What a gem.

via Head Like An Orange

To play devil’s advocate to my vinyl post, some things do die:

Wednesday’s demise of Code Spaces is a cautionary tale, not just for services in the business of storing sensitive data, but also for end users who entrust their most valuable assets to such services. Within the span of 12 hours, the service experienced the permanent destruction of most Apache Subversion repositories and Elastic Block Store volumes and all of the service’s virtual machines. With no way to restore the data, Code Spaces officials said they were winding down the operation and helping customers migrate any remaining data to other services.
What he said.

Analogue, meet Digital. Digital, meet Analogue.

Osmo. Play Beyond the Screen

Mr. White’s latest release, “Lazaretto” (Third Man/Columbia), opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart with 138,000 sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and 40,000 of those sales were for its “ultra” vinyl edition. That is the biggest week for a vinyl album since SoundScan began tracking music sales in 1991; the last title to hold the record was Pearl Jam’s “Vitalogy,” which sold 34,000 copies on LP when it came out in 1994.
—Ben Sisario, NYTimes.com
Keep stories like this in mind whenever you’re feeling the urge to declare something “dead”. Vinyl won’t ever beat digital download sales, but it’s far from dead.

Dan Gilbert: The psychology of your future self

username: combustion

Amazon Fire (photo taken from The Verge)
“I love the smell of commerce in the morning.”
—Brody, Mall Rats

I can’t remember how I found SkyVector. All I know is it has some great chart porn.

Google sees you as a user, Amazon sees you as a consumer, Microsoft sees you as an employee (though they’re trying to change that).

Apple sees you as a person, but one at leisure who doesn’t want to be using a computer in the first place.
—Drewbot

This new wave is also opportunistic. But in a much hotter real estate market with lower start-up costs, it’s driven as well by a taste for “authenticity,” “character” and other buzzwords today’s tech firms love. At the same time, constructing anything new here is a major headache. The city is crippled by an obstructionist set of city planning rules — the consequence of local activism and a Talmudic bureaucracy. Legislation from the mid-’80s caps the total amount of new office space that can be built here. All this contributes to why adaptive reuse has taken hold.
—Michael Kimmelman, Urban Renewal, No Bulldozer, NYTimes.com
So is Kimmelman saying these “obstructionist” rules are a good thing? Seems the tech nerds moving in would likely pass over new buildings and offices anyway (if they did exist) for “authentic” existing spacings.

Pocket Art Director
via Designer News

I don’t care what you call it. I call it awesome.

Over at the New Yorker, Jill Lepore calls out Clayton Christensen on his innovation and disruption theories:

In his original research, Christensen established the cutoff for measuring a company’s success or failure as 1989 and explained that ” ‘successful firms’ were arbitrarily defined as those which achieved more than fifty million dollars in revenues in constant 1987 dollars in any single year between 1977 and 1989–even if they subsequently withdrew from the market.” Much of the theory of disruptive innovation rests on this arbitrary definition of success.
I love Christensen’s work, but it’s always interesting to read opposing views.