Links for 05-16-2011

• Why Don’t We Video Chat More Often? | Singularity Hub - "Ten years ago if someone had told you that in 2011 everyone would have a webcam in their home or in their pocket, and that the cost of video chat was going to be zero, how many of us would have predicted that people still wouldn’t use it?"
• Louisiana River Control
• Michael Bay’s Scenario « xkcd - This is actually a good rundown on what's going on with the Mississippi River diversions going on in Louisiana.
• How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet"
• The IT Coffin Corner: Caught Between Virtualization Stall and the Cloud Barrier « Scott Crawford
• The story of the classic font Futura | Art and design | guardian.co.uk - "The news that Swedish design giant Ikea has decided to ditch the classic typeface Futura from its corporate branding has caused outrage among typophiles worldwide. But what does Futura look like? And why does it matter?"
• The cost benefit myth of the public cloud | Andi Mann – Übergeek - This has been perhaps the biggest surprise as cloud computing has developed.
• Why al-Qaida Hopes Osama bin Laden Did a Backup, and Other Cautionary Tales - Yottabytes: Storage and Disaster Recovery - Have to love lede: "Granted, it’s not every IT administrator who has to deal with a C-level executive in a remote office losing confidential company data because an elite armed military force broke into the place he was staying and took it. That said, there’s a number of lessons that IT administrators can take away from this week’s news."
• VMware’s CloudFoundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift – Compare and Contrast | The Virtualization Practice - "These are both works in progress and their scope will doubtless grow massively.  It would be nice if the two initiatives could somehow come together, since there is a lot of overlap, but in the real world we assume they won’t.  OpenShift seems to offer broader language options – notably PHP and Python, to be more serious about IaaS-cloud neutrality, to offer better J2EE support, and also to be more mature. CloudFoundry seems more unified and to offer a better route from development to production irrespective of whether the choice is made to use private or public clouds."
• When We Tested Nuclear Bombs - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic
• The New York Times Adjusts Printing on The Fly - FishbowlNY