While I agree that URL shortening stinks for all sorts of philosophical and practical reasons, it grinds at me that HN's crippled markdown doesn't let you specify text for links. It makes it hard to integrate multiple links into text, because I am forced to line-break after each to achieve a minimum of readability.
You can see that the HN formatter is sympathetic to this type of textual disaster and "shortened" your links, just by omitting the last 20 or so characters of each.
I worked at Xerox when they did their rebranding. At a big company meeting I saw it and said, "seriously?"
Not only is it bland and generic, but my eyes keep thinking that the sphere is "off" somehow. Something about how they drew the lines on the X tricks my eyes and makes it look not-quite-spherical. Like they got the CEO's 15-year-old nephew to Photoshop a sphere.
We had a Ruby user group meeting at MySpace HQ here in LA after the redesign but before the troubles. The reception desk, the signs, everywhere I was confronted by their new logo. And I literally couldn't believe it.
My mind was blown and refused to believe this was their actual identity. So every time I saw it, I said to myself, "Really?!" I just had to visit their website again just now to make sure. This should not be anyone's reaction to a logo.
I still don't understand how such a mistake happened. "You know, we've seen lots of logos but we really love the one where you literally rip off the 'my' from the MyNetworkTV logo and put a sideways brace next to it. It makes us feel like crazy madmen that can do anything we want." I mean, that's my best-case scenario.
The new Xerox logo sphere has the same problem as AT&T's new sphere logo. The perspective is off-center, so the poles are not aligned! Just looking at the AT&T logo makes me dizzy..
the timeless http://www.pronetworks.org/v21/images/uploads/blog_images/xe...
vs. the new http://www.electricsistahood.com/images/ever/new_xerox_logo....
While we're at it, let's toss in MySpace:
the meh http://www.subscribersrule.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/my...
vs. the WTF-worthy http://studiokandm.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/myspace_lo...