"How can I filter out the images? I just want to read the articles."

March 22, 2009 4:53 AM

NSFW-filter: Playboy Archive has 53 vintage issues of America's favorite gentleman's magazine up for free (legitimately). Requires a download of Microsoft's Silverlight.

I know it's BEWBIEFILTER but hey, the advertisements alone are incredible.

posted by bardic (129 comments total)

Silverlight? No, thanks. Guess I will have to do with trillions of other articles on the web.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:04 AM on March 22, 2009 [6 favorites]

I wish there was some way to (legitimately) download these into PDF. Really, believe it or not I'm interesting in reading the article back when Playboy was about a "lifestyle" and not just porn for people who can't figure out how to download it online.

And yes, I do read Playboy for the articles.
posted by champthom at 5:05 AM on March 22, 2009 [4 favorites]

God, those are old. Amazing how the line art and cartoons take me back. Thanks for posting this.
posted by RussHy at 5:11 AM on March 22, 2009

Thanks for posting this. I spent hours looking at old stereo ads.
posted by mattholomew at 5:14 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

Is iffy 70s porn, crap jokes, old Triumph TR7 and Marantz ads, boorish articles really worth the Silverlight download? I'll stick with naked German people for now thanks all the same.
posted by mattoxic at 5:24 AM on March 22, 2009

Silverlight? No.
posted by slater at 5:30 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

Someone should notify Microsoft about this thread. If you can't sell your free product using naked women, you really have a problem.
posted by ghost of a past number at 5:40 AM on March 22, 2009 [112 favorites]

Metafilter: If you can't sell your free product using naked women, you really have a problem.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:47 AM on March 22, 2009 [4 favorites]

You would think that you'd have to install Fleshlight to enjoy this.
posted by zerobyproxy at 5:52 AM on March 22, 2009 [4 favorites]

Silverlight? No.

Just another voice echoing the above. Not even for boobies.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:59 AM on March 22, 2009

You know, in the 1950s you really could say you read it for the articles. All that text!
posted by alasdair at 6:09 AM on March 22, 2009

I'm not up on all this new-fangled technology. I ask this from a truly naive perspective. What is it about Silverlight that has everyone running for cover?
posted by netbros at 6:16 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

Silverlight? No, thanks. Guess I will have to do with trillions of other naked women on the web.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:27 AM on March 22, 2009

I was just wondering the same thing. I'm guessing it's because OMG Microsoft is teh sux0r and jump right on that bandwagon.
posted by fatbaq at 6:27 AM on March 22, 2009 [3 favorites]

Silverlight's not the best streaming platform, but I haven't noticed the quality of my life decrease since installing it. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong.
posted by proj at 6:29 AM on March 22, 2009 [9 favorites]

What is it about Silverlight that has everyone running for cover?
It's Flash. Only re-invented by Microsoft. And with much higher sys reqs for non-Windows clients.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:33 AM on March 22, 2009 [2 favorites]

It's certainly not the kind of application you could do without using something like Flash or Silverlight, no matter how much some people might believe that HTML+CSS+JS can do everything.

Disclaimer: I work for the Evil Empire.
posted by Slothrup at 6:34 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

netbros, on a Mac, Silvertlight just sucks. It's not a mature product, it's striving to fill a void that doesn't exists, and it's buggy. Who was calling for yet another flashlike technology? I don't know how it acts on a PC, but on the Mac side the "OMG Microsoft is teh sux0r," isn't a bandwagon, it's a reality. MY Media Player is one step away from a virus, Explorer wasn't updated for years and was finally abandoned (but from an IT stand point still had to be supported for quite some time), and Office, arguable the only MS product that doesn't suck has long been the foster kid of the software world. We were the testing ground for crap no one wanted, and it took years to get the things we did want.

On another note, when I worked for Borders I would often buy the German version of Playboy, just so when people said, "You speak German?" I could say "No, who looks at this for the articles?"
posted by cjorgensen at 6:36 AM on March 22, 2009 [4 favorites]

These days, it's really quaint to say "but I only read it for the nekkid pictures."

Seriously, though, no amount of airbrushed flesh is worth installing Silverlight.
posted by fourcheesemac at 6:44 AM on March 22, 2009

Does it have the '78 Bo Derek issue? Cos that was my issue, if you know what I mean.
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 6:44 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

Also, doesn't work with Moonlight.
posted by swift at 6:48 AM on March 22, 2009 [2 favorites]

Slothrup: "It's certainly not the kind of application you could do without using something like Flash or Silverlight, no matter how much some people might believe that HTML+CSS+JS can do everything."

What? I work for a digital magazine purveyor, and we only use HTML+CSS+JS. What are we doing wrong? What does the digital Playboy do that's impossible to do with technologies everyone can support? Your answer better not be "animated page curls when you hover over the corner of the page".
posted by Plutor at 6:49 AM on March 22, 2009 [4 favorites]

(Oh, that's weird. I seem to have gotten Bo Derek and Bo Jackson conflated in my head. I guess I was paying even less attention during the 80s than I thought.)
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:58 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

Yup. Free naked lady pictures and you nerds are arguing about computers.
posted by jimmythefish at 6:59 AM on March 22, 2009 [45 favorites]

What does the digital Playboy do that's impossible to do with technologies everyone can support?

Maybe you should look at what they've done. Consider it "competitive research". If you're too scared to install the runtime or don't have a platform that can use it, you can probably find a video from the MIX keynote that shows a demo of the viewer.

Obviously, it's not "impossible" in the sense that "you can't create an application that lets you look at a magazine online". But you'd end up with a totally different (and --in my opinion-- far inferior) experience.
posted by Slothrup at 7:02 AM on March 22, 2009

Oh, and "page"? There aren't any.
posted by Slothrup at 7:02 AM on March 22, 2009

Found the one I used to use, I mean read, as a kid. I guess Silverlight's problem is that it makes your arm tired and your hand sticky. Bad software.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 7:04 AM on March 22, 2009

There's a March 1980 issue with Bo Derek on the cover, Henry. Was that your weapon of choice?
posted by emelenjr at 7:15 AM on March 22, 2009

You had me at NSFW. And lost me at Silverlight.
posted by tommasz at 7:21 AM on March 22, 2009 [2 favorites]

I accidentally the whole Silverlight.
posted by Area Control at 7:26 AM on March 22, 2009 [2 favorites]

Well, one thing I like about Silverlight is its support for dynamic languages, esp. Python and Ruby. Not really in a useful state, yet, but at least somebody's trying to bring client-side programming into the XXI^st.
posted by signal at 7:33 AM on March 22, 2009

Thanks for this, it's like a little time machine back to my fathers ad agency parties, martinis and overflowing ashtrays.

