Links for 06-26-2008

• Intel stays behind the curve … again | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com - I still have a nagging suspicion that there's more resistance to and less interest in Vista than one would normally expect from a major upgrade. However, I agree with Ed that a lot of what we're hearing now we heard when XP came out.
• Facebook: Better Cloud Servers Needed - Data Center Knowledge - Computers in shipping contaienrs do seem to be a legit trend--at least for a few mega-scale service providers.
• North Carolina will pay IBM $750,000 for 10 jobs | The Register - Leaving aside Ashlee's customary snark, I found the small staffing numbers for next gen datacenters interesting. This reinforces some of Nick Carr's more negative ponderings in The Big Switch.
• The Long Tail: Where to run the One Machine? - Location matters in the cloud. Three strategies.
• Megan McArdle (June 26, 2008) - The vast neo-con conspiracy turns its eyes to Europe - "I am reminded of PJ O'Rourke's comment that America is like the most popular (and hated) girl in the class. Canada and Europe, particularly, seem to be prone to the illusion that we spend all of our time thinking up ways to make them feel bad, when in truth we barely think about them at all. "
• The Mouse Is Dead - I don't especially buy the "mouse is dead" meme. But, as I've written about, I do think that there's plenty of opportunity for new input devices to come on the scene.
• louisgray.com: Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter. - Amen. Speed is not always your friend. "Whether you're writing a blog post or entering something on Twitter, it absolutely makes sense to take a cue from traditional media and check your facts."
• Monospace/Fixed Width Programmer's Fonts - If you're tired of using Courier for your monospaced font needs.
• Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant -
  "So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package. The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind."

Links for 06-25-2008

• Yapta: Tracking Airfare Changes Made Easy - ReadWriteWeb - I should probably look at some of these travel booking sites a bit more closely.
• Black Star Rising - The Case Against Photo Illustrations - I'm inclined to agree with this comment: "A "photo illustration" must be clearly fake or else it is not acceptable."
• Morning Conundrum: DIY Wedding Albums - Shoot The Blog - I've used Blurb and LuLu. I'll probably try MyPublisher the next time I put together a book of my photography.
• tecosystems » Question for Cloud Campers: The Cloud and Standards - I need to think some about how to most usefully organize the cloud computing space.
• Pajamas Media » Why Trains Just Don’t Work in America - Sadly, I think Charlie's right. I much prefer rail to air but US distances are just too big outside of a few limited regions (e.g. Northeast).
• In Energy-Stingy Japan, an Extravagant Indulgence: Posh Privies - "High-end toilets can also sense when someone enters or leaves the bathroom, raising or lowering their lids accordingly. Many models have a "learning mode," which allows them to memorize the lavatory schedules of household members.These always-on electricity-guzzlers (keeping water warm for bottom-washing devours power) barely existed in Japan before 1980. Now, they are in 68 percent of homes, accounting for about 4 percent of household energy consumption. They use more power than dishwashers or clothes dryers."
• Marginal Revolution: My favorite song - What to do if you end up in Europe in 1000 AD--set to music :-)
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Encryption and the law - Good thought. Implication is that we're probably going to move towards encrypting data in the cloud in a way that the service provider can't decrypt it.
• Photos: How UPS Next Day delivers | CNET News.com - I find the scope of today's big logistics operations REALLY impressive.
• Digital politics: The future is broadband, not Facebook | The Social - CNET News.com - In other words, as in business, a lot of the most important action happens in the backroom blocking and tackling.
• Bert P. Krages Attorney at Law Photographer's Rights Page - A downloadable PDF flyer describing the rights of photographers.
• Microsoft Watch - Corporate - A Month of Gates #6 - Interestingly, the monopoly not really discussed here is AT&T--which was broken up and then reconstituted in different form after a generation of technology.
• How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine - Interesting read, but I'm not sure how you square simultaneous advice to be brief and to be thoughtful and comprehensive.

