Hasta La Gadget!

A lot has changed on the internet over the last 17 years, but one of the small constants has been eBay’s decidedly 90s logo, which has remained colorful and off-kilter as others have shifted with the trends. Now, after all these years, it’s finally making a clean break (mostly). The company today took the wraps off a whole new logo, one that retains the old colors but does away with the overlapping, non-conformist letters — or, as eBay President Devin Wenig puts it, a logo that’s “rooted in our proud history and reflects a dynamic future.” You can find the company’s full explanation of the change at the link below, and look for the logo itself to actually be put into use by eBay in mid-October.

Filed under: Internet, Alt

eBay straightens out its logo after 17 years originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Sep 2012 14:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The late Chairman Mao Zedong, founding father of the People’s Republic of China and global revolutionary icon, is still revered in China though the country has taken a radical turn down the capitalist road since his passing in 1976. These 8 revised and reimagined Mao posters reference the Great Helmsman’s impressive pop culture presence to sell consumer goods and more to today’s well-washed & wealthy proletariat.

There’s been a lot of nostalgia circulating around the PC world in the past year, but there’s only one element of early home computing history that everyone shares in common: the floppy drive. A guest writer posting at HP’s Input Output blog, Steve Vaughan-Nichols, is acknowledging our shared sentimentality with a rare retrospective of those skinny magnetic disks from their beginning to their (effective) end. Many of us are familiar with the floppies that fed our Amigas, early Macs and IBM PCs; Vaughan-Nichols goes beyond that to address the frustrations that led to the first 8-inch floppy at IBM in 1967, the esoteric reasons behind the 5.25-inch size and other tidbits that might normally escape our memory. Don’t be sad knowing that the floppy’s story ends with a whimper, rather than a bang. Instead, be glad for the look back at a technology that arguably greased the wheels of the PC era, even if it sometimes led to getting more disks than you could ever use. Sorry about that.

[Image credit: Al Pavangkanan, Flickr]

Filed under: Storage, Alt

Writer breaks down floppy drive history in detail, recalls the good sectors and the bad originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 01:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In 2004, Facebook had 70,000 users—most of them Ivy League elites. Most people had no idea it existed. But before the site hit the nearly billion yokels it boasts today, one kid traveled NYC to sell the idea. This is what it looked like. More »

World Humanitarian Day
set annually for August 19th was originally designated to recognize
humanitarian personnel and those who had lost their lives working for
humanitarian causes. It’s origin was a direct result of a massive
bombing attack of Iraq by America and its allies, escalating on March
21, 2003. Known in military parlance as "Shock ‘n Awe," and taken from
Sun Tzu’s "The Art of War"
(544-496 BC), it’s a military doctrine based on the use of overwhelming
power to paralyze an adversary’s perception of the battlefield and
destroy its will to fight back.