The Silverlight issue is a non-starter for me. I'm using a new MacBook for the weekend and wasn't even sure if Silverlight was installed (is it bundled with Office or something?) but the site just worked. I avoid proprietary crap like the plague but can't see how it matters whether or not I use an Adobe or a Microsoft product. Pick a behemoth.
posted by cedar at 7:37 AM on March 22, 2009

I have no problem installing Silverlight. I have to act like a consumer who couldn't care less about CSS or JavaScript or web standards. It's just another extension that is optional and therefore entirely at one's discretion. I have yet to see anything that made it a necessity but we all have different interests. Some of the ads and typography in these old issues are slightly interesting but I could easily live without them and will never visit this site again.

That said I'm sick of lack of support for standards and defacto standards as a developer. Flash for example, has been a god send for video on the web with .FLV and there goes Apple refusing to support Flash on the iPhone so now we have to present an alternative compatible video file or hope the rumoured support is coming. High horse fuckers.

The end users probably don't and won't care, and they probably won't care if they have to install Silverlight either. I always advise clients to stay away from Flash except for video and Silverlight if they can but they often can and don't want to. We usually provide a standards based alternative but it seems the marketing types just love the flash and silver.
posted by juiceCake at 7:40 AM on March 22, 2009

It'll take more than free softcore porn for me to install Silverlight.
posted by furtive at 7:44 AM on March 22, 2009

Think of the heartache this will cause when it appears on reddit. Oh the humanity!
posted by kitfreeman at 7:51 AM on March 22, 2009 [2 favorites]

Ah, yeah, it was either 78 or 80.

LOL my issue HAR HAR
posted by Henry C. Mabuse at 7:52 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

This is interesting even for just the ads.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 8:00 AM on March 22, 2009

Maybe you should look at what they've done.

Is there anyone else who can explain, in words, what's uniquely cool about Silverlight? Thanks.
posted by mediareport at 8:00 AM on March 22, 2009

You had me curious, slothrup, so I actually installed silverlight to see what you were talking about.

For those who don't want to bother, here's what it is:
A screen full of magazine cover images, in a horizontal-scroll format. There's some progressive-load magic on the images so that instead of loading top to bottom they start out as blurry blocks of color and get progressively less blurry. They occasionally get stuck partially loaded and stay blurry.

Clicking to a different tab or resizing the window causes the images to reload from the beginning, sometimes.

Clicking a cover image causes a little zoom effect to a screenful of page images, also with the blurry progressive-load thing. I can't quite figure out whether this is a bug or what was intended: sometimes clicking an image will cause it to zoom in, sometimes it'll go to the next page. Some of the pages have little overlaid numbers on them for some reason, and they've made the table of contents pages clickable.

The images don't stay in memory for very long after they load, so you're mostly looking at blurry rectangles most of the time.

There's a custom-built slider at the bottom of the screen which almost, but not quite, serves the same purpose that a regular horizontal scrollbar would have, but wonkier.

That's pretty much all that's here.

Oh, and it breaks the back button. Awesome.

So, Slothrup, you're completely wrong: It would be pretty simple to reproduce 90% of this using in-browser technologies (jpgs of each page at a few different resolutions, an imagemap or two, plus a handful of scroll and zoom and fade effects.) You'd have to work pretty hard to get the interface to be as irritating and inconsistent as what's found here, but I'm sure that part could be managed.

Literally the only thing that's new here is the progressive loading of the images. Even that could be done in-browser if you really wanted to (a la google maps)... but I'm not sure why you'd want to. Maybe this is just a matter of familiarity, but if I'm looking at a partially loaded image, I'd rather see the top half of the image than a blurry unreadable representation of the whole thing.

I am now uninstalling Silverlight.
posted by ook at 8:05 AM on March 22, 2009 [37 favorites]

I'd love to see Bill and Steve team up on a practical joke where they announce each other's new technologies as their own. The resulting love and hate fests would expose the fanboys for what they really are - more about the brand than the product.
Also these two statements: I'm using a new MacBook and I avoid proprietary crap like the plague together made me chuckle a little.
posted by rocket88 at 8:07 AM on March 22, 2009 [7 favorites]

Is there anyone else who can explain, in words, what's uniquely cool about Silverlight?

For consumers, nothing.

For developers who are already completely married to MS technologies, silverlight might be easier to learn than Flash, or easier to tie into other MS stuff they're already using.


But as far as I can tell, Silverlight is purely "me too!" tech. That they're desperate enough to try giving it away with free boobies is a sign of how well it's been catching on.
posted by ook at 8:18 AM on March 22, 2009 [2 favorites]

Thanks, ook.
posted by mediareport at 8:18 AM on March 22, 2009

Maybe this is just a matter of familiarity, but if I'm looking at a partially loaded image, I'd rather see the top half of the image than a blurry unreadable representation of the whole thing.

I think it depends on what you're looking at. If I'm navigating through a magazine and want to focus on the *articles*, then being able to see really quickly that a particular page doesn't have any of them is very useful.

Also, if you're using the scrollbar at the bottom, then you're doing it the wrong way. It's much more convenient to grab the page with the mouse and pull it horizontally -- like Google Maps.

It would be pretty simple to reproduce 90% of this using in-browser technologies

Since you're the second person to have said so, I'll concede that you're probably right. I just find the programming model too painful to consider implementing such a thing using those technologies -- as a single stack, it's starting to rival the Windows API for its byzantine layers of accumulated crap. But to be fair, I have no idea whether or not implementing in Silverlight would be any better as I've never used it for anything significant.

Well, one thing I like about Silverlight is its support for dynamic languages, esp. Python and Ruby.

Thanks! I'm one of the language guys working on IronPython and IronRuby...
posted by Slothrup at 8:21 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

That they're desperate enough to try giving it away with free boobies is a sign of how well it's been catching on.

I don't think the world works the way you think it does. NBC using Silverlight for the Olympics -- *that*'s something that we're almost certainly paying for. Some third party using the tech to create an application for *their* customers -- not so much.
posted by Slothrup at 8:23 AM on March 22, 2009

ook: "For those who don't want to bother, here's what it is"

Thanks for the report, ook. Slothrup's "there are no pages" claim almost convinced me to install Silverlight just to see how they were implementing reflowable text while keeping images and ads intact (this is one of our ongoing challenges). I'm glad to see he meant "you can see all of the pages at the same time". Like this thing from a while back.