Links for 06-23-2008

• Rob Galbraith DPI: Firefox 3, released today, supports colour managed web browsing - Enabling color-managed Web browsing in Firefox.
• Zoomii.com - The "Real" Online Bookstore - An attempt to replicate the look and feel of a real bookstore online. Intriguing idea though I'm not sure it's responsive enough to really work.
• SomaFM: Listener Supported, Commercial-Free Internet Radio - A recommendation from Simon Phipps. I'll have to check it out.
• Analyst predictions :) « Technobabble 2.0 - Funny. [via carterlusher]
• Link by Link - Delaying News in the Era of the Internet - NYTimes.com - "In the case of Wikipedia, this is emphatically not what the site was meant to do. One of the principles of the site is No Original Research — every fact must have appeared somewhere reputable before it can be repeated...Yet, time and again Wikipedia has been the place where news has broken, usually from anonymous writers who report a death on a person’s article page, like that of the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin in 2005, or, a year later, the killing of the film director and actress Adrienne Shelley in Greenwich Village."
• Cody's, landmark Berkeley bookstore, closes - Sad. Harvard Square is pretty slim pickings these days too with the Coop the only major store left. (Though it was good to see the Globe Corner Bookstore reopen in a new location much tomy pleasant surprise.)
• 10 Reasons Why The Black Hats Have Us Outgunned | HaveMacWillBlog (aka Robin Bloor’s Blog) - Scary stuff.
• Reason Magazine - The Wealth of LibriVox - Reason article about the LibriVox audiobooks project.
• Book Review - 'The Pixar Touch,' by David A. Price - Review - NYTimes.com - Nice article about the history of Pixar.
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Two aphorisms and a few notes - "Blogging is the soapbox in the park, the shout in the street; Twitter is the whispering of a clique."
• Pipl - People Search - It's surprising (and a bit scary) some of the things that this turns up.
• bbum’s weblog-o-mat » Blog Archive » What is good tequila? - Good overview.
• Charles and Ray Eames and the Polaroid SX-70 - Shoot The Blog - Cool video of Charles and Ray Eames explaining the SX-70 camera.
• Mad Men - Very Short List - "...[last season] watching TV became a depressing exercise. The saving grace? AMC’s gleaming 1960’s-era drama Mad Men." Fully agree. It tries a bit too hard at times to look and act period but well worth watching.
• Delicious founder leaves Yahoo | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - "Yahoo believes there are plenty other folks to keep Delicious healthy" Seems rather optimistic presumption on the part of Yahoo to presume that there was anything about del.icio.us especially helthy to begin with--other than healthy share of mind in a product category that they've helped to make a backwater.
• ASCII by Jason Scott: Midphase's New Goat Herders - Bad customer service is forever.

Links for 06-17-2008

• tecosystems » Open Source: Thinking Outside the Glass Box - Interesting piece by SOG. He makes good points though I wonder if such a broad definition of Open Source is so broad as to be not particularly useful (i.e. everything as Open Source).
• Schneier on Security: LifeLock and Identity Theft - Not something I'm particularly expert on but seems a thorough and fair rundown on the whole LifeLock business.
• The AP v. Everybody: Not So Clearly Fair Use | CenterNetworks - And, finally, I think it fair comment that a lot of blogs out there--even those who don't gratuitously scrape posts and stories--often resort to relatively long excerpts with comparatively short doses of commentary of any kind.
• Why Saul Hansell is wrong on AP » mathewingram.com/work | - A couple more comments here/ As a conceptual matter, "fair use" makes a great default starting point. In practice, it's horribly vague so I do think that explicit guidelines would be welcome. However, AP has done a horrible job; some guidelines that they've at least implicitly suggested fall way short of what's widely considered good fair use practice by the most principled and thoughtful users.
• The A.P., Hot News and Hotheaded Blogs - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - Probably the most thoughtful piece I've read on the AP dustup.

Links for 06-16-2008

• ongoing · Deletionist Morons - As Nick Carr has noted, one area where Wikimedia shines especially brightly is in its embrace of the obscure. Wikipedia is less good dealing with the clearly notable and well-established.
• The Secret Diary of [Steve Jobs] Jerry Yang: The first great battle of the Internet is over, and I'm delighted to announce that we've finished in second place - "Do we even have any PR people? I have no idea. Whatever we're paying them, it's 100% too much. Who else could go into a PR battle against Microsoft and come out looking like the low-IQ side of the equation?"
• Boat Ramps for Trailer Sailors - New Englad boat ramps
• Firefox 3: Google Browser Sync Discontinued, No Firefox 3 Support - I can't say that this either surprises or bothers me. But Google really needs to add cloud bookmarking to its portfolio.

Links for 06-13-2008

• PhotoshopDisasters: Washington Post: Unlikely - The really weird thing is that if you read through the comment thread and consider the evidence, it appears that this is not, in fact, a Photoshop job but just a weird optical illusion.
• Standalone OSS revenue to reach $4.83 billion by 2012 | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - This is not a lot of money--even if it's only a portion of the revenues related to Open Source.
• Scalent strokes physical to virtual to whatever you like play | The Register - Brilliant line from Ashlee! "Start-ups in the systems management arena tend to scare us. They promise the world and usually deliver a rundown village mired in a drought."
• NewsFactor Network | What Will It Take To Put Apple Back on Top? - It's nice to at least sometimes be able to predict the future with some accuracy.
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips » HDR Tidbits (links, news, inspiration) - A lot of HDR is overdone but I've been meaning to try it.
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The multi-tasking virus - "That minds wander is not news - "wandering" may well be the default setting for our brains - but the scale of it today does seem to be something new and remarkable."
  
