Links for 01-17-2008

• ITunes Movie Rentals and Netflix Online: Different Markets - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - Good analysis of why these serve different needs.


• Joyent Outage Tied to Software Updates - Data Center Knowledge - One of the problems with being on the bleeding edge.


• Maison Fleury: SUN acquires MySQL for $1Gazillion - "There will not be an open source company that goes public for the foreseeable future. Liquidity is too good and too hard to pass up. The players are too big with too much at stake. That's a shame... I wanted to see an ecosystem of independent companies."


• Dynamist Blog: Phishing at Flickr - Flickr apparently claims to be unable to restore a maiciously-deleted account.


• Greg Matter : Weblog - "A decade later, databases matter even more. They are to storage what application containers are to computing. "


• tecosystems » Give Me a M: The MySQL/Sun Q&A - " if Red Hat is seeking an open source database alternative to complete its stack and compete with the larger entities, they’re [EnterpriseDB] probably the best remaining candidate."


• Old School BBS: The Chinese Social Networking Phenomenon - ReadWriteWeb - As a one-time active BBS user, I found this interesting.


• BurtonGroupResponseFinal.pdf (application/pdf Object) - ODF response to Burton Group report.


• Why I'm disappointed in Apple's ultraslim new laptop. - By Paul Boutin - Slate Magazine - This Slate article echoes some of my thoughts from yesterday. My biggest issue with the Air isn't a missing optical drive or something silly like that; it's the kluginess of connecting to anything but WiFi.


• Mandriva, Turbolinux enter Linux alliance | Underexposed - CNET News.com - "Forgive me if I sound skeptical, but during the nine years I've covered Linux, not once have I seen a favorable outcome to the partnership of the type Mandriva and Turbolinux announced Wednesday.


• Library of Congress Blog » My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven (Library of Congress) - A very interesting development; the LOC is starting to make photos from its collections available on flickr.