Links for 12-01-2010

• Allegations Against Hurd Included Leak of H-P Plans - WSJ.com - This is probably as definitive an account as we'll get.
• Should China Rethink High Speed Rail? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - "To get a really catastrophic misallocation of resources, it seems to take a government; corporations can only screw things up on an artisinal scale."
• Are IT vendors missing the point of cloud? | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - "Developers are leading the charge to cloud, whether IT operations likes it or not. Cloud computing is an application-centric operations model, and as such its adoption is driven by how applications are built, packaged, deployed, monitored, and automated. Re-creating the server-, network-, and storage-centric approaches of the static past in a cloud environment is not conducive to meeting the demands of this new operations model."
• Online, Anonymity Breeds Contempt - NYTimes.com
• NIST Moves Forward on Cloud Computing
• Morgan Stanley's Legendary Tech Analyst Mary Meeker Moving To Kleiner Perkins
• I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of E-Mail - Cringely on technology
• The secret to how cats drink, as told to professors by Cutta Cutta
• New Beast on the Block - Tuned In - TIME.com - What a fall. This is almost worse than just fading away.
• The Economics of the Cloud: Dissecting a Must-Read White Paper - CIO.com - The lead argument in this data would seem to be that public clouds (in various forms) make sense for SMBs. Which is hard to argue with. The broader arguments I've seen based on this dat seem more... difficult.
• Open Atmosphere : Microsoft is the New "Open" | Network World - "You've got to Microsoft credit. They may have gotten beaten up by VMWare, bruised by Amazon, and haven't been very well acknowledged by the cloud market. But they have made some fundamental strategic changes designed to accomplish one thing, and one thing only: driving more applications and more users to their cloud. But the leopard hasn't really changed its spots. They've simply recognized the control points in the industry are changing. Microsoft is being more open on the periphery to draw users into its monolithic, proprietary cloud platform."
• You Write 'Bias Journalism' and I Read 'Derp' - Nice rant!
• 2010 Cloud Computing Predictions from around the Web - Good wrapup.
• TidBITS Opinion: A Eulogy for the Xserve: May It Rack in Peace - The fundamental issue is that just as Apple was thinking about getting more serious about enterprise computing, the iPod started to really take off.