It is to laugh! Not an April Fools joke

[Undertoad]

It pains me to have to say this, but since it's today: the following is not April Fools' related. But if this message appeared on Slashdot today, you would assume that it was...

news.com is reporting that Unisys and Microsoft are going together on an anti-Unix campaign, largely directed at Sun, that claims that Unix is expensive and difficult. And in putting together the campaign, Unisys has created a website: wehavethewayout.com

And when you go to Netcraft's "What's that site running? page" , and enter the URL for the Unisys campaign web site, you find that it's running on... yes, you guessed it, Unix. OK, FreeBSD. The complete string of what they're running is "Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.14 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on FreeBSD". This is accurate because it's something returned by the server of the site itself; basically, there's a way to ask a web server what it's running, and most of the time, it will tell you, if you ask right.

That's the bulk of the news.com story. I took it a step further. I went to the damn site itself - www.wehavethewayout.com - and noticed that they have a "Join the eCommunity" link. OK, I'm game for a new community. I click on the link and it opens a new window. That window is blank. The site is not responding. Hmmm.

A few minutes later, it DOES respond. So I go back to Netcraft to ask: what is "ecommunity.unisys.com" running? That being the URL of their little link.

Yes, the site that was failing to respond was running: "Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4/Windows 98".

It is to laugh.