Arrrgggh!!! It's a Mac!!
July 12, 2005 6:02 PM   Subscribe

Help me find a computer prank.

It's a URL and when the link is clicked, it appears to erase the Windows hard drive and replaces it with a Mac desktop. It's probably one of the best computer pranks I've ever seen.

The fake Mac desktop has a few games on it (one I recall is that game where you have to match up pairs of pictures).

I've Googled but can't find it. If I recall rightly, the website has a Japanese-sounding name, possibly beginning with a 'y'.

Any ideas, Me-Fiers?
posted by essexjan to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I remember this! You're right about the “y” thing. It was... Mac OS 8. Who'd have thought saving all 3000+ bookmarks would come in handy?
posted by Monochrome at 8:16 PM on July 12, 2005


I write software for a living. If a window popped up and indicated my disk was being erased, I would IMMEDIATELY yank my computer's power cord. This would destroy all my unsaved work and possibly corrupt the filesystem, but that's a small price to pay in exchange stopping the deletion. Then I would remove the disk from my computer and install it on another machine. After backing up all personal data, I would erase the disk and reload the system from scratch. This would take many hours.

Killing the power is a drastic reaction, but it is the only guaranteed way to halt the destruction of my data. And since this "virus" clearly penetrated my firewall and my anti-virus software, those tools can't be trusted to clean up the mess. Therefore I must reload the system from scratch.

At this point, you'll notice that your joke has no punchline. Your victim's damage-mitigation procedure, if sensible, will prevent your program from running to completion. They will only learn of your prank if you chose to tell them.

For safety, I suggest you play this prank on someone physically smaller than yourself.
posted by ryanrs at 9:14 PM on July 12, 2005


If I had a software developer who unplugged his machine every time a web popup told him something bad was happening to his computer, I'd probably fire him.

Just sayin'.
posted by icey at 1:26 AM on July 13, 2005


Response by poster: Thanks monochrome. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to run on Firefox, and only to a limited extent on IE, it gave me an error message: I'm sorry but this Mac runs on DHTML only.

But that's the site I was thinking of.

Much appreciated. Thanks.
posted by essexjan at 2:45 AM on July 13, 2005 [1 favorite]


I write software for a living, and I think that's utterly batshit insane.

Real developers keep backups.
posted by mkultra at 7:04 AM on July 13, 2005


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