I’d be willing to bet big money that the owner of this car is a developer or some other high-tech type:
Tag: Geek Culture
Remember those articles from a couple of weeks back — the ones about QSOL’s ads for their servers with the tagline “Don’t feel bad. Our servers won’t go down on you either”? Valleywag has picked up the story in an article titled A blowjob ad reappears in Linux Journal.
The article concludes with this observation:
Obviously QSol ran the ad to titillate and shock, and get talked about — and from that perspective, the company has succeeded. But then there’s the quality of the ad itself. Leave aside the broken promises, and the ad’s tiresome execution. Why would you want to buy servers from a company that clearly hasn’t had a new idea in seven years?
Categories
Guitar vs. “Guitar Hero”
Click to see the comic on its original page.
Trust me, kids: learn to play a musical instrument reasonably well before college.
As for accordion playing, the “coolness graph” looks like this:
The “Our Servers Won’t Go Down” Ad
(You might want to read the previous post for some background first.)
The ad pictured to the right is the original “Don’t feel bad. Our servers won’t go down on you either” ad that got Qsol into trouble in back in 2000. The ad has received some much-deserved derision with a DisGraceful Award from GraceNet (a group that promotes the contributions of women in technology) and a place in the In Search of Stupidity Museum (the companion site for Rick Chapman’s book bearing the same title).
The ad ran in Linux Journal in late 2000, and after a number of complaints, Qsol responded in the “Letters to the Editor” section saying:
We sincerely apologize to all those who have expressed concern about our advertisement recently featured in Linux Journal (November 2000). It was certainly not our intention to be offensive and we wish to again express our regret to anyone who was displeased by the ad. We understand that this has angered some readers and have therefore reacted immediately by pulling this artwork from all future issues of the magazine. Again, we extend our sincerest apologies.
Something must’ve changed their minds, because they ran an updated version of the ad in the August 2007 Linux Journal (and presumably other tech magazines from their publisher).
The Reaction So Far
The ad got a link in Reddit titled Who says Linux geeks don’t have a sense of humor?. The usual jokes were made (“rm -rf clothes”, for example), but not a single commenter suggested that the ad might just be a little bit sexist and possibly a cause of women’s avoidance of high tech. Elizabeth Bevilacqua wrote about the ad in her LiveJournal, and a couple of male commenters did the usual hand-wringing.
I’m hardly someone you could accuse of being politically correct; I have some issues with the way that society currently treats perfectly natural male behaviours as suspect.
However, I think that stuff like the Qsol doesn’t help the high-tech gender balance. I think it “breaks” rather than “bends” (from the expression “If it bends, it’s comedy; if it breaks, it’s not”). Once again, what Neal Stephenson wrote in Snow Crash about sexism in geekdom still holds true. In the novel, the men belived that Juanita Marquez’s work on faces and facial expressions for a VR interface was relatively unimportant, and Stephenson wrote:
It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
I think that the ad does the tech industry a double disservice. It sends a message to women that they might want to look to another field for a career and it makes men in high tech look like dolts.
Doc Searls Helps Out
I sent an email expressing my concerns to the man I like to refer to as “the adult supervision of the blogosphere”, Doc Searls, who’s Linux Journal’s senior editor. He responded quickly, saying that he’d have a word with the publisher and asked me to please pass his apolgies along.
Thanks, Doc! You’re the best.
These mousepads were reason number one, this is reason number 2…
Click the ad to see it on its original page at full size.
Update
I did a little Googling and found that Qsol ran this ad back in 2000 in Linux Journal. After receiving complaints (and increased sales), Qsol’s president Joe Safai apologizes and promised not to run it again.
After finding out that the ad originally ran in 2000, I decided to give the copyright notice at the bottom of the ad. I could’ve sworn it said “Copyright 2007”. It does.
More Googling led me to Elizabeth Bevilacqua’s LiveJournal, where she wrote:
My employer recently footed the bill for a subscription to Linux Journal for me (how cool is that?). I received my first issue this week, dove into it, and was floored by the 5th page.
No, not by some fantastic article, not by the ToC, by an advertisement. An advertisement by QSOL.com Server Appliances. WARNING, implied sexual content: see it here.
I sighed and figured this was going to be par for the course for a tech magazine. I mentioned it to the LinuxChix and that’s when someone said “Isn’t that ad really old?” Nope, August 2007 Linux Journal!
Elizabeth has sent letters to Qsol and Linux Journal. Perhaps I’ll drop my good buddy Doc Searls — he’s their senior editor — a line.
Categories
Anime Video of “Code Monkey”
The machinima videos that people have made for Jonathan Coulton’s geek anthem Code Monkey haven’t impressed me; unlike the Red vs. Blue series of animations, the visuals feel poorly matched with the storyline.
Better by far is this video, which does an excellent job of repurposing clips from the Japanese animated TV series Black Heaven. If you watch only one fan-made video of Code Monkey, watch this one:
Based on a ten-page (!) confession by a former Geek Squad member in which he wrote that Geek Squad agents scour your computer for those porn and personal pictures and videos and copy them onto their thumb drives, Consumerist set up a string operation in which they rigged a computer to record all user activity and brought it in to a number of Best Buy stores to have Geek Squad install iTunes on it.
They report:
We took it to around a dozen Best Buy Geek Squads and asked them to perform simple tasks, like installing iTunes. Most places were fine, sometimes doing the job right on the counter, sometimes even for free.
Click here to see their blog entry and (work-safe) video, and be sure to read these follow-up articles:
- Why We’re Not Telling Geek Squad CEO Which Agent Stole The Porn
- How To Make Your Computer Catch People Stealing Your Porn
There remains one question that I’m sure a lot of guys are asking: Where’d they get that desktop wallpaper image, and could they please share it?
