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Switch Different
x180 writes "Those goofy hackers over at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego this week have, in a spate of fun, put together a series of Switch ad spoofs for the geeky ones. Writes Rael Dornfest in his blog, 'You've no doubt seen Apple's fabulous Switch campaign commercials. But what of the others? The geeky ones. The scripters. The sysadmins in their server cages. The command-line jockeys. Those through whom the source flows openly.' See the stories of hackers chucking Emacs in favor of Vi, leaving Perl to explore Python, and leaving the familiar home of Unix to play with XP." These, of course, aren't the only switch parodies. Their numbers are Legion.
We at the Phoenix News Service had a news story in a similar vein: PC Companies Counter "Real People" Campaign With "Real Porn Stars" Campaign
Well maybe if all the movies didnt sound like the parents from Peanuts I would appreciate the humor a bit more. As it stands maybe they should switch to some film classes.
HB
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-7- 12&res=l
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
http://www.benbrown.com/switch/. com/switch/
http://animoller
http://www.ubergeek.tv/switchback/
Okay, that was just sad watching those videos. I want to praise them and call them geeks, but honestly, they looked more like DORKS in the video. 2 thumbs down man.
that a few of the parodies listed at the top of googles search have been hit with cease and desist's by Apple, and yet the www.benbrown.com/switch one is still up.
:)
it is hilarious though
I propose linuxadvertising.org :)
we could take donations from the community and make our own commercials. One could be about schools that made the switch to linux in fear of M$ audits and such. Ive always scoffed when people start talking about linux hasent lived up to this and isnt ready for that because linux is not a company but a little self promotion doesnt hurt
Here's one about Apple Gamers, it's pretty funny.
http://www.drunkgamers.com/switch0001.shtml
Well, thankyou for that in-depth critique, but if you look closer, you'll see that it's not only in quicktime. There are also mpeg's provided.
...that all the movies on the site are in Quicktime, no?
Heh yah, I'd hate Quicktime too if I wasn't maxed out on karma.
A pet peeve of most animators is when somebody is unwilling or unable (bandwidth, etc) to install a codec or player. It sucks because we spend so much time picking the right one for the project. Until a single codec comes along and wipes the others out in every single category, you're just going to have to deal with having a bunch of different players despite the slimey tactics some of them use.
"Derp de derp."
When we have this
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I fully agree.
;-)
XP is not *that* bad.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
That Ani Moller has a sexy accent.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The ultimate "Switch" parody has to be this one - one by Billy G. himself!
I took the time to type up the scripts because I thought they were funny. If you can download the videos, it's worth the wait and pain of using quicktime.
------------
So when I started using linux, all the people were talking about was emacs. You know emacs, emacs, emacs!
It does everything. I'd type in emacs, and I'd wait for it to load. I'd wait a really long time.
And I mean, my pinky started to hurt. You know the ctrl-alt-meta-escape thing.
So eventually my system administrator suggested that I try vi, so that other people could log into the machine.
So, I tried out vi, and it was really fast, and it was really good, and I loved it.
And my pinky stopped hurting. -- holds up hands, spells out VI -- Vee Eye
vi/switch
Chris DiBona, and I'm an editor for Slashdot.
------------
I've been using python for years, to pretty much everything.
And life was pretty good. And then my space bar broke... and then my tab key broke...
So then I couldn't use Python anymore. So I had to switch programming languages.
I work with Geeslin, Young, and Serrati. SO I picked perl, it seemed pretty natural. In fact, perl seemed natural.
I mean, it did pretty much what I ment all of the time. Even if I didn't know what I ment.
I mean, I get to macho code. I have job security, and I get to use all the keys on my keyboard... It's nice.
perl.com/switch
Hi, I'm David Asher, and I'm a developer for active state.
------------
You know, I never thought that I would make the switch but,
I've heard it was something that people did, and it was something that I wanted to try out.
There's so much more room to grow, everything runs so much cooler, and I find it so much more intuitive.
I have the freedom that I've always sort of wanted, and it fits my life sytle, just better... and I love it, I love it.
boxers/switch
Hi, my name is Ken Willaims, and I wear boxers.
------------
Ahh... white space... Ohhh
Byte code... byte code! I mean, it actually compiles to byte code.
Guido van Rossen is just so much cooler then Larry.
Larry Wall, what's that? 5.. 4.. 9 letters.
Guido van Rossen, I mean, that's definately into the double digits.
I mean, he's even longer than Larry. Wall, what kind of name is Wall? Now Rossen, that's a name!
