our world is an interesting place

While summer doesn’t officially start for seven days, it may as well have. It is beautiful where I live. While Matt from MetaFilter plays in the sun, I’ll toil in a stuffy basement (I love it here).

Nothing marks a beautiful pre-summer day like a set of random links. Enjoy:

 

actos de la volición

Fun with Babelfish. Robots translating aov to Spanish. Rob Fletcher becomes Robo Fletcher, I apparently work for “el silverorange”, and thegeniuses@actsofvolition.com are losgenios@actsofvolition.com.

Keep up the good work, robots.

 

“you are encouraged to bring the holy book of your choice”

My Holy Book comes with a CDROM
A friend of mine recently cast off his American birthright to become a Canadian citizen (actually, he just became a dual citizen, but casting off birthright sounds very cool). He was given the choice of either swearing or affirming the oath of citizenship. He was told that “you are encouraged to bring the holy book of your choice”.

He put it nicely: So politically correct, it offends everyone. Does this not seem a little odd? Mind you, I don’t have any better suggestions. It’s just interesting to see that we have no universal standard to hold each other too.

In the same super-politically-correct, you have to pledge allegiance to the Queen of England!? It is just plain bizarre. I was born in Canada and have apparently tacitly agreed to all of these things.

Swear to your god. If you do not have a god, just promise.

 

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.

hard drives and hard drives - all full of porn

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.

folders and folders - all full of porn
 

Goodnight sweetheart. I will dance on your grave.

goodnight, irene, goodnight, irene, I'll see you, in my sleep.
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

VIEW LARGE IMAGE - If only there was a 'launch Microsoft Word Norwegian Version 4.07b' button
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.