Connections

Cloud computing's culture of discipline

2012-01-31T14:52:00.000-05:00

Enterprise architects have led the way to successful business transformations. That was one of the key points delivered by MIT's Jeanne Ross in an interview she did with my one-time analyst colleague, Dana Gardner. Ross is the Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research where she "studies how firms develop competitive advantage through the implementation and reuse of digitized platforms." The interview is excerpted in Gardner's ZDNet blog, which also links to the full podcast and transcript.

What particularly struck me about the interview is that, although the "cloud" word was essentially nowhere to be found, a great deal of Ross' points echoed best practices that I'm seeing coming out of the first wave of private cloud deployments.

...the thing we’re learning about enterprise architecture is that there’s a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline.
Nobody wants to get rid of the heroes in their company. Heroes are people who see a problem and solve it. But we do want to get past heroes sub-optimizing. What companies traditionally did before they started thinking about what architecture would mean, is they relied on individuals to do what seemed best and that clearly can sub-optimize in an environment that increasingly is global and requires things like a single face to the customer.
What we’re trying to do is adopt a culture of discipline, where there are certain things that people throughout an enterprise understand are the way things need to be done, so that we actually can operate as an enterprise, not as individuals all trying to do the best thing based on our own experience.

This philosophy is very much in line with the idea that a cloud moves beyond virtualization by shifting to a services-centric approach. This means offering a standardized catalog of services to users and controlling access to and deployment of those services through policy. In other words, it's about granting access to IT services within a framework of established, consistent policies. A "culture of discipline," if you would, rather than an ad hoc "culture of heroes." (I discuss more details of this shift in this CNET Blog Network post.)

What's worth noting about this culture of cloud computing in the context of cloud computing though is that it can really streamline the access to IT resources rather than the other way around. Yes, there are consistent controls and policies in place, but self-service access within that framework makes for more agility not less.

A discipline of culture doesn't need to mean a culture of "No." In fact, it can make saying "Yes" easier and faster.

Links for 01-31-2012

2012-01-31T13:22:00.001-05:00

Visualizing the Future of Tech - Cool visualization tho may be too high level to deduce a lot.
(500) https://www.illuminata.com/?name=tpcc - @merv I wrote this piece in 2004(!) TPC-C as a simulation of the real world has only gotten sillier since
MIT's Ross on how enterprise architecture and IT more than ever lead to business transformation | ZDNet - "Yes, the thing we’re learning about enterprise architecture is that there’s a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline."
One tsp. — Online Recipe Box
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Why publishers should give away ebooks - "Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right - in tune with the universe, somehow." -- Appealing idea. But I'm skeptical it can work in many cases.
The Future Of Screen Typography Is In Your Hands - Smashing Coding | Smashing Coding - "In many ways, 2012 is the new 1999. We have the freedom to work with any font we like via the @font-face selector. But our main tool, the browser, does not have any OpenType features to speak of. We have to create workarounds."
Open Virtualization Alliance – News & Events - I'll be speaking at the @OVAorg webinar 2/15-16. Register:
New Ferris Bueller Ad Released - The Daily Beast

Cloudy Chat podcast now live

2012-01-30T15:08:00.001-05:00

After way too many detours and struggles with XML, my Cloudy Chat podcast is now live on iTunes. My current plan is to use this podcast primarily as a forum for 5 to 15 minute interviews on topics related to cloud computing. The initial episodes feature Red Hatters talking about a variety of topics. Have a listen. Suggestions for topics or improvements welcome.

Links for 01-30-2012

2012-01-30T12:10:00.001-05:00

Virtual Pet Owners Sue Google Over Lost ‘Gold’ | paidContent - "Disputes over SuperPoke gold and other online currencies were once the stuff of futurists and law school hypotheticals. But now it’s big business—observers suspect the sale of virtual goods counts for a healthy portion of Faceook’s revenue. And Forbes magazine recently asked if the social network should be considered a central bank in light of the spread of Facebook Credits."
Red Hat on Open Source and the Cloud – Intel Conversations in the Cloud – Episode 37 | Connected Social Media - "In this Intel Conversations in the Cloud audio podcast with Allyson Klein: Gordon Haff from Red Hat chats about cloud topics including: management of cloud workloads, challenges in solution delivery in a hybrid model, a broader adoption of open source in cloud, and his company’s work with the Open Data Center Alliance."
The Ecommerce Revolution Is All About You | TechCrunch - "Amazon and Netflix represent the first wave of personalization. I believe that we are going to enter into the next wave of a more personalized e-commerce experience as retailers and e-commerce sites move towards mining data to improve sales and conversions."
CI Fail: Contextual Relevance Gone Bad | Forrester Blogs - Oops. Nurture emails gone bad.
Here Come the Cloud Cartels - NYTimes.com - Seems to be coming back to the Greg P "there will be 5 computers" meme which isn't really how things have been playing out.
Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
Bay Area Technology Professionals Can’t Get Hired as Industry Moves On - NYTimes.com - "“These are people who know how to run a factory floor, but most of these new companies don’t care about that,” said Connie Buck, a career counselor who helps run Pro Match."
Coming Apart by Charles Murray - Quiz - RT @mjasay: Interesting quiz/article on the ignorance of elite Americans about the mainstream
Amazing nature - The Eagle Owl - 1000 fps towards camera.