-- turns around and begins talking with his ass cheeks --
This is my ass! My ass likes Python!
-- ass talking -- Hahahahar, python good! nanannanananaaaa
-- turns back around --
Ohh, and then there's all the cool Monty Python jokes. Because I love monty python so-oo much.
I mean, that dead knight guy who wouldn't die. Ohh... that kills me every time.
I'm so sick of camels... what is it with camels? Camels in the desert, oasis...
Yawn, yawn, yawn! I want a sexy, sleek... phallic?! Wait... excuse me.
python.org/switch
Nat Torkington, pron star
------------
So my dad had this linux box that I used to use for programming assignments.
I just like hacked all night using vi, gcc, perl, you know all that stuff.
Window managers... desktop managers... editors...
You had to be like a computer scientists, just to like even pick something.
And that's why I switched to Windows XP.
I mean, it's sooo much simpler. All my decisions have been made for me.
There are only 3 color schemes to choose from!
And really, if I want to pick colors, I'm going to paint my toe.
You know, all that glittery stuff... glow in the dark...
I mean there are just so many shades of pink.
So right, XP, simple... it's easy for a girl to grok... or something.
Sure, it crashes now and thing, but you know, you just push the, you know, button thinggy.
I mean, you know the one, the button thingy.
xp/switch.
I'm Sarah Burcham, blog news
------------
Yeah, it's an ISO standard. 'Legion' equates to a quantity of 3520. 'Multitudinous' is 1579, 'numerous' a mere 89, and 'sundry' is 567 everywhere except the US (where we think it's 543. it's even worse than our adherence to the imperial measuring system). I hear they'll be quantifying 'myriad', 'voluminous', and 'uncounted' next year. 'Flock', unfortunately, was a fiasco after that incident with the bird-watchers in Paris and the official decision has been put off till 2008.
Dyolf Knip
What exactly can you do with a mac that you can't do with a PC? Act all elitest?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Using people who are not hideously ugly might help. Btw, was that chick pregnant or just fat?
I agree. The first thing we should judge anyone who intends to leave their house on should be physical beauty. No one cares if what your personality is like, or how skilled you are. If you aren't extraordinarly attractive, just stay inside.
</sarcasm>
An article on Yahoo News today about Northgate's new "challenge" to Apple with their all-in-one computer/home multimedia machine (Personally, I think it looks sort of a combo iMac/eMac ... an eiMac) was the latest example to my mind.
Flat screens were unusual and esoteric. Apple makes them defacto with the iMac; now they are expected, necessary. MP3 players externally were the size of walkmen (and internally not much better then zip disks), connected via USB (if you were lucky) and were incredibly kludgy. Out comes the iPod; everyone is racing to remake/top them.
I remember when the beige computer makers tried to reinvent their products with translucent plastic as if that was the key to the original iMac/G3s. I remember how desperate and sad Windows 1 - 3.1 were in their attempts to approach the simple elegance of the Mac OS. I remember how many Gnome/KDE Aqua themes were floating about (and still are, slightly under the radar) after OS X was unveiled.
My point: however much Linux drives the geek masses forward in their open source quest, Apple is the internalized mental image that a majority of people hold when they think of the next step in computing. Not just civilians: examine the Aqua themed page that you're reading right now.
(For every "too damn expensive, one button mouse" geek dismisser, I wonder how many are willing to admit that they drool at night at the thought of owning a TI Powerbook, and wish they could have back all the months it took them to try and configure their window manager to approach the functionality of Aqua out of the box).
Dude, 5 minutes of hair, makeup, and wardrobe would have made these people presentable. It wouldn't have hurt if they practiced their little bits and actualy had something funny to say.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Speaking of Switch parodies, one of the reasons I refuse to switch over to Macs is Apple's disgustingly litigious attitude. This website was forced by Apple's lawyers to take down their parody of the switch campaign, if there's any truth to the webmasters claims. I wonder how long these other parody sites will last.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
After watching all of the switch ads, especially this one, maybe its time for me to switch?
But I'm running kde3 now, and fancy UI effects don't impress me much. Add to that the organs I have to sell on the black market to afford some nice Apple hardware, and the interest doesn't seem justified.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
It works for me pretty well right now, but I've had trouble with it in the past. Like when it ate the mime association for PNG and BMP files. If I tried to go to a .png URI it would load the whole thing scaled to the size of the window and I couldn't save. PNGs in pages used IE's internal renderer and didn't have a problem
Then there was the time when closing a QuickTime subwindow would kill IE and close every browser window I had open... Got to a page with a QuickTime move, go back or close the window, loose all the surf sessions. It was annoying as fuck.
