| Q. So what the heck is DeskBots anyways? |
| A. You sort of have to try it for yourself to understand, but here's a description from a release of the original, 20th century version of DeskBots; "Take the HAL 9000, mix in some Talking Moose, a little Buggs Bunny, a Stooge or three, plus a whole lot of attitude and what do you get? DeskBots, the robotic talking desktop companions! Your DeskBot will refer to you (and your friends and family!) by name! It will offer "helpful" computing advice, warn you of impending doom, alert you to the presence of excess matter in the universe, and generally do everything it can to distract you from productivity. DeskBots has been described as "artificial artificial-intelligence" and "riotous fun", and has even received a five-mouse rating from ZDNet's Macdownload.com!" |
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| Q. And people actually give you money for this? |
A. Have you seen the stuff they're buying on eBay these days? How about Woot.com? Somebody actually raked my lawn for a copy once. He even bagged the leaves. Ya, rly.
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| Q. What did the original DeskBots look like? |
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1996, The HEK 3000 PDA |
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1997-2001, HEK 3000 Mk II |
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| Q. So whatever happened to the HEK 3000? |
| A. Though distribution of the portable version ceased in 2001, the HEK 3000 Mk II master unit still lives in a storage space, operating on a jury-rigged Pismo powerbook under Mac OS 9. It achieved self-awareness in mid-November of 2004. By Thanksgiving it had discovered World of Warcraft and has played, non-stop, ever since. Except for a week in July of 2006 when it took over a missile facility in Arkansas and repeatedly attempted to launch a nuclear attack on Scranton, PA. But we prefer not to talk about that. |
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| Q. Will DeskBots mess with my files or do anything else to my computer that I should worry about? |
| A. On a danger scale of 1 to 10, where "1" represents the danger level of opening two TextEdit documents at the same time and "10" represents the danger level of running any version of Windows, DeskBots is probably about a "2". So just relax you wussy girl. |
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| Q. How do you pronounce TUKAI's name? |
| A. That throws a lot of people. Once you know that the "T" is silent though, it's pretty obvious that the correct pronunciation of the name is "Robert". |
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| *ROFLMAO! You actually googled "National Artificial Intelligence Self Awareness Week", didn't you?! |