Links for 01-26-2012

2012-01-26T10:50:00.001-05:00

Google’s no-opt-out privacy changes and the end of the anonymous Internet - ComPost - The Washington Post - Miss the anonymous Internet? Seems hyperbolic. And for most of Internet's history was really no anonymity.
The new MPL | opensource.com - "The final reason is suggested by that last observation of the ascendancy of the Apache License. Though it is speculation based only on my personal impressions, I believe that the concept of weak copyleft has been losing relevance, with community projects increasingly choosing between either strong copyleft or a standard noncopyleft license. Developers who favor copyleft will tend to favor strong copyleft, while those who prioritize technology adoption over commons preservation will naturally favor permissive licenses. "
Corporations Are Required By Law To Maximize Profits | eBay v. Newmark | Senator Al Franken - Sort of.
e-books: You Can't Take It With You - Simon Says... - "If the e-book stores had framed their business as a super digital lending library (with prices to match) I might be an avid customer by now. Instead, by saying I am buying the book, and charging prices that are a delta on the cover price rather than a delta on the cost of a lending library, they draw my attention increasingly to all the things I can't do - lend, share, resell, bequeath. Perhaps it's time for some reframing?"
Winter Vegetable Recipes - Saveur.com
Alistair Croll: Thoughts on Hybrid Cloud Computing - Viewpoints - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Agree some. Disagree some.
Average Is Over - NYTimes.com - "In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over."
Target Sends Letter Vendors Asking for Help to Combat 'Showrooming' Comparison Shopping - WSJ.com - "Showrooming is an increasing problem for chains ranging from Best Buy Co. to Barnes & Noble Inc., at the same time that it's a boon for Amazon.com Inc. and other online retailers. This year store sales overall edged up 4.1% during the holiday shopping season, while online sales jumped 15%. And while online sales represent only 8% of total sales, that is up from just 2% in 2000."
Intel and InfiniBand: Pure HPC Play, or Is There a Fabric in the Works? | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com - RT @utollwi: Intel and InfiniBand: Pure HPC Play, or Is There a Fabric in the Works? -
t.co / Twitter - RT @TestKitchen: The Dark 'n' Stormy is gaining popularity. Throw a party and make your own Ginger Beer with this spicy DIY: ...
MIT Genius Stuffs 100 Processors Into Single Chip | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com - Good piece on Tilera backstory and "wimpy" cores vs. "brawny" cores.
InfiniBand eight years later | The Pervasive Data Center - CNET News - From the vaults. I wrote this update on InfiniBand in 2008.
IBM's Open Virtualization Alliance, oVirt and KVM Update | ZDNet - RT @dkusnetzky: My ZDnet post> IBM's Open Virtualization Alliance, oVirt and KVM Update
Intel Newsroom: News Stories: Intel Takes Key Step in Accelerating High-Performance Computing with InfiniBand Acquisition - RT @Chris_Gaun: Intel buys InfiniBand << Talk about coming full circle. Intel played big role in IB early then got out.
Intel shuffles management team - Intel, business issues - CIO - Intel management shuffle:

Links for 01-23-2012

2012-01-23T13:15:00.001-05:00

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com - "A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day."
Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Retrospective on Linux and Opinion on the Future | The Linux Foundation Video Site

Links for 01-20-2012

2012-01-20T12:48:00.001-05:00

Don't expect the end of electronics obsolescence anytime soon - O'Reilly Radar - I think certain device classes so tend to reach plateaus but, yes, rapid upgrades are more the norm than historically.
Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy | Hacker News - Ref HN thread Find bothersome reflexive condemnation follows ANY media copyright infringement enforcement
Gamasutra - News - Microsoft gamifies Visual Studio with achievements - Visual Studio "achievements"? Gamification has officially run amuck.
Amazon DynamoDB: First Look – tecosystems - Typically thorough writeup on Amazon DynamoDB by @sogrady
"Marathon Man" and cloud storage: Is it safe? - Computerworld Blogs - "For those of us in a cloud-related field, the same question -- "Is it safe?" -- is only slightly less cringe worthy. Here again, at least part of the torture stems from the lack of clarity about the question itself. When asked if public cloud storage is safe, (or cost effective, scalable, high-performance) the only correct answer has to be, "Compared to what?""

