Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
Steve Wilhite Dies: Beloved Inventor Of The GIF Was 74
deadline.comThe man who helped launch a million memes has died. Steve Wilhite, who is credited with inventing the GIF file format, which makes possible the proliferation of funny Simpsons and SpongeBob memes across the internet, died on March 14 due to complications from Covid.
His wife Kathaleen announced the news to NPR.The GIF or “Graphic Interchange Format,” according to a 1987 document, “allows high-quality, high-resolution graphics to be displayed on a variety of graphics hardware and is intended as an exchange and display mechanism for graphics images.” Those attributes were a boon in the early, dial-up days of the internet, when images could take forever to load.
They still matter today in an era of quick-twitch social media posts and cell phones. It also helps that they allow users to have fun.Wilhite and his team at CompuServe created the the GIF image file format from the earlier Unisys-owned LZW algorithm in 1987.
It went on to become the most popular image format on the internet. But its success was not without controversy. A debate has raged for decades over the proper pronunciation of the acronym: Is it “jif” or “gif,” Wilhite was often asked.“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Wilhite told the New York Times. “They are wrong.
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