• Yahoogle?: Microsoft Will “Let Loose the Dogs of War” | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD - "While I have never much liked Microsoft’s thuggish tendencies and think it’ll use particularly sneaky techniques here since they’re smarting over really blowing their attempted takeover of Yahoo, with true repercussions still to come, such pressure on a Yahoo-Google link-up is much deserved."
• Linux Hater's Blog - This is really funny. Thanks Miguel!

Links for 06-10-2008

• Beautiful Black and White Photography | Monday Inspiration | Smashing Magazine - Like the headline says.
• Is Google Making Us Stupid?--Nick Carr - Well wortht the read--even if it's fairly long. (That's a joke as you'll see after reading the piece."Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading."
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Confession: I secretly despise the idiots who camp out overnight for my keynotes - When Lyons is good, he's good.

Links for 06-09-2008

• Delicious 2.0: We’ve Been Waiting 9 Months - Delicious 2/0 apparently not well...
• Michael Gartenberg - The importance of AAPL's event on Monday isn't a new iPhone - This is a really perceptive post. The i{hone doesn't have the usual chicken/egg problem.
• elliott.org | Unbelievable! American Airlines charges $15 for first checked bag - This seems an especially boneheaded move. Second checked bag, OK. (Though that causes some problems ytoo.) But, as many commenters say, it's hard to believe that this won't increase the amount of luggage that people try to carry on.
• Cassini Nears Four-year Mark - The Big Picture - Boston.com - Awesome Cassini pics.
• Icon War - Pretty cool. [via robinbloor]
• Gates-Ballmer Clash Shaped Microsoft's Coming Handover - WSJ.com - "Some major decisions got stuck due to the impasse, Messrs. Gates and Ballmer said. In one case, two vice presidents clashed over the future of NetDocs, a promising effort to offer software programs such as word processing over the Internet. The issue: Because NetDocs risked cannibalizing sales of Microsoft's cash-cow Office programs, some executives wanted NetDocs killed. Messrs. Gates and Ballmer were unable to settle on a plan. First, NetDocs ballooned to a 400-person staff, then it got folded into the Office group in early 2001, where it died."
• A VC: Hyperlocal Has To Be Peer Produced - I'm not convinced that all this hyperlocal content will just appear through volunteer efforts. Especially if you're talking about politics and other topics that take some real digging. OTOH, there's a lot of volunteer energy in local communities.

Links for 06-04-2008

• SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » SkyNet Lives! (aka EC2 @ SmugMug) - SmugMug stores over half a petabyte of data on S3 (before replication). And lots of great details in this post about SmugMug's architecture.
• Amazon Web Services Blog: The Emerging Cloud Service Architecture - Interesting post about the buildout of the Amazon Web Services ecosystem.
• Trouble at eBay - ReadWriteWeb - Suggestions that online auctions are dead are perhaps hyperbolic, but it's clear that eBay's general direction is generally away from the "world's biggest flea market" towards a much more Amazon-esque ecommerce playform.
• Coding Horror: Whatever Happened to UI Consistency? - Great post. I've linked previously to a great talk about the Office 2007 UI from MIX08 but it's fair comment that such is an isolated and un-integrated example.
• Going Medieval: Time-Warner Begins Metered Bandwidth Testing - I'm of mixed feelings about this. The trend is certainly away from metered use. OTOH, to the degree that P2P creates a hugely bimodal distribution it may make sense to draw a line somewhere.
• Electronic Device Stirs Unease at BookExpo - NYTimes.com - Books and, to a lesser degree, movies have been protected because the technology for low-friction copies doesn't exist (as it does with music). Could e-books change that?
• U Try Being UTube! : NPR - UTube.com getting YouTube traffic. People are confused. People are morons. "As the lawsuit puts it, these unwanted visitors, "often fill out Plaintiff's sales request form, seeking more information in a vulgar and belligerent manner. Exhibit 1 is a message left by one visitor who asks, 'WHERE THE F*** ARE THE VIDEOS??? 1.5 BILLION DOLLARS FOR THIS PIECE OF S*** WEBSITE? GOOGLE GOT TAKEN.'""
• High gas prices promote 'digital nomad' lifestyle | Computerworld Blogs - I suspect that part of the issue here is that "green" is popular primarily when it saves money. But, in the case of telecommuting, it's the employees' money, not the companies--unless you start talking about really large scale remote work approaches as in the case of Sun.
• Applications for the Masses by the Masses: Why Engineers Are An Endangered Species - Nice presentation from Java One by Sun's Todd Fast about how application development is changing. via @ritam

Links for 05-30-2008

• Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality - ReadWriteWeb - Good discussion of Semantic search--what it is. And isn't.
• Google spotlights data center inner workings | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - Interesting look into some details of Google's server infrastructure.
• Microsoft loses a Zune retailer | Crave, the gadget blog - CNET - Zune really does seem to be sucking wind. OTOH, Microsoft does have a good history of sticking with things that don't succeed at first.

