• Rowanyote (unregistered) in reply to Pap

    It is TOO!!  I will go look it up and show you.... : ) 

     

    >  Oh, speaking of WTFs, did you guys know that gullible isn't in the dictionary?

  • Rowanyote (unregistered) in reply to mnature



    M.U.L.E. was a marvelous game.  Wish someone would update it and market it. 

    Could make money from this idea.  How about a M.U.L.E. for illegal immigrants?  It shows them the way, occasionally dispenses water and subsistence junk food, provides shelter from the sun, warns when the border patrol is coming near, and signals the handlers when it is time to get picked up.

    CAPTCHA:  whiskey  [neat, please]

     

    Nope, that job is already being done by C.O.Y.O.T.E.S.   Better animals for a desert environment....

  • Cranky Observer (unregistered)

    Personally, I suspect that this is a composite of stories from several dotcoms rather than a single entity.  But as far as the donkey goes, while I don't actually believe that happened I have seen stranger things in real life while attempting to put data connectivity into acquired sites worldwide in the 1998-2000 timeframe.  10 years after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the re-integration of Poland into the economy of the West you wouldn't think that there would be entire industrial towns (not small ones) in Poland with no telephone service (much less datacomm), but you would be wrong:  there were.

    Cranky

     

  • clueless (unregistered) in reply to Mortvar

    You have obviously never played Magic the gathering ;-)

    I dont follow, what does that have to do with what i said? I dont play board games that much so forgive me if I sound ignorant

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    The people at Virtudyne are the nicest people you could meet.  When surveyed, all the developers recognized the shortcomings, and even cared greatly about them.  They certainly have the resources to choose a new direction, and win at it too.  I hope they do win.  I am grateful to the employees, employers and investors at Virtudyne.  "Junior" has the kind of character that one would hope to see succeed in management.

    I'd still be there if I hadn't been given an officer position with another company. 

     

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    The Author of this article is Brian Oxley, or as we called him: "The Twitching Twerp"

    most of his information is secondhand

    he couldn't even distinguish the founder's son from the "savior's" son

    he was also ignorant of the various business models.

    or why the VP of nothing was kept on. 

     everyone knew all of this, nobody talked to the twerp, I'm not surprised he knew almost nothing.

     yeah, they tried some unconventional things, but that is not all they tried.

  • Amattamous (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    I think this article really tells you all you need to know: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_27/b3890117_mz063.htm. I'm interested by just how close this is in many ways to VirtuDyne :

     Also, I stumbled across http://www.simnigeria.net. It wasn't accessible to me, but it was visible in Google Cache as the same template - now THERE'S an interesting possibility ... "Dear sir, although you may not know me, let me introduce myself. I am SimNigeria ...." :-)

    And this one strikes me as hilarious: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kevinmaney/2005-09-27-hurricane_x.htm

     Captcha: paste [Yummy!]

  • Amattamous (unregistered)

    Oooh, even better: a PROFILE! http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/04/16/BU235706.DTL&type=business

     Captcha: truthiness [Like toothiness but less susceptible to decay]

  • (cs) in reply to ssprencel

    WTF? I quote from above: "and my Christian faith still has confidence that people will do the right thing when push comes to shove" in what Bible did you find this.... according to what I have learned in church, people are inherently corrupt... and have to be "saved"..... you didn't listen very closely to the teacher in Sunday school did you?

    Virudyne's leader is a total ass who used bully-ing tactics due to his lack of leadership, intelligence, people skills, and any other trait needed in a good leader. That ASS actually had the gall to hold sales people up in front of others with foul language and hot-tempered rhetoric - depsite the fact that the sales people were the very people who did their best to find something, ANYTHING, good about the farce of an OS from "Virtudyne".

    I hope no one from Virudyne ever forgets the WIKI wave that pervaded Virudyne in 2005. Oh my, "where's your Wiki?", - "hey, project managers, where's your Wiki?" - "hey, account managers, where's your Wiki?"

