Links for 05-26-2010

• HP outperforms IBM in Q1 server sales - Servers - ComputerworldUK - The shift towards x86 at the high end does seem to be accelerating.
• The Wrong Way to Cloud-Enable A Data Center « Data Center Knowledge - This is good!
• 'Lost' finale: All the unanswered questions, courtesy of College Humor - From Inside the Box - Zap2it - Pretty good!
• Home - Cloud Commons
• CloudStandards - A wiki litng various standardization efforts going on around cloud computing.
• IBM's Moffat, Chiesi Were `Intimate,' U.S. Says - Bloomberg - Can't say this story is a shocker. It's the only thing that ever made any sense to me.
• An analysis of WebM and its patent risk | carlodaffara.conecta.it - This post is more optimistic about patent risk in WebM because of apparent deliberate(?) "sub-optimal" choices.
• IPad Rivals Encounter Delays - Forbes.com - Not that I had any regrets, but makes me feel that much better about not waiting for whatever the "ideal" device coming down the pike turns out to be.
• HP explains why printer ink is so expensive - Computerworld Blogs
• Practical Analysis: The Slog Toward Private Clouds -- Cloud Computing -- InformationWeek - "SaaS is simply better understood than the other forms of cloud computing, including internal private clouds, and that comes through in our survey." << Consistent with what I see as well. And only gets more pronounced among less IT-savvy audiences.
• Internet Evolution - Midmarket Clan Editor's Blog - Midmarket Favors Local Cloud Support - "While your average midmarket company may do massive amounts of business with larger suppliers, they are more likely to favor cloud computing service and support from smaller vendors located closer to their own businesses." << Another reason why public clouds aren't just about mega-providers.
• There is No Such Thing as Mass Culture Any More - Business - The Atlantic - "We live in a different world, one where there's something for almost everyone--but not the same thing."

Links for 05-24-2010

• Logitech’s big plans for Google TV | VentureBeat - Although it's only a part of the problem, input devices for the 10 ft experience are sorely deficient. But Logitech comes among the closest today.
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Another Foxconn jumper, and you know who’s the real victim? Me - This is in such poor taste. I will not laugh. I will not laugh.
• Sayonara, iPhone: Why I'm Switching to Android - Techtonic Shifts Blog - Newsweek.com - Smack down by Dan Lyons aka FSJ.
• Could cloud computing get any more confusing? | ZDNet - This seems to specirfically refer to public clouds.
• Apple Marketing's Top 10 Dumb Mistakes | Sales Machine | BNET - I disagree with most of this.
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : “One man, one company” - It's FSJ but the quote is real. Google and Apple are officially at war. “If we did not act, we faced a draconian future, where one man, one company, one carrier was the future.”
• Top 10 LOST Twists « The Bottom Shelf
• RIP: Tech That Will Die this Decade | ConceivablyTech - I disagree about PC/Mac though I suspect that's there at least partly to be provocative. The rest I mostly (though not entirely) agree with for loose enough definitions of dead and with stated qualifications.

Links for 05-20-2010

• I want choice, but only if I agree with your choice | thomas fitzgerald.net - "I think Ted’s problem, like that of many analysts/bloggers/journalists/geeks etc on the issue is that they’re confusing fundamental flaws with not liking something. People like Ted don’t like the closed nature of the App store, but that doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally flawed, or a lack of choice."
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: What are the Key Qualities of a Great City?
• Six Degrees of Black Sabbath #6dobs - Cool app showing the relationships between two musicians.
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : From the mailbag - "The times they are a changing, and very soon the all-purpose computer, where you can buy and run any software you want, will be obsolete, replaced by the iPad, which costs more and does less and only runs software made by Apple or approved by Apple and sold through Apple’s store. This is the future and it will be way better than what we’ve had so far, which is why legacy PC companies are freaking the fuck out. They see their messy “open” world slipping away and being replaced by the neat, tidy world where everything works seamlessly because, frankly, there are no seams."
• Diary Of An x264 Developer » The first in-depth technical analysis of VP8 - Very in-depth analysis and this: "Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today’s overly litigious day and age. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. Until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be extremely cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem."
• Stack Wars: What Is The Enterprise Stack? « Wikibon Blog - "The pending enterprise stack wars pit highly vertically integrated companies against a virtually integrated whole. In theory, the vertical approach can be more easily managed because its owned by a single company. However the virtual approach is more open and potentially has more industry reach."
• Why IBM, Microsoft and SAP Like Oracle’s Apple Strategy With Sun — Datamation.com - Worth reading.
• Web Browsers Leave 'Fingerprints' Behind as You Surf the Net | Electronic Frontier Foundation - I participated in this a while back and my browser was easily unique. It's hard to evaluate the actual risk here but correlation can be quite powerful.
• S4 - Super Simple Storage Service - It look me a minute to realize this was a joke because I could actually imagine a pricing scheme for cloud-based backups where making the backup was cheap but there was a significant charge for doing a restore.