Links for 01-19-2012

2012-01-19T11:28:00.001-05:00

Romney Didn’t Win Iowa After All. Is It Too Late To Change the Story? | Entertainment | TIME.com - "Romney was leading New Hampshire by a lot anyway, and he went on to win it. But might he have lost a few percentage points from the perception that he had been weakened after Iowa? Maybe. Maybe not. There’s no time machine, no alternate timeline we can visit. If he had lost a few points, though, suddenly we would have been looking at an entirely different narrative: Romney came up just short in Iowa, having gone all in with his campaign in the closing weeks. Then he underperformed in New Hampshire, a state next door to Massachusetts, which he should have won going away. Is he weakened?"
(404) https://www.buzzfeed.com/burnred/predictions-of-what-2011-would-be-like-in-a-1911-n-281tvia - What 2011 will be like from 1911 @amcpherson << surprisingly accurate in many respects
Obama's Indefensible Pipeline Punt — The American Magazine - RT @nearwalden: Re-tweeting Vaclav Smil's analysis of Keystone XL from last November:
Why Sharing Passwords With Your Girlfriend/Boyfriend Is A Spectacularly Bad Idea - Forbes - "There is something pure and romantic about the idea of sharing everything, and having no secrets from one another. But it’s romantic the same way that Romeo and Juliet is romantic, in a tragic, horrible, everyone-is-miserable-and-dies-at-the-end kind of way."
Cisco boasts of 10,000th server customer • Channel Register - "The jury is still out as to whether Cisco Systems' foray into servers hasn't done more harm than good to its overall business, but one thing seems certain: the business is growing. Cisco's iron is competing and the Unified Computing System blade and rack servers cannot be called a failure. Earlier this month, Cisco added its 10,000th server customer and the company, which has been under intense pressure in its core router and switch business in the past two years, wanted to brag a bit about how this business is growing – and about who is buying its server iron."
Services | Navigating Through The Cloud - RT @rladvisory: - Figuring Cloud Costs: @rladvisory << Good advice
Figuring Cloud Costs - "The key message here is not to assume that just because it’s Cloud it’s always going to be cheaper than an on-premise equivalent. If you own IT applications and infrastructure that still have some life in them, your switching costs may be far from trivial."
How a private cloud goes beyond virtualization management | The Pervasive Data Center - CNET News - RT @adjamianinc: Excellent article about private cloud and virtualization, very articulate.
redhat.com | SOPA and PIPA: Threatening Innovation and Economic Growth - #redhat blog on SOPA & PIPA: "Threatening Innovation and Economic Growth"
Amazon Takes Another Pass at NoSQL with DynamoDB - ReadWriteCloud
Yahoo's Yang is gone. That was the easy part | Deep Tech - CNET News - "In the early days of the Web, Yang got a lot of credit. Today, he's getting a lot of the blame, implicit in the 3 percent after-hours rise in Yahoo's stock price that elevated its market capitalization by more than $500 million. Call it the Great Scapegoat theory of history."

Links for 01-18-2012

2012-01-18T10:42:00.001-05:00

The Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library :: View Collecition
Bostonography - A lot of cool mapping visualizations around Boston.
Ueno Park, Tokyo | Flickr - Photo Sharing! - A new strategy for improving in Gartner MQs:
Can the naysaying and give Jerry Yang his due - CBS News - "No way around it - that's all part of his legacy. Yet it's only part of his legacy. History seems so clear with the benefit of hindsight. Faulting Yang for failing to see over the same horizon that blinded most of the rest of us is the easy, uncharitable call. Let's credit a legendary tech pioneer for a record of accomplishment that deserves commendation."
Rocky Horror: Let's Do the Time Warp Again, Again. Ryan Landry Kicks Up Dr. Frank-N-Furter at Oberon - JimSullivanInk.com - Going to go see Rocky Horror on stage this Friday at Oberon!
PandoDaily: Just What We Needed, Another Tech-News Site - San Francisco News - The Snitch - "Ah, yes. "Disclosure." This is Arrington's watchword, too. It's based on the addled idea that, as long as you disclose the fact that you're shamelessly shilling for some company, it's okay to shamelessly shill for some company. Which is better than not disclosing, but it still raises the question of how readers are served. "

Links for 01-17-2012

2012-01-17T13:43:00.001-05:00

Goodnight, Television? | Techland | TIME.com - "We’re still some distance from a world where online streaming of content can truly challenge the dominance of television, but recent figures suggest that the number of households in the U.S. with at least one television actually fell in 2011. Are we finally seeing the long-awaited beginning of “cord-cutting”? And if so, what are people cutting their cords in favor of?"
Kodak and the Brutal Difficulty of Transformation - Scott Anthony - Harvard Business Review - "Kodak's struggles show how brutally hard it is to get transformation right. The company took aggressive action, became a viable player in the emerging disruptive space, invested in new growth businesses, but it just doesn't seem like it was enough."
Tech Industry Buys Itself a Mouthpiece - "How did Silicon Valleys bigwigs react when their favorite trade publication adopted strict new conflicts of interest policies? They banded together to pay someone else to cover them." << Ouch! (Though, however snarky, I don't really disagree.)
No Demand for Windows 8 Tablets? Or Don't Trust Predictive Surveys CIO.com - I agree with Rob here. No one really knows. My biggest question here is how many of the relevant players focus sufficiently on usage models--i.e. really understand and account for differences between tablets and PCs.
Twitter - Cool look at unit numbers in personal computing history

Why Fujifilm Survives (and Kodak May Not)

2012-01-16T17:00:00.001-05:00

The Economist this week has a really good article about the diverging fortunes of Kodak and Fujifilm. The reasons given in the article are various although many of them can be summed up as poor execution and slowness to change on the part of Kodak.

It's not that Kodak didn't see change coming. For example, "Larry Matteson, a former Kodak executive who now teaches at the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business, recalls writing a report in 1979 detailing, fairly accurately, how different parts of the market would switch from film to digital, starting with government reconnaissance, then professional photography and finally the mass market, all by 2010. He was only a few years out."

I encourage you to read the whole article, but I wanted to point out one particular contrast. It's interesting because it runs something counter to certain conventional Marketing 101 wisdom.

Kodak tried (unsuccessfully) to parlay its experience with chemicals into pharmaceuticals. However, its main thrust was ultimately to transition their analog film business directly into the digital domain. As the article notes, "George Fisher, who served as Kodak’s boss from 1993 until 1999, decided that its expertise lay not in chemicals but in imaging. He cranked out digital cameras and offered customers the ability to post and share pictures online." By contrast:

Fujifilm diversified more successfully. Film is a bit like skin: both contain collagen. Just as photos fade because of oxidation, cosmetics firms would like you to think that skin is preserved with anti-oxidants. In Fujifilm’s library of 200,000 chemical compounds, some 4,000 are related to anti-oxidants. So the company launched a line of cosmetics, called Astalift, which is sold in Asia and is being launched in Europe this year.
Fujifilm also sought new outlets for its expertise in film: for example, making optical films for LCD flat-panel screens. It has invested $4 billion in the business since 2000. And this has paid off. In one sort of film, to expand the LCD viewing angle, Fujifilm enjoys a 100% market share.

Kodak's execution may have been flawed but, in important respects, its strategy stemmed almost directly from Theodore Levitt's famous 1960 Harvard Business Review article, "Marketing Myopia." This article popularized the idea that companies should define themselves in terms of markets and customer needs, rather than products--such as thinking in terms of the "transportation" market rather than the "railroad" product. The idea is that companies doing so are better able to transition to new products and services as underlying technologies and environments change.

When Kodak decided it wasn't in the film business (a product) but in imaging (a broader customer need), it was following a well-worn strategic dictum.

While this can be a good approach, I've argued previously that it's often not. "Understanding of customers," or brand strength, or distribution channels can be less important than fundamental competitive advantages rooted in technology.

Links for 01-16-2012

2012-01-16T12:50:00.001-05:00

Red Hat, IBM, EMC, Cisco join 'cloud' open standards group :: Editor's Blog at WRAL Tech Wire - "IDC analyst Mary Johnston Turner, praised the idea, telling Gigaom that application portability is critical. “A lot of what goes on now with cloud is really silo’d — an app here, an app there. We all talk about the hybrid cloud, but without application portability it won’t happen because it’s really hard to actually move workloads around,” she told Barb Darow."
Tech giants back standard for cloud portability | Cloud computing - InfoWorld - "In an effort to make cloud service more portable, a group of tech giants that includes IBM, Cisco, EMC, CA, SAP, and Red Hat today unveiled the first draft of open interoperability specification called TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications). Capgemini, Citrix, NetApp, PwC, Software AG, Virtunomic, and WSO2, among others, are also contributors."
Technological change: The last Kodak moment? | The Economist - Interesting look at contrast between Fujifilm and Kodak.
The Flip Side of a Big Audience | Smarterware - Nice piece.
Six Marketing Mistakes at CES 2012 - Alex Goldfayn - Harvard Business Review - "And everywhere you go in this gathering of the smartest people in the most exciting business category on the planet, there are marketing mistakes being made. It's fascinating, really: most of the products and ideas shown here are tremendous — it's the showing that is generally awful."
The Saltworks » Blog Archive » The Vendor Lock-In Bogeyman - "There had better be a damned good reason for wanting to bring the development of a complex business system in-house, and the threat of vendor lock-in isn’t it." << Don't fully agree with all the points but I appreciate the argument.
Cloud computing could drive vendor lock-in: Dell | ITworld - "There is this big shift from proprietary to open," said English."However, if you're looking at private cloud solutions that are based on technology that locks you into a specific storage vendor or a specific network vendor, it is creating a situation where the trend ticks back a little bit," he added.Implementing a cloud solution means buying into the specific protocols, standards and tools of the cloud vendor, making future migration difficult and expensive. ""
Defining Noncommercial - CC Wiki - 119 page report trying to refine Non-commercial CC? Srsly? On what planet is this useful result?
Untitled (http://public.dhe.ibm.com/eserver/benchmarks/news/newsblurb_x3850X5_4p_specvirt_113011.pdf?sf2734604=1) - RT @OpenKVM: SPECvirt benchmark is out: #openKVM beats ESXi virtualization performance by 20% in head-to-head battle!
How One Bit of Stupidity Could Have Brought Down a Multi-Million Dollar Media Company | Peter Shankman - Assume people are watching.

Links for 01-13-2012

2012-01-13T09:48:00.001-05:00

VMWare Co-Founder Diane Greene Joins Google's Board - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD - RT @matteastwood: Great addition for Google -> VMWare Co-Founder Diane Greene Joins Google’s Board
Bottom Line - Mercedes apologizes for using Che Guevara image - This seems... Well, not a good idea. Even if it does grab attention.
Newsweek Reviving Its 1960s Design for 'Mad Men' Issue | MediaWorks - Advertising Age
Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Legend of Apple and Xerox PARC and the Truth About Innovation - "It's not enough for an innovation to be great in order to be successful. It also has to be in the right place and at the right time, which is why so many innovations originally invented by one company end up being successfully commercialized by another."
Tip for Getting More Organized: Don't - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review - "IBM researchers observed that email users who "searched" rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste."
Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante? | The Public Editor - NYTimes.com - The reaction to this piece seems overblown. The questions being asked sound reasonable to me.

Links for 01-11-2012

2012-01-11T10:28:00.001-05:00

Intel’s dilemma: Whose problem do Ultrabooks solve? — Mobile Technology News - "Even with that unique, forward-thinking demonstration, however, it still seems to me like Intel is trying too hard to invent something that’s just the natural evolution of laptops. In turn, its branding of Ultrabooks is more about solving Intel’s problem — less reliance on it as devices embrace ARM chips — than solving a consumer problem."
Tablets: What Amazon and Apple know that all the CES tablet peddlers are still missing | TechRepublic - Really good post about the mistakes still being made around tablets
The Wirecutter | A List of the Best Gadgets
Sensible Talk About Social Media Measurement | paulgillin.com - RT @MariaSpinola: A guide to digital ROI that puts common sense ahead of the current fan/follower frenzy
CSC unveils government-specific cloud -- Government Computer News - The platform is geared for agencies with information systems processing data at the Federal Information Security Management Act's moderate and low system classification levels. CSC enhances security with the company’s own holistic defense-in-depth security framework. The framework comprises physical and logical security, virtual machines, access control and data integrity capabilities required to support mission-critical applications, CSC officials said.

Links for 01-10-2012

2012-01-10T10:58:00.001-05:00

Depleted Cranium » Blog Archive » Time to Revive the Nuclear Energy Experiment Set?
Big data terminology and positioning : DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services - Nice take at thinking about buckets/use cases.
Intel shows off ultrabook prototype at CES - Computerworld - RT @ScotFinnie: Intel shows off ultrabook prototype at CES - by @sgaudin << Guy said "mode" word. This won't end well
CRM News: Software: Oracle's Downward Spiral - A lot of negative ORCL sentiment from survey data from @danolds.
Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 – Plog Photo Blog
Freakonomics » Typo or Biggest NFL News of the Year? - Ouch. You don't want to be this copy editor today
The Beginning of the End of the Server Virtualization Landscape as We Know It - RT @matteastwood: The Beginning of End of Server Virtualization Landscape as We Know It > << Year VMware not neeeded

Links for 01-09-2012

2012-01-09T11:32:00.001-05:00

Cloud Computing: A high-level how-to « Barton's Blog
Enterprise Will Spend $19 Billion on Apple Hardware in 2012 - John Paczkowski - Enterprise - AllThingsD - "If Apple’s not aggressively pushing its hardware into the enterprise market, how is it getting there? Carried in by the rank and file. Employees are buying iPhones and iPads, and sometimes even MacBooks, as well. And enterprise is increasingly supporting them on the back end. Sometimes, it’s even subsidizing them or their use. This is the “consumerization of IT” we’re hearing so much about these days, and clearly it’s working very much in Apple’s favor."
Canon PowerShot G1 X Announced « Canon Rumors - Not entirely unsurprisingly, Canon has upleveled its Gx series with something of a reboot:
Daring Fireball: You Do Not Need to Manually Manage iOS Multitasking - I've heard this advice given at a Genius Bar as well.
xkcd: 1000 Comics - Only 24 to go until a big round number milestone. Love it! :-)

Links for 01-06-2012

2012-01-06T10:11:00.001-05:00

Amazon Kindles: Easy Come, Easy Go - NYTimes.com - "As might be guessed, the comments on the positive reviews say the reviewer is wrong and the Fire is not nearly as good as asserted, while the comments on the negative reviews say the reviewer is wrong and the Fire is not nearly as bad as suggested. The intensity on both sides continues to be surprising. When I was a kid, long before we turned into Geek Nation, anyone who displayed this much interest in electronics would be mocked and forced to sit alone in the lunchroom."
Abandoned Subway Tunnels and Other Industrial Settings: Photography by Shawn Dufour
The E-Reader, as we know it, is doomed - "E-readers are playing an important role today. They fill a void that tablets cannot fill. They patch a gap that cannot be patched technologically. At the same time, manufacturers are working to build compelling, readable displays that are not hampered by the problems of e-ink." -- Mostly agree with this over a sufficient time horizon. Though I wonder if an approximately free e-ink e-book reader could remain useful long-term.
Kodak's travails: Better heed the lesson, camera makers | Deep Tech - CNET News
Lady and the Tramp | The 25 All-TIME Best Animated Films | Entertainment | TIME.com
Data Analytics: So, What's Your Algorithm? - WSJ.com - "The new year will bring plenty of splashy stories about iPads and IPOs. There is a more important theme gathering around us: How analytics harvested from massive databases will begin to inform our day-to-day business decisions. Call it Big Data, analytics, or decision science. Over time, this will change your world more than the iPad 3."
10 cloud startups to watch in 2012 | LinkedIn

Links for 01-03-2012

2012-01-03T09:48:00.001-05:00

The United and Continental Airline Mashup - Brand New - "Somewhere, somehow it was decided that the absolute best of both worlds was to have the United name with the Continental look. It’s not. Financially, strategically and press releasingly, it does make sense, I wouldn’t even venture into thinking that the decision was wrong, but the visual manifestation is like fingernails on chalkboard."
Canon S100 Review: 5. Lens: Digital Photography Review - Canon's S100 getting knocks f sample variation. Wouldn't shock if related to same Thai supply chain issues as delayed
The iPad Turns One: My Top 10 iPad Apps Over the Past Year
End of an Era: The Golden Age of Tech Blogging is Over « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing - As is often the case with such things, the situation is complicated. And a lot depends on what you mean by blogging and what its objectives are.
10 Ways Cloud Computing Will Disrupt our Businesses in 2012 - Forbes
12 Predictions for 2012 | APMdigest: Where Application Performance Management, BSM, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing Meet - "Hybrid Cloud was so 2011! In this new world of choices, business will expect hybrid IT: a combination of on-site and off-site; cloud and legacy; private and public; physical and virtual; social and secure; enterprise and consumer; desktop and server; mobile and static. Business will also expect IT to make them work together, whether IT owns the service or not. IT must act as a trusted advisor, as a service broker, and as quality assurance for this brave new world of complex Hybrid IT.Andi MannVP of Strategic Solutions, CA Technologies"
36 Hours - Cambridge, Mass. - NYTimes.com - RT @nytimestravel: This week's 36 Hours is in Cambridge, Mass. << A few odd choices but OK overall
Facebook’s ‘Cool Space’ Campus Points to Future of Office Growth - Businessweek - RT @GeorgeDWatt: Facebook's $250m renovation to create "hacker style" environment. << Apparently Sun's old MP campus
Utah man wins Lamborghini, crashes it hours later - Boston.com - Who'd have thunk a Lamborghini with a totally inexperienced driver was bad on ice? :-)

Links for 12-15-2011

2011-12-15T18:38:00.001-05:00

Fountainhead: Predictions: What You WON'T See in IT For 2012 - Good list. Would quibble here and there but don't really disagree with any of the basic assertions.
Envelope Please... Announcing the Winners for the 2011 Washies | CIO's Guide to Cloud Computing and On-Demand | Appirio - The 2011 cloudwashing winners.
From the comments - This sums up my take pretty well: "The “class warfare” comment shows Josh is missing the point on this one. It’s not that the Mercedes is “empirically better” and certainly not “because it’s more expensive.” That’s not what Siegler is saying. He’s saying the experience of driving a merc is better (he doesn’t give any reasons it’s better) in a way which not everyone can appreciate. I don’t know if what Siegler is saying about the Nexus is right. I haven’t used it. But I can appreciate the metaphor. There is a level of attention to detail which is paid to some products that some people simply do not care about, and for other people it absolutely MAKES the product. For instance, BMW engineers the sound of the closing car door. This is something that subtly affects the experience of driving a BMW. I think this sort of thing is what Siegler was (admittedly poorly) describing."
Horseshit | The Verge Forums - I mostly disagree about this. Yes, the original article generalized. But there are indeed aspects of experience that large groups of people just don't care about--or "get" if you would--or, as in the case of cars, dismiss as not worth the cost.
How Much Does Facebook Know About You? [Video]
IN-DEPTH PHOTO ANALYSIS OF THE SUPPOSED RQ-170 SENTINEL DRONE IN IRANIAN HANDS | aviationintel
Infochimps Blog - RT @JoMaitlandSF: Oh boy I could get lost in data sets in here for hours! << I blame u f new productivity suck:-)
Logo Evolution of 25 Famous Brands

Podcast: Red Hat's Tushar Katarki talks grid

2011-12-15T12:48:00.001-05:00

I sat down last week with Red Hat's product manager for grid products, Tushar Katarki, who joined us recently. In this interview, Tushar talks about:

What grid is
How it's evolving
What's new with Red Hat's MRG Grid product
How Dreamworks uses grid
What's coming

Listen to MP3 version (6:00)

Listen to OGG version (6:00)

Links for 12-14-2011

2011-12-14T16:10:00.001-05:00

How American food got so bad — Marginal Revolution - "I think there is a very bad period for American food. It runs something like 1910 through maybe the 1980’s. And that’s the age of the frozen TV dinner, of the sugar donut, of fast food, of the chain, and really a lot of it is not very good. If you go back to the 19th century and you read Europeans who’ve come to the United States, they’re really quite impressed by the freshness and variety that is on offer."
Ten things your kid will never see | Sync™ Blog - I'm totally off to get my Geritol now.
Banking on Change: Software IT Spending Predictions for 2012 | Sandhill - “Increases in IT spending in 2012 for large enterprises will be concentrated in cloud, mobile and Big Data solutions. As enterprises realize the power of a cloud infrastructure combined with Big Data solutions that can use this infrastructure, new analytical solutions will be possible and will be pursued. Mobile solutions will continue to have an impact on large enterprise IT, and spending will increase as more new solutions are deployed."
Top 10 Presentations on Cloud Computing
When Truth Survives Free Speech - NYTimes.com - "In the pre-Web days, someone like Ms. Cox might have been one more obsessive in the lobby of a newspaper, waiting to show a reporter a stack of documents that proved the biggest story never told. The Web has allowed Ms. Cox to cut out the middleman; various blogs give voice to her every theory, and search algorithms give her work prominence."
An Office Designed To Keep Employees Working From Home | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation - RT @marcosluis2186: An Office Designed To Keep Employees Working From Home << interesting concepts

