Category Archives: ads

ie8 finally caught up

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Did you see the puke commercial Microsoft has running to promote IE8? They pulled it already on their own site but it’s on Youtube now so it’s gonna stay out there for now. But the thing is that they are throwing some big bucks at it to promote their latest IE release which bring us the awesome novelty of… euhm… nothing I guess.

Microsoft has been playing catch-up when it comes to it’s browser of years and they finally built a new version which can compete with Firefox, Chrome and Opera. So basically now they also have tabs, crash protection, phishing protection, pr0n- euhm.. privacy-mode and can-you-fucking-believe it web standard compliance! Microsoft built a standard compliant browser! Amazing isn’t it?

Anyway they clearly feel like winning back some of that lost browser market share as they duke it out on a comparison page with a big ad campaign and some other browsers. I say “some” because they left out Safari and Opera which are at least equally big as Chrome right? But hey, I guess they wanted to stand face to face with their nemesis Google I suppose. Some of the comparisons are biased and funny. Like the security one. If you click through to that NSSLabs report it shows that IE 7 was scoring the worst of all. The tests also match IE 8 RC1 with Firefox 3.0.7 Not Firefox 3.5 which was also out around that period in beta form which is a pity and makes the report a tad incomplete IMO.
This item is particularly funny in another comparison:

Internet Explorer 8 is more compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser.

That’s not hard now is it, if most website builders had to make sure their site works on your older non-standard-compliant crappy browsers because 90% of folks where serving using IE back in the day.

The good thing however is that there is finally a safe IE version out there that non-techies can use to safely browse the web and not get their systems infected with malware, trojans and virii.
Cause when that happens it’s up to us geeks to go over there with our disinfecting USB-sticks and waste our time to to get that PC back up and running again.

Time we could spend better on writing cool Firefox add-ons for example.
I still recommend Firefox 3.5 though which now has tear-off tabs, the awesome bar, anti-virus software integration, massive customization possibilities, a spell checker, full zoom (images and stuff as well), support for hundred of search engine (or Wikipedia etc) and so much more.

Photo by Garry, cc-licensed.

vintage computer ads

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Clicking away through various Flickr groups and user accounts finally landed me on this old computer modem ad, telling us how damn sexy that particular piece of hardware really was. I never particularly found any computer hardware sexy since it’s way too uncurvy for that, but a huge square top box set like that was never sexy in anyone’s book I reckon. Never the less, these ads show how fast technology is moving forward, and this makes these vintage computer ads quite funny to watch. It just makes you wonder if we will be looking back at our current ads for the iPhone, mp3 players, or whatever in 20 years or so and find them equally hilarious. There’s more, in  SA_Steve‘s vintage ad collection (not all geek).

banksy pwned paris hilton

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Paris Hilton, naked, just the way we like her.I always loved the social criticism Banksy spread through the streets with his stencil and graffiti art, and his occasional pranks, like the one where he put some of his own art in the Brooklyn museum. But his last one where he enhanced 500 copies of the first and hopefully last Paris Hilton CD with his own views of her well earned fame really puts the cherry on the pie.

There’s this video up at youtube on how the whole thing was done, which is nice, and if you feel like taking a closer look at the art itself, you can check out these images I ripped and posted in my flickr gallery.

Credits where credits are due however, so I have to say I ripped the pictures from a myspace contant of mine going by the name of SirKazm, another Banksy fan, and judging from the URL’s to the images came from, he got them from the celebrity gossip blog called The Gossip Rag. If you’re into news like Jessica Alba’s fetish for dolphins, this might be a site for you.

The thought of this all will make it at least a bit more bearable to hear that bubble-gum pop reggae crap tune being played so bloody much on the commercial radio stations these days.

Just a bit though.

about 2 wool pullers

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it's just reality distortedI wrote about how computers are used to manipulate what we see on television and in magazines daily to the extreme before, and today I ran into some more crazy evidence while on a clicking spree although the interweb.

I ended up on this french site called ipub which is all about wicked looking ads, and a post that linked to 2 graphic artists who did some totaly amasing retouching, or in some case, recreative sessions.
The first is Glen Honiball, which is mostly into retouching pictures. He gets crap base material to work with in a lot of cases, and turns them into a picture perfect scene to be used in ads. Foods looks better, girls look prettier and cars are shinier after he’s done with them. Nice!
The second artist is Taylor James which did that Coke Christmas ad you’ve probably all seen. The Coke snowy landscape Christmas scene is one of those works where he takes a bunch of unrelated pictures and turns them into a full blown landscape. Pretty bloody amasing how these guys master Photoshop if you ask me (but you didn’t).

It makes you think though, or at least it makes me think. Nothing we see on television or in magazines can be trusted for real. Every single picture has been altered and “perfected”. Nothing we didn’t know before, but it still managed to surprise me when I see these kind of images how far it’s extending.

You can’t even trust a picture of a spoon full of soup ffs.