Linked List: July 30, 2018

Monday, 30 July 2018

Milton Glaser’s Proposed Logo for Trump’s ‘Space Force’ 

Paul Kafasis:

An idiotic idea doesn’t deserve branding this good.

I would buy this on a t-shirt in a heartbeat.

Samsung’s Anti-iPhone X Ads 

Rado Slavov, writing for PhoneArena:

Instead, Samsung decided to focus on the negative marketing and go after its rival. What’s happening is Samsung is trying to play a finite game here — its objective is to win the battle of this smartphone generation, which comes at the expense of its own brand strength and integrity. Such unprovoked aggressive behavior is never typical of the winning side; it’s most often exhibited by the losing team, which, realizing that the final seconds of the match are ticking away, starts playing in a rough and desperate, pissed off way. After the confident Galaxy S8 launch, surely the missed expectations for this year’s Galaxy S9 have put some pressure on the consumer products team. But again, Samsung is not playing the game it should be playing, and its behavior is atypical for a gigantic tech company that’s supposedly a market leader and innovator.

Samsung should be less concerned about iPhones and more concerned about setting its own phone apart from other Android phones. What makes a high-end Samsung phone stand apart? Samsung keeps banging the drum about the iPhone X notch looking silly, but they’re only further emphasizing a distinguishing iPhone characteristic — one that other Android handset makers are racing to copy.

The Japanese Ghost Characters Haunting Unicode 

Paul McCann:

In 1978 Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters (幽霊文字).

I love a story like this.