Hitachi's Strange Educational Marketing
Hitachi has produced a very weird "School-House Rocks"-type animation to
promote their new perpendicular data
storage method, which they claim may increase the current space limit on their hd's (specifically their space
constrained microdrives) 10 fold.
I've never seen disco-dancing bits before. This one just has to be seen to be
believed.
I'd love to know the back-story behind this video. I wonder if some of they guys working on the drives just got
bored one night. It's very similar to the HomeStar Runner video for the Bare Naked Ladies "Experimental Film"
11:00 am | permalink |
/technology/gadgets |
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How Ajax (and lots and lots of amateurs) are Changing the Web
Adaptive Path published a piece back in February about the way that smart
web applications are changing the web by
doing away with the
click-reload-click-reload paradigm. You only need to look as far as
Google
Maps to see why
this is a great thing. If you're a web designer or just entranced by how cool not having to wait for Google Maps
to
reload is every time you move the map check the piece out. It's fascinating.
A few days ago, Adaptive Path's CEO (who boasts clients such as the UN and Intel) busted out with a very "1999"-ish
prediction: the web itself is about
to change.
The catch here is that Janice Fraser was here in 1999. In fact, she worked for Netscape back in 1996. She's
intensely familiar with the whole "bubble" thing and isn't about to be sucked in by one cool new technology that
promises to change everything.
Instead, she sees changing coming from the outskirts of the web, growing like a tide. She sees our army of amateur
encyclopedia writers at wikipedia, our wannabe news-writers blogging away, our
hobbyist geeks churning out open
source code. And
she's not alone.
Combine that groundswell of truly innovative development power (in the way that only hobbyists can innovate because
they've
got
nothing to
lose) with the coming shift from click-reload to true web based applications - and suddenly, her predictions of
massive change don't seem that crazy. Speaking from my own experience as both a serious web-surfer and a
writer/web-designer, my habits have changed significantly in the past few months. I get most of my "web" fix through
my email client, thunderbird's rss reader. I've switched
back to doing most of my design in a text editor using php and
CSS+XHTML. The web is changing and the way you surf may never be the same. The user has more and more control
over the content they consume every day. Some people see the tides of change as
scary and threatening.
I say, grab your board - surf's up.
3:54 am | permalink |
/technology/web |
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