I don't know if this is the case, but I know my old iBook (whose logic board died) got discolored pretty easily around the wristrests.
And I admit it, it's because my paws were dirty as hell.
I bet you the person who posted this to Flickr is just trying to prove to his girlfriend, "See! I'm not the only one! My wristrest isn't dirty because I haven't showered in six years, it's because Apple is crappy! It's just like how I didn't hit my G4 Cube with a sledgehammer, and Apple just sucks at manufacturing!"
I've been gushing over eMusic for a while, simply because they've just gotten it so right. With their model, they understand, beyond the whole record store mentality, what it means to be a music fan. And you just don't get that with iTunes or (especially) Napster.
There's just something graceful about a service that surprises you with new bands all the time. I've been able to wade my toes into genres that I wouldn't have touched otherwise, like twee-pop. (Heavenly is a great band.)
It's nice to know that these guys are not only successful, but they're successful in all the right ways. I have a feeling that there'll be a point where eMusic gets so successful that the major labels have to start taking notice and talking to them more seriously. Beyond the lack of DRM, they just do so many things right.
...to come out a winner long-term. The PC market is huge, and as long as Apple keeps its niche comparable to the market share that other hardware companies have (i.e. its market share should be compared with HP and Dell, not Microsoft), then they've succeeded in the market.
Let's stop making this a Apple v. Microsoft fight, because it hasn't realistically been one for a while.
This "restart" ad is false advertising -- Windows XP is an extremely stable platform (unless Apple is referring to people who are still using Windows 98 and Windows ME -- but I don't think so).
My work PC is a supposed top-of-the-line Dell box with 3 gigs of RAM, which I use for design work. But you wouldn't guess it by the way it completely IGNORES commands such as "Save" in Photoshop. It seems like it just doesn't know how to handle memory worth a crap. I'd consider this assessment accurate.
I'm suggesting that they're retarded to think that they should even consider remaining superficial. I'm saying they should rebrand their site the right way, not like this.
...the corporate identies of those companies are strong and well-thought-out. Slashdot doesn't have consistent branding and would be more difficult to work with.
And in most rebranding projects, they throw at least some stuff out.
Three replies thus far, all of them basically pouncing on a very minor part of my post.
95% of my post wasn't about Digg. It was about Slashdot. Digg and Slashdot are two different sites that mine a similar market.
I wasn't basing my point around Digg. I was merely exemplifying it. I know a lot of people around here don't like Digg, just as a lot of people here don't like Slashdot. But really, I think both sites could learn something from the other.
The truth is, though, Slashdot has ten layers of old structure that it should peel away and clean up, and that'd be true whether or not Digg existed.
Your confines are really tight, and don't really provide any room for the identity to grow. Considering your competition (digg) has a much stronger, cleaner design because they haven't had to be tied to a decade of old design rules, I would almost say that you'd be better off throwing some of the rules out.
I think if you really want to redesign the site, you need to be willing to try new approaches with the architecture -- redoing many of the icons, cleaning up what can be a glut of information, and giving the site a more modern style that suits 2006. Tebrand the site and get rid of the font; create a new logo.
I hate to put it this way, because it's so cliche, but think outside the box. Your parameters make the box really hard to move around in.
I'm betting the best designs you get are the ones that ignore your rules and regulations the most.
I've read your other posts on this topic, and I just have to say this. Stop defending the rights of a dead man. You don't know how he feels.
It doesn't matter how the family feels. Google was doing something noble and bringing attention to and these jackasses got bent out of shape. I can't believe that you somehow find this position defendable. I work in the newspaper industry, as a designer in fact. If we were to do something like this in my paper, and run a story about Miro, nothing would happen. In fact, we'd probably go a lot further with our design. It'd be fair use, too, and even if it weren't, this could easily be argued in a court of law.
If this was an encyclopedia that decided to use Miro's art, it wouldn't be an issue at all. Nobody would notice, even.
The only reason this is an issue is because Google is a huge company.
But Google uses the paintings in a way that could consitute parody in a court of law.
It may be using Miro's real works, but it's adding something to them, rather than being directly stolen. It falls under fair use.
