Putney, VT
“Get me Bert’s man at the Wall Street Journal”
Well, today, that would be me:
…Up until the 1960’s, advertising was considered a written medium. The most successful ad campaigns, it was believed, had the most convincing argument…
I humbly disagree. See Pernod, Cycles Gladiator, and any number of other famous advertisements from the industrial revolution through World War II, which rely as much on imagery and association as modern advertisements do.
Advertising, in its relationship with popular culture, is as much passenger as driver. The postwar thirst for safety and normalcy that spawned suburbs and unaccented, anonymous suits extended even to the ad industry; it didn’t take them long to remember that there are more effective ways to sell a ham.
Regular Expressions Generation and Testing Tool
As someone who adores the utility of Regular Expressions but struggles mightily with their dense and highly-specific syntax, I find this tool invaluable.
“They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”
An Apple employee, to Wired.
GPOYW: remember-when-cross-results-was-underground edition?
I find this take on the classic honey bear somewhat disturbing. While it may be more anatomically correct to place the dispensing mechanism on the bottom end of the bear, it certainly doesn’t make for a very appetizing metaphor.
“Thank you for your counter-notification. It has been forwarded to the party that sent the takedown notification. If we receive no response, your material will be restored between 10 and 14 business days from today.”
This is what really gets me about the DMCA dance. Takedown requests are honored immediately, with no delay for a counter-notification on the part of a user. I filed a counter-notification yesterday, electronically, at YouTube, within hours of the takedown and they’re just getting to it now.
While YouTube awaits action from the party that filed a takedown request for the next 10-14 days, my video is still down. As a copyright holder myself, I understand the need to ensure material is used fairly, but this is a pretty damn lopsided conflict resolution system.
It’s especially frustrating since this particular copyright holder has made three spurious requests in the past; at what point do they cross the line from protecting their work to suppressing mine? Might a lawsuit from users to get YouTube to balance out their DMCA procedure, or does the 12-year-old legislation need to updated at a more basic level?
Ah, the joys of inheriting a project.
Looks like I owe Mark Renshaw a beer.
“Some phone owners admit that they are just trying Android phones to get a feel for their options, almost as if they are trying to date other people before deciding whether it’s time to break up.”
I’m a little skeptical that this (as reported here) happens. Wireless providers have gone out of their way to ensure that consumers have essentially no ability to do this. Sure, Eric Schmidt can afford it, but I’m not certain anyone else can.
Also, some of these quotes are ridiculous. Am I the only one who gets the sense that the good technology writers all found themselves better-paying (and more secure) lines of work?
