His blog presence is missed, but Reginald “Raganwald” Braithwaite is alive and well in real life. He and I work in the same building, and we’ve caught up with each other a couple of times recently. Here we are (along with developer/paparazzo Libin Pan) having dim sum at one of Kristan “Krispy” Uccello’s local developer lunches…
Me, Libin Pan and Reg Braithwaite.
Photo by Adam Wisniewski.
I like Penny Arcade‘s take on the current Seinfeld/Gates TV ads for Windows:
Click the comic to see it on its original page.
My favourite line from the article accompanying the comic: “Trying to associate Microsoft with “fun” is like trying to associate Satan with aromatherapy.” Mind you, I think they managed to pull it off with the XBox 360.
The first Microsoft commercial featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld established them as oddball buddies in a commercial running one minutes and thirty seconds. In the follow-up, they’re living with a suburban family as an exercise in being in touch with ordinary people and weirdness ensues. The version shown below is the long one — it runs for four minutes and thirty seconds, and features a teensy bit of technology and tech terms (for a brief moment, Gates talks about object-oriented design) and another “Bill, give me a sign!” ending.
My friend Miss Fipi Lele, who provides me with a lot of pictures for my blogs, pointed me to this photo on Shorpy, “The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog”. It depicts “multi-processor computing”, circa 1924:
Click the photo to see it on its original site, Shorpy, at full size.
The caption for the photo at Shorpy is:
November 24, 1924. Washington, D.C. “Bonus Bureau, Computing Division. Many clerks figure the amount of the bonus each veteran is entitled to.”
Before the age of electronic computers, the term computer referred to someone whose profession was performing mathematical calculations by hand.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the profession’s origins (see the entry Human Computer):
The approach was taken for astronomical and other complex calculations. Perhaps the first example of organized human computing was by the Frenchman Alexis Claude Clairaut (1713–1765), when he divided the computation to determine timing of the return of Halley’s Comet with two colleagues, Joseph-Jérôme Le Lepart and Nicole-Reine Étable. For some men being a computer was a temporary position until they moved on to greater advancements. For women the occupation was generally closed, but this changed in the late nineteenth century with Edward Charles Pickering. His group was at times termed “Pickering’s Harem.” Many of the women astronomers from this era are computers with possibly the best known being Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Florence Cushman was one of the Harvard University computers from 1888 onward. Among her best known works for him was A Catalogue of 16,300 Stars Observed with the 12-inch Meridian Photometer. She also worked with Annie Jump Cannon. That said as a female computer she normally earned half of what a male counterpart would.
The Indian mathematician Radhanath Sikdar was employed as a “computer” for the Great Trigonometric Survey of India in 1840. It was he who first identified and calculated the height of the world’s highest mountain, later called Mount Everest.
Some of my coworkers at b5 were all hot-and-bothered about the demo for the XBox 360 game Too Human, so I decided to download it and give it a try. I played it and was generally less than impressed with both the gameplay and especially the storyline (like Assassin’s Creed, the story’s a rather clumsy mish-mash of swords-and-sorcery and sci-fi genres).
Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, the fast-trash-talking host of the excellent videogame review show Zero Punctuation agrees with me. He panned the game in his trademark fashion:
“Was this ad supposed to be funny?” is the question that a lot of techies are asking after having seen the first of the new series of Microsoft ads featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. The ad, which sets up both the tone for future commercials and the Bill/Jerry dynamic, could’ve been lifted straight from any number of Seinfeld episodes. In fact, the “Churro? No thanks” exchange is practically a repeat of the “Snapple? No.” exchanges in the episodes The Virgin and The Visa.
It’s a real shame that the ad turned out this way because there’s prior work with Bill and celebrities that is funny and gives Microsoft a warmer, fuzzier image. Here are two of the most notable ones…
This video was shown at Microsoft’s 2005 Professional Developers Conference, and unlike the ad with Seinfeld, it makes good use of the source material and the guest star, and better still, it’s actually funny. They could’ve easily repurposed this ad or called Jon Heder to shoot some more:
This one’s not as funny or as clever as the
We’ll have to wait ands see if the next Gates/Seinfeld ad is any better, or at least generates more than a mild chuckle. They’ve got nowhere to go but up…
At last, the first Microsoft commercial featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates! Its humor follows the Seinfeld formula with one difference: Jerry plays the Kramer-esque role while Bill plays the “Seinfeld” part.
The ad runs for 1 minute and 30 seconds, the first minute of which is devoted to Jerry helping Bill shop for discount shoes. Microsoft or what they promise for the future isn’t mentioned until the 1:02 mark, and the big revelation is that they’re going to make computers moist and chewy like cake. The commercial ends with Bill shaking the junk in his trunk, followed by three cards: “The Future”, “Delicious”, and finally the Windows logo.
My guess is that the purpose of this commercial is to set the tone and flavor of the Gates/Seinfeld relationship for the ones to follow, which presumably will have a little more substance.