And lots of other times it just didn't work. Id rather just not deal with it. What's wrong with MPEG? I'd rather have a 10% larger file or whatever then deal with all this crap
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Maybe there are a lot of switch ads because people find them annoying and stupid?
... an eiMac) was the latest example to my mind.
An article [yahoo.com] on Yahoo News today about Northgate's new "challenge" to Apple with their all-in-one computer/home multimedia machine [northgate.com] (Personally, I think it looks sort of a combo iMac/eMac
Well of course you do. But to me, it just looks like any other 'all in one' PC. There's no rounded bulb like the old school imac/emac, there's no swivel stand like the new imacs. There are lots of
MP3 players externally were the size of walkmen (and internally not much better then zip disks), connected via USB (if you were lucky) and were incredibly kludge. Out comes the iPod; everyone is racing to remake/top them.
That's not true either. There were, and still are, a lot of mp3 players that were a lot smaller then the iPod, True all of the 'hard drive' mp3 players around were big and clunky, but not all mp3 players.
Yeh, the iPod has a nice design, but it's hardly the end-all, be-all that Mac zealots seem to think it is. A nice refinement, but hardly revolutionary
(For every "too damn expensive, one button mouse" geek dismisser, I wonder how many are willing to admit that they drool at night at the thought of owning a TI Powerbook, and wish they could have back all the months it took them to try and configure their window manager to approach the functionality of Aqua out of the box).
No, my Sony Vaio SR is good enough for me, and smaller and lighter then an ibook with all the video editing capabilities (Firewire and all). And yes, it has more then two buttons.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's also a WMV file
*mild content warning*
Punchbaby.com Apple Parody
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
Well, I just tried that out and all I can say is that if it only takes a 3rd of a second to search a 30 gig hard drive my computer must be pretty god damn fast!
Anyway, I asked what you could do not what you could do slightly faster on a mac that you couldn't on a PC.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Using Macs. It's like Iceland.
Dead link. 404... Got another one?
chrisd is posting it, and he is featured in one of the "funny" switch ads. how cute.
The middle mind speaks!
some mod that up.
"I couldn't find the any key and e-machines told me to go fuck myself"
Brilliant.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If you're talking about the Sarah one..have you had your eyes tested lately? :P
Another parody, combining 'switch' and the '.mac' debacle...
Yeah, I know it's a self-link, but.. well... mod me down if it's not funny.
Kevin Fox
To bad apple didn't give me the choice a few years ago. Yes, they are better now but burned bridges are still burnned, and MPEG is still easier to deal with.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Emacs : Vi :: Unix : XP. Not the other way around.
Also, change your sig. April 27th is long gone...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Um no, let's clear a few things up:
MPEG (1 I assume?) is capped at 352 by 240something. Plus its' compression isn't as good as modern codecs.
Quicktime is not proprietary crap, it's actually very good for things such as movie trailers. Plus, it's both PC and Mac. Some of us artist types think that's important.
Real's viewer stinks, which is a bummer since it has cool development tools, good bit per quality ratio and great a great servers olution.
MS has a better viewer than Real, and is about the same on the other points I brought up.
DivX is pretty cool but for mass market there aren't enough people with it installed.
Bink is like MPEG2, and it's slow as heck to compress. But the quality is good, it can play back on slower computers, and it has some kick ass options for viewing like making it executable. (Which also makes people paranoid about viruses. Heh.)
So no, MPEG1 does not 'make everybody happy'. Why you got a +1 for that I'll never know. Trust me, if it were that simple, they'd all be using it. However, every codec and viewer has their advantages.
This is the sorta thing you become knowledgable about when you actually make videos.
"Derp de derp."
You're an easy man to impress...I took one look at that page and nearly lost my cookies. That dopey look, those gigantic teeth, just...frightening.
Then again I married a woman from Thailand so my concept of beauty probably doesn't match the average american's.
Until a single codec comes along and wipes the others out in every single category, you're just going to have to deal with having a bunch of different players...
Uh, this happened already, it's called DiVX;-) and is freely available to everyone. I don't know if it'll stream or not or what it takes to stream it if it will though.
I guess you could always use a divx codec in a quicktime wrapper, leave it in an mpeg wrapper for those of us without macs.
I'd say the ad campaign worked.
Man... she looks baaaaked ;) Red squinty eyes, slow speech, and the use of the word "bummer"
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Maybe it's my gamma setting, but that dude almost looks as though he was computer generated!
Pretty please? Somebody?
At least we know Jobs has a sense of humor!
