‘Red Carpet of Death’ scuppers Gates’ knighthood

http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk/2005/03/07/gates-knighthood.html

Updated:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070701153302/http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk/2005/03/07/gates-knighthood.html

‘Red Carpet of Death’ scuppers Gates’ knighthood

“Palace courtiers battled with software for more than two hours during the ceremony, with the waiting audience of be-hatted sycophants growing increasingly restless, as Her Majesty repeatedly failed to knight Mr Gates. After two false starts, the Keeper of the Royal Disks (more affectionately, if warily, known as Hard Rod) was forced to reinitialise the Monarch’s ageing boot drive, reinstall Microdaft Monarchy.

Several onlookers who knew-a-thing-or-two-about-computers thought that a virus may have been to blame, the most likely candidate being the infamous “Camilla” Trojan. If left unchecked, this wicked little filly of code can cause fatal system errors in any Royal lineage, and has even been known to lead to full Republic status in a matter of weeks. A palace IT manager said later that “Camilla is an absolutely lethal Worm which can leverage outage disruption in mission-critical architectures, whilst further impacting substantive legacy systems… blah blah blah…”

The Royal honour was to have been bestowed at the personal request of the British Prime Minister, a known technophobe, in recognition of Mr Gates’s regular help with “sorting-out his Hotmail account”. More cynical observers have suggested, ridiculously in our view, that Mr Gates’s stupendous wealth may also have entered into the equation: World-Dominating Technology + Very Rich Guy + PM = Third Term. Absurd.

Following his eventual knighthood, as an American citizen Mr Gates cannot of course be referred to as “Sir Willy”, as this is an honour that can only be bestowed upon British subjects in a bizarre “RubbaDubbing” ceremony. However, since software patches were added in 1997 and 2001, the UK now runs remotely on a networked operating system based in Washington, so it seems likely that provided Mr Gates returns his original program disks, and agrees to the installation of a UK-registered dongle, he will be automatically upgraded to a full “substantive” knight in due course.”