Links for 05-29-2008

• Amazon.com: The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia: David King: Books - Altering photos didn't start with Photoshop [via Dead Programmer's Cafe]
• Dartmouth Parity Email from Angus King - "I have some first hand experience with this democracy stuff and it is often cumbersome and sometimes downright annoying. But when you lose elections and keep losing, the idea is to figure out why and respond to the issues being raised, not simply change the rules so you don't have to cope with that pesky majority which disagrees with you."
• Desktop Virtualization: Prospective Winners and Losers | HaveMacWillBlog (aka Robin Bloor’s Blog) - Good rundown although I'm uncertain that desktop virtualization corrrelates to lower client revenues as seems to be the underlying assumption here.
• Inexperienced - Can I jump into D300? - Photo.net Nikon Forum - Good discussion on getting into digital. And, amen: "I used to shoot nothing but slide film where the only way to land the perfect image was to nail the exposure. " Just one of the things I love about digital. I have fond memories of darkrooms--but, at this point, don't really miss them.
• Gallery: 10 most annoying programs on the Internet | TechRepublic Photo Gallery - This is funny and I at least 75% agree.
• Megan McArdle (May 27, 2008) - Black and white and read less and less (Media) - This angle on the "unbundling" of newspapers is discussed less than others (such as investigative journalism). However, this post aligns well with my observations as well; blogs etc. are very spotty at covering local news/events.

Links for 05-27-2008

• James Governor’s Monkchips » On blogging, AR, Adobe Getting It, David Mendels and “Rich Internet Apps: How We Live Now” - Interesting things happening in the way applications are evolving. Existing taxonomies may not be especially interesting or enlightening--which is one of the reasons that we use taxonomies.
• Economist.com-Down on the server farm - Discussion of the siting of Internet datacenters.
• Sometimes Crowds Aren't That Wise - ReadWriteWeb - "Last year, we laid out a set of rules to get the most out of a crowd. It might be a good idea to revisit those here:"
• tecosystems » The Social Networking Implications of Social Networking Tools - I agree with pretty much everything here. At the end of the day you have to filter how much "stuff" flows by you. I have a few thoughts here I need to post on.
• Cover Story - Emily Gould - Exposed - Blog-Post Confidential - Gawker - NYTimes.com - "What I gained — and lost — by writing about my intimate life online."
• The URL Is Dead, Long Live Search - ReadWriteWeb - This is certainly true for me. "These are called "navigational" searches -- searches done when the user already knows exactly where he or she wants to end up -- and they make up a surprising large number of total sea[r]ches."

Links for 05-22-2008

• In the next evolution of the web public interaction will be less important « Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior - Not sure I agree, but interesting post.
• See « Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats - I Can Has Cheezburger? - Good one.
• Macs account for two-thirds of sales of PCs costing $1,000 or more | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com - Data shows that Macs are 66% of >$1K PCs (and 14% overall). Wow. Part of this I think is that Apple has ended up capturing a slice of the market that people once thought would go to Linux. (Although as stshank notes this is retail--which skews the data somewhat esp. wrt Dell.)
• shimenawa - On owning books - And my biggest problem with the Kindle. [via William Patry]
• The Patry Copyright Blog: First Sale Victory in Vernor - U.S. District Court in Seattle "first sale doctrine" decision goes against Autodesk. This judgment basically held that it's OK to resell used software.
• Computer Programs Decide Humans' Fates, Set Social Policy, Panelists Say | Threat Level from Wired.com - Rather thought provoking post wrt Google. As "reading" mail to display ads becomes more sophisticated when does it become something akin to understanding with all sorts of implications?
• Official Google Blog: Introduction to Google Search Quality - Got to love this line: "For something that is used so often by so many people, surprisingly little is known about ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design."
• The Dvorak Keyboard Controversy: Interesting Thing of the Day - "The QWERTY keyboard layout is weird and hard to learn. A competitor, the Dvorak layout, may be superior, but arguments on both sides are so full of hype and bias that it's hard to determine who to believe."
• tecosystems » When is Open Open? And When is Open Closed? - Good discussion of this topic--including in the comments.
• Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World - Fascinating article.
• TuneGlue° | Relationship Explorer - A very cool looking music relationship explorer. [via VSL]

A PR Rant

It seems that, if possible, I'm getting more and more PR mail that, if not quite spam, certainly is starting to get in the neighborhood. I'm speaking of the press releases and PR missives that concern trivial announcements or events associated with trivial companies that are typically not even associated with anything I cover.

