When computers really were something you could look up to…This is a massive gallery of computer advertising from the days of yore, with really high quality images too 
Monthly Archive for February, 2005
Ok, I am not gonna get in the habit of posting email forwards here…I just thought this one was particularly worthy…
A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and D+G tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd… "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?"
The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?"
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulae. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturised HP LaserJet printer and turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1586 sheep".
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep." says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the boot of his car. Then the shepherd says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?" The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?".
"You're a consultant." says the shepherd.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"
"No guessing required," answers the shepherd. "You showed up here even though nobody called you, you want to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question I never asked, and you know nothing at all about my business… Now give me back my dog."
Just to give a little background…
Lokitorrent was a reasonably good bittorrent link site, it was generally where a lot of people went post-suprnova. The owner posted a message, which at the time seemed very likely, that he was being prosecuted for distributing his content. He then proceeded to raise a hell-ov-a-lotta money for the legal defense fund.
See My Blog At That Time (ahh, the power of the blog)
Anyway, the site later went down and was replaced by a rather nasty note from the MPAA saying that had everyone's IP address and that they were gonna git u (or words to that effect). A lot of people freaked out and the world was buzzing with anti-mpaa fervor once again.
BUT…
and this is a pretty clever but…
One of the admins at earthreactor (another p2p page) did a little digging, I would assume originally to see if they were in trouble or not. He found that the Lokitorrent prosecution was an elaborate scam perpetrated by the owner of the domain, who had bagged the legal defense fund and run for the hills.
Part of me feels sorry for the people who donated, another feels contempt for the guy who took the money and ran. But the resounding feeling I have is one of awe, for someone who perpetrated an IRC-sytle scam over the web, even manipulating main-stream media…
Remember the guy with too much time who created a mario out of post-it notes?…well, now there are a team of guys with too much time who created a whole scene.
Wow…now thats a confident company, well except for the fact that it is located across the road from their offices as well as having a permanent security camera directed on it.
Also, apparently only the top few layers are actually real money…the rest is fake money, similar to the kind used in movies…still a damn good campaign tho
Some Star Wars Episode III pix have been leaked online, doubt the site will last for long…but it is a good spoiler for the upcoming movie.
Not sure whether it is due to extended periods using 3dsmax, the resolution of the images, or what…but the 3d is a little crappy in these pictures, it doesn’t look like ILM's best to me…
Gallery Here (Warning: HUGE page size, apprx 6mb)
This crazy german artist rips apart old computer hardware and reassembles it into interesting sculpture. Most of it is pretty ghastly, but there are a couple of exceptions, like this tower pictured above constructed from HDD platters.
Gallery Here (translated by google)
The Miss Digital World 2005 pageant is on, where 3d artists create their own miss world model and pit them against the rest. The only pagent where poise plays a limited role…
Pretty damn freaky if you ask me…they say as the CG modeling gets better, the freakyness increases…it certainly seems that way.
Some cool photos of what happens when you play with electro-magnets and magnetic liquid. They create some lovely patterns, so reminiscent of natural forms.
Just to continue the days influx of random doodle style drawings, I found this floating around the aggrigator. Weird text based gallery, but actually aids in the random nature of the work (or inane junk as it is called on the site).
This entry doesn’t really have much of a point to it, other than to describe a term I heard over the weekend which particularly interests me.
Social Sculpture: a piece of sculpture created by the chaotic nature of it's viewers.
Thinking about it, most of the links I have added here regarding sculpture can be referred to as social sculpture.