| A Video Program From The Heart of Darkness The very word of its name strikes terror into the heart of newbies. Few people know the secret history behind its development. I dare not use the application's name for fear of . . . I can't say what. But it turns out that it was an experiment meant to drive otherwise sane folks utterly bonkers. The theory was to produce a program that would allege that it played videos, but the dark secret was that it was primarily to be used as an error-generating application. In the mind of one of the secret creators, "I figured if I could create a video program that actually blocked almost every video format on earth, I could really mess with people's heads." "Of course we got this program onto as many distros. as we could. We added some gibberish about licensing and idealism. That was the part that sold the developers. And now, you know, you can be sure if your distro. is driving you nuts, we had a lot to do with it." He went on to show me how brilliantly this player could deflect even the most common video formats. Then with a sinister smile he added, "Wait till we find ways to block even the open-source video formats with error messages. That'll really fry some minds. But we're holding off till a lot more people get dependent on their distros. Come the next upgrade, we figure we can reduce their functionality by 25% at a minimum. It's a weird thing to live for, I know, but I guess I'm kind of sick that way." |