My company asked me to put a demo of our technology up on our website. So I created a blank web page with a windows error message in the center that read: "The radiation shielding on your monitor has failed, please do not sit directly in front of your computer."
Then, I did something really sneaky: Using FrontPage (there really is a use for it:P) I downloaded a CNN Health page and wrote up a fictional health warning about the 'Microwave Virus'. Heh It was a silly idea: A virus floats around people's machines and increases the power of UV guns in your monitor by 400%. Eventually it burns out some of the shielding and exposes people to radiation. Common symptoms included drowsiness, irritability, and other stuff you typically feel at work.
I renamed my computer on the network to 'www.cnn-news.com' and set up MS's Personal Web server on my computer to host that fake web page I created. Except for the domain, the URL looked exactly like one of CNN's pages. I even corrected all the links to go to other areas of CNN's site. (It seems like a lot of trouble, but like I said, FrontPage made it real easy.) Of course, I sent out a 'virus advisory'.... Anybody on our network was able to visit 'www.cnn-news.com' (with the address stuff at the end) to hit that page.
So what happened was first a few people opened my message about the new demo, and they got the 'Radiation Shielding has Failed' message. They ignored that (they work too hard), then they read my advisory of the 'Microwave Virus' and put the two together.
When I got to work, several of the women in the office were standing around asking each other if they should go to their doctor. The System Administrator about died laughing when I let him on it. (He had to put up with strange questions about radiation shielding all morning. Heh.)
Not sure if that quite qualifies as an easter egg, but a fun story nonetheless.:)
There was an easter egg on Survivor's site that let the curious person know who was going to remain.
Well, ok that wasn't exactly an easter egg. The site had a picture of each contestant with an X over them to indicate they got booted. The webmaster didn't upload an X'd image of the winner. Heh.
Heh I remember Sega's Dreamcast site had a neat looking DC logo made out of text. Only the text'd change around, kinda like it was trying to brute force decrypt it. Somebody poked around the HTML code and found that one of the decrypted messages was "SONY SUCKS!". Heh.
1.) The popular radio stations play the same songs to death. Sony (nor the RIAA) has to worry about people not buying CD's since they only play one or two songs per album.
2.) They can sneak commercials in and get money for that.
I am curious if and how the RIAA responds to this device. If I were a gambling man, I'd say that they'll ignore it for the reasons above. They're not worried about 'digital piracy', they're worried about not getting money. Part of me thinks that at least part of the reasoning for keeping CD prices high is that it maintains demand for radio.
I wish the RIAA and Sony would get legally entanged, though. Sony has a ton of money in the bank.
When I was in Brazil, a friend of mine told me about his efforts to get the Brazilian Gov't to adopt Open Source technologies. One of the reasons he brought up was historical documents. He was concerned (and rightfully so IMHO) that MS's proprietary.DOC format would only be readable as long as Office products were around. Even then, proprietary file formats have a way of going extinct.
With Open Source, theoretically a file format would never 'go extinct' since the original code for it will always be around.
That's probably the best Open Source argument I've ever heard.
The sig happened because I had some questionable moderations in the beginning. Having the +1 score by default was causing me to get 'overrated' mods quite a bit. Heck, it got me banned for a couple of days for getting modded down too much. So I added the sig to give the moderators a reminder that I was trying to be genuinely interesting. It seems to have worked, the moderations I've been getting have been much better.
Just to be clear though: I'm not trying to Troll with this nick. I took it out of curiosity. I look forward to the day when I can get a default score of 2. I'm really curious about what'll happen then. heh.:)
Sadly, Hollywood's taste is so bad that I think this flick will simply be a 'Who would win?' type of movie. Unfortunately, that's not an interesting subject for reasons that people have already posted here.
Instead, they should develop the movie that gives you deeper insights into each character, taking the plot away from the 'whos gonna win?' direction. To put it another way: If you find out that Batman wins, it shouldn't ruin the movie for you.
With that said, why not explore what could possibly make these two guys fight? What kind of ethical questions would that provide for Superman? What could possibly happen to make the Man of Steel defeat somebody who, like himself, has made his life's work to protect people?
How would Batman feel about having the opportunity to deal the death blow to Superman? In light of how his parents were killed, how could he bring himself to destroy somebody that undoubtedly would have prevented it if he could?
