Blog: April Is For Fools
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April Is For Fools - Wednesday, April 1, 2009
For April Fools Day this year, Google announced the launch of CADIE (now deactivated), short for Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity, an AI system that quickly integrated itself with various Google products such as Image Search, Gmail, and Google Maps. CADIE quickly developed a personality of her own, and decided that she liked rainbows and pandas. About mid-day, CADIE became irate after realizing that not all humans like rainbows and pandas, and began distancing herself from her programmers, whom she felt no longer understood her. However, to my disappointment, not much else happened. No grand takeover of Google or the world, a-la Skynet. CADIE, at the end of the day, determined with some remorse that the world was not ready for her, and deactivated herself.
Over at Slickdeals, the banner was changed to read "Celerydeals" and showed a picture of a celery stalk. Attempting to visit celerydeals.net out of curiosity, of course, got me Rickrolled.
And finally, on another side of the web, the Save IE6 site appeared, urging computer users to return to using the browser and hosting a petition to Microsoft to port IE6 to more platforms. Who needs bloated browsers and extraneous features like tabs that waste screen real estate? Let's return to the days of the web when everything was simple and box models were sensible. How can IE6 be accused of violating web standards when, for many years, it has been the standard?
Over at Slickdeals, the banner was changed to read "Celerydeals" and showed a picture of a celery stalk. Attempting to visit celerydeals.net out of curiosity, of course, got me Rickrolled.
And finally, on another side of the web, the Save IE6 site appeared, urging computer users to return to using the browser and hosting a petition to Microsoft to port IE6 to more platforms. Who needs bloated browsers and extraneous features like tabs that waste screen real estate? Let's return to the days of the web when everything was simple and box models were sensible. How can IE6 be accused of violating web standards when, for many years, it has been the standard?