In the end, we're quibbling over implementation. I will concede that HTML+CSS+JS is far from the most elegant language stack there is, and when I said "everyone can support it", that may be literally true, but the sad reality is that IE8 just made that job even harder. There's a certain appeal to writing an interface for a single-vendor viewer.
posted by Plutor at 8:29 AM on March 22, 2009

Does Silverlight cause the pages to be stuck together?
posted by Tube at 8:30 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

ook kinda got me hot with his erotica. Reminded me of the days where people would argue the superiority of gif vs. jpg for porn. Gif loaded faster, and you got to see the whole thing, and then it got less blurry, but the color sucks. Jpg loaded top down, had better color, but the files were too big.

And as to the flash on the iPhone bit, it's not a matter of "High horse fuckers," but of performance. If flash was on the iPhone you'd have more people bitching about how crapy it was, and by extension the iPhone, than are currently complaining about its lack of flash.

I may have to fire up a scratch monkey mac this afternoon, install silverlight, and pretend like I'll on a 2400 baud modem waiting for the nudey gif to become a little less blurry.
posted by cjorgensen at 8:32 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

Also, if you're using the scrollbar at the bottom, then you're doing it the wrong way. It's much more convenient to grab the page with the mouse and pull it horizontally -- like Google Maps.

Ok, didn't realize that. That wouldn't be trivial to do in-browser, but certainly possible. (Again with the google maps :)

I just find the programming model too painful to consider implementing such a thing using those technologies -- as a single stack, it's starting to rival the Windows API for its byzantine layers of accumulated crap.

I find this attitude confusing. Certainly the existing web technologies are becoming more complex, because they can do more stuff. I do not see this as an argument for adding yet another complex piece of technology to the stack.

I don't think the world works the way you think it does. NBC using Silverlight for the Olympics -- *that*'s something that we're almost certainly paying for. Some third party using the tech to create an application for *their* customers -- not so much.

Is your point that Playboy is too small for MS to have bothered with as a promotional platform for this technology? If so, that's a point I would probably concede.
posted by ook at 8:35 AM on March 22, 2009

Yup. Free naked lady pictures and you nerds are arguing about computers.

Silicon vs Silicone?
posted by jonmc at 8:36 AM on March 22, 2009 [4 favorites]

I really don't get what all the outrage is about re: silverlight. I installed it to watch streaming movies on my laptop in firefox with netflix. It took... maybe three clicks. And now I can watch movies.
And look at... ads in playboy.

I have not been inconvenienced or adversely affected.

Any hope of getting on-topic?
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 8:41 AM on March 22, 2009

HI I'M ON METAFILTER AND I COULD OVERTHINK A PLUG-IN FULL OF BOOBIES.
posted by joe vrrr at 8:43 AM on March 22, 2009 [7 favorites]

Any hope of getting on-topic?

We are on-topic. Is this discussion less interesting than a page full of "Hey! I used to masturbate to that!" would be?

ok, yeah, it probably is
posted by ook at 8:49 AM on March 22, 2009 [6 favorites]

Certainly the existing web technologies are becoming more complex, because they can do more stuff. I do not see this as an argument for adding yet another complex piece of technology to the stack.

When you continually change something to make it do "more stuff" while trying to retain compatibility with the "old stuff", you eventually end up with a mess. The way to view Silverlight or Flash from a programmer's perspective is that it *replaces* part of the stack with something that improves the development experience for kind of interactive, media-rich content that people are starting to expect. And that's because these platforms were designed up-front for that type of applications -- as opposed to the "standard stack", which was designed at a time when most content was static.

Is your point that Playboy is too small for MS to have bothered with as a promotional platform for this technology?

Pretty much, yes.
posted by Slothrup at 8:54 AM on March 22, 2009

See, now it's on-topic to discuss what's on-topic or not.

*begin endless recursive masturbatory loop*
posted by mediareport at 8:55 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

One more nerd thing I forgot to mention; slothrup, maybe you can answer this: does copy-paste not work in silverlight?

They did include a "link" button that shows a url which (presumably) lets you link directly to a given page within one of the magazines -- which is awesome; more flash developers should learn that lesson. But while I can select the URL in its text field, I can't copy it. Is this a bug in the OSX plugin, a bug in silverlight in general, or just a problem with Playboy's particular implementation?


Meanwhile: Shields & Yarnell are fucking creepy.
posted by ook at 8:56 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

January 1972, Marilyn Cole. That is all I'm saying.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 9:01 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

"Hey! I used to masturbate to that!"

Used to?
posted by bardic at 9:02 AM on March 22, 2009

I'm opposed to Silverlight for a few reasons. The first is that it seems completely redundant. We already have Flash, do we really need an MS branded Flash knock off too?

More important, the more crap a user piles onto their system, the more problems they run into. And, of course, the more security holes there are. So now they'll need Java, and Flash, *AND* Silverlight, each one eating up resources with its autoupdate program, and each one yet another chink in their armor. And no, Joe User mostly isn't even aware that there is an autoupdate program running for Flash and Java, much less that they take resources (and sometimes crash, or eat all the available memory).

But far worse, from my POV, is that I'm a Linux user. We're barely beginning to get semi-decent Flash support. There's still no official Shockwave support for Linux. Moonlight sucks balls, the dev team is doing its best but unfortunately right now Moonlight simply does not work.

So after long years of broken and buggy Flash support we finally get Flash mostly working for Linux users. And now MS is trying to con people into using their Flash knockoff, yet again creating potentially interesting content that is simply unavailable to me. Thanks.
posted by sotonohito at 9:11 AM on March 22, 2009 [7 favorites]

The way to view Silverlight or Flash from a programmer's perspective is that it *replaces* part of the stack with something that improves the development experience for kind of interactive, media-rich content that people are starting to expect.

Fair enough, that's a valid strategy. Not one I happen to agree with, but certainly defensible.

This is mostly a javascript problem; CSS and HTML, while certainly imperfect, can hardly be described as crufty. Sure, one strategy is to try to replace JS with something else -- but what seems to be more the current trend is that more and more people are adopting js libraries (such as jQuery) that abstract away the complexity of supporting multiple browsers in raw Javascript. While from a pure code execution standpoint this is more complex, from a developer standpoint it's much easier since you rarely if ever need worry about what's going on underneath the abstraction.

