Famous ‘1984’ Macintosh TV ad gets a makeover
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, March 24, 2007
Whether Apple Inc. likes it or not, its classic “1984” Macintosh television ad, which aired only during the Super Bowl that year, has been reincarnated with a political veneer and is becoming one of the latest hits on Google Inc.’s YouTube.
A copy of the original commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, has been remade into a satirical attack piece against presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, replacing the Big Brother figure with the Democratic senator from New York instead. It then ends with a message supporting her opponent Sen. Barack Obama and a colorful Apple-like logo that has been converted into an “O.” The woman runner in the commercial has also been modified so that she’s wearing an iPod.
The creator of the so-called online video mash-up is unknown, and Obama’s campaign has denied being behind it.
Late night is for sleeping, not surfing:
A half-hour before the clock strikes midnight, India’s top technology institute pulls the plug on Internet access in students’ dorm rooms.
Attend classes, turn out for sports and socialize. That’s the Indian Institute of Technology’s message to students, many of whom were showing up for class bleary-eyed, if it all, after late nights spent Internet surfing and gaming.
“We found attendance for the first lecture at 8:30 a.m. was falling,” said Aruna Thosar-Dixit, an IIT spokeswoman. “Students were not alert, they were sleepy, some were even sleeping.”
The ban has been in force since March 13 at the Mumbai IIT, one of seven prestigious engineering and technology institutes in the country. Access in individual dorms has been blocked starting at 11:30 p.m. each evening. It is restored 12:30 p.m. the next day.
Professors found students spent more time on the Internet than socializing and attending sports and cultural functions, Thosar-Dixit said.
Wanna celebrate a game of strategic simulation?:
Irish playwright Oscar Wilde once said, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
Students participating in a novel design contest might rephrase the famous quotation to something like, “Art imitates video games that imitate life.”
Students at Parsons The New School for Design in New York, Academy of Art University in San Francisco and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles are teaming up with Redwood City-based Electronic Arts Inc. to produce exhibitions that celebrate “The Sims.”
The strategic simulation game was the brainchild of EA designer Will Wright. Players create their own homes, businesses and social networks using virtual characters, or Sims, who live in suburban SimCity.
Since the title’s debut in 2000, fans have bought more than 85 million copies of “Sims” games, which are starkly dissimilar from the violent “first-person shooters” popular with hard-core gamers. The game is credited with greatly expanding the market to include girls, older adults and other nontraditional gamers.
Judges will award $36,000 in prizes.
Podcasting is elementary:
Kathy Shields says podcasting is easy – so simple, in fact, that her kindergartners do it.
Shields joined about 200 people over the weekend for “PodCamp,” a conference for anyone interested in broadcasting video or audio programs over the Internet.
Podcasts are typically sound files that can be played on personal computers, TiVo Inc.’s digital recorders and music players such as Apple Inc.’s iPod. Many are regularly scheduled and automatically delivered, and more recently some have incorporated video.
“With podcasting … it’s ‘Who?’ and not ‘How many?’” said Josh Hallett, who presented a podcasting session. “You can be a very successful podcaster if only four people are listening to it and if you change someone’s life.”
Shields introduced podcasting last year to her elementary school classes outside Atlanta. Podcasts, she said, allow parents to watch or listen to their child’s experiences with Field Day or Thanksgiving. Families with overseas relatives can also easily share them.
Get the latest on what you like:
A new service lets visitors create custom news sites centered around niche hobbies, business ventures and other special interests, pulling stories on the topic from some 25,000 news sources.
Congoo’s new News Circles lets you pull news from about 480 predetermined categories or create your own using keywords. Once you’ve set up a circle, you can share the collection with friends and colleagues who have similar interests and needs. Others may add comments on specific items within the circle.
The free news service gets about 150,000 news articles daily, including some through partnerships with for-pay sites such as The Wall Street Journal. Access to the paid content is free, though users are limited on how many they can see a month.
RFID chips need more development, European Commission says:
Privacy and security need to be built into radio frequency identification tags before they become widespread, the European Commission said, announcing it would publish guidelines later this year.
RFID chips can be used to automatically identify and verify passports, luggage, livestock or pharmaceuticals and have a range of potential uses – from telling doctors what medicines patients have been given to instantly pointing out expired food.
Advocates of the technology – which for now is used mainly on cases of items in warehouses, not individual products – laud its ability to speed inventory and checkout. But opponents say that because wireless chips can be read from afar, people and their purchases could be surreptitiously tracked.