Links for 05-18-2010

• Is PaaS Just Outsourced Application Server Platforms? - How PaaS relates to app servers.
• Marginal Revolution: Questions that are rarely asked - "If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its function be and what would it look like?"
• Cloud Computing and Electricity: Beyond the Utility Model | May 2010 | Communications of the ACM - Some good analysis of the limits of the utility model in cloud computing.
• Marco.org - The iPad doesn’t need to do everything - Absolutely 100% spot-on.

Links for 05-17-2010

• Harvard International Review - "His argument is constructed on the premise that there are four competing explanations for weak victory in asymmetric wars, each of which has weaknesses in predicting outcomes or explaining the trend of increasing weak actor victories."
• Chronicles of Conflict: the History of Adobe vs. Apple — RoughlyDrafted Magazine - Good history of Adobe and Apple.
• Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight - Great head. Good article too.

Links for 05-13-2010

• Lost and Heroes: In Defense of Arrogance - Tuned In - TIME.com - " "Awesome" and "awful" are actually closer to each other on the continuum of quality than either is to "meh." "
• Why Ma Bell Got the Ill Communication | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD - "Nearly one in four U.S. households has abandoned traditional landline telephones in favor of their wireless brethren. " Knew it was a trend but had no idea it was this high.
• Special Report: Can That Guy in Ironman 2 Whip IBM in Real Life? - ABC News - ""The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed," said Ellison. "Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.""
• What Makes a Data Center a Private Cloud? . Datacenter Blog . Blogs . IDC Insights Community - IDC: What makes a private cloud.
• Does Virtualization Security Really Matter? | Andi Mann – Übergeek - Andi makes the case that interest levels in pure-play virtualization security have waned.
• James Hamilton on cloud economies of scale | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - I'm not at all convinced that anyone yet has a good understanding of how the economics of well-run enterprise-class private clouds stack up against those of a provider like Amazon.
• Marginal Revolution: Are you an asker or a guesser? - Fascinating.
• Hitsville » The case against non-profit news sites - Good read.

Links for 05-11-2010

• First-ever test of public cloud management wares
• How to Save the News - Magazine - The Atlantic - "That goal is a reinvented business model to sustain professional news-gathering. This is essential if the “crowd sourcing” and citizen journalism that have already transformed news coverage—for instance, the videos from inside the Iranian protests last summer—are not to be the world’s only source of information. Accounts like those are certainly valuable, but they will be all the more significant if they are buttressed by reports from people who are paid to keep track of government agencies, go into danger zones, investigate and analyze public and private abuse, and generally serve as systematic rather than ad hoc observers. (I am talking about what journalism should do, not what it often does.) "
• ASCII by Jason Scott / DistriWiki: A Proposal - Interesting discussion but ultimately distribution suggests to me the Web as a whole rather than Wikipedia whether in multiple forms or not.
• The Lost Tribes of RadioShack: Tinkerers Search for New Spiritual Home | Magazine - I confess that I've tended to view Radio Shack as the source of last resort but a long-term trend seems to be intensifying.
• Your Virtual Machine Teleporter is ready Are you? - Virtual Geek

Links for 05-10-2010

• Multi-Tenant, Silver: On-Demand/Hosted, Tinsel « The Applicator - I read this as a long-winded rant that private clouds are bad without using that term.
• Say Goodbye to the Computer Keyboard and Mouse | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD
• VIDEO: Your Light Saber and You - Vintage instructional film. Good stuff!
• DODOcase - Welcome - Looks nice. My only concern was also voiced by Macgirl that the foam in the corners might well wear out/compress over time.
• best of craigslist: Contest to be my boss! - I feel uncomfortable about those "compete to design my logo for $200" sites.
• The Full ‘Metropolis’ - NYTimes.com - Yah. Not especially a film I agreee with politically but nevertheless a brilliant piece of work.