For most purposes, I find this approach preferable to welding on an entirely separate -- not to mention proprietary -- technology, which just ends up meaning you have to learn how to use both of them.
posted by ook at 9:15 AM on March 22, 2009

does copy-paste not work in silverlight?

I assume that there's text you can copy and text that you can't. One of the scenarios for Silverlight is LOB apps, where an inability to copy and paste would be unacceptable. In the specific case you mention, I was able to copy the URL and paste it into another browser. But I'm running in Vista (and Firefox) so that may be a bug in the OS/X implementation. :(

I'd guess that your random "text string on a page" is as uncopyable as in Flash.

They did include a "link" button that shows a url which (presumably) lets you link directly to a given page within one of the magazines

Yeah, it's a nice touch by the app developer. As I understand it, there's direct support in (the forthcoming) Silverlight 3 for creating URLs that point inside of the application. That's something I wouldn't mind seeing show up in Flash, too.
posted by Slothrup at 9:16 AM on March 22, 2009

Oh, and one more thing? WTF is the matter with NOT using insane Flash interfaces for stuff that doesn't need it?

Why not simply put up a page of cover thumbnails, each linked to a page containing thumbnails for the pages in each issue? I mean, is it just that the developers *WANT* the users to cuss at their ill thought out and poorly implemented "fancy" designs?

Its like DVD animated menus. Yes, they can be mildly intersting and cool looking the first time you see them, but what you want is to simply get to your menu choices quickly, not to sit through the "cool" (and unskippable) animation for the zillionth time.

Unless the FlashSilverlight interface actually SPEEDS UP the browsing I'm going to flat out say its a shitty idea regardless of whether its done with Real Flash or MS Knockoff Flash.
posted by sotonohito at 9:18 AM on March 22, 2009 [7 favorites]

The problem with Silverlight is not whether it's good or bad software. It's that It's Another Fucking Piece of Software That Talks to the Internet. That in itself it a very bad thing, and it's poisonous to security in general.

What's wrong with installing one more plugin? It's that it will be full of security holes. I don't care if it was designed by Bruce Schneider with Whitfield Diffie's head sticking out of his ass; there will be exploitable vulnerabilities. It will take years for them to all be sorted out. New ones will be introduced in the interim.

Worse yet, you accustom users to installing software at random for no good reason. Oh, look, Playboy wants me to install Silverlight! Hustler needs DejaVu! Screw says I have to install Downadup! Okey-dokey! Titties!

Okay, done fuming now.
posted by phooky at 9:23 AM on March 22, 2009 [12 favorites]

Why not simply put up a page of cover thumbnails, each linked to a page containing thumbnails for the pages in each issue? I mean, is it just that the developers *WANT* the users to cuss at their ill thought out and poorly implemented "fancy" designs?

Frankly, I suspect that it's because Playboy doesn't want you to steal their content and that Silverlight (or Flash, presumably) makes that really hard.
posted by Slothrup at 9:24 AM on March 22, 2009 [2 favorites]

Why not simply put up a page of cover thumbnails, each linked to a page containing thumbnails for the pages in each issue?

Apparently, that's not sexy enough.
posted by mediareport at 9:25 AM on March 22, 2009

So...we have these, all shelved and yellowing and crumbling and sticky, stored permanently (but accessibly) in the back at work. What are the chances I get written up for using this online app?
posted by carsonb at 9:27 AM on March 22, 2009

Apparently, that's not sexy enough.

A hand fetishist might disagree.
posted by UbuRoivas at 9:32 AM on March 22, 2009

Why Silverlight? One answer is DeepZoom. Basically, you should think of this as continuous multiscale (like Google Maps, but with smooth interpolation between scales), on your own content, and on collections of objects (not just a single atomic object). This is the technology that was produce by the Seadragon team in Live Labs, which is also part of the goodness in Photosynth (another Live Labs incubation).

I run Live Labs, Seadragon, sponsored Photosynth (and transfered it into product) and a bunch of other things at MS. My team built what is marketed as DeepZoom in Silverlight.

For those of you that think this is merely a "me too," I suspect that the more you investigate what we are doing, and the more you actually examine the space, the more you'll come to realize that we are actually doing something quite novel.

It's easy to jump to black-and-white interpretations of the world. But as someone who has personally written over 100K of lines of open source code AND who works at MS, I think the world is a lot more complex and interesting than your black-and-white lens suggests.

So, go ahead an knock yourself out with the knee-jerk "me too" reactions of dumping on MS and Silverlight. We'll still be here building stuff. And when these sort of interactions and visualizations are ubiquitous, you can tell everyone how obvious they are and how you knew along that this is the way things would evolve. It's all good.
posted by dr.flakenstein at 9:35 AM on March 22, 2009 [21 favorites]

I run Live Labs, Seadragon, sponsored Photosynth (and transfered it into product) and a bunch of other things at MS. My team built what is marketed as DeepZoom in Silverlight.

Well done, Dr. F....
posted by Brian B. at 9:45 AM on March 22, 2009

it's nice to hear that this zooming is the way of the future, but i really can't see how zooming will enhance my experience of browsing old playboys.

unless this Silverlight thing also has some kind of vaseline-lens filter, i'd rather go without.

(speaking as one who doesn't hold an opinion one way or another regarding Silverlight, except that it supposedly sucks ass on a mac)
posted by UbuRoivas at 9:47 AM on March 22, 2009

Can I be the 10,000th person to say, ' Silverlight? No thanks.'? Becuase, I just want you guys to know.
posted by lyam at 9:50 AM on March 22, 2009

sure, but you need to get your timing right. i think you jumped the gun a bit, there.
posted by UbuRoivas at 9:54 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

As I understand it, there's direct support in (the forthcoming) Silverlight 3 for creating URLs that point inside of the application. That's something I wouldn't mind seeing show up in Flash, too.

I'm in complete agreement on that one; the biggest weakness of multi-page flash websites is that it's rarely possible to link to anything inside the site. It's great that silverlight 3 will address this -- though I wonder how they'd make the "current" url visible within an app; presumably it's not going to be possible to stuff it into the URL bar where people would expect to see it. This isn't a silverlight issue specifically, it'd be a problem with any plug-in, but it's a significant problem, since it involves replicating or working around UI that already exists in the browser. See above re "back button" (which is also a flaw that Flash shares with this.)

Frankly, I suspect that it's because Playboy doesn't want you to steal their content and that Silverlight (or Flash, presumably) makes that really hard.

