If you’re a fan of HR Giger’s Alien and are planning to get married soon, here’s a cake design you might want to consider choosing:
Ok, we have to admit that a cake like that might freak out your guests just a little, and they might worry ending up having a chest buster trying to get out their stomach a few days later, but who cares, right? It’s your wedding cake after all!
Edit: This work of art comes from Seattle-based Jet City Cakes. Thank you for contacting us Paul!
[Via Walyou]
Google is preparing to test a 1 gigabit broadband service in the US. Just to recap, that’s 1000 megabits per second. Put another way, that’s the theoretical ability to download a DVD in 37 seconds.
The plan is to work in partnership with local and state governments to set-up fiber-optic networks reaching between 50,000 and 500,000 people. One analyst says that each network would cost somewhere between $60 million and $1.6 billion to set up. The scary thing is that that’s effectively loose change for Google, which has approximately $25 billion in cash.
Nobody seems to be able to come up with a logical explanation as to how these projects could possibly be profitable at this stage, though it appears that might not be the intention. Instead one theory has it that Google simply wants to supply ridiculously fast broadband to enough people that they’ll sing its praises and prompt the rest of the population to demand faster speeds from their own providers. The idea is that the faster people can access the internet, the more sites they’ll visit and thus the more adverts they’ll see.
It’s also not clear how and why Google went with the 1 gigabit figure. It would certainly be an amazing coincidence if that really was the maximum speed the proposed networks could reach. More likely the firm either thought it made for an impressive figure or simply liked the fact that it started with a ‘G’ (look out for the term “Googlebit”.)
There is a more sinister possibility though. If Google controls your internet access, it means it has the technical ability to know everything you do online. And for a company that makes its money by selling targeted advertising, that could be a goldmine.
Of course, from the company with the slogan “Don’t Be Evil”, it may be hard to see them use such intrusive tactics. It might be hard to imagine any internet provides using your entire internet activity for advertising, but that’s exactly what a controversial firm named Phorm tries to do and has even tested secretly with some ISPs in the United Kingdom. It may turn out that a loss of privacy is the price to play with ultra-broadband.
Made by Jamie Bell as an end of class project for an art course, A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything is a brilliant stop motion short produced entirely out of biro pens. The whole thing has been drawn on over 2100 pages, which took him about 3 weeks to complete.
I don’t know what it is with Google products, but as soon as the company releases something new, it always takes less than 24 hours before people start releasing spoofs about said products on the web. The following one makes fun of Google Buzz, which we quite like by the way!
He’s about ten feet tall and breathes fire. Nick and Anna Berte of Bel Air, Maryland built a giant snowman and rigged it with a flamethrower inside! And what did you do while you were stuck at home during the blizzard?
Tags: fire, flamethrower, snow, snowman
Photoshop turns 20 today. The photo-editing software has become one of the few pieces of technology where the brand name has become a verb, others including “to Google” and to a lesser extent “to eBay” (an action often performed on unwanted Christmas gifts.)
Strictly speaking, the software was first distributed in 1988, though this was in the form of around 200 copies under a deal with a scanner company which wanted a free gift to send out with its scanners. 10 February 1990 marked the official release of Photoshop 1.0.
The software began its life in 1987 when a postgraduate student named Thomas Knoll, working on a doctorate on computer vision, decided he needed a diversion from his studies. With no LOLcats to visit (and how could such a thing have existed before Photoshop), Knoll tried to develop a way of displaying grayscale images on his black and white monitor.
Knoll’s brother John, who worked for Industrial Light and Magic, then helped him tweak the program (known simply as Display back then) to work in color and then add some basic functionalities to it such as adjusting brightness levels. John then persuaded Thomas the project had commercial possibilities and, after the scanner deal, the pair reached a licensing agreement with Adobe.
(For a more detailed history of Photoshop’s origins, check out http://photoshopnews.com/feature-stories/photoshop-profile-thomas-john-knoll-10/)
Today the system dominates the market (for once the phrase “industry standard” is appropriate), though its high price means it’s probably one of the most pirated applications among home users.
Its popularity means there’s more scope than ever for producing misleading images, whether that be airbrushing models to produce unnaturally “perfect” figures, or creating missiles from thin air.
Unfortunately, Photoshop is like Othello: it takes a moment to learn and a lifetime to master. And those who don’t master it are celebrated at the Photoshop Disasters blog. A great example is this pair of pictures for the US and Polish markets respectively in which a man undergoes a Michael Jackson-like transformation. There is one flaw, however: check out the “white” man’s hand:
While in no way as awesome as the Original Bacon Explosion, this sausage roll stuffed with a cheesy double beef burrito from Taco Bell certainly looks unhealthy yummy… but why on earth did the creator forget to put a bacon wrap around the thing is beyond me!
[Via EpicPortions]
After over a year of near-weekly pics posts, sometimes it’s a challenge to come up with a new topic. Sometimes I just go to Flickr and put in “geeky” as a keyword and look around for a while until something catches my fancy. Sometimes a theme will simply emerge from things that show up; for example, a surprising number of people like to take pictures of Pacman-inspired food. Today, what I found was a lot of people dressed like Spock. Voila!
There are, of course, some dangers inherent in dressing as Spock. – helix90 (CC)
Produced by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, a North Carolina-based comedy duo, T-Shirt Wars is a stop-motion video featuring our two friends and the epic battle between shirts of various colors and designs. Check it out:
[Via Laughing Squid]
Macworld, one of the biggest expositions dedicated to Apple’s products has started this morning in San Francisco, California – and for the first time, Apple Inc. won’t be showing up. The Cupertino-based giant had announced last year that their participation to the event was not necessary anymore, as consumers didn’t really need to attend to a show to be aware of the latest developments in the company. With the ever-increasing number of Apple stores all around the world, attendance to Macworld really has became irrelevant for Apple.
But even without Steve Jobs, the event will attract approximately 30,000 attendees, and more than 250 other corporations will be there to present their products.
For those of you interested in going to the show, Macworld 2010 will be ending next Saturday.