Let me give you a case in point. I'm not naming names because this is, unfortunately, but one random example among countless and I have no interest in embarrassing any specific individuals. (With the aid of Google, you can probably figure out the guilty party but I'm not going to.)

So let's start with the subject line.

ACME Recognized for Application Acceleration Innovation

Seeing that this is going to be about some sort of "recognition" or award has already started started my finger rapidly moving towards the delete key. Other leading candidates include CEO speeches, sales office openings, new Board of Directors members, random conferences, and new white papers on the company Web site.

I wanted to provide you with an update on ACME, a leading provider of solutions that accelerate dynamic web applications. Over the last week ACME has been recognized by three leading organizations for its innovations in the application acceleration space.

I don't especially care about accelerating dynamic web applications and I'm not sure what I've written or what it says in my bio that would make you think I do. But, then, it's hard to vet your list that carefully when this is doubtless going to thousands of your closest friends.

Most significantly, ACME received the Red Herring 100 Award given to the 100 most innovative private technology companies in North America by Red Herring magazine. Red Herring's annual list of top companies has traditionally identified new and innovative technologies and the companies responsible for them.

And this is the most significant? You see "magazine" isn't quite the operative word here because, well, there is no Red Herring magazine any longer. That went down last year. (In all fairness, because I am nothing if not fair, there is still an online edition but it's hardly the touchstone of high-tech journalism that it once was.)

In addition, ACME's BIT SCRAMBLER was named a finalist for the Best of TechEd 2008 IT Professional Award. The Best of Tech-Ed 2008 Awards recognize companies who offer innovative products in the industry. Winners will be selected by Window IT Pro and SQL Server magazines and announced at TechEd in June.

More magazine awards. Nothing personal, but I find most of these pretty bogus. I've even been involved in judging a few "Best of the Year" type things and I've found it all horribly arbitrary once you get away from products that have actually been hands-on comparison-tested. Oh, and I see they're just a finalist--which for all I know means they just entered themselves for the award.

Finally, the British Colombia [sic] Technology Industry Association (BCTIA) selected ACME as a finalist for the Most Promising Start-Up and Excellence in Product Innovation categories in its annual Technology Impact Awards, the premier awards program devoted to promoting and celebrating innovation and high-tech excellence in the province of British Columbia, Canada. Winners will be announced at the BCTIA's awards gala in June.

British Columbia is a very nice place. Vancouver, Victoria, Whistler--great destinations all. But with all due respect to my friends from British Columbia, now we're really starting to stretch. I'm sure the BCTIA awards gala is an affair not to be missed and all that, but--how do I put this nicely--did ACME really have to survive insurmountable odds to become, again, a finalist for this particular award?

I feel better now.

(Again. I have no desire to pile on this particular company. They're probably nice people, are kind to dogs, and may even make an interesting product. But this kind of email does not raise my estimation of them.)

[Update: And BTW. Unless our allies across the sea have invaded a certain South American country, I believe that the proper spelling for BC is "Columbia."]

Too much information is as bad as too little

There's a great point in this comment:

Not surprisingly, people develop strong filters for what information they're going to take in, let alone process. When you say oh it does no harm to provide people with more information, you're totally missing this. It certainly may do them harm, because, as a rule, all of our information bandwidth is presently occupied -- very few of us are standing around, in line at fast-food joints or not, wondering how we can find something to read or think about because our brain is just bored, bored, bored.

I ran into a situation just this weekend. My power went out Sunday morning. I have various outdoor cookery thingies out in the garage but that's sort of a pain. How about firing up my propane-powered stove? What could be the issue?  But the manual has this scary warning about NOT operating the stovetop.

I know the electrical spark thingies won't work but I'm OK with that. And the on/off lighting indicators won't work. OK as well.

And as far as I can determine those were the only reasons the stern warning was in the manual. Which decreases respect and observance for any other warnings that have a serious basis. Of course, many of the other warnings involve admonitions about warming up your gasoline on the stovetop and the like. Not that these aren't things to guard against but the conflating of the basic common sense with the the non-obvious but important doesn't do anyone a favor.

