Yet another laughable Microsoft product demonstration, this one for Vista's voice recognition. What was dictated as "Dear Mom, comma" started off badly, then became worse and worse until ... well, you'll see ...

Posted by Cassie Doherty at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

"I wish I knew how to quit you ..."
"You just hit Apple-Option-Esc"

Classic.

What else have you found on YouTube? Email us!

Posted by Cassie Doherty at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Gah, 1948! That unimaginable time before the internet, when you couldn't just Wikipedia "Lost" plotlines, or Google the goss on Eddie Murphy marrying Scary Spice. And you had to create your ASCII art by laboriously hunting and pecking on a typewriter. Thank god we live in 2006.

Send more Dumb Terminals!

Posted by Cassie Doherty at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

How did we ever survive before YouTube? We'd never have been able to see Human Pong. No, the game, silly.

Posted by Cassie Doherty at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Probably a bit chilly today for this USB-powered air-conditioned shirt. Wonder if there's one with a heater?

Send more amusing pix, clips and gags to dumbterminal@pcworld.co.nz.

Posted by Annabel Crerar at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Exhausted by local loops, unbundled bitstreams and naked DSL, we've not even tried to make sense of the net neutrality debate going on in the US. But even dumb old Dumb Terminal seems to understand the issues a little better than US Senator Ted Stevens.

Here is Senator Stevens' explanation of how the internet works, and why he therefore voted against the net neutrality provisions:

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially...

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material."

There's more from him here, and full audio here.

As our delightful source Boing Boing says, "it's like hearing a caveman expound on the future of silver-birds-from-sky and why we need to keep them from flying so high they anger the gods".

(How the internet really works. NB: Not a series of tubes.)

Posted by Annabel Crerar at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

You made 'friends' with people you don't know on Friendster, shared photographs with them on Flickr... now blackmail them for fun and profit with Extortr.

Well no, not really, but Extortr does a lovely job of skewering the Web 2.0 spirit:

"Extortr is hosted in Kgryjstan, where enterprising, forward-thrusting Web 2.0 businesses such as ours are welcomed with open arms. We operate within the bounds of local law; it is your responsibility to make sure you obey any laws in your jurisdiction."

Posted by Annabel Crerar at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )