- 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."
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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