I’ve been creating an icon system this week for my company. One of the icons we need is for a database.

Doing a quick search on The Noun Project (or Google Images) reveals what you’ll get: a stack of cylinders.

If you’re old enough to remember the spinning disk drives that came before solid state hard drives, you’ll have a clue to the origin of the cylindric stack.

Go back a little farther to 1956 and you’ll hit the source.

Some specs on the 305 (via Wikipedia):

• one of the last vacuum tube computers that IBM built
• It weighed over a ton
• stored 5 million 7-bit (6 data bits plus 1 parity bit) alphanumeric characters (5 MB)
• it had fifty 24-inch-diameter (610 mm) disks.
• two independent access arms moved up and down to select a disk, and in and out to select a recording track, all under servo control
• Average time to locate a single record was 600 milliseconds
• the system was leased for $3,200 per month in 1957 dollars, equivalent to a purchase price of about $160,000
• more than 1,000 systems were built
• production ended in 1961

I continue to wonder about the future of icons. How long do we represent current technologies with iconic representations of things which no longer exist or that we rarely use?

Envelopes for email. Handsets from rotary telephones for (cellular) phones, magnifying glasses, physical bookmarks, point-and-shoot cameras, alarm clocks with two bells on top, paint brushes, block erasers, reel-to-reel tapes.

—humansofny

A new American dream has gradually replaced the old one. Instead of leisure, or thrift, consumption has become a patriotic duty. Corporations can justify anything–from environmental destruction to prison construction–for the sake of inventing more work to do. A liberal arts education, originally meant to prepare people to use their free time wisely, has been repackaged as an expensive and inefficient job-training program. We have stopped imagining, as Keynes thought it so reasonable to do, that our grandchildren might have it easier than ourselves. We hope that they’ll have jobs, maybe even jobs that they like.

The new dream of overwork has taken hold with remarkable tenacity. Hardly anyone talks about expecting or even deserving shorter workdays anymore; the best we can hope for is the perfect job, one that also happens to be our passion. In the dogged, lonely pursuit of it, we don’t bother organizing with our co-workers. We’re made to think so badly of ourselves as to assume that if we had more free time, we’d squander it.
—Nathan Schneider, Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

Someone uploaded a seamless loop of the ambient sound from Deckard’s apartment in Blade Runner to YouTube.
This would drive some people crazy to listen to.
Me? I like listening to ambient/lyricless music/sound whenever I’m working on something that requires serious thinking. Kind of Blue by Miles Davis and Music Has the Right to Children by Boards of Canada are two albums I listen to all the time while I work/design/draw/think.
via DrewBot

Robin Williams, Dead at 63

Over the past year or so, I’ve grown more and more obsessed on the topic of robots replacing humans in the workforce.
I found a handful of links recently.
From Marcus Wohlsen at Wired:

The redefinition of work itself is one of the most intriguing possibilities imagined in a recent Pew Research report on the future of robots and jobs. Certainly, the prospect of a robot-powered, post-scarcity future of mandatory mass leisure feels like a far-off scenario, and an edge case even then. In the present, ensuring that everyone has enough often seems harder for humans to accomplish than producing enough in the first place. But assuming a future that looks more like Star Trek than Blade Runner, a lot of people could end up with a lot more time on their hands. In that case, robots won’t just be taking our jobs; they’ll be forcing us to confront a major existential dilemma: if we didn’t have to work anymore, what would we do?
The New York Times also has an article reporting on the Pew Research Report.
Tyler Cowen also has a good, short post on his views:
1. The law of comparative advantage has not been repealed. Machines take away some jobs and create others, while producing more output overall.
2. That said, some particular kinds of machines increase the relative return to skilled labor. If the new jobs require working with computers, and working with computers effectively is hard, reemploying lower-skilled workers at good wages may be difficult.
If you think robots can’t replace creative jobs, you’re being short-sighted.
It’s all just a matter of time.