Links for 05-20-2008

• Oracle Confirms $285M Utah Data Center - Data Center Knowledge - Although this datacenter is for several purposes, this article highlights Oracle's On Demand business. It's logical/inevitable that large ISVs are getting into SaaS one way or another.
• How to Make Facebook Useful Again - ReadWriteWeb - "For true Facebook'ers, though, real email is for business only. Using Facebook (and MySpace) is how you talk to your friends. (The frightening implications of what this means to an I.T. department that is charged with email archiving for compliance purposes and yet doesn't block Facebook.com is a subject for another article!)" A lot of good thoughts in this post.
• 10 things you can do when Windows XP won’t boot | 10 Things | TechRepublic.com - A nice list--even if, in my experience, you spend a lot of time fiddling with this sort of thing and then you have to end up rebuilding the system from scratch anyway.
• Megan McArdle (May 19, 2008) - Nature, nurture, or what? - A lot of interesting discussion in the comments. I found myself going a lot "He's right" and, then. a minute later "No, he's right."
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Cloud may squeeze margins, says Microsoft exec - "In five years, 50 percent of our Exchange mailboxes will be Exchange Online," said [Microsoft SVP] Capossela, who expects a portion of Exchange Online customers to come from customers switching from International Business Machines' Lotus Domino system."
• Distractions: Why Solitaire is Still Addictive - To be honest, I find the "mindless" computer games less interesting than I did before there was so much stuff on the Web I could waste time with :-)
• The Volokh Conspiracy - Dartmouth VRWC Yadda Yadda: - Todd Zywicki, who was elected as a petition trustee, on various matters related to the current fight over Dartmouth Board of Trustees representation.

New pics from Nevada

Earlier this month, I had a few days off between events in Las Vegas and San Francisco so I decided to rent a car and spend the time exploring some ghost town and semi-ghost towns in Nevada--as well as Great Basin National Park (the former Lehman Caves National Monument). My Nevada photos (99% from this trip) are in this Flickr set. (Photo on the left is from Pioche.)

Links for 05-19-2008

• Amazon Web Services Blog: Lots of Bits - Amazon Web Services now consume more bandwidth than Amazon.com retail sites.
• Marginal Revolution: The Uncanny Valley - "It was well known that as depictions of humans became more lifelike, audiences would perceive them as more appealing -- until the realism reached a certain point, close to human but not quite, when suddenly the depictions would be perceived as repulsive. "
• ivan krstić · code culture » Sic Transit Gloria Laptopio - Not a disinterested observer but an in-depth look at what is increasingly looking like the OLPC debacle.
• Five Reasons -- Wait, Six! -- to Start Considering WiMax Today - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership - So I guess the betting money is that wimax may actually happen one of these days.

Links for 05-16-2008

• Smithereens: It's like your mother always said, if you play your music too loud in those earphones, you'll get killed by fallen aircraft... wait, was that it? - "Now I certainly agree that it is just common sense to make sure you can hear when you are going to be near moving vehicles, but let's be serious here, this kid was not hit by a city bus, it was a lightweight aircraft, keyword being air, where it ought to have stayed."
• Coding Horror: Where Are All the Open Source Billionaires? - This is from last year but I've been thinking about some of these issues again. WRT some of the comments, while it's certainly true that open source is not a business plan, it does effectively constrain associated business plans in some important ways.

Links for 05-15-2008

• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Gilligan's web - "Despite the party-pooperism of the Deletionists, the true glory of Wikipedia continues to lie in the obscure, the arcane, and the ephemeral. Nowhere else will you find such painstakingly detailed descriptions of TV shows, video games, cartoons, obsolete software languages, Canadian train stations, and the workings of machines that exist only in science fiction. "
• Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web - ReadWriteWeb
• Watching a new word spread through the blogosphere - Duke Listens! - This is, in a sense, the dark side of online advertising. A HUGE number of people scrape content in the hope (I'd guess largely futile) of making a quick buck.
• Coast Guide Online - Massachusetts Coast Guide to Boston & the North Shore provides maps and descriptions of not only the spectacular beaches found on major road maps, but smaller, little-known coastal treasures too.
• Google vs. Microsoft may not be zero sum, but... | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs - "I suspect that OpenOffice wasn't disruptive enough. It's not purely a question of license cost: It's also a question of training and deployment costs." Bingo. Cloud computing deployments costs aren't zero either, but they're lower.
• Wi-Fi Networking News: EarthLink Will Shutter Philadelphia Network, Company Says - And the telcos wanted to FIGHT muni wi-fi?
• Cleaning Camera Sensors - Good overview of cleaning DSLR sensors by Jeff Greene.
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: HP rolls up EDS - Although Nick Carr (of all people) disagrees. "In a conference call this morning, he [Hurd] highlighted "a leaner cost structure" as one of the major benefits of the merger. "There's a tremendous leverage you get from scale," he said. With this buy, Hurd doesn't have his head in the clouds. His concerns are altogether earthly."
• HP-EDS: It’s About The Clouds, Baby! - GigaOM - This echoes some of my thoughts about the deal. Whether people buy computers or computing, HP wants a seat at the table.
• 60 Photography Links You Can’t Live Without at CameraPorn - Some I know, a few I don't care for, but some good stuff here to check out.