Your post was confusing as hell, and hard to follow, but the point I culled from it was that you're undervaluing newsrooms in their abilities to gather news, which totally misses my point: My point is that journalists have to work together with the community in an interactive way to really represent the people of it.
Journalism still needs more than a few random people online reporting for it to be valuable.
The ads in the print publication keep it afloat, barring the YellowAdvantage, CareerBuilder and classifieds. The developers took a hands-off approach to advertising, like Google.
But these same features are their downfall: readers of online media don't all see the same news, since they can customize what they want to see, and since many newspaper web sites display stories according to what readers have seen before; stories may change from hour to hour, even from minute to minute, so different readers will see different versions of stories.
That was the point that got me. It seems that he's taking the main advantage of online newspapers and turning it into a fault.
That said, a master's candidate recently did a critique of my paper's website, and he was brutal to a fault. He didn't understand the concerns of the newsroom -- or even how our print publication, which is unique, worked -- at all in many of his arguments, he picked away at the tiny stuff, and essentially ticked away at some of the things that lowly web design people and newsroom folks (I'm the latter, a graphic designer to be exact) can't touch for corporate reasons.
Which eventually leads to my main point: Often, the structure of the newsroom is the problem with making many of the improvements needed. Advertising won't budge on something, administration won't budge, a reporter will get pissed if their story isn't given the play it deserves, editors don't trust their readers.
But large newspaper sites? It's like vomited information, in blown chunks every-which-where, with no helpful structure, and it's starting to dry and get a little discolored. One of the things that my paper (Bluffton Today) has done, is that it's taken the interactive community elements and played them up. We're probably the only newspaper in the world that uses Drupal as a CMS. We've basically relegated, for better or worse, most of our content to a print version of the newspaper that you can weed through in an "As Printed" section. The decreased focus on the paper's content (which is distributed free to 16,500 people throughout the community anyway) has had the side effect of getting to the meat of what we should be for our town: A resource for the community, and an organic one at that. The blogs and spotted galleries are our centerpiece, and that's what makes it unique and useful to readers.
That's the kind of thing, whether through institutional weaknesses or traditional thinking that large papers just suck at. There's such a focus on news judgment -- and how theirs is better than readers -- that they don't want to open the community input can of worms. Instead, they can't think outside the newshole or the thousands of tr and td tags that make up a newspaper front page.
A friend of mine, an online editor for a Big 10 college paper, recently mentioned a talk he had with the editor of his college newspaper. He wanted to try some untraditional things similar to Facebook or MySpace, and the editor essentially brought up the trust issue -- he didn't trust his readers to have as good of news judgment as he did. That sort of institutional thinking is bad for an industry as a whole, and I have a feeling my more open-minded friend will go a lot further than that editor will because he is looking at the prize when it comes to online journalism, and it isn't the same prize as print. The prize is taking the community and making them just as much of the news generation process as the newsroom itself. When it comes to online newspaper websites, that's the untapped resource, seeping its way through the tertiary levels of the soil, beginning to surface in the newsroom -- well, after someone moves the coffee maker off the top of it.
Hahahahaha. So, let me get this straight. I try to start a dialogue, you get whiny; I make more valid points, you drop your milk and cookies on the floor and go home crying to mom.
I wasn't even trolling you; I may have criticized your taste in music, but believe me, you would get eaten alive in the wrong scene. Grow some thicker skin and take a chance with something other than the Hot AC you currently favor; believe me, and since you read my recent posts, you know what I'm talking about, there are much weighter things in the world to cry about.
Sorry if I feel that the band who gave us "Everything You Want" isn't the best band in the world. Multiple points of view are fine, but man, you're making an argument that there's still quality in the music industry using the same mediocre major-label acts we're complaining about lacking in quality, the ones that ARE getting the major label support needed to sell records in this industry right now.
Read the rest of my post. I'm not being an asshole here. I'm just suggesting that your tastes may not be as nuanced as you think. If you're still pimping Vertical Horizon five years after everyone wrote them off, it would be wrong of me not to say to you that you need to find another band to enjoy.
Oh quiet, old guy. You should know just as well as anyone else that some of the best musical nuggets to ever come from the annals of rock history were written and performed by people who didn't know jack squat about how to play. Listen to most Garage rock (Barry and the Remains and some of their Nuggets bretheren) and listen to the Sex Pistols and Nirvana and the Pixies. Hell, you can't tell me Leadbelly or Charlie Christian were classically trained, either.
