who keeps repeating a joke that was never funny?
Are you kidding? Slashdot is the homepage of the guy who keeps repeating a joke that was never funny.
E.g. Hot Grits, Bluescreen, Throwing Chairs, etc.
Talk about overdoing it. (Score:1)
Errr, this is madness. What I used to love about the old April Fools /. way of doing it, is they would mix up real stories that seemed questionable, with APril Fools ones, and you always second guessed the story. This current way, errrr, why boter using the page at all? %90 of them aren't even remotely funny or believable.