Audio player war
Creative is having a cow, and
their ship is sinking. I am pretty confident that the fundamental reason behind this is a misunderstanding of their users and the actual market space they are competing for.
Apple wins with the iPod because:
- It is simple to use.
- The "techmology" is close to invisible: the techiness of the item is obfuscated by minimalist design.
- The actual number of features exposed by the iPod is minimal as well.
- Creative still thinks in terms of MP3s. Apple simply refers to songs.
In many ways, I think that the MP3 vs. song thing is one of the most significant. Most non-dorks don't give a rat's what format a song is in, they just care about being able to get to it easily and have it sound good!
Calling them MP3s is not necessarily directly preventing them from succeeding, but what it is doing is continuing to confuse people who just want to listen to music rather than thinking about their music like a dork.
OpenMind Commonsense
Really interesting Commonsense archive at MIT.
Neologism of the day! CAPTCHA!
CAPTCHA is an acronym for:
completely
automated
public
Turing-test to tell
computers and
humans
apart.
These are the fun squiggly word things you see often when signing up for a new web-mail account or buying tickets for a show online. I guess it still
qualifies as a neologism, despite the fact that it is commonly used and was introduced in 2000.
It seems to me that the acronym is somewhat redundant in that
Turing-tests are designed to tell computers and humans apart.
More about captchas on Wikipedia...
New tattoo: Veronica

You can ask why I got this tattoo, but I won't tell you straight. Suffice it to say that it is an inside joke.