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Windoze 2495 by Chris Pirazzi: Not for Sale!

Windoze 2495 — by Chris Pirazzi — Not for Sale!
Resistance is futile! You will be assimilated!

I created this political satire image, "Windoze 2495," on October 4th, 1994, and posted it on my old website. Since then, it has spread anonymously all over the internet. It is on most of the anti-Microsoft websites of course, but it pops up in other surprising places. For example, for at least 10 years it was one of the little recurring icons used to decorate articles about Microsoft on the technical computer news site slashdot.org. People have done all sorts of things to/with my image: scaled it, masked it, added titles over it, greyed out the colors, and in some cases even claimed it as their own work.

One particularly pathetic loser, the kind of person who really lets down your faith in mankind, took my image without permission, presented it on his website with no attribution (so that any reasonable person would think it was his work—and many on the web did), and started making money off of my image by printing it on a t-shirt and charging $10 plus shipping. It annoyed me a lot that he stole my image and essentially made it seem like he created it, making money on something I intended to release as a political satire collage for all to view for free. Sure, it's great that another person was distributing my image, but the act of selling my image for a profit poisons the very intent of the image and is the kind of hypocritical move we'd expect from a slimy, money-centric organization like, say, Microsoft!

But what really pissed me off was that his t-shirt looked like utter crap—he didn't even have the basic pre-school competence or integrity to brighten up the image a bit so that it would look good when printed on a t-shirt! I don't have any idea how much this pod made off of my work, but there was some small recompense when he suddenly had to shut down his site "due to unexpected (and unwanted) attention from an attorney representing Bill Gates."

I'm certainly not the only person to associate Bill Gates with the evil Borg of Star Trek—the association is almost instinctive for computer types. But I think I was the first one to create a photographic collage. The same idea was done in a really cool cover of an old edition of Boardwatch magazine (May 1996, Volume X, Issue 5, artist's name was Kathy Meyers) and they have been selling posters of their cover since 1996! Doing a web search for "Bill Gates as a Borg" reveals a few new takes on the theme as well.

Chris Pirazzi, chris@pirazzi.net

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CopyrightAll text and images copyright 1999-2023 Chris Pirazzi unless otherwise indicated.
Submit This Site

Like what you see?
Help spread the word on social media:
Support This Site

This hobby site is supported by readers like you. To guarantee future updates, please support the site in one of these ways:
donate now   Donate Now
Use your credit card or PayPal to donate in support of the site.
get anything from amazon.com
Use this link to Amazon—you pay the same, I get 4%.
get my thai dictionary app
Learn Thai with my Talking Thai-English-Thai Dictionary app: iOS, Android, Windows.
get my thai phrasebook app
Experience Thailand richly with my Talking Thai-English-Thai Phrasebook app.
get my chinese phrasebook app
Visit China easily with my Talking Chinese-English-Chinese Phrasebook app.
get thailand fever
I co-authored this bilingual cultural guide to Thai-Western romantic relationships.
See Also

You'll probably also like these sites...
homeland security threat chart
Ever wonder what Homeland Security conditions green to red really mean?
buzzword bingo: now with Web 2.0!
Discover the answer to meetings—Tom Davis's buzzword bingo.
corpspeak
Out-BS your boss: generate endless corporate bullshit with corpspeak.
webspeak
Get VC funding: generate spews of meaningless web techno jargon.
free music from MusicWithoutEnd™
IRS, United Airlines, Bank of America launch free online music service.
Copyright

All text and images copyright 1999-2023 Chris Pirazzi unless otherwise indicated.