They knew very little about how to play their instruments, but all of them provided some essential moments in rock history, and music history. Why, you ask? The passion showed. It showed in the three minutes they were performing a hit song; it showed in the classic albums they produced. They didn't know the rules, and they put a middle finger up to them.
Not every band is like King Crimson. Not ever guitarist is like Steve Vai. Thank God, because music would be soulless and lifeless.
The best music of the last couple of years has been passionate stuff like the Arcade Fire and Iron & Wine. Your criticisms are just completely closed-minded and ignorant about what makes good music work.
I'll give you Robert Randolph, but Vertical effin' Horizon? Man, someone needs to get acquainted with some Arcade Fire, Bloc Party and Sufjan Stevens, stat. Your taste is VERY middle-of-the-road.
The problem is that popular music has been in a terrible case of the doldrums since about 2000. Eminem has been the only true larger-than-life figure in the 2000s, testing both the creative and moral limits of what his music can do.
In an era where our true artistes and trailblazers are limited to indie labels and likely will never see their videos played on MTV, of course there's a major drought, the same kind of drought television was facing before they realized -- oh crap! -- people don't want to watch variations on the same theme all the time, and love surprises. We got "Arrested Development," "My Name is Earl," "Desperate Housewives," and "Lost" out of that revelation.
As long as there's corporate mindthink around thinking about numbers rather than quality, music is going to suck.
EXCUSE ME IF I FOUND IT TROUBLESOME THAT MY 46-YEAR-OLD MOTHER WAS PLAYING A COMPUTER GAME SIXTEEN HOURS A DAY RIGHT AFTER MY DAD DIED, JACKASS.
I'm not talking about a brother or someone who's my age. I'm talking about a mother with a family of five to take care of, who just lost someone close to them, and who needed something to pick her spirits up.
I'm not attacking YOUR playing, so don't treat it like that. I'm pissed that my mom spent so much time on the family computer that I had to spend $1000 to buy my own just so I could get schoolwork done. I'm pissed that my family was struggling so much (while I was at school) that they got kicked out of their house and my uncle had to bail them out. I'm pissed that on days planned weeks in advance where she was supposed to come visit me at school, she never showed up because she was busy playing a game. I'm pissed that she's not here anymore, and YOU, ANONYMOUS COWARD, have the cajones to tell me that it's not right to get in her life, because she can stop whenever. SHE CAN'T -- IT'S TOO LATE.
I can't believe the lengths people will go to justify their own gaming existence and make me look to be the bad guy because I find it troublesome that a FAMILY MEMBER WHO WAS ADDICTED TO PLAYING A FUCKING RPG DIED.
If you want to justify your own existence, fine. Just don't act as if my concern isn't valid.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if this is the case, but I know my old iBook (whose logic board died) got discolored pretty easily around the wristrests.
And I admit it, it's because my paws were dirty as hell.
I bet you the person who posted this to Flickr is just trying to prove to his girlfriend, "See! I'm not the only one! My wristrest isn't dirty because I haven't showered in six years, it's because Apple is crappy! It's just like how I didn't hit my G4 Cube with a sledgehammer, and Apple just sucks at manufacturing!"
There's just something graceful about a service that surprises you with new bands all the time. I've been able to wade my toes into genres that I wouldn't have touched otherwise, like twee-pop. (Heavenly is a great band.)
It's nice to know that these guys are not only successful, but they're successful in all the right ways. I have a feeling that there'll be a point where eMusic gets so successful that the major labels have to start taking notice and talking to them more seriously. Beyond the lack of DRM, they just do so many things right.
Let's stop making this a Apple v. Microsoft fight, because it hasn't realistically been one for a while.
"My name is Jeffrey Toback, and I care about your children. Vote for me this November."
This "restart" ad is false advertising -- Windows XP is an extremely stable platform (unless Apple is referring to people who are still using Windows 98 and Windows ME -- but I don't think so).
