“Even if Longhorn is a big improvement over Windows, it
still won’t ignite a revolution. Why? Because–and believe me, I
never thought I’d say this in a million years–Microsoft’s software
is good enough. We all bitch and moan about one shortcoming or
another, as I’ve often done in these pages over the years. But
there’s not a whole lot Microsoft can do to make its programs so
much better that they justify the suffering we have to endure any
time we upgrade to something new. Longhorn might get geeks all
sweaty with desire, but to the rest of us, it’s still just an
operating system.”
doesn’t go into much technical detail, but annodex
seems like an interesting new open source kid on the media
annotation scene:
“”Within five years it’ll be on everybody’s desktop,”
predicts Silvia Pfeiffer of CSIRO Mathematical and Information
Sciences in Sydney, Australia. Her team is releasing the code as
open source for others to use and modify.”
ha. so, i had a rather official looking email presumably from paypal sitting in my inbox for a day, asking for me to verify my account information. when i clicked on the the link, much to my surprise, i found the link was dead. it was only at this point that i realized that the email was a very well-designed hoax. this is a very special hoax, because it’s the first email hoax that has ever coerced me to click on anything. luckily for me the site was already taken down.
is now officially available. it’s a little ugly, but i’ll give it a
fighting chance, since i decided to not pay the m$ office tax when i
purchased my ibook.
“My latest attempt… involves embedding validation and redisplay rules in the markup of the form itself. The form is written in XHTML, but with a number of additional tags and elements. Any form field elements can have a number of additional attributes which specify the validation rules of the form.”
how do you market without marketing? that’s the question for pabst and its pbr brand. anyone who’s spent time in places like chicago knows that all the cool kids have been drinking pabst blue ribbon for quiet some time. i’d chalked it up to the ever popular retro-chic-unironic irony thing that is so popular with the kids these days and thought it would die a quick, inevitable death with a nod in the “the hipster handbood”, but it’s still growing in popularity. and now, pabst is apparently trying to figure out how to grow in a market that has adopted the brand presumably because it hasn’t done much marketing for 20 years:
“In theory, a company that discovers one of its products has started growing of its own accord could simply do nothing. But it’s hard to do nothing. Especially for marketers. For P.B.R. it was clearly important to at least appear to be doing as little as possible. This is one reason that a traditional response to the discovery that ”alternative people” were buying the beer in Portland — taking out ads on local alt-rock stations — was nixed. It’s one reason that when Kid Rock’s lawyer came sniffing around to work an endorsement deal, Pabst said no. It’s one reason that the company has passed on the chance to back a major snowboarding event or to sponsor an extreme athlete. It’s one reason that even upbeat five-year plans for where the brand may go envision no television advertising at all.”