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Banned
Location: UCSD, 510.49 miles from my love
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Quote:
Originally posted by notaneel
This HAS to be a joke.
Please... GOD... let it be a joke.
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YEP!
ok, heres a full follow up, it was a hoax, but a very good one.
full story:
Quote:
The Overclockers.com website published a barely believable hoax last week detailing the gutting of a brand new and very expensive Power Mac G5. This brought on an unbelievable reaction from the Mac community.
The hoaxer, identified only as "Andy," claimed he received a dual-processor G5 for Christmas. But preferring a Windows PC, he swapped out the insides of the $3,000 machine for the guts of a cheapo PC. The post included several digital photographs to prove the outrageous claim.
The stunt quickly became meme of the week. As news of it spread around the world, it generated the best traffic ever for the long-running Overclockers site, which claimed more than 300,000 visitors a day.
Reaction from the Mac community was swift and brutal.
Andy said his e-mail inbox quickly filled to capacity, with more than 1,300 messages, and an unknown number bounced. The mail he did receive was full of nice, kind thoughts like death threats, insults and all kinds of colorful invective.
"I hope your PC blows up and leaves your miserable face disfigured forever," read one. "You will surely burn in hell for an eternity for this one."
Another said Andy should be hung by his testicles and set on fire.
"Turning a perfectly good dual G5 into a crappy PC was the ticket that got you to hell," wrote another, citing the common eternal damnation theme. "And if you were in front of me I'd pop a corn-born Teflon bullet from my Glock in your fucking face."
It wasn't just hate-filled e-mail. Haddock labeled Andy "possibly the most stupid person on the planet."
"I posted it and the world turned upside down," said Joe Citarella, who runs the Overclockers site. "It was absolutely incredible.... I've never seen a reaction as intense and emotional as this. The reaction has been nothing short of an avalanche."
"Some people took it really, really hard," he continued. "I guess it shows Mac users relate to their machines differently.... We've gutted Dells and we never got a 'My God you desecrated a Dell!' reaction."
Andy, a PC technician in his 20s who lives on the East Coast, said he was given an empty G5 case by a buddy (he declined to explain further) and filled it with PC components to fool another friend. For further kicks, he invented the Christmas story and submitted it to Overclockers. He said he had no idea it would cause such a fuss.
"I am astonished as to how fast and far this went," he said. "I got e-mails from people in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Ireland, Germany, U.K., Portugal, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia just to name a few places besides the U.S."
Andy said he was critiqued by PC users as well as Mac fans, but the truly unbalanced stuff came from the Mac camp.
"Mac users are nuttier than a fruitcake," Andy said. "People have an unnatural emotional attachment to object(s) like computers. For some, their reaction was akin to me butchering their parents or a beloved pet."
Andy said some of the mail commented on his troubled psyche and warned of future mental problems. But "the majority of people just cussed me and said I was insane."
"I didn't expect to get any responses," he said, "but some of them were rather amusing so I laughed a lot and shared with friends. I had no idea that so many people in the world were so gullible."
Feeling guilty, Andy wrote to the site explaining the whole thing was just a little joke.
But Citarella said some of the site's readers don't believe Andy's explanation.
"His last message is kind of contrite, but a lot of people out there think he's covering up his butchery," Citarella said. "Some people think he's making it up to protect himself.
"I'm a parent, and if my son did something like this (to a new computer) I'd kill him."
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What a great job, I gotta applaud 'Andy' for that trick, had me fooled by his faked stupidity...
We deserved that, you may laugh now.
Last edited by numist; 02-05-2004 at 12:53 PM..
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