My work PC is a supposed top-of-the-line Dell box with 3 gigs of RAM, which I use for design work. But you wouldn't guess it by the way it completely IGNORES commands such as "Save" in Photoshop. It seems like it just doesn't know how to handle memory worth a crap. I'd consider this assessment accurate.
"...we wouldn't have to download torrents!"
"But we would download torrents! In fact, we'd just download more!"
I'm suggesting that they're retarded to think that they should even consider remaining superficial. I'm saying they should rebrand their site the right way, not like this.
Despite all your rage against my post, you're still just a rat in a cage. Tell me how anything I suggested couldn't be done with the CSS.
...the corporate identies of those companies are strong and well-thought-out. Slashdot doesn't have consistent branding and would be more difficult to work with. And in most rebranding projects, they throw at least some stuff out.
Three replies thus far, all of them basically pouncing on a very minor part of my post.
95% of my post wasn't about Digg. It was about Slashdot. Digg and Slashdot are two different sites that mine a similar market.
I wasn't basing my point around Digg. I was merely exemplifying it. I know a lot of people around here don't like Digg, just as a lot of people here don't like Slashdot. But really, I think both sites could learn something from the other.
The truth is, though, Slashdot has ten layers of old structure that it should peel away and clean up, and that'd be true whether or not Digg existed.
...don't just redecorate it.
Your confines are really tight, and don't really provide any room for the identity to grow. Considering your competition (digg) has a much stronger, cleaner design because they haven't had to be tied to a decade of old design rules, I would almost say that you'd be better off throwing some of the rules out.
I think if you really want to redesign the site, you need to be willing to try new approaches with the architecture -- redoing many of the icons, cleaning up what can be a glut of information, and giving the site a more modern style that suits 2006. Tebrand the site and get rid of the font; create a new logo.
I hate to put it this way, because it's so cliche, but think outside the box. Your parameters make the box really hard to move around in.
I'm betting the best designs you get are the ones that ignore your rules and regulations the most.
I've read your other posts on this topic, and I just have to say this. Stop defending the rights of a dead man. You don't know how he feels.
It doesn't matter how the family feels. Google was doing something noble and bringing attention to and these jackasses got bent out of shape. I can't believe that you somehow find this position defendable. I work in the newspaper industry, as a designer in fact. If we were to do something like this in my paper, and run a story about Miro, nothing would happen. In fact, we'd probably go a lot further with our design. It'd be fair use, too, and even if it weren't, this could easily be argued in a court of law.
If this was an encyclopedia that decided to use Miro's art, it wouldn't be an issue at all. Nobody would notice, even.
The only reason this is an issue is because Google is a huge company.
But Google uses the paintings in a way that could consitute parody in a court of law. It may be using Miro's real works, but it's adding something to them, rather than being directly stolen. It falls under fair use.
I read that too and felt the bias bleeding through. It seems that they don't understand Apple's market.
Journalism still needs more than a few random people online reporting for it to be valuable.
Seriously, what the hell does this have to do with anything other than stroking your own personal ego?
The ads in the print publication keep it afloat, barring the YellowAdvantage, CareerBuilder and classifieds. The developers took a hands-off approach to advertising, like Google.
That was the point that got me. It seems that he's taking the main advantage of online newspapers and turning it into a fault.
That said, a master's candidate recently did a critique of my paper's website, and he was brutal to a fault. He didn't understand the concerns of the newsroom -- or even how our print publication, which is unique, worked -- at all in many of his arguments, he picked away at the tiny stuff, and essentially ticked away at some of the things that lowly web design people and newsroom folks (I'm the latter, a graphic designer to be exact) can't touch for corporate reasons.
Which eventually leads to my main point: Often, the structure of the newsroom is the problem with making many of the improvements needed. Advertising won't budge on something, administration won't budge, a reporter will get pissed if their story isn't given the play it deserves, editors don't trust their readers.
But large newspaper sites? It's like vomited information, in blown chunks every-which-where, with no helpful structure, and it's starting to dry and get a little discolored. One of the things that my paper (Bluffton Today) has done, is that it's taken the interactive community elements and played them up. We're probably the only newspaper in the world that uses Drupal as a CMS. We've basically relegated, for better or worse, most of our content to a print version of the newspaper that you can weed through in an "As Printed" section. The decreased focus on the paper's content (which is distributed free to 16,500 people throughout the community anyway) has had the side effect of getting to the meat of what we should be for our town: A resource for the community, and an organic one at that. The blogs and spotted galleries are our centerpiece, and that's what makes it unique and useful to readers.