I actually kinda agree with this one as well; it's inconvenient for users but not without purpose. I did a little more digging into who actually built the thing, and it turns out to have been the same people who did the Complete New Yorker DVDs, which similarly use proprietary tech (PDF in that case, if I remember correctly) for what could otherwise have been a box full of jpegs, purely for copy-protection purposes. (So, slothrup, you were correct that MS didn't have a direct hand in building it, though they weren't above using it to promote the tech: "It was launched and showcased during Microsoft's Mix developers conference in Las Vegas yesterday")

(The New Yorker DVDs were virtually unusable, unfortunately.)

So, go ahead an knock yourself out with the knee-jerk "me too" reactions of dumping on MS and Silverlight. We'll still be here building stuff. And when these sort of interactions and visualizations are ubiquitous, you can tell everyone how obvious they are and how you knew along that this is the way things would evolve.

So far the discussion has been fairly polite, with a marked absence of snide condescension. Perhaps you'd like to help keep it that way?

"DeepZoom" does seem like it has potential, at least in apps like Photosynth. (On anything other than a very high-bandwidth connection, the experience of using Photosynth is mostly that of looking at a lot of blurry rectangles, but that feels more like growing pains than an underlying flaw.) This application doesn't serve as a very good demonstration of it, unfortunately, but it is as already noted the only part of this app that couldn't be replicated directly without a plugin.

So, point conceded: DeepZoom in itself is not me-too tech. But does silverlight offer anything novel for users other than DeepZoom? Serious question. I'm not at all against plug-in tech when it serves a clear purpose; the Unity plugin is cool, and Flash has its place, when used wisely. But if Silverlight is just DeepZoom plus a whole bunch of stuff you can already do other ways, why not drop all the me-too stuff and just focus on the part that's genuinely cool?
posted by ook at 10:03 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

you can tell everyone how obvious they are and how you knew along that this is the way things would evolve

i'm now trying really hard to imagine any kind of real-world conversation in which i gloat over having predicted some kind of interface change..."you know those ergonomic tv remote controls, where the buttons aren't laid out in neat rows, but arranged so as to be easily accessible to your thumb? i knew they were going to come along eventually, i really did! and stereo controls on your car steering wheel - yep, knew about that one too..."

i think a cocktail party would be the ideal situation for one of those chats, though a watercooler conversation might do at a pinch.


posted by UbuRoivas at 10:14 AM on March 22, 2009

Since you're the second person to have said so, I'll concede that you're probably right. I just find the programming model too painful to consider implementing such a thing using those technologies

I'm not a web professional developer, but I've read a lot of people gushing about jQuery. People have written javascript libraries that make it easier to do cool things that were just hypothetically possible using raw Javascript/CSS/Ajax.

Maybe it wouldn't be quite as slick, but it could work well.

A lot of these high profile sites that come out in silver light, I'm sure Microsoft paid for them, or somehow reduced the cost. It seems like there are a ton of developers who are really wedded to the "Microsoft way" Windows, VB or C#, ASP, and now Silverlight. Microsoft's dev tools are actually nice, they, obviously have a good incentive to make great dev tools and the resources to do it. On the other hand, I think a lot of the worst developers are Microsoft devs.

One of the reasons, I think is that good developers love to play around with stuff, and with Microsoft you have to pay license fees to use anything. So if you're a curious budding programmer, you're far more likely download some free app then pay for MS stuff. On the other hand, if you're a soulless (not to mention brainless) corporate drone, you're much more likely to learn on Microsoft.

Microsoft does make an effort give away their software to college students, so I did play around with in college (and I pirated dev studio in highschool. Heh)
posted by delmoi at 10:27 AM on March 22, 2009

Fu*kin' auto update for Silverlight cheeses my balls.

(I knew this was going to end up being a Silverlight-Suxx0r thread. How could it not?)
posted by Skygazer at 10:27 AM on March 22, 2009

And damn, I was looking forward to reading some sweet vintage articles.
posted by Skygazer at 10:29 AM on March 22, 2009

"In the same issue, OUI examines the growing menace of Women Who Rape." Thanks Silverlight!
posted by Voivod at 10:36 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: full of geeks that would rather argue about software than look at boobs.
posted by sararah at 10:46 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

I mean, is it just that the developers *WANT* the users to cuss at their ill thought out and poorly implemented "fancy" designs?

Developers? Once again proof positive that everyone lives in different circles. In our experience, being developers, it's the clients who want these things. They couldn't care less about standards or plugins. They often want exactly what this is and I would not be at all surprised if it costs less to develop this sort of thing in Silverlight and the zoom capabilities are perfect for this type of application. I'm willing to bet that the client couldn't care less that some people don't care for it and I'm also willing to bet that a lot of people outside of developers couldn't care less either.

I am now uninstalling Silverlight.

I'm not. But I did uninstall the Safari 4 beta and installed Firefox 3 beta. And I also didn't visit BoingBoing today.
posted by juiceCake at 10:51 AM on March 22, 2009

A few days ago I actually thought about posting a link to RoboZZle which is a fun programming based puzzle game written for Silverlight. I hesitated because I'm on the Silverlight team and the guy that wrote the game works at Microsoft as well and I didn't want there to be a conflict of interest (even though I discovered the game independently). I'm glad that I didn't because it looks like it would have been a complete clusterfuck.
posted by mge at 11:05 AM on March 22, 2009 [3 favorites]

Congratulations on one of the dumbest comment threads in recent history!
posted by Burhanistan at 11:11 AM on March 22, 2009

Thanks, burhanistan! Your contribution really helped!
posted by ook at 11:16 AM on March 22, 2009 [11 favorites]

Fu*kin' auto update for Silverlight cheeses my balls.

A digression.

The trend seems to be for applications to update themselves without even necessarily asking or telling you about it (examples: Windows Update, Silverlight, Google Chrome). I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it's my computer and you shouldn't be pushing out new executable code onto it that does who-knows-what. On the other hand, it's not like I did some exhaustive analysis on the original code to show that it was secure or good. And the large number of unpatched computers on the net are a real threat to everyone, not just to their owners.

Still, I can't help but be concerned, particularly as "auto-update" looks like an attractive target for those looking to spread malware.
posted by Slothrup at 11:17 AM on March 22, 2009

"For those of you that think this is merely a 'me too,' I suspect that the more you investigate what we are doing, and the more you actually examine the space, the more you'll come to realize that we are actually doing something quite novel."