Links for 05-07-2010

• Carcassonne Board Game Coming to IPhone, IPad - PCWorld - I've been wanting to try out this game for ages. Sounds like a good opportunity.
• Inconvenient Questions - Game developers bitch, at least privately, but, yeah, the technorati to the degree that they think about it at all seem to accept that the closed development environments of gaming consoles is just the way things are.
• What iPads Did To My Family - Chuck's Blog - Anyone who refers to "the family NAS server" and the household support escalation process is definitely a geek! Otherwise, this post does make me go hmm. I've been thinking of the iPad as a replacement for a Kindle or as a travel device. Maybe that's wrong.
• A Note on Newsweek (long) (updated) - Culture - The Atlantic - Pre the full richness of today's Web, I found weekly news mags (typically Time) a good way to make sure I was somehow getting synced up with important happenings, trends, etc.; I was not a big reader of daily newspapers or the evening news. That function is, of course, long gone.
• Awesome one-man reenactment of Downfall "Hitler Bunker" scene - Boing Boing
• Analyst: Netbook Sales Growth Declining Since Apple iPad Announced | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD - Some correlation does seem probable as both devices can be thought of as being in an "supplementary low-end mobile device that isn't a full-fledged notebook" category.
• Cloud Computing Trends and Services | Walt Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD - One of the things that causes a lot of confusion is that what consumers think of as the "cloud" (SaaS, Web 2.0, etc.) actually has very little to do with cloud computing infrastructure.

Links for 05-05-2010

• Darwin's Finches, 20th Century Business, and APIs - Cool slide show.
• Why is Business Writing So Awful? - Not really fair for a variety of reasons, but very true.
• from dc to light : Disable autocomplete in OpenOffice - This comment says it all. "That function is the absolute worst ever in the history of horrible functions. I nearly deleted open office."

Links for 05-04-2010

• Cloud.com | The Power Behind Your Cloud - I just found out that Peder Ulander (who I know from Sun) now runs marketing here.
• Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909 - Recombu
• Understanding Cloud Datacenter Economies of Scale | Cloudscaling - James Urquhart disputes the claims around networking but this post gives a good overview of economies of scale. It's an important point because some early cloud assumptions posited very high scale points needed for economies.
• 1,000,000 iPads. 28 days. First Take « GartenBlog - "Apple has validated this market. As i’ve talked in the past, there’s a worldwide market for 50,000 of anything. Try to sell 500,00 that’s another story. Get to a million and you’re a success by any measure. I suspect that in the history of ‘tweener devices, if you added up all the efforts over the last decade they likely didn’t app to a million units sold. The market is real and it’s a new line of business."

What the Millionth iPad Means

From Michael Gartenberg:

Apple has validated this market. As i’ve talked in the past, there’s a worldwide market for 50,000 of anything. Try to sell 500,00 that’s another story. Get to a million and you’re a success by any measure. I suspect that in the history of ‘tweener devices, if you added up all the efforts over the last decade they likely didn’t app to a million units sold. The market is real and it’s a new line of business.

I concur. Maybe there's a worldwide market for 100,000 of anything from Apple. But nonetheless, I largely agree with Michael.

The iPad costs more than I want to spend for where it is technologically. I'm looking for something lighter, cheaper, and more readable in sunlight. In other words, something that could replace my Kindle when traveling rather than be an additional device to carry.

But that's more of a comment on the state of the art of components than a knock on Apple who (the Flash mess aside) has, I think, generally done as good a job as they could have with what theey had to work with. It's also not a commentary on take on tablets being a legitimate tweener category. In fact, I'm a big believer.

Links for 05-03-2010

• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Realtimesink - "There's been much written about how the Web provides new opportunities for people to express themselves. That's true, and welcome. But the Web is also an enormous global timesink, sucking up massive amounts of time that might have gone into more productive, thoughtful, and fulfilling activities."
• Hardwood-Roasted Bone Marrow » Craigie On Main
• Europe.view: Redrawing the map | The Economist
• The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash - Charlie's Diary - "My take on the iPhone OS, and the iPad, isn't just that they're the start of a whole new range of Apple computers that have a user interface as radically different from their predecessors as the original Macintosh was from previous command-line PCs. Rather, they're a hugely ambitious attempt to keep Apple relevant to the future of computing, once Moore's law tapers off and the personal computer industry craters and turns into a profitability wasteland."
• tecosystems » Mobile is the New Desktop: The HP/Palm Q&A - This hits the "why" pretty well. I'm not sure anyone (including the parties involved) can truly know how well this will play out at this point.
• H.P. and Palm – P.D.A. Powerhouses Unite - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - I remember the time when everybody just HAD to have a PDA.
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : We are removing Flash support from OS X - Oh, this is really a good one!
• Steve Jobs’ Apple-Adobe Letter: A Bullshit-Free Translation - This is pretty funny (and pretty accurate).
• Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War - PowerPoint - NYTimes.com - This "death by Powerpoint" article has been getting a lot of press.
• Helping To Avoid A Really Bad Day - Chuck's Blog - Chuck makes a lot of great points.

Photos from Tuscany

Before I got started with my new job at Red Hat, I took a two week trip to Tuscany--beating the volcano back by about 24 hours. I spent time in Florence, some of the Sienese hill towns, the mountains near Barga, and the Cinque Terra (which is actually in the Liguria region just north of Tuscany). My photos are now up on Flickr and you can see them here.