Yesterday, TidBITS reported on an interesting development in Seattle:
Seattle’s City Council has passed an emergency measure to ban free Wi-Fi access within city limits, following testimony from experts and fire officials regarding their investigation of last week’s explosion at the popular “Beans, Beans, The Magical Fruit” coffeehouse.
Icon magazine covers the 21 most influential designers: everyone from ikea to creative commons.
Design Observer catches a sign that shows great design makes words unnecessary:
Clay Shirky tries to convert his own DVD to AVI, and the software gives him a bullshit error message:
To comply with copyright laws, DVD device input is not allowed.
Slight problem here:
Except, of course, there are no copyright laws at issue here, since I’M THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.
In a This Is Broken-style moment, david yee catches a UPS Store in a bad moment.
Inc. magazine has a piece on 26 most fascinating entrepreneurs. There’s Craig Newmark (for putting the free in free markets) and Mike Lazaridis, who really get it:
Mike Lazaridis, whose company launched the BlackBerry in 1998, developed his philosophy of innovation as an intern at Ontario’s Control Data in the early 1980s. He often saw the engineers butt heads with the marketing department.
…
“The kiss of death is when you allow marketing to dumb down innovations”
John McCallum told CBC radio he was launching a pilot project in Ottawa called “E-file or Else,” with long delays and even a 5 percent surcharge for paper filers.
coupla neat boing boing parodies from yesterday:
My call for sanity regarding the fair use of the brick
Bricks have many legitimate uses, including shelter, crowd dispersal, and brief grandstanding against Israeli tanks, so why all the focus on the very few which are heaved through shop windows to allow for the sharing of items? I paid for that brick, I’m not interested in being told what to do with it.
My 4:40 am shouty talk at my sock-covered fist on the Greyhound 234 westbound, transcribed for campus dissemination and worship.
Ingenious wallmod allows items to be stored on vertical surfaces
This guy (warning: site has no pop-ups) modded the wall over his bed with several shelves — three, to be exact. The lack of visible shelf brackets is very futuristic (although brackets can give a shelf a cool steampunky look). If you want to try it yourself, step-by-step instructions are here. Sweet! Link (Thanks, Francis!)
There is only one logical integration of all these statistics with the recent Soundscan data: even though actual point-of-purchase sales are up by about 9% in the US – and the industry sold over 13,000,000 more units in 2004 (1st quarter) than in 2003 (1st quarter) – the Industry is still claiming a loss of 7% because RIAA members shipped 7% fewer records than in 2003.
Forget the confusing percentages, here’s an oversimplified example: I shipped 1000 units last year and sold 700 of them. This year I sold 770 units but shipped only 930 units. I shipped 10% less units this year. And this is what the RIAA wants the public to accept as “a loss.”