Links for 05-13-2008

• HP’s bid for EDS: Opportunity costs loom | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com - Overall, I'm probably a bit more positive (mostly because of Mark Hurd) but I basically agree with Larry's analysis.
• When Crowdsourcing Fails: Cambrian House Headed to the Deadpool - From the comments: "A key assumption for us, which proved out NOT true: given a great idea with great community support and great market test data, we would be able to find (crowdsource) a team willing to execute it OR we could execute it ourselves. We needed amazing founding teams for each of the ideas – this is where our model fell short." i.e. execution trumps ideas.
• Why Yelp Works - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - Egoboo apparently survives as part of a viable business model given the right conditions.
• The Canon FD Documentation Project - Main Menu - Very comprehensive archive of Canon FD manuals.
• Are Americans Afraid of the Outdoors?: Scientific American - Although the data is intriguing, drawing a correlation with video games is very bad statistics.
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Why Dell will not bounce back - This is really funny--with just enough truth to be really brilliant.
• Megan McArdle - "The Brijit concept is similar: take people who have time but no money, and marry them to people who have money but no time. Or rather, pay the people who have a lot of time on their hands to read stuff, and then tell the people who have money but no time what they really need to look at, and what they can safely skip."
• Tiki: Interesting Thing of the Day - "in keeping with the modern “retro is good” meme, Tiki is experiencing a renaissance. I couldn’t be happier. I missed the Tiki fad the first time around, and of all the imaginary cultures I’ve experienced, Tiki is among my favorites. "

Links for 05-07-2007

• Annals of Innovation: In the Air: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - Malcolm Gladwell on innovation and invention.


• Black Star Rising - Stock Photographers Keep Playing the Hits - "Like popular songs manufactured from a formula, stock photo "hits" aren't necessarily the photos you'd choose as the best representatives of your heart or talent -- but they sure can pull in dollars for you while you are laboring to survive in the stock photo industry."


• Fairness, idealism and other atrocities - Los Angeles Times - "Commencement advice you're unlikely to hear elsewhere." from P.J. O'Rourke [via Marginal Revolution]


• 25 WYSIWYG Editors Reviewed | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine - When it comes to coding editors, it's damn hard a get clear overview of all the benefits and functionalities different editors have offer. However, in end everybody needs one, so important know which editor is


• A How-to Guide to How-to Videos | Katherine Boehret | The Mossberg Solution | AllThingsD - "It's not always easy to learn from the information you find online, and how-to videos can be a big help -- especially when they're well-made and discoverable using sites featuring instructional clips."


• It's official: The future of Sun/MySQL is open...and closed | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs - I agree with Matt. Sun has clarified--if in a somewhat offhand way--what its "hybrid" software strategy going forward is. There have been consistently uttered codewords.


• Megan McArdle (May 06, 2008) - What's wrong with chain restaurants? - I try to avoid most chain restaurants but I guess I agree with this more than not.


• Happy spamiversary! Spam reaches 30 - tech - 25 April 2008 - New Scientist Tech - A bulk advertising message sent on the precursor to the internet 30 years ago spawned a phenomenon that now accounts for 90% of all email


• Delta Rolls Out Fancy Seats for Plebeians | Popular Science - Looks interesting.


• Trendpedia (beta) - Social media monitoring, buzz tracking, brand measurement and blog trend search - I'm not sure how much stock to put in these trends tools but I've used them to backup some intuitive impressions about "buzz" levels.


• Reason Magazine - Huzza for Commerce! - "Hotels, then and now, are a material manifestation of a world that prizes free mobility and peaceful exchange."


• OGC unveils new logo to red faces - Telegraph - Very funny.


• There is No Web 3.0, There is No Web 2.0 - There is Just the Web - ReadWriteWeb - I pretty much agree, if only because "web 3.0" seems to encompass a variety of at least somewhat orthogonal things.


• Sun chum Oracle pushes database buyers to IBM | The Register - Per-core pricing and power factors are such a fricking mess. I had to deal with this sort of customized pricing for each new system generation back in the bad old days.


• Linux 2 6 25 - Linux Kernel Newbies - Summary of the changes and new features merged in the Linux Kernel during the 2.6.25 development.