Maybe so. However, in the meantime, we have some poor implementations. I really don't see the advantage of using it in this particular case over simple web-based image thumbnail navigation (I'm sure Playboy is concerned about copying, but if so it's not being used for the right reasons). Also, it would be nice if MS could create tools for the whole web, not just people on MS platforms.
posted by krinklyfig at 11:30 AM on March 22, 2009

"I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it's my computer and you shouldn't be pushing out new executable code onto it that does who-knows-what. On the other hand, it's not like I did some exhaustive analysis on the original code to show that it was secure or good. And the large number of unpatched computers on the net are a real threat to everyone, not just to their owners."

This creates big messes in corporate networks, you realize. Apps like Silverlight often have to be blocked due to policy. If you have a strict policy, nothing should be updating on any machine on the network without prior testing, even if it's a security update.
posted by krinklyfig at 11:33 AM on March 22, 2009

I've learned to think of Live Labs as being kinda the mavericks of Microsoft. I'm pretty anti-Microsoft, but maps.live.com is great for Birdseye View and DeepZoom. Even Songsmith was pretty inventive, though pretty useless if you know anything about music.
posted by scrowdid at 11:34 AM on March 22, 2009

Slothrup My gripe against the various autoupdate features is that nine times out of ten its built as a separate executable that runs at login. Thus furthering the slow of login to a crawl. Worse, many of them don't simply load, check for update and then cleanly exit. They tend to stick around, occupying cycles and occasionally crashing and/or eating all the available memory. Google updater is particularly evil that way in my experience.

So I've got a steady stream of users complaining to me that their computers are running slow, in part because of all the autoupdate cruft they accumulate. Adobe, Google desktop, Java, Google chrome, Flash, et bloody cetera, each one of them wants their own updater, running potentially insecure code, and dragging down machines that should be fast to a crawl.

As a sysadmin I can appreciate the fact that updates are necessary and that most users simply won't update when they should. But, as a sysadmin, I'm extremely concerned that the autoupdates are an open door for malware, and that they detract from the usability of the computer. Especially the MS autoupdates that incessantly demand a reboot. A few of my users have lost work because they went away from their systems and when they came back discovered that the Windows Updater had very conveniently restarted their machines for them. Yes, they should have saved what they were doing before they got up, but still.

And, as I said, for me personally an MS proprietary (and therefore pretty much guaranteed never to get along well with Linux) web media plugin is a very bad thing regardless of its feature set, usability, etc. To me all it means is yet more potentially nifty webpages that I'm told I have to spend $300+ just to view.
posted by sotonohito at 11:39 AM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

This thread is hilarious.
posted by brundlefly at 11:45 AM on March 22, 2009

The problem with Silverlight is that it's set out its stall as a better Flash when the best thing about Flash in my eyes is that it's so horrible to use that people only tend to use it when absolutely necessary. Flash is bad for the web, but it's okay for filling in the gaps where the web has problems.

And I've seen a lot of Silverlight demos. They're all technically impressive and things I would never, ever want to use, like those Flash sites that designers and marketeers have that are utterly unusable. And if these visualisations and interactions do get ubiquitous, I'll be using the same sites I've always had and telling the kids to get off of my lawn. And that's a big "if", as they'll need a killer app first - something they have failed to find.

I don't have a problem with any other MS product though. .NET in particular is a great idea, as long as I don't need to use it on web.
posted by HaloMan at 11:52 AM on March 22, 2009

So I've got a steady stream of users complaining to me that their computers are running slow, in part because of all the autoupdate cruft they accumulate. Adobe, Google desktop, Java, Google chrome, Flash, et bloody cetera, each one of them wants their own updater, running potentially insecure code, and dragging down machines that should be fast to a crawl.

You're totally preaching to the choir, there. I was musing more about the *notion* of automatic updates than their actual *implementation* -- which I think we can all agree sucks monkey balls. And that's well before the updater programs try to push *more* programs down your throat -- if you're running iTunes, then you must obviously want Safari. And if you have a JVM installed, then how about Open Office -- never mind the fact that you're running on a fucking server. Adobe didn't even give users an option: that security update to Acrobat just put AIR on your machine and wow! look at the size of the AIR installed base!

Don't get me started...
posted by Slothrup at 12:00 PM on March 22, 2009

"This thread is hilarious."

Well, I've seen Playboy before, even these issues. So ...

I'd be willing to wager that if they'd used Flash (which is still proprietary but ubiquitous), you'd get a few gripes but that would be the extent of the tech conversation in the thread.
posted by krinklyfig at 12:06 PM on March 22, 2009

Burhanistan: "Congratulations on one of the dumbest comment threads in recent history!"

brundlefly: "This thread is hilarious."

I don't get how you think this is somehow not a reasonable topic for discussion. I can guarantee that most MetaFilter users have seen Internet pornography either voluntarily or through popups, and virtually anyone who's even heard of the Internet knows that it's rampant. So we're supposed to discuss how great it is that finally there are boobs on the Internet?

No, wait, maybe you just somehow think we're not as good as you because we can discuss something despite the fact that we're only one click away from naked women.
posted by Plutor at 12:22 PM on March 22, 2009 [5 favorites]

Silverlight? Doesn't that require a Windows OS to run?

Bet its not even ADA compliant - how are the blind gonna use this?
posted by rough ashlar at 12:24 PM on March 22, 2009

Wait, guys. Did you know this thing uses Silverlight?

I have an idea. Let's flip out.
posted by kbanas at 12:39 PM on March 22, 2009

Silverlight? Doesn't that require a Windows OS to run?

Also, no, there is an OS X version of Silverlight.
posted by kbanas at 12:39 PM on March 22, 2009

It's a nice archive. I find the ads to be fascinating.

Plus it's refreshing to see pubic hair.

Silverlight wasn't too shabby either, but it seemed to piss off my harddrive. Plus piclens does it better.
posted by Lord_Pall at 12:41 PM on March 22, 2009

So, putting the Silverlight discussion - interesting as it is - aside for a bit. What did the few of you who actually bit the bullet and installed think about the content of the linked site? As a girl, who didn't grow up in the US even, I had very little exposure to Playboy. Besides knowing that it existed, maybe a few boyfriends who talked about it or had a few issues, and that people "read it for the articles, wink wink", I think this is the most that I've seen of it ever.

What really struck me from the overall presentation was the evolution of the magazine from the 1950s to the 2000s, and how very dated some of the 70s and 80s covers looked, while the 50s/60s covers were more like stylized art than anything else. The transition from 50s to 60s was the most pronounced, I thought, and really shows the evolution not only of societal norms but in magazine printing technology as well - reflected in the increased use of photo images (rather than illustrations) and ads, and then later the increased use of color. The covers by themselves, both the images and the stories they highlight, is like a time machine. It was also interesting that the amount of text increased on the covers, from the image being the focus in the 50s/60s to the text crowding the image in the later issues. The advertisements, like some have already noted, are interesting by themselves as well. There is a marked increase of what I would term "ad speak" through time, and the ads take up more and more space. The original ads seem quaint and tiny by today's standards.