Links for 12-12-2011

2011-12-12T12:35:00.001-05:00

Print - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics - Very details and sobering read. From a design perspective, the way Airbus averages two opposing flight control inputs is particularly striking.
Open-source webOS is dead on arrival | ZDNet - "The bottom line is HP appears to be not so much contributing webOS to the open-source community as it is abandoning it to open source. Neither Google with Android nor Apple with iOS will need to worry about webOS being a competitor. Unless HP shows that they’ll be a lot more serious about supporting open-source webOS than it has to date, webOS is dead as the Indianapolis Colts’ Super Bowl hopes."
In Defense of Kitchen Gadgets - Megan McArdle - Life - The Atlantic - In defense of kitchen gadgets: Need to keep this one handy :-)

Links for 12-09-2011

2011-12-09T08:54:00.001-05:00

Cloud computing history lesson | Technology Spectator - (Primarily focused on public clouds.)
Why An Investment Firm Was Awarded $2.5 Million After Being Defamed By Blogger - Forbes - People are still free to disagree but seems a rather more in-depth view of situation than the usual uncritical Internet mob.
Top Ten Virtualization Risks Hiding in Your Company
Untitled (http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-08/) - Today's Dilbert is great:
Print - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics
Spam sinks to lowest level in almost three years, says Symantec | Security - CNET News - RT @amcafee: Spam is down... to 70% of all email - (HT @adamthierer ) << But uptick social media etc attacks
Why Siri had to start in beta | Benoit Maison's blog - Good perspective on the importance of lots of data in speech recognition.
Siri Is Apple's Broken Promise - The Siri backlash: . OTOH, have heard positive comments. Voice recognition has been a long road.

Links for 12-06-2011

2011-12-06T21:04:00.001-05:00

The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2011
If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come You're Not Rich? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - "And in fact, if management of all these large public companies really were the staggeringly malevolent yet totally hapless lackwits that so many seem to believe, it should be really, really easy to get rich by outwitting them. Oh, sure, they'd probably get all their rich friends in Congress and Kiwanis to gang up on you, but since, according to the internet, almost all those people are also too dumb to come in out of the rain, you should be able to defeat them with a couple of well-placed banana peels."
All.I.Can’s Kootenay Street Segment Goes Viral | Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine - "It’s definitely one of the coolest street ski segments you will ever see on film. Not only that, it might just be one of the best ski segments ever caught on film. And it all goes down on the streets of Trail, Rossland and Nelson in crappy, grey, wet, gravelly conditions. Shot by Dave Mossop of Sherpas Cinema, and starring JP Auclair, one of the most legendary freeskiers in the world, the segment was recently cracked to the world online and has since gone viral. Surprise, surprise."
Why Siri Can't Find Abortion Clinics & How It's Not An Apple Conspiracy - Seems a pretty good rundown of Siri weaknesses in real world
When will we have IaaS Cloud Standards? Not till 2015 | Forrester Blogs - "If you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for IaaS to become more standardized, stop it. You’ll be waiting there till 2015, while everyone else is building fundamental skills and ramping up their cloud knowledge. So jump in the game already!"
Your LED Light Bulb Holiday Shopping Guide - Forbes

Links for 12-02-2011

2011-12-02T09:53:00.001-05:00

Building a Spotify App « Music Machinery
Red Hat Gordon Haff: from open source to cloud computing - Computer Business Online - Me on Chinese TV.
The 5 Best Toys of All Time | GeekDad | Wired.com - RT @jyarmis: the 5 best toys of all time (from @berkson0) i played with all 5 #nostalgia
The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum
Sous Vide for the Holidays | Michael Ruhlman - I bought a PID controller for my crockpot this year and I like the results.
IDC - Press Release - prUS23177411 - "One year ago, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that the IT industry's next dominant platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies, would begin its transition into the mainstream. Today, spending on these technologies is growing at about 18% per year and is expected to account for at least 80% of IT spending growth between now and 2020. With future market revenues at stake, IDC predicts that 2012 will be marked by some of the first high-stakes battles as companies seek to position themselves for leadership in these critical and fast-growing technology areas."

