aycangulez

True. What often seperates a good speaker from a mediocre one is how it behaves at high volumes. Most speakers made for home use regardless of the price lose composure when cranked high. The main culprit is usually the dome tweeters (a type of hi-frequency driver) that start to compress at high volumes. The solution is to use a compression driver (CD) with a waveguide but mostly for aesthetic reasons, there are virtually no commercial speakers on the market that use CDs.

The alternative is to use public announcement (PA) speakers. Virtually all of them are equipped with CDs, but they are relatively large, and unless you have a dedicated listening/home theater room, they won't really fit a home's decor well.

It occured to me that having the month before the day is the most practical solution because the most important piece in a date is the month as years change only every 365 days or so, and a day gains meaning only when associated with a month. In other words, the month, being the most salient piece comes first.

I still use Photoshop 6.0 circa 1999. It loads in a few seconds max, and it has all the core functionality necessary for web graphics work. In fact, even PS 5.5 would do fine because it was the first version that supported Save for Web.

If you are using the latest version of Photoshop for web work only, you are wasting time and money for tons of features you don't really need.

Looks very similar to Blockout from 1989: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockout

In Blockout, you had a transparent falling block so you could see what was below.

I strongly believe that the following excerpt from the article directly applies to any line of work including software development:

"I don’t know if an artist can last by meeting the current public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don’t think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don’t know many lasting works of art that are condescending or deliberately stupid or were created as content.

Don’t tell me I’m a brand. I’m famous and people recognize me, but I can’t look in the mirror and see my brand identity.

Keep talking about brands and you know what you’ll get? Bad clothes. Bad hair. Bad books. Bad movies. And bad records. And bankrupt businesses. Rides that were fun for a year with no employee loyalty but everyone got rich fucking you. Who wants that? The answer is purity. We can afford it. Let’s go find it again while we can."

I have been following Fingleton, the author of this article for quite a while. His main thesis that "Japan's lost decade is an illusion" has not changed much over the years. In fact, he was among the group "Japan bashers" in the 90s, and their main argument was that Japan's Ministry of Finance (MOF) was intentionally trying to paint a grim image of Japan to gain advantage in trade negotiations. This argument holds little water these days: it is next to impossible to hide information about the true state of a country when access to information is so easy thanks to the Internet.

Fingleton also claims that Japanese are early adopters in technology, which is only partly true. Japanese, in general, prefer to excel in something by using manual skills and they take great pride in that. They resort to technology only when manual skill is not enough. Making good cars require industrial robots so they have plenty of them, but in other parts of the industry, adoption of advanced technology can be quite limited. In other words, Japanese companies often find themselves at local maximums as compared to their American counterparts. Just look at the current state of Japan's once great electronics companies: Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, NEC, Hitachi, etc. Only Canon seems to be doing fine these days.