From a sociology/anthropology perspective this was an amazing collection that I would have loved to write an essay about in college.
posted by gemmy at 12:52 PM on March 22, 2009 [5 favorites]

Playboy has always been Flash compatible, but to use it correctly you also need to install Trenchcoat.
posted by Benjy at 1:06 PM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

My problem with Silverlight isn't the technology itself. It's the lock-in that results. Microsoft has shown in the past that they will abuse their monopoly position by imposing barriers to entry. They will poison web standards, just to increase their market share and get more users on their platform. Samba, Microsoft Java/J++, IE/Netscape, WordPerfect, all of these were examples of Microsoft abusing it's position to remove competition, sometimes hurting standards in the process. And this hurts consumers.

The software is awesome, as most Microsoft tech usually is. Well integrated with other Microsoft tools, easy to use, innovative. But there's also a social cost. A proprietary Internet is not cool. Most of the individual teams in Microsoft see themselves as just working on interesting projects that are useful. But it's clear that the management knows what they're doing, and they use these projects to further lock-in users to the MS platform.

And it's a shame, because this is an interesting cultural artifact. I love 70s/80s-era magazines.
posted by formless at 1:06 PM on March 22, 2009 [3 favorites]

Uh, Plutor, if you don't see the humor in a bunch of computer dorks (of which I am one, having read the whole thread), discussing web technology in a thread about vintage playboys... I... I don't know what to tell you. You need to take yourself less seriously.

Besides, if you think the only interest one could have in issues of Playboy from the 50s would be prurient, then you are majorly missing the point of this post.

On the topic of this post, this is pretty neat, even if it is in Silverlight.
posted by brundlefly at 1:10 PM on March 22, 2009

The site crashes Opera 9.64, nuff said.
posted by mygoditsbob at 1:35 PM on March 22, 2009

gemmy Actually, I think more people do, or did anyway, read it for the articles than you might think. I originally got a subscription for the naked girls, but honestly they people they choose for the centerfolds, for the most part, may as well be clones. "Yay, yet another blonde with implants, my heart is all aflutter..."

Unfortunately, I think the articles are less than they might be. On the surface Playboy is a very progressive mag, but under the surface its all about the aristocracy and the wannabe aristocrats. Lots of great writers have contributed, but mostly they haven't contributed their best stuff. The interviews and the fiction were generally the best.

I used to really like Playboy, much as I used to really like Heinlein. Then, as I got older, I found that while its still got good points it isn't really all that great. There's some good stuff there, but its shrouded in a lot of iffy at best stuff.
posted by sotonohito at 1:39 PM on March 22, 2009 [2 favorites]

how are the blind gonna use this?

Ironic, considering the many cases of male blindness facilitated by Playboy.
posted by zippy at 1:49 PM on March 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

well that crashed my browser rather quickly :-(
posted by SatansCabanaboy at 2:01 PM on March 22, 2009

the blind are going to do what they always did - read the braille version.
posted by UbuRoivas at 2:03 PM on March 22, 2009

For those of you that think this is merely a "me too,"...

But couldn't DeepZoom have been developed using Flash or AIR or Java? I don't mean to disrespect your fantastic product, but does it's functionality hinge on features that only exist in Silverlight?
posted by furtive at 2:12 PM on March 22, 2009

what, no Deep Zoom jokes yet...
posted by geos at 2:14 PM on March 22, 2009

But couldn't DeepZoom have been developed using Flash or AIR or Java?

You mean, "why use your own preexisting proprietary software when you could use someone else's?"

Okay, Java isn't *quite* as proprietary any more, but it also competes directly with .NET, upon which Silverlight is based.
posted by Slothrup at 2:34 PM on March 22, 2009

Do you think that would be part of the complex and interesting world that dr.flakenstein alluded to, but didn't deign to elucidate in any way?
posted by UbuRoivas at 3:52 PM on March 22, 2009

It's Flash. Only invented by Microsoft

Or: it's Flash, only it doesn't suck. Flash is a piece of crap, and I say that as a developer who uses it all the time. I'd much much rather use Silverlight, but for my purposes the install base is just too small.

And Silverlight does run on Windows, OSX, and even Linux through Novell's Moonlight.
posted by wildcrdj at 6:46 PM on March 22, 2009

On the other hand, I think a lot of the worst developers are Microsoft devs.

Hmm, my experience is the opposite, having worked about half my career in OSS land and half in Microsoft land. Although, of those worse-than-MS devs I refer to, they were pretty much all Perl/Ruby/etc website people who knew how to hack stuff together but no idea whatsoever of architecture or design. And I never worked with any VB people, who are the Microsoft equivalent of the Linux people I'm referring to.

C# vs Java, though, C# wins hands down. Of course it had the advantage of coming later. I'm mostly doing Python these days, though, and it is a lot more fun to work in than C# was.
posted by wildcrdj at 6:53 PM on March 22, 2009

I installed Silverlight on my Mac to watch Netflix instant movies. Seems to work just fine. So does this.

I loved seeing a Quasar ad showing you how easy it is to use one of these newfangled video cameras - the kind with a 15 pound camera and a 50 pound VCR you carry on a strap on your shoulder.
posted by fungible at 7:10 PM on March 22, 2009

Or: it's Flash, only it doesn't suck.

I thought that was called "Flex".
posted by ook at 7:46 PM on March 22, 2009

I am now uninstalling Silverlight.

Yeah, good luck with that. This might help. Then again, you might not have a problem using the normal uninstall methods.

Or: it's Flash, only it doesn't suck. Flash is a piece of crap, and I say that as a developer who uses it all the time.

Say what? Flash is an extremely good frontend for ECMAScript (a.k.a. JavaScript). Programmatic vector coding is dead-simple, it's fast, it works well. Socket support was decent when I stopped using Flash (around version 5)… I can only imagine it's better with the later versions. Internal font support (which everyone seems to take for granted) is stoopid-simple and the output is great. Yeah, the IDE is convoluted. So do your stuff in code and forget about the timeline.

Silverflesh is just another in a series of never-ending examples where Microsoft fears anything it doesn't control, didn't create itself. Like Java. Sorry, typo… I meant Java.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:48 PM on March 22, 2009

"Is [...] old Triumph TR7 and Marantz ads [...] really worth the Silverlight download?"

