Links for 11-21-2011

• How Facebook is ruining sharing | Molly Rants - CNET News - "Sharing and recommendation shouldn't be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing--we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. Open Graph will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems."
• 1 visionary + 3 launchers + 1,500 employees = ? | Space Exploration | Air & Space Magazine
• Daring Fireball: Getting Steve Jobs Wrong - A good read although I agree with Gladwell more than not in this case.
• A human review of the Kindle Fire – Marco.org - "A tablet is a tough sell. It’s too big for your pocket, so you won’t always have it available like a phone. It’s too small to have rich and precise input methods like keyboards and mice, and its power and size constraints prevent it from using advanced PC-class hardware, so it’s probably not going to replace your laptop. It’s just one more gadget to charge, encase, carry (sometimes), care for, and update. And it’s one more expenditure that can easily be cut and done without, especially in an economic depression. “Tablets” weren’t a category that anyone needed to give a damn about until the iPad. It was a massive hit not because it managed to remove any of the problems inherent to tablets, but because it was so delightful, fun, and pleasant to use that anyone who tried their friend’s iPad for a few minutes needed to have one of their own."
• Man stole goat in Lakeway, served it at barbecue, police say - RT @jyarmis: ya know, we just don't get these kinds of stories up here in the northeast
• TOP500 List of Supercomputers Released | Linux.com - Wow. Just *one* Windows system on TOP500. Admittedly, more focused on smaller clusters but still.
• redhat.com | Downloadable Version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta Now Available to All - Downloadable version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 beta available
• Amazon: How and why did Amazon get into the cloud computing business? - Quora - The "use up excess capacity" origin of AWS is definitively a myth.
• 5 Ways We Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation | Cracked.com - "Older people talk about how fat you're getting, about childhood obesity and diabetes and how you're all lazy slugs. They imply that back in their day, kids got up and did 50 jump squats every morning just because they enjoyed the sense of pride in their self discipline. But let me let you in on a little secret: We only got exercise because there was nothing fun to do indoors. If they had Modern Warfare multiplayer when I was a kid, we would have played the shit out of it."
• Cambridge, MA police include yoga instructions with parking tickets | Nerve.com - "What will those smarty-pants up in Cambridge think of next? First they founded a couple of good schools*, then they invented rowing**, and now the Cambridge Police Department are printing stress-reducing yoga instructions on the back of parking tickets."
• Why Is Payroll Hard - "I once thought payroll was simple too. It turns out that it is essentially complex, because of all the special deals and weird practices that have been set up over years of union negotiations and HR people with strange ideas."
• eReaders are alive and well, thanks very much - FierceContentManagement - "Remember when some joker predicted the end of eReaders a while back--oh, that was me. In the words of the late, great Gilda Radner playing Emily Latella, "never mind." New research suggests that eReaders are not only doing well, they are dare I say, thriving." Shows how tricky predicting convergence trends can be.
• Magazine Archive - Technology Review - RT @jason_pontin: All of @techreview's archives going back to 1899 are now live on our Web site. Here's January 1899:
• How to replace low bit rate tracks with higher quality tracks from iTunes Match – MacDailyNews - Welcome Home - How to upgrade your local iTunes library w higher quality matches:
• Flash: Misunderstood by Adobe, Apple, the Haters, and the Press - "Seldom have I seen a technology so widely adopted yet so poorly understood, so polarized between haters and fanboys, and so indifferently managed by its owners.  It may have many other problems, but Flash’s worst problem is how widely it is misunderstood by key parties."
• xkcd: Map Projections - Today's xkcd is great for map geeks