    Wiki's will save the company. That's right, if we not only lie in out marketing, lie on our website, lie to our own sales people, lie to potential employees during the interview process - if we now lie in a quasi-systematic, open forum known as a WIKI, we can shift the known laws of physics, thermodynamics, and common sense and truly convince not only everyone outside the company but now OURSELVES that the lie is truth

    Wiki, Wiki, Wiki (imagine you scratch a record back and forth and say that three times)

  • (cs) in reply to ssprencel

    oh and by the way.... the skank was a terrible lay. pretty face, sucked in bed....

  • (cs)

    It is all true. The Digital Donkey was Simdesk's greatest non-achievement. I love listening to Lou Waters JUNIORS long diatribes (sp?) of total inane bullsht. Now that I am long gone and dar away from that madhouse, I can tell you that he bullsht coming from Waters sounds funnier everyday. And if he even thinks to sue Alex, there is so much fraud, abuse, and sexual shinnanigins that went on at Simdesk, it would make your head spin.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous Reader

    Anonymous:
    (If you feel a moral obligation to tell these stories anyway, one possible option could be to start a sister site which allows everyone to submit stories anonymously, sorting by quality determined by voting consensus. When you've got a story you need to tell which you can't tell because you fear being sued, you can submit it anonymously on your own site. I assume that a disclaimer could take care of the legal problems here(the submitter could probably theoretically be sued, but of course no logs would be kept). This could also be handy for code snippets that can't be easily anonymized.)

    Can somebody invest and expand on this site

    http://clientcopia.com/ 

  • RyeBrye (unregistered) in reply to Pap

    Actually, it is... but it's definition is completely different from daily use.

  • LL (unregistered)

    During the Italian campaign of WW2, generals not only used horses, oxen and donkeys extensively, they were crying out for more. Mock not the animal of toil. Afghan-based SAS troops used horses almost exclusively for large parts of their operations in inaccesible areas.

  • jackson (unregistered) in reply to anxious

    fuck you !!

  • jackson (unregistered) in reply to Marak

    FUCK ALL THIS SHIT -- SIMWHOPP WAS A RIP OFF !!

  • jackson (unregistered) in reply to Rowanyote

    THEY FUCKED ALL OF US !!

  • tool (unregistered)

    SimDesk finally went out of business a few weeks ago:

    http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2008_4560248

    Here's the best part: the last sentence of the article is

    "Lewis said the president of SimDesk recently told him that the company had about 145,000 (SEE CORRECTION) active users."

    However, that correction says:

    "CORRECTION: A story on Friday's page B1 misstated the number of recent users of SimDesk Technologies' online products. The actual figure, according to the city of Houston's technology director, was 145."

  • comment (unregistered)

    It's always amazing how people enjoy the cruelty of half truths to demean others. The term Digital Donkey emerged when people discovered church organizations were putting computers on donkeys to take up mountains to deliver to schools in Paraguay that didn't have electricity. The computers were outfitted with solar powered capabilities along with the ability to hook up to the Internet via satelite (Internet is provided free by the UN for education purposes). The concept had relevance because many schools in South America do not have electricity. In some third world countries up to 40% of schools have no electricty and yet the country still has to find a way of educating its children about IT to give them a chance in the technical world.

  • Beerman (unregistered)

    The company is no longer around actually except for maybe 5 or 6 guys that were hired on to a new company all were let go of. Seems like some of the people leaving these comments were probably laid off from there and couldn't find jobs else where (for a good reason) so you spent 5 valuable pages of this site to beat down on the junk you were a part of. get a life. get a job actually. and do something productive for once there was a reason you were let go of.

  • Connect the dots! La la la la la la! (unregistered)

    Now THIS is what I call a TRUE WTF. They just don't make'em like that anymore...

    Who in their right mind could possibly think that this could ever possibly be profitable? I mean, not just the donkey thing, but creating a new Office suite from scratch, when there are plenty of good Office suites around already, including OpenOffice which is free?

    GOOD LORD!

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    The biggest irony?

    Something that actually has the potential to be a MSOffice killer has been developed for free.

    It's name? OpenOffice.

  • anoncow (unregistered) in reply to themagni

    I think you mean MNEMONIC, not pnemonic.

  • Eamonn (unregistered)

    OK, so this is a comment on a very old post, but here's a video from today's news that looks spookily familiar:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28002064

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