They both had their parents killed tragically, they have that pain in common. Could they come to a resolution?
In any case, with questions like these (or hopefully more interesting ones, I am not a writer heh) the movie could actually be rather meaningful. If the movie tries to be like Spiderman and is written to show of using the latest effects to have two 'super humans' battle it out, then there's no way it's going to but much more than a jock flick.
I hope somebody puts some interesting thought into this. Both characters are deep enough that they could tell a fascinating story. This really is the type of movie that should be animated. It's hard to take a guy seriously when he's wearing bright blue underwear.
I am so surprised that this name wasn't registerred. I had to post over 100 times to get somebody to notice that. The funny thing is I've had this sig for a while, heh.
I knew somebody was gonna fall for it, but it took longer than I thought it would. It was worth the wait because I never expected that it'd be so visible! heh.
"What's so difficult about making Red Hat do Windows tasks?"
Because I've spent the last couple of days at work trying to get Redhat up to that point and have only been semi-successful. I'm annoyed with it because I'm trying to use it right now and it's hard because it does have a steep learning curve. You wouldn't BELIEVE what I'm going to have to do to get sound to work on it.
Sadly, I haven't been able to find a 'So you are a Windows guy moving into Linux' tut yet. Even the install phase was a bitch without reading up more on how Linux works. *Sigh*
That was mainly frustration leaking out, not an intelligent opinion. I wrote that just after leaving work. So you'll understand when I say 'I really dont want to argue about it.' However, if you know of a good "Windows to Linux" article somewhere, I'd hugely appreciate it.
"The [H] on the image is the HardOCP watermark thing that they place on any images on their site."
Doh!! I shoulda noticed that! hehe. *wasn't paying attention.
If you're curious how I found those images: All I did was go to Google's image search and typed in 'ATI Radeon 8500'. Before long, I ran across product pics.
That was a fun little project, took about 10 minutes.:)
Masochistic? Masochistic is when you try to set up RedHat to do the day to day stuff that Windows makes easy. Heh
All I did was type in 'ATI Radeon 8500' at Google's image search and flipped through the pages a bit. When I saw something that looked like a product shot, I grabbed it. The main clue that I had the right card was the cable running from the GPU fan to the card. It only took me about 10 minutes to do.
Yep. They did a damn credible job, though. It's pretty obvious that they were quite observant of what details would give it away. As a hardcore Photoshop user, I give this fake pic an A-. I think I found the images they merged together to make the fake pic.
What they basically did was they took the ass end of the 8500 card and stuck it on the end of the 7500 board. It's interesting that they did this because they had to invent part of the circuit board themselves in order to place the processors. (I imagine the [H] on the final image was meant to cover up an obvious error.)
They did a relatively credible job, but they did make one crappy mistake. When ATI took the 'product photos', they did them at slightly different angles. The 'artist' who faked the dual GPU image did a respectable job of masking the perspective problem. But they would have done much better to cast a few lines to the point of convergence, then use the Photoshop 'distort' feature to line them up a little more accurately. That's why the processor to the right looks like it's not pushed in all the way.
I'm impressed with the amount of work they had to do in order to cook up this image. It was considerably tougher than 'copy/paste'.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh I love pranks like that.
:P) I downloaded a CNN Health page and wrote up a fictional health warning about the 'Microwave Virus'. Heh It was a silly idea: A virus floats around people's machines and increases the power of UV guns in your monitor by 400%. Eventually it burns out some of the shielding and exposes people to radiation. Common symptoms included drowsiness, irritability, and other stuff you typically feel at work.
:)
My company asked me to put a demo of our technology up on our website. So I created a blank web page with a windows error message in the center that read: "The radiation shielding on your monitor has failed, please do not sit directly in front of your computer."
Then, I did something really sneaky: Using FrontPage (there really is a use for it
I renamed my computer on the network to 'www.cnn-news.com' and set up MS's Personal Web server on my computer to host that fake web page I created. Except for the domain, the URL looked exactly like one of CNN's pages. I even corrected all the links to go to other areas of CNN's site. (It seems like a lot of trouble, but like I said, FrontPage made it real easy.) Of course, I sent out a 'virus advisory'.... Anybody on our network was able to visit 'www.cnn-news.com' (with the address stuff at the end) to hit that page.