Links for 04-25-2007

• View from the Wing » Blog Archive » Air Traffic Delays Are Awful, Everything Else is Worse - "So in the end we’re left with piecemeal tinkering, and a recognition that in a politically constrained world we have tradeoffs — and the current world is better than the one of thirty years ago."
• EconLog, Loose Mortgage Credit, Arnold Kling: Library of Economics and Liberty - "Keep this in mind when people say that better regulation could have prevented this problem. It sounds like what they are talking is that lenders charged exorbitant interest rates to hapless borrowers. In fact, lenders were guilty of charging borrowers too little for loans, as well as approving too many unqualified borrowers. If you think that alert regulators would have cracked down on lenders for providing too many home ownership opportunities to Americans, especially minorities, then you believe in a different political environment than what I remember."
• Tilt Shift Photography Comes to Advertising - Shoot The Blog - I love how these look like miniatures-- I guess because we associate that sort of out-of-focusness with pictures of small things.
• Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll: The myth, science and craft of music discovery - "The dynamics of discovery include a whole ecology of social recommendations, automated recommender systems, happenstance and serendipity — and the interactions between all of these influences."
• Man discovers his net wasn't neutered | The Register - "So why wasn't accidental downtime the first suspect? That's the first sign that the mob is in charge. The most rational explanation becomes the least obvious. Occam's Razor has been put away and forgotten."
• Ten things to know about Microsoft’s Live Mesh | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com - Nice overview of Microsoft's Live Mesh.
• How Is New York Like a Japanese Farm Stand? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog - I confess that I'm shocked the number is so high.

Links for 04-23-2008

• Exodus of key figures from OLPC a troubling sign for project - "Although OLPC may be close to going on life support, it's important to note that its efforts so far have have contributed much to budget computing and open technology. The organization's vision largely influenced the emergence of competition in the budget subnotebook market." Sounds about right.
• The Constant Siege - I spent a lot of time in B&W darkrooms once upon a time even though I was never anything like this obsessive.
• HipMojo.com » eBay and Craigslist - Why Companies Who Invest Ask for Control" - '“Put the bong down, the honeymoon is over' is the only message I can walk away from this news that eBay is suing Craig Newmark." (of craigslist)
• implemented » Web 3.0 - The Semantic, Implicit, Mobile or Distributed Web? - A comprehensive study of the various definitions of Web 3.0 that people have used in the past, including the Semantic, Mobile, Implicit and the proposed Distributed Web.
• Google's festering problem with the AGPL | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs - Not especially surprising that Google doesn't want to go anywhere near licenses that treat Web services as a form of software "distribution" from a license perspective.
• VMware placates Wall Street with 70 per cent Q1 revenue surge | The Register - It's worth noting that VMware leads in x86 virtualization revenue--by far (as in roughly two orders of magnitude).
• Airlines to Charge for Second Bag - New York Times - Five major airlines plan to start charging coach passengers as much as $25 next month to check a second bag. Uggh but probably inevitable. This doesn't affect me on business but will on personal trips when I'm lugging a lot of camping gear.
• WebUrbanist » 7 Abandoned Wonders of the Former Soviet Union: Deserted Cities, Buildings, Bases and More - I found this fascinating.
• Cloud Vendors A to Z (Revised) | John M Willis ESM Blog - A long list of cloud computing players--mostly those on the infrastructure side in one form or another. There are a few true SaaS (application) companies listed but it's just a sampling. I'd quibble with some of the specifics but a good view of the landscape.
• How Valid Are T.V. Weather Forecasts? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog - "no forecaster is ever better than just assuming it won’t rain. If you think that’s bad, sadly it gets worse"

The Best Simple Explanation to the Monty Hall Problem

The Monty Hall problem is always good for an argument. For me, though, the basic version is pretty straightforward. Well, after I found the right way to visualize it anyway. (Basically if he knows where the prize is and will always open one of his two doors without the prize, you're effectively being given the opportunity to trade your one door for his two.) However, the question of whether the assumption that Monty knows where the prize is affects the benefit of switching. It does and it's not intuitive--at least to me. The below comment does a good job of succinctly explaining.

There are a lot of people arguing that Monte not knowing still makes it worth switching. It doesn't. Here's why. (From here on I'm spelling it Monty.) If Monty knows, the possibilities are:
1. You picked car. Monty opens a goat. Switching bad.
2. You picked goat A. Monty opens a goat. Switching good.
3. You picked goat B. Monty opens a goat. Switching good.

Two good switch, one bad switch. 2/3 chance it's worth switching.

If Monty doesn't know, the possibilities are:
1. You picked car. Monty opens Goat A. Switching bad.
2. You picked car. Monty opens Goat B. Switching bad.
3. You picked goat A. Monty opens Goat B. Switching good.
4. You picked goat A. Monty opens car. No switch option.
5. You picked goat B. Monty opes Goat A. Switching good.
6. You picked goat B. Monty opens car. No switch option.

So in this case there is 2/6 chance switching is bad, 2/6 chance switching is good, and 2/6 chance you don't have the option to switch. If you *do* have the option, that leaves you 2/4 and 2/4 good or bad. (Fractions not minimised to avoid confusing people.)

Posted by: RavenBlack | April 15, 2008 at 05:56 PM