This week Michael and Bryan discuss club soda, f!cked up Aussie films, Harry Dean Stanton, cigars, pedo van characteristics, driving lessons, aBetterQueue.com, Netflix and various other crappy movies that were inflicted upon Bryan. The episode opens with the exhaust from a 1968 Dodge Charger.
Weekly Exhaust Episode 12

Bryan fires off a global warming SCUD over at Missile Test :

My lack of concern for global warming has nothing to do with denialism. I am not a crackpot or a right wing nutjob who believes that global warming is a political issue, and not a real issue. Global warming is real, it is happening now, and it will only get worse. But, my pessimistic nature leads me to believe we will deserve every single bad effect of a warming planet, and all because we, in particular Americans, are responsible for it. We have had decades to combat global warming and have done little. We have been unable to muster the will to tackle this multi-generational problem and by the time we will, it will be too late.

I attack the United States as the primary contributor to global warming, but that places the blame equally on all of us, and that is just not so. A single person can do some things to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, such as using public transport, driving fuel-efficient vehicles, and limiting use of electrical appliances. But, the big changes that are necessary to combat global warming have to come from government, in the form of new legislation and regulations.
All actions have consequences, but some consequences are more serious than others.

Brad Reed at BGR:

It’s something we’ve long suspected but now we finally have the proof we need: Your wireless carrier wants to push you to buy a Samsung smartphone over an iPhone. Kantar Worldpanel has just released a new study (PDF) confirming reports that we’ve long heard about carriers trying to steer their customers away from the iPhone and toward rival devices — most prominently, Samsung’s.
No shit. Mobile carriers and cable companies are run by scumbags.
Let’s continue:
Why, exactly, are carriers doing this? It’s not exactly a conspiracy so much as it’s rational self-interest. The iPhone carries a very high subsidy cost for carriers, who are concerned about Apple racking up too much market power. After all, if the iPhone becomes more popular than it already is, then it gives Apple leverage to push for even stronger carrier subsidies.

This is exacerbated by the fact that iPhone customers are the most fanatically loyal smartphone users around — once they’ve been converted they don’t even think of trying other devices.
This last part is the key: “This is exacerbated by the fact that iPhone customers are the most fanatically loyal smartphone users around”.
This isn’t as correct as it should be. Apple sold 1-2 million iPhones in 2007. They sold over 35 million iPhones in Q3 2014.
It’s not only that iPhone customers are loyal: Apple continues to gain more and more loyal users each quarter of each year. There’s a good chance the person you’re pointing at and calling an “Apple fanoi” or an “Apple fanatic” wasn’t one 6 months or a year ago. This is despite the efforts of scumbag carriers trying to convince you to buy phones you don’t want.
As Steve Jobs once said, “Let the consumers vote with their wallets.”

As much as I love Macworld, I have to say that the one indispensable website in our community is Daring Fireball — an indie website.

As cool as Twitter is, its early success in our community was due entirely to Twitterrific. And it took The Iconfactory to come up with the word “tweet” and the bird logo for Twitter.

It took Loren Brichter to invent pull-to-refresh in Tweetie.

It took Marco Arment to invent the entire read-later category with Instapaper.
Amen.
via Bombtune

From Studio Oefner

The Disintegrating series representing a staggering amount of work- has been created from hundreds not to say thousands of shots. Each car has been dismantled completely, from the body shell to the smallest screws, then photographed piece by piece in a specific position to obtain the illusion of an exploding car.
Fuck. Me.

From the NY Daily News:

Tech giant Microsoft is in negotiations to open its first ever New York City retail store on Fifth Ave., sources told the Daily News.

The deal, at 677 Fifth Ave. near 53rd St., would give Microsoft a splashy presence on the top retail corridor in the country and put it just a stone’s throw from its biggest rival Apple’s iconic glass cube store.
Not a good idea.
Remember, Microsoft is the very antithesis of strategy.
Repeat after me: Microsoft: Software, Services, Enterprise. Microsoft: Software, Services, Enterprise.

—Mike Monteiro

That new focus on Microsoft as a productivity company could spell the end for projects like Surface Mini, or even the larger ARM-based versions of Surface. Calculations by Computerworld suggest that Microsoft has lost $1.7 billion on Surface hardware, including the $900 million write-off for the Surface RT last year. That’s a huge loss for something Nadella describes as an effort to “stimulate more demand for the entire Windows ecosystem.” Microsoft has thrown similar amounts of cash at Xbox over the years, but the Xbox 360 sales have proven there’s demand for Microsoft’s games consoles.
—Tom Warren, The Verge
Microsoft has lost $1.7 billion on Surface hardware. Well done!
I’m trying to remember if Apple ever lost money on the iPad?
Oh that’s right, they never did.