You made my saturday morning funny.
Quicktime may not be proprietry per-se but the latest codecs for it are. It runs on Windows and Mac, not PC and Mac - Linux, the BSDs, BeOS, etc, do not have players available and it's up to Apple to make such players available - they'll sue anyone who tries to do it themselves. Overall, that makes any QT stream using Soressen,etc, for all intents and purposes proprietry and non-cross platform. QT without the latest codecs or MPEG4 is much, much, uglier than older RealPlayers, I strongly doubt you're proposing the use of QT with a non-proprietry codec, and if you were proposing MPEG4 I'm pretty sure you'd have said that.
Finally, Windows doesn't come with QuickTime, and Real is bundled with certain webbrowsers, so picking QT over DivX on the grounds that "not enough people have it installed" looks a little absurd in my book.
Until Apple do the decent thing and either open up their codecs, port them to more platforms, or maybe even produce a Java version of their player (god help us!) I don't think it's reasonable to treat it as non-proprietry. Probably the best codec to use right now, because it genuinely is cross platform and the spec is open, is MPEG4. QT6 and WMP support it natively, Real plans to make their's compatable with it, and there are free-software solutions in programs like MPlayer. And it's very high quality.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
DIVX ;-) kinda needs better audio/video syncronisation IMO
Might just be your slow box, you never know.
To quote from the Linux User Top 10 Bad Sayings, "It works fine for me".
http://www.benbrown.com/switch/
http://animoller.com/switch/
Just because you think the switch ads are retarded doesn't mean that you can't like Apple or their products. All of my friends that are Mac users think they switch ads are moronic, and somewhat insulted at being associated with the bunch of morons and blithering malcontents featured in them. That doesn't mean they still don't like their Macs, though, or that they are going to quit using/buying them.
The person I was replying to said that someone didn't "Want enough" when they said their PC did everything they wanted. Now, don't you think it's fair to actually ask them what the hell they mean? What is it the PC user isn't wanting? What is it they can't do on a Mac.
You just replied with an idiotic statement that has no bearing in reality.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Well, obviously the ads are designed to say that Macs are better. I mean, all of those people said their lives improved soo much going to the Mac. It's more intuitive, it's more UNIXy, it's less crash prone, etc.
That last point really irks me, because until OSX, Mac OS was one of the least stable OSs out there.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
QuickTime is not proprietary crap, it's actually very good for things such as movie trailers. Plus, it's both PC and Mac. Some of us artist types think that's important.
I know it's often used for movie trailers, much to my annoyance. But why exactly is it "quite good"? Because apple will provide free hosting? MPEG or MPEG4 would work just as well IMO.
Look I don't care about what makes a video easy to 'make' I want something that will be easy to view on any computer. And the best bet for that right now is MPEG(no, the res is not capped).
DivX is nice, but you can't really call it non-proprietary these days. The last release actualy included spyware...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
First of all, older versions of DiVX were hard to aquire and install. If you're a geek who wants to watch pirated moves, it's OK. But I wouldn't put up web content in it. I wouldn't think your average luser would know where to find it
The fact that DiVX has gone propritary and even includes spyware (well, the last time I checked) dosn't help either. If you tell someone to 'download divx' they might just end up with that.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Man, I used to be a math major...
You know, with all those, like, problems, and
equations and stuff...
Calc, linear algebra, advanced calc...
Group theory...
But then my GPA went down, so I switched to computer science!
Now, all I have to do is get into protracted fights about obscure and ill-thought-out Notepad clones
that have terminally silly keyboard shortcuts...
Yeah. Like Emacs, vi....
It's all so easy, and my profs are amazed that
they have a student who pays attention!
http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/switch
Now I have an A+, and I go drinking every night!
- undoware.ca
3,520 is on the small side but would be enough to be considered a legion. (that is: between 3000 to 6000 infantrymen & another 100 to 200 cavalrymen)
from dictionary.com
Yeah, that's definitely one of the best ways to approach it. I'm not sure why somebody wouldn't do that to be honest. (Unless they feel they NEEED to stream...) Fortunately some of the big sites are okay about that.
"Derp de derp."
Oh ok, now we get to the root of your problem. Most people aren't going to read your mind to realize that divx has sync problems when you're skipping forwards and backwards through a clip.
I've seen this on my box too, generally I just pause the clip and hit play again. Takes all of a half second and the sync matches easily. I use either mplayer or xine and xine tends to do this more often than mplayer.
Beats the hell out of using Windows Media player though.
You need Quicktime 6 to view the stream.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol