hard drive icons: now and then
Behold a visual history of Hard Drive icons in the parallel worlds of Windows and Mac. Notice how they get more and more realistic without becoming more meaningful. Personally I prefer the balance between abstraction and a tactile feel found in the Win9x/W2k and MacOS 9 versions.
The old Mac (v6 and before, I think) icon is pretty impressive and to someone who hasn’t opened up their computer, just as meaningful as any of the other icons.
Photorealism is the dumbest idea of all. So that’s what a hard drive looks like.
UPDATE:
Here’s the equivalent chart of folder icons. Very similar parallels, problems, and progression to the hard drive icons.
Timothy McVeigh Executed
A reminder that we are not marching towards a blissful and peaceful future: The U.S. executed Timothy McVeigh today.
What do you think of that?
ATM machines and PIN numbers
Common Errors in English has been one of my favorite sites for a very long time. I’ve never noticed it being updated. But it remains a source of endless entertainment.
It’s full of (you guessed it) common English mistakes which should be brought to everybody’s attention, even if they are accepted. Like ‘Lo Fat’ or ‘Lite’. Reading it is both humbling, and rewarding, because it seems for every item I see that makes me say “I’m glad I’m a genius and don’t say that“, there is about half an item that reminds me how ashamed I should be about my use of our nonsensical language.
I got a kick out of the following:
“This is the sort of English up with which I cannot put.” – Winston Chruchill, on the topic of ending a sentence with a preposition.
Now, if we can only do something about Islanders who say “I seen him kick my car, so I bet him up”.*
* I did not mean all Islanders. Just a healthy handful. Matt and Steve speak better than I do and they’re Islanders. I’m from Winnipeg, and I respect Islanders.
videos for bordom and bandwidth
A few low quality videos from last summers evening stress release activities at work.
- Keyboard, Buick, meet North River Road
(1.3Mb MPEG) - Keyboard, meet Buick
(1.3Mb MPEG)
fear of grocery stores and sliding doors
For those who find the grocery store (and stores in general) claustrophobic and frightening like myself, I recommend waferbaby’s how to survive the grocery store.
Goodnight sweetheart. I will dance on your grave.
There is a special place in hell for a browser that reloads a page every time the user resizes their window (try building a web-based application on this rickety platform). Netscape will soon take it’s place in that special place. Netscape 4 has less than 10% of the user base and the number is dwindling fast. I will not miss it.
While many would correctly assert that Netscape died when Internet Explorer 4.0 was released, it’s good to see Netscape admit it themselves. They have announced that “We’re in Media, Not Browser Business Now“. Shut up and die.
QWERTY, Cut, & Paste
Speaking of behemoths, Microsoft introduces a keyboard with the long overdue Copy, Cut, and Paste keys. A Microsoft Word key is lame, but anyone who has done the Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V a hundred times knows that the pinky and index finder were not meant to be that far from each other for any length of time.
I know this is please our good friend Dan James (despite what this photo may lead you to think, Dan does not play hockey). He’s been ranting about Cut & Paste keys for years. Also, Microsoft’s keyboards are the most spill resistant I have every seen. Very clever engineering.
the death of the free web
News.com tends to consist of little more than a collection of press releases and product announcements. However, their new feature, The Death of the Free Web is a fine collection of articles measuring the effects of the crash of dot-com-tomfoolery.
The bottom line of the articles is that we will all start to pay to web services. I agree and disagree. I agree because this is not a new idea. Jakob Nielsen has been saying for years that until there is a good scheme for micropayments (an easy way to pay for small transactions) the net will not mature. 
Also, companies like GoTo.com have been charging and gladly proclaiming it. They go so far as to list the cost to advertiser next to every search result. This is a brilliant exercise in simplicity and a straightforward business plan (although I sure as hell didn’t spend $0.53 based on my search results).
On the opposite end of the intelligence spectrum we have sites like Go.com, Snap.com, and Netscape.com which couldn’t possibly suck more. These properties deserve to crumble as they were built on false premises summed up nicely by the former CEO of Terra Lycos, “Audience was meant to drive stickiness, stickiness was meant to drive the network at large, and the network at large was meant to drive earnings.” If A then B. Duh.
On the other hand, the free web is doing nicely. Despite some hiccups in publishing schedules and hosting, as Jefferey Zeldman says, the independent content producer refuses to die. There are fantastic independent sites out there.
In a professional context, I’ve seen the web do some pretty cool stuff for real businesses. Not eyeballs or stickiness, but cash (increasing sales, reducing costs, increasing efficiency).
Regardless, the web continues to be about what it has always been about: funny pictures (like pictures of me, and of robots).
dialup friendly
Old school computer columnist John C. Dvorak’s The Myth of Broadband looks at the idea that broadband doesn’t matter until most users have it. Right now, they don’t.
On the bright side, a dialup connection is much better now than it was two years ago. I don’t know if it’s hardware, software, or phone lines, but I remember not being able to listen to any useful streaming audio over a modem. Now a decent 56K dialup can sustain high-quality audio.
aov continues to be dialup friendly. Our frontpage varies in size, but is usually between 20K – 30Kb.