So what happened was first a few people opened my message about the new demo, and they got the 'Radiation Shielding has Failed' message. They ignored that (they work too hard), then they read my advisory of the 'Microwave Virus' and put the two together.
When I got to work, several of the women in the office were standing around asking each other if they should go to their doctor. The System Administrator about died laughing when I let him on it. (He had to put up with strange questions about radiation shielding all morning. Heh.)
Not sure if that quite qualifies as an easter egg, but a fun story nonetheless.
There was an easter egg on Survivor's site that let the curious person know who was going to remain.
Well, ok that wasn't exactly an easter egg. The site had a picture of each contestant with an X over them to indicate they got booted. The webmaster didn't upload an X'd image of the winner. Heh.
Heh I remember Sega's Dreamcast site had a neat looking DC logo made out of text. Only the text'd change around, kinda like it was trying to brute force decrypt it. Somebody poked around the HTML code and found that one of the decrypted messages was "SONY SUCKS!". Heh.
One man's garbage is another man's +1, Funny.
http://www.nanogator.com/pimpsmiley.gif
Probably for two reasons:
1.) The popular radio stations play the same songs to death. Sony (nor the RIAA) has to worry about people not buying CD's since they only play one or two songs per album.
2.) They can sneak commercials in and get money for that.
I am curious if and how the RIAA responds to this device. If I were a gambling man, I'd say that they'll ignore it for the reasons above. They're not worried about 'digital piracy', they're worried about not getting money. Part of me thinks that at least part of the reasoning for keeping CD prices high is that it maintains demand for radio.
I wish the RIAA and Sony would get legally entanged, though. Sony has a ton of money in the bank.
When I was in Brazil, a friend of mine told me about his efforts to get the Brazilian Gov't to adopt Open Source technologies. One of the reasons he brought up was historical documents. He was concerned (and rightfully so IMHO) that MS's proprietary .DOC format would only be readable as long as Office products were around. Even then, proprietary file formats have a way of going extinct.
With Open Source, theoretically a file format would never 'go extinct' since the original code for it will always be around.
That's probably the best Open Source argument I've ever heard.
Thanks man!
*Finding this to be an interesting read.*
'Dark age' refers to a decline in literacy stemming from political chaos and social disorder.
And we all knoe wot IRC and ICQ has dun to our grammar skillz. ROFLMAO
I was going to say X-Wing... but I think we both basically agree. Lucasarts managed to knock Wing Commander out of it's roosts with those two games.
:)
To be fair, though, those games are pretty old. I think I played X-Wing on my 486. heh.
"There seems to be a lot of assumption that this movie would cast Batman and Superman as enemies."
:)
Well yeah, the word 'Vs.' or versus really does kind of imply that. Heh.
Im more curious about what it'd take to get those two to fight rather than who'd win.
"Hmmm...exacting revenge on junk faxers...might there actually be a good use for the goatse picture here?"
Probably not. Ever seen the visual quality of a fax machine? It'd probably get mistaken as a missing persons bulletin for a french movie star. Heh
Geez, I run at 1600 by 1200 and I still had to scroll every 10 lines or so. I got people yelling at me down on the street because I read slow.
Don't even bother scanning your cat! Just go here!
Heh
:)
The sig happened because I had some questionable moderations in the beginning. Having the +1 score by default was causing me to get 'overrated' mods quite a bit. Heck, it got me banned for a couple of days for getting modded down too much. So I added the sig to give the moderators a reminder that I was trying to be genuinely interesting. It seems to have worked, the moderations I've been getting have been much better.
Just to be clear though: I'm not trying to Troll with this nick. I took it out of curiosity. I look forward to the day when I can get a default score of 2. I'm really curious about what'll happen then. heh.
"No no, he said RedHat was 'masochistic'."
Heh ironically, the next day Slashdot runs a story that emphasizes the point that got me modded down. That's classic!
Sadly, Hollywood's taste is so bad that I think this flick will simply be a 'Who would win?' type of movie. Unfortunately, that's not an interesting subject for reasons that people have already posted here.
Instead, they should develop the movie that gives you deeper insights into each character, taking the plot away from the 'whos gonna win?' direction. To put it another way: If you find out that Batman wins, it shouldn't ruin the movie for you.
With that said, why not explore what could possibly make these two guys fight? What kind of ethical questions would that provide for Superman? What could possibly happen to make the Man of Steel defeat somebody who, like himself, has made his life's work to protect people?
