“Stealing music is not killing music,” said Pittman. “When I talk to people in the music business, most of them will admit that the problem is they’re selling songs and not albums. I mean, you do the math… I realized that as an industry we’d kind of been smoking crack.”
And my personal favorite:
[...] director Steven Soderbergh, who is currently the vice president of the Directors Guild of America, wants us to become more like France. “Litigation is slow and the Internet is fast, so it doesn’t make sense to ask the government to be our police,” he said. “What we would like is to be deputized to solve our own problems, to be granted the kind of pull-down and inspection abilities being proposed in France so we can act swiftly and fairly on our own behalf.”
I’m not quite sure why so many companies undergo rebranding initiatives. Walmart did one recently that made no sense to me, and Tropicana just decided to rebrand as well. In fact, it appears that Tropicana’s rebranding directly caused a 20% reduction in sales. It’s not hard to tell why when you compare the old and the new packages. More on the AdAge article about this blunder.
Branding is expensive. Changing an existing brand is even more expensive. Going from a good brand to what can only be described as “generic” is sheer insanity. Idiots.
“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.” -Jack Handey
All the content above was randomly generated, according to this meme and slopped together using Photoshop. I can’t help but think that it really does look like it could be a real album.
To add my own twist, I decided to link to the first song I could find that was free… it ended up being pretty good too. Listen to it to complete the experience.
Working with such random content was sort of refreshing. It certainly let me spend some time focusing on getting the typography just the way I wanted it.
During its first decade, the Mac offered clearly superior usability compared to competing personal computer platforms (DOS, Windows, OS/2). Not until Windows 95 did the PC start to approximate Mac-level usability. Despite this Mac advantage, PCs have sold vastly better in every single year since 1984, and the Mac has yet to exceed a single-digit market share.
The Mac’s miserable marketplace performance seems to pose a strong argument against usability. Why bother, if it doesn’t sell? The counter-argument is that usability is the only reason Mac survived.
This afternoon I decided to hunt down any photography groups that met in Missoula. I was left aghast when my Google Groups search for “Missoula photo” lead to a very different kind of top result. I was pointed to a post on comp.robotics.misc about the Mars Rover. Nothing to do with my search really… I almost didn’t click it. Curiosity, of course, got the best to me and I found the reason that I was lead to that article.
“Spirit had a busy weekend, culminating with a 75-meter (246-feet) drive toward “Missoula Crater” on sol 103, which ended at 2:33 a.m. PST on April 18.”
A friend just wrote a few words about how Facebook has utterly changed what war means to soldiers and citizens back home alike. Short and worth the read.
I’ve been a proud Firefox user since, well, it wasn’t called Firefox. For a long time, it was the clear leader in the browser market. When version 2 was too outdated to use, and version 3 was buggier than ever, I switched to my OS’s native browser—Safari.
I’ve been pretty happy with Safari for a while. It is speedy, has a great UI, and just oozes excellent typography (something that I have not ignored.) Lately it’s been forgetting my saved passwords which has been frustrating to say the least. At work I use Chrome quite a bit, and I enjoy it. Chrome is (blazingly) fast at JavaScript heavy apps that I use all the time (like Gmail or Google Reader.) I’m also digging the single input search/address bar. But with both Safari and Chrome the lack of quality add-ons is killing me, and I start longing for my trusty Firefox again.
Does anyone have some advice for a user who’s lost his path in the second iteration of the browser wars? Should I forgive Firefox for it’s crashes of old? Is it time to try something else, like Camino or Opera?
