Posted on 03/29/2014 1:12:32 PM PDT by smokingfrog
Lush green hills under a cobalt blue sky with precisely the right amount of fluffy clouds floating about. Who hasn’t been lost in reverie staring at the default Windows XP wallpaper, dreaming of Middle Earth or maybe a weekend in Cork County?
Yet that shot of a bucolic paradise has turned into a very personal nightmare for Charles O’Lear, the man who captured the iconic photo and sold it to Microsoft.
O’Lear took a one-time payment for the photo rather than trying to negotiate a license fee. Even a tiny fee per Windows XP license would have yielded him a hefty payday over the years.
Surprisingly enough, the photograph was actually taken on the side of a highway in Sonoma, California, rather than Ireland or New Zealand. According to a somewhat hazy estimate by The Sydney Morning Herald, a billion people have viewed the scene since Microsoft bought it.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Thanks for the tip. Now I know a little about Mr. Albert Bierstadt and the Rocky Mountain School of Luminism. Even Bierstadt couldn’t make a living solely based on being a painter except for a few years. He was also a teacher. Of course this was shortly before the Civil War, and who knows how the economy was back then if you weren’t part of a big farming family.
It’s a boring pic. I always thought it was a CGI creation.
I was expecting Teletubbies to crest the hill at any moment.
Tinky Winky
Dipsy
La La
Po
Telly Tubbies ???
The Pink Floyd “Flying Pig” screensaver has a similar look.
Why would M$ agree to pay a licensing fee for a photo? They could have gotten a million others just like it.
First thing people did was replace it with a picture of their dog or cat or Baywatch babes or whatever.
Yes. Then I thought, maybe this is part of the effort.
Me, too. Very first thing I do is set up a light blue or light turquoise desktop. Then, on Win 7, I get rid of the damned Aeropeek.
I call it the Teletubby desktop. It looks just like the set of that silly (but disturbing) show.
agreed, no on twisted his arm to sell the damn pic in the first place, this just proves he’s not as smart as Bill Gates.
IBM needed Gates' DOS. Gates did not need this guy's picture.
Wow I never heard of that guy so I looked up him up in Google images, holy smoke his paintings are mind blowing! Thanks! Now THESE are desktop pics!!
I'm trying to decide what to do with a reallllly old laptop that has XP on it. Small hard drive, precious little memory, so-so speed, dial-up modem (I had to buy a USB wireless adapter so I could use my WIFI network), but the damn thing still works fine. I'm not going to keep using XP after April 8th, but don't know what to do. It would cost more to have Windows 7 installed than the thing is worth. It's fairly heavy, so I guess I could sell it as a canoe anchor at my next garage sale. ;)
Or would have gotten him nothing because MS would have found another image without a per copy fee to include in Windows.
Check on eBay for prices. It might be worth parting out for people who want to keep similar computers running.
If wallpaper is what you are after, you can ask Google to find images exactly the same size as your monitor. Just replace the numbers with the proper pixel dimensions:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Albert+Bierstadt&safe=off&tbm=isch&tbs=isz:ex,iszw:2560,iszh:1600
It may help to use numbers that are a size or two up from your monitor, but in the same proportion.
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