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Basic Hip has a great selection of stills from Hitchcock’s Vertigo accompanied by photos of the San Francisco scenes as they were in 2003.
It’s amazing how recognisable the scenes are after almost 50 years of change. San Francisco is a very cool city, but it looks impossibly cool in ’58 when compared to the images of today.
The MySpace Mexico website is set to launch following a lengthy beta phase. The site joins over a dozen regional MySpace sites scattered across the globe.
Life is full of bad ideas that should never see the light of day. Unfortunately, 3D Mailbox, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest email program” has pooped its head out from the sphincter of the idea fairy.
The idea is so implausible it sounds like an April fools gag:
Think of 3D Mailbox as email meets videogame. It’s e-mail for the visual generation. 3D Mailbox turns your emails into people: beautiful models represent good email, and goofy Sumo guys represent spam. Chill with your email poolside and in private cabanas, and feed your spam to the sharks! The beautiful locales and Brazilian background music make you feel like you’re on vacation any time of the day.
Right… so each of my emails is represented as a person, and I can “chill” with them poolside?
I can then arrange them into cabanas (mailboxes):
If the bouncer (spam filter) can’t decide if a person (email) is legit, they’re forced to skate around naked at the ice rink:
Genuis!!! To think I’ve been wasting all these years using Entourage.
Students at Oxford are receiving fines via email after University staff discovered evidence of campus rules being broken on Facebook. The misdemeanors in question are typical student fare: “spraying fluids” (hopefully not urine) and throwing eggs.
Read the full story at msnbc.com.
Most people would consider tea spillage of any kind to be a disaster of Titanic proportions, but the intrepid artists of the Tea Sketches Flickr group have learned to create beauty from tragedy.
The next time your steaming cup of cha leaves a mark, whip out a 2B pencil and get drawing…
The ever colourful ColorWare have added the iPhone to their roster of rainbow products. If you can’t deal with the prospect of owning an iPhone in its default black never fear – ColorWare are offering them in a dazzling array of custom colours.
Check out their colourful version of the Nano, MacBook and Mac mini.
There’s a new Flex tutorial for beginners over at onlamp.com. They rarely cover Flash/Flex (which is fair enough given that it’s a LAMP-based site), but the article is well written and serves as a nice little introduction to the technology.
The Moller M200G hover car by Moller International is supposedly coming to market in the no-too-distant future. Priced between £45,000 and £62,000, the car will allow consumers to live out their wildest Jetsons fantasies.
You can see a video of the M200G in action here.
Once upon a time, consumers viewed Sony as a desirable brand. The company was renowned for innovation: the legendary Walkman, the groundbreaking PlayStation, Aibo, the first commercially available robotic pet.
Fast forward a few years, and things are looking grim. They now produce derivative rubbish that nobody in their right mind would want to invest in. Take the NW-HD5 for example:
It’s a poor man’s iPod that uses Sony’s proprietary format, ATRAC3. Sony helpfully bundled SonicStage with the player to encourage users to convert all their nice MP3 files into Sony’s white elephant format, leaving them with gigabytes of useless music when the player stops working. Cheers Sony!
The Bean is equally terrible:
Surely somebody within Sony must have noticed that this thing is a pig! What will they think of next? The Sony Spud – an MP3 (sorry, ATRAC3) player shaped like a potato?
Poor products and incredible errors of judgment have plagued the company in recent times: take their sluggish, wait-and-see approach in the TV market. Upon closing their south Wales manufacturing plant with the loss of 650 jobs, Sony announced:
“The demand for CRT-based televisions within the UK and Europe has fallen significantly and the transition to flat TVs has been much quicker than we first expected”
No kidding!
Their lack of foresight is astonishing for company that claims to be at the forefront of technology. They’re playing catch-up now with the Bravia range of televisions, but is it too little too late? The Bravia range may have a nice television campaign to support sales, but Sony’s competitors are offering products of similar (if not better) quality at a lower price.
The PlayStation 3 is another great example of a product that arrived too late for far too much money. The Xbox 360 currently retails at £296.96 on Amazon, or a mere £195.48 if you fancy the Core System. The PlayStation 3 comes in at a whopping £419.99! It may play Blu-Ray discs (which will be obsolete in no time as broadband speeds and on-demand services increase), wifi and a larger drive, but why bundle these things in off the bat?
The PS3 has…. what…. about 20 games? The 360 has loads (OK, so shoot me, I don’t know exactly how many).
Sony have just unveiled their latest product: a clock radio with an integrated iPod dock.
Another piggy pig pig! It is so piggy is stinks like bacon! It looks like a car battery or possibly a toaster.
The VAIO is yet another example of the derivative rubbish they’ve been peddling for far too long.
Hmmmmmm… looks suspiciously like the Apple MacBook! At least they’re priced reasonably enough.
Sony’s retail outlets are looking very tired – if you’ve walked past the one on Baker Street you’ll know what I mean.
Sony – please, go back to square one, head back to the drawing board and dream up some new, innovative, exciting products before it’s too late.
Rant over.