Well they also have Datsun, BMW, DKW/Auto Union, BMC *, Rootes, Ford * *, Fiat, Honda, Plymouth, Porsche, and Renault ads

However I could really go for a working slide rule tie clasp.
posted by Mitheral at 8:17 PM on March 22, 2009

I would often buy the German version of Playboy, just so when people said, "You speak German?" I could say "No, who looks at this for the articles?"

The Braille version also works well on the coffee table.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:56 PM on March 22, 2009

eponysterical!
posted by UbuRoivas at 9:00 PM on March 22, 2009

September, 1974: Perhaps, as a change of pace, I could become a pimp.
posted by squalor at 10:32 PM on March 22, 2009

Right now, Microsoft is pushing two technologies very hard, and both are based off of "the web is the new platform."

One is SharePoint. Enough Office-like stuff now exists that it just isn't a space they can "win" anymore. But in terms of a web-based CMS that can be used for a whole organization, integrated with Outlook, Active Directory, and so forth, SharePoint is the new frontier. The next version of Office will come with SharePoint Designer, that's how critical SharePoint is for Microsoft.

The other part is the "rich functionality" (translation: shiny, slick, and beepy, like a freshly-used German sex toy) on the web. That's Flash's space, but if they can make it do windowing stuff nicely, they'll go for it. It does have some nice bits to it, and if you believe in The Web as Platform, your two previous choices were AJAX and Flash, since standard "click and wait for the server to generate a new page and then my browser will doggedly render said page as soon as it arrives" does not have the responsiveness that The Web as Platform requires. Silverlight is another choice.

And the two are tied together. During a recent presentation ostensibly about SharePoint, the Microsoft guys spent about 25% of the time pushing the "oooh, here are the sexy things you can do with Silverlight!" agenda. And they might have a shot with it, because it is based off of .NET, so the developers you already have who know .NET do not need to pick up ActionScript to do the "oooh ahhh" stuff for which clients so often beg.

Whether Microsoft will succeed is anyone's guess. They have the financial muscle and the contacts to make it appear in places like Playboy. I think more than brute force will be required to penetrate the market, though.
posted by adipocere at 11:45 PM on March 22, 2009

You said "penetrate."
posted by bardic at 12:39 AM on March 23, 2009

I installed Silverlight to watch streams of the Olympic fencing and modern pentathlon last year. Kill me already. And Seadragon / Deep Zoom's tech is effing cool, especially for people who want to look at digitised records without having to deal with multiple-scaled images or PDFs. Great if you're looking at the ads.

And I'm reading these for the ads. Not the articles. Not the boobies. Who knew that America used to make so many different kinds of suit, hat, pipe etc.?

(I'm now wondering how much those very old Playboys informed the reinvention of the French edition, which is short on silicone and plucked pudenda.)
posted by holgate at 1:41 AM on March 23, 2009

I'm at work right now..... This is entirely way too not safe for me. But if anyone asks I am doing research on silverlight.... Got it!
posted by Mastercheddaar at 7:55 AM on March 23, 2009

Whiny knee-jerk anti-MS haters. Silverlight is pretty neat.
posted by Perplexity at 8:29 AM on March 23, 2009

One entirely non-Silverlight-related question, is there any sort of index? Search capability? I was hunting online the other day for Shel Silverstein's Playboy cartoons and was wondering if they're in this archive and would be easily findable? (I'm interested in seeing some before I splurge on the book collection.)
posted by 100watts at 12:20 PM on March 23, 2009

Right up there with you guys who discovered porn in the woods were us girls, who, after sneaking Dad's latest Playboy out of the house, would compare ourselves with the women in the magazine.

Now, of course, the women are very cookie-cutter: lots of blondes, of Hef's particular favorite platinum shade, completely shaven and airbrushed, silicone-enhanced breasts and heavily made-up faces.

But back in the 70's and 80's, when I "came of age", the women were as diverse as...well, as people really are.

I got my husband his very first subscription to Playboy when we were married, and I used to like both the attractive women and the writing: short stories by writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen King, fiction from new college kids coming up in the ranks, political commentary and, of course, open discussions of sexuality that you really couldn't find anywhere else, except maybe Cosmopolitan under Helen Gurley Brown's stewardship.

But, I have to agree with those that observed that, these days, each issue is more covered in ads, less full of witty, novel and contemporary writing, with lots of the same old stuff (if I have to read one more article about how pot should be legalized, for example, no matter what my personal stance, I think I'll go nuts).

And the girls (and they are girls, rarely is there a centerfold above 22 or so) all kind of blur together after awhile, becoming indistinguishable from each other.

It makes me sad, and a little wistful for the titillating, forbidden fruit it used to be, when I was just another teen girl smuggling the latest issue out of the house to my girl friends.
posted by misha at 12:33 PM on March 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

wildcrdj wrote "And Silverlight does run on Windows, OSX, and even Linux through Novell's Moonlight."

No, actually, it doesn't. It might claim to, but either they're lying or there's fine print that says "only on a few select sites". It sure didn't work for this.

Of course, excluding Linux users from your audience isn't really a huge sacrifice at this point, and (much as it pains me to admit it) a lot of us dual boot so if we *REALLY* want to see your content we could go to Windows. But unless Silverlight offers something truly compelling why deliberately chose to exclude Linux users?
posted by sotonohito at 5:34 PM on March 23, 2009

Dingdang! November 1988 has one of my favorite ad series of all times (and I'd hoped it had): Phototron! I'd see them in either Playboy or Nat'l Lampoon and inexplicably it was in the latter magazine the model (the same for both series) was dressed in the negligee. I'd forgotten how excellent the ad text was: somehow its a machine that they'd never in a million years want you growing cannabis in -- but hey, this thing we've created is really excellent for growing cannabis. Best bad text in a national magazine ad ever.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 8:51 PM on March 23, 2009

A friend used to have a few issues from the 70s in Braille. I always enjoyed the articles and boobies fairly equally.

About Silverlight? Meh. I couldn't care less. I tried it to watch the Olympics, but it barely worked. This worked better but was still a bit disappointing. I'm sure it will get better.
posted by schyler523 at 10:51 AM on March 25, 2009

jimmythefish: "Yup. Free naked lady pictures and you nerds are arguing about computers."

Quoted for truth, and because it needs repeating.
posted by Effigy2000 at 6:08 PM on March 28, 2009