How would Batman feel about having the opportunity to deal the death blow to Superman? In light of how his parents were killed, how could he bring himself to destroy somebody that undoubtedly would have prevented it if he could?
They both had their parents killed tragically, they have that pain in common. Could they come to a resolution?
In any case, with questions like these (or hopefully more interesting ones, I am not a writer heh) the movie could actually be rather meaningful. If the movie tries to be like Spiderman and is written to show of using the latest effects to have two 'super humans' battle it out, then there's no way it's going to but much more than a jock flick.
I hope somebody puts some interesting thought into this. Both characters are deep enough that they could tell a fascinating story. This really is the type of movie that should be animated. It's hard to take a guy seriously when he's wearing bright blue underwear.
Thanks man, it's appreciated. :)
I may get back to you on that.
Anon
Heheeee.
I am so surprised that this name wasn't registerred. I had to post over 100 times to get somebody to notice that. The funny thing is I've had this sig for a while, heh.
I knew somebody was gonna fall for it, but it took longer than I thought it would. It was worth the wait because I never expected that it'd be so visible! heh.
That should be easy, they're all on your RedHat CD!
"What's so difficult about making Red Hat do Windows tasks?"
Because I've spent the last couple of days at work trying to get Redhat up to that point and have only been semi-successful. I'm annoyed with it because I'm trying to use it right now and it's hard because it does have a steep learning curve. You wouldn't BELIEVE what I'm going to have to do to get sound to work on it.
Sadly, I haven't been able to find a 'So you are a Windows guy moving into Linux' tut yet. Even the install phase was a bitch without reading up more on how Linux works. *Sigh*
That was mainly frustration leaking out, not an intelligent opinion. I wrote that just after leaving work. So you'll understand when I say 'I really dont want to argue about it.' However, if you know of a good "Windows to Linux" article somewhere, I'd hugely appreciate it.
"The [H] on the image is the HardOCP watermark thing that they place on any images on their site."
:)
Doh!! I shoulda noticed that! hehe. *wasn't paying attention.
If you're curious how I found those images: All I did was go to Google's image search and typed in 'ATI Radeon 8500'. Before long, I ran across product pics.
That was a fun little project, took about 10 minutes.
Masochistic? Masochistic is when you try to set up RedHat to do the day to day stuff that Windows makes easy. Heh
All I did was type in 'ATI Radeon 8500' at Google's image search and flipped through the pages a bit. When I saw something that looked like a product shot, I grabbed it. The main clue that I had the right card was the cable running from the GPU fan to the card. It only took me about 10 minutes to do.
"Yeah, that's an objective point of view..."
That reminds me of this guy that went onto IRC preaching about how people should be using Macs instead of PC's. He actually said this:
"Don't believe that biased crap you hear in PC Magazine, if you want the unbiased truth go to MacAddict.com!"
Heh.
"The sad part is that you fools actually believed it was a real card!"
I can't find your post in the other article where you pointed that out. Can you point me towards it?
*thinks he won't get a response because the AC that posted that response didn't know either.*
Yep. They did a damn credible job, though. It's pretty obvious that they were quite observant of what details would give it away. As a hardcore Photoshop user, I give this fake pic an A-. I think I found the images they merged together to make the fake pic.
r 75 00/r7500close.jpg
/ im ages/radeon8500_boardshot.jpg
V 83 Ci5cT_1_1_l.jpg
Check out this one:
http://www.hothardware.com/reviews/images/r8500
and this one:
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/01q4/011016
And here is the final image:
http://www.hardocp.com/images/news/10262426625G
What they basically did was they took the ass end of the 8500 card and stuck it on the end of the 7500 board. It's interesting that they did this because they had to invent part of the circuit board themselves in order to place the processors. (I imagine the [H] on the final image was meant to cover up an obvious error.)
They did a relatively credible job, but they did make one crappy mistake. When ATI took the 'product photos', they did them at slightly different angles. The 'artist' who faked the dual GPU image did a respectable job of masking the perspective problem. But they would have done much better to cast a few lines to the point of convergence, then use the Photoshop 'distort' feature to line them up a little more accurately. That's why the processor to the right looks like it's not pushed in all the way.
I'm impressed with the amount of work they had to do in order to cook up this image. It was considerably tougher than 'copy/paste'.