That's the kind of thing, whether through institutional weaknesses or traditional thinking that large papers just suck at. There's such a focus on news judgment -- and how theirs is better than readers -- that they don't want to open the community input can of worms. Instead, they can't think outside the newshole or the thousands of tr and td tags that make up a newspaper front page.
A friend of mine, an online editor for a Big 10 college paper, recently mentioned a talk he had with the editor of his college newspaper. He wanted to try some untraditional things similar to Facebook or MySpace, and the editor essentially brought up the trust issue -- he didn't trust his readers to have as good of news judgment as he did. That sort of institutional thinking is bad for an industry as a whole, and I have a feeling my more open-minded friend will go a lot further than that editor will because he is looking at the prize when it comes to online journalism, and it isn't the same prize as print. The prize is taking the community and making them just as much of the news generation process as the newsroom itself. When it comes to online newspaper websites, that's the untapped resource, seeping its way through the tertiary levels of the soil, beginning to surface in the newsroom -- well, after someone moves the coffee maker off the top of it.
I wasn't even trolling you; I may have criticized your taste in music, but believe me, you would get eaten alive in the wrong scene. Grow some thicker skin and take a chance with something other than the Hot AC you currently favor; believe me, and since you read my recent posts, you know what I'm talking about, there are much weighter things in the world to cry about.
Read the rest of my post. I'm not being an asshole here. I'm just suggesting that your tastes may not be as nuanced as you think. If you're still pimping Vertical Horizon five years after everyone wrote them off, it would be wrong of me not to say to you that you need to find another band to enjoy.
They knew very little about how to play their instruments, but all of them provided some essential moments in rock history, and music history. Why, you ask? The passion showed. It showed in the three minutes they were performing a hit song; it showed in the classic albums they produced. They didn't know the rules, and they put a middle finger up to them.
Not every band is like King Crimson. Not ever guitarist is like Steve Vai. Thank God, because music would be soulless and lifeless.
The best music of the last couple of years has been passionate stuff like the Arcade Fire and Iron & Wine. Your criticisms are just completely closed-minded and ignorant about what makes good music work.
The problem is that popular music has been in a terrible case of the doldrums since about 2000. Eminem has been the only true larger-than-life figure in the 2000s, testing both the creative and moral limits of what his music can do.
In an era where our true artistes and trailblazers are limited to indie labels and likely will never see their videos played on MTV, of course there's a major drought, the same kind of drought television was facing before they realized -- oh crap! -- people don't want to watch variations on the same theme all the time, and love surprises. We got "Arrested Development," "My Name is Earl," "Desperate Housewives," and "Lost" out of that revelation.
As long as there's corporate mindthink around thinking about numbers rather than quality, music is going to suck.
That original hed shows major bias in one direction. It's terrible. First thing I picked up on when I read it.
Do you guys even understand what sIFR does, or are you just making your own halfassed judgements?
I'm not talking about a brother or someone who's my age. I'm talking about a mother with a family of five to take care of, who just lost someone close to them, and who needed something to pick her spirits up.
I'm not attacking YOUR playing, so don't treat it like that. I'm pissed that my mom spent so much time on the family computer that I had to spend $1000 to buy my own just so I could get schoolwork done. I'm pissed that my family was struggling so much (while I was at school) that they got kicked out of their house and my uncle had to bail them out. I'm pissed that on days planned weeks in advance where she was supposed to come visit me at school, she never showed up because she was busy playing a game. I'm pissed that she's not here anymore, and YOU, ANONYMOUS COWARD, have the cajones to tell me that it's not right to get in her life, because she can stop whenever. SHE CAN'T -- IT'S TOO LATE.
I can't believe the lengths people will go to justify their own gaming existence and make me look to be the bad guy because I find it troublesome that a FAMILY MEMBER WHO WAS ADDICTED TO PLAYING A FUCKING RPG DIED.
If you want to justify your own existence, fine. Just don't act as if my concern isn't valid.