Ha ha ha!

Facebook dropped the rounded trendy crap from it's design! It is back to squares. And all that happened just a few months after I was completely outraged by it's "rounded redesign". I knew they would come to senses and drop that trendy junk!

Enjoy =]

1500 hours of moving legobricks and take photos of them. Respect!

During the last year or so there was an enormous hype about Cameron's new movie "Avatar". The movie was shrouded in mystery and sprinkled with supreme power words, like "movie that will redefine the cinema experience", or "this will change your life", etc.

As the time passed, the hype was getting enormous. Everyone went to cinemas to see "Watchmen", and even tho "Watchmen" are really good people were saying that they expect even more from "Avatar".

And yesterday, the trailer hit the internet.

And if you ask me, the shit hit the fan, blew up into 1000 pieces and sprinkled me all over face.

Lets start:
(CLICK ON SMALL IMAGES TO GET FULL RESOLUTION HD SHOTS)

This looks really good. But let's face it, cinema was able to produce realistic space imagery 40 years ago, so nothing impressive.

OK, they got some robots. They look like bloody LEGO robots. You have to be aware that during this year Transformers 2 were in cinemas as well. They had some AWESOME display of how robots should be done. You cannot just put some mechanical mumbo-jumbo and call it job finished.

Here the shit is starting to approach the fan. It's flying pretty fast towards the 4 rotating blades. The face looks so unrealistic that this all starts to take shape of Harry Potter in Space.

And the shit hits the fan right about here. Titanic? Really? REALLY? Let me just quickly remind you that James Cameron did some other movies. Aliens. Abyss. Terminator. By choosing to put Titanic they clearly made a target for this movie - semi retarded men, insecure women and children who like Harry Potter.

There is nothing realistic in this shots. We have all seen fantasy graphic, and we have all seen BETTER fantasy graphic. Blizzard trailers and "World of Warcraft" cinematographic for example. Screw this, this is not even funny any more.

On top of all this, from the trailer you can extract the following storyline. We, the Humans discover new planet. At first we are cool with the species living there. Then some stuff happens, main character gets ported into body of an indigenous humanoid being. Being stupid Humans as we are, the supreme army commanders decide to burn the whole planet or at least take all of it's resources or something, but our main character will step in to defend the poor local people. Bam bam bam, explosions and love drama.

Excuse my French, but ... the fuck?!

Seriously ... we have seen this cliché at least two hundred times so far, stop using it.

This is craziest thing I've seen in long time. Linus Åkesson (lht) made crazy demo running from a microcontroller based on the Propeller chip from Parallax. External I/O consists of stereo sound (at line level) and a VGA signal. 32 bit processors, 48k of ram. and 32k rom. The Propeller is used in many industries including manufacturing, process control, robotics, automotive and communications. I got two left hands and I suck with soldering iron, but I really admire folks who are into electronics. If you want to try Parallax out, you can get Parallax demo board and download the eeprom file of the demo and try it for your self.

Checkout Turbulence by lft:

(turn on your speakers because music is great!)

Oh I would like to know. Awesome invitation! :)
(if you are using your rss reader, open up post because video embedding doesn't work as it should)

The hall of fame of "The Greatest Marketing Tricks" that by my standards so far contained these two power-tricks:

$1.99
Dollar ninety-nine is the greatest marketing trick of all time, no doubt about it. People that do not look carefully will put into their basket an object for which they will think it costs ONE Dollar, but it will in reality cost them TWO Dollars. That is a price increase of 100%. No other value has the same impact. $0.99 is just too suspicious - nothing costs zero, so people will notice the cents. And anything above $2 does not yield such an increase of price at the checkout. The $2.99 that looks as just 2 Dollars and is actually almost 3 is just an increase of 50%.

NEW!
This tag, usually wrapped into some fancy sticker graphics will without any doubt increase the sale of a product. People just cannot resist buying things that are NEW. Even if that "new" component is just redesigned package - as it is often the case in shampoos or any body-care products. Basically: you have the same product inside, make a little bit fancier packaging, slap a "NEW" sticker on it, and *SHAZAM* your sales go sky high.

And now, ladies and gentleman, I present to you the third addition to this:

NOT NEW!

( The sticker says: Not NEW but it helps! )

Using the power of "NEW" the designers of this poster have outdone even the greatest magicians. This product is not new, it was here (obviously) for a long time, but it seems the sales are low. So do what? Slap a "NEW" sticker on it, but add truth to it - NOT on top of NEW. Seriously, dirty, yet awesome trick making the "Not New" almost as powerful as "New".

Kudos to the designers/copywriters that made this.

In the last couple of months there was a lot of talk about killing IE6 in multiple ways. Some high reach websites are talking about, and some of the biggest websites are directly telling people to switch to newer browser if they come with IE6.

However, even with all this pressure from developers and big websites, it is super-unlikely that IE6 will die until Microsoft decides that enough is enough and stops officially supporting IE6. This could mean that maybe they could force your Windows to silently download an upgraded Internet Explorer and just forcefully install it. Until that happens, IE6 will live on.

Apart from all the corporate mumbo-jumbo about big companies having hard time upgrading thousands of computers to newer IE, there is another huge reason why IE6 will not die:

We, the developers, continue to find ways to support IE6 in one way or another. Let's face it, a good web development company will always have an IE6 "version" of a site. That's it. And as long as we build sites that work on IE6, even in downgraded version, people will have no reason to upgrade.

You could say now "Well, but if they had upgraded browser, they would see a much more beautiful and functional website". But I say to that: you are a fool. We, the developers, know how the site looks under modern browser, and how it looks under old browser. A user coming in with IE6 only sees the downgraded version, but to that user THAT version is the only one. The user has no clue that there is a better version.

Facebook will warn you that you have IE6, but you can just ignore/close that warning block, and continue to use it.

If we as developers wanted TRULY to kill IE6 we should completely stop supporting it. Coming to a Facebook with IE6 should give you a blank window with warning and HUGE buttons do download Firefox/Chrome or upgrade IE. Until you do that - no Facebook for you. Same goes with Youtube, Twitter, and all the other hard hitters.

I know that this has issues of lowering the visitor count, but the big players should at least do this for a period of one week, or at least a couple of days.

Because, as it is now, users have absolutely no reason to upgrade from IE6. All the websites work good under it.

Also, we are doing our part too:

EDIT:
On the same day I wrote this post, John Nack (Adobe) wrote on his blog that Adobe will, starting from next Creative Suite, be INTEL ONLY on Mac (Intel and AMD on PC). Yes kids, that is right, Mac Power PC platforms and all of those older shit-systems are out. Just like that. Adobe will make no workarounds or hacks to get the software to work on old systems, even if that means the loss of few percent of general population.

And I respect and support that fully, and wish that more software and webdev companies started following the same principle - if it is old, just trash it into the can.

SUPREME EDIT TO THIS:
Web Burza, one of the great web development companies in the region (respect!) recently decided to drop IE6 support from their main development cycle. IE6 support will remain as a service they offer, but only as a side service (and you understand that this directly means that IE6 support will cost clients more). GO GO GO!

So I was walking down some old street when I saw this:

Even the vandals making bad graffiti know the typography terminology! Look at them small caps R! =)

ROTFLMAO :)

If you are annoyed by this behaviour as I am, enter about:config in address bar and press enter. Search for key browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab and set it to false. Presto, no auto FireFox closing! :) Just be sure to close it from time to time to clean up his horrifying memory leaks.