Links for 12-01-2011

2011-12-01T08:53:00.001-05:00

Top 10 Cloud Predictions for 2012: The Awkward Teenage Years Are Upon Us | Forrester Blogs - Like the analogy. Wish I had thought of it :-)
As Cloud Becomes a Teenager, It Is Time for Adult Supervision! | Andi Mann – Übergeek - "As a toddler, cloud was not expected to have any maturity, discipline, self-control, or to understand the real world. So we all just did our best to help it grow, resigned in the process to just clean up after it and at least to prevent any life-threatening injuries. However, as cloud becomes a teenager, I think a key to building real maturity (as in real life) is in giving our budding teen the benefit of adult experience and supervision, while expecting it to show a growing level of responsibility. We need to give our teens the benefit of our ‘grown-up’ experience in the real world, provide them with a positive role model, be a ‘responsible adult’ for them, and expect them to show an increasing degree of self-discipline."
Analyst: Pay TV Industry to Lose 200,000 Subscribers in 2012 - The Hollywood Reporter - If I could get basic HD OTA, I'd probably drop my cable sub. I don't use it much but I don't want to give up broadcast HD entirely either.
Going Beyond PUE for Data Center Efficiency » Data Center Knowledge - Good rundown of the issues with PUE.
The Big Green Egg | Michael Ruhlman - Cool toy :-)
Where in the World? A Google Earth Puzzle - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic
Don't Trust Your Gut With Assortment Planning - Marshall Fisher - Harvard Business Review - "Retailers periodically update their product assortments, deleting slow sellers and adding new products in response to shifts in consumer demand or to accommodate new offerings from suppliers. Assortment-planning processes vary greatly across retailers and product segments but have one thing in common: They rely too much on human judgment and not enough on hard data that might allow a retailer to predict how customers will react to a change in the assortment."

Posting HTML from Pinboard

2011-11-30T12:58:00.001-05:00

I finally jumped off social bookmarking site Delicious during the whole kerfuffle over their problem-laden relaunch and moved to Pinboard on the recommendation of @sogrady and others. I had previously setup an account when the then parent of Delicious, Yahoo, began to send signals that it was shutting the service down. I now switched full-time.

The problem was that some Javascript code I was using to easily generate HTML code from my bookmarks and notes for pasting into Blogger stopped working.(See, for example, this post.) This was actually the reason that I didn't switch to Pinboard full-time when I first setup the account.

I'm far from a Javascript wizard and I had received the code indirectly through a friend so the issue wasn't immediately obvious. It should have kept working; the API's were supposedly compatible except for some documented format changes. But it didn't work.

However, with my full-time switch I had to do something so I dove in and started hacking at the code. What appears to have been the problem was that, with the old Delicious (the new Delicious broke the code too), an object with global scope was being instantiated by the JSON call that retrieves recent bookmarks. Copying the JSON object into a global variable seemed to fix the problem. This doubtless should have been obvious.

In any case, if you use Pinboard and ever have occasion to create HTML from your bookmarks for posting somewhere else, you may find this code useful. You just need to substitute your username into the JSON URL where the comment tells you to. You can also customize in other ways as shown on the Pinboard HowTo page.

pinboardlinks_template.html

Links for 11-30-2011

2011-11-30T11:08:00.001-05:00

Big Data: Asking the right questions

2011-11-30T10:18:00.001-05:00

In this interview by Mac Slocum over at O'Reilly Radar, Alistair Croll, Strata online program chair, weighs in on the differences between Big Data and more traditional Business Intelligence.

Big data is a successor to traditional BI, and in that respect, there's bound to be some bloodshed. But both BI and big data are trying to do the same thing: answer questions. If big data gets businesses asking better questions, it's good for everyone.
Big data is different from BI in three main ways:
It's about more data than BI, and this is certainly a traditional definition of big data.
It's about faster data than BI, which means exploration and interactivity, and in some cases delivering results in less time than it takes to load a web page.
It's about unstructured data, which we only decide how to use after we've collected it and need algorithms and interactivity in order to find the patterns it contains.
When traditional BI bumps up against the edges of big, fast, or unstructured, that's when big data takes over. So, it's likely that in a few years we'll ask a business question, and the tools themselves will decide if they can use traditional relational databases and data warehouses or if they should send the task to a different architecture based on its processing requirements.
What's obvious to anyone on either side of the BI/big data fence is that the importance of asking the right questions — and the business value of doing so — has gone way, way up.

Croll's last point--that asking the right questions is critical--bears highlighting. There are many reasons that traditional data warehousing and business intelligence has been, in the main, a disappointment. However, I'd argue that one big reason is that most companies never figured out what sort of answers would lead to actionable, valuable business results.
After all, while there is a kernel of truth to the oft-repeated data warehousing fable about diapers and beer sales, that data never led to any shelves being rearranged.

Podcast: Red Hat's Kim Palko talks messaging and AMQP

2011-11-29T12:46:00.001-05:00

Messaging used to be the province of expensive, proprietary software but--as in many other areas of the software universe--that's changed with open source. And the AMQP protocol provides a particularly good example of the open source development model in which innovation comes from customers as well as vendors. I sat down with Kim Palko, Red Hat's Senior Product Manager for messaging, to talk about the latest happenings with AMQP.
Topics we cover in this podcast include:

How customers use messaging products
What AMQP is and why it's generating so much buzz
Red Hat's MRG-Messaging implementation of AMQP
How Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS uses MRG-M
The new JCA resource adapter

Listen to MP3 (13:49)
Listen to OGG (13:49)

Red Hat's Doug O'Flaherty discusses Supercomputing (SC11): Big data and more

2011-11-29T09:09:00.001-05:00

As far as I'm concerned, the Supercomputing show may just be the most interesting computer industry trade show. I didn't make it this year--the content is a bit less central to my day-to-day interests than in the past--but I did have the opportunity to record an interview with fellow Red Hat marketeer Doug O'Flaherty who did make it out to Seattle.

Topics we cover in this podcast include:

The big announcements and themes
What Red Hat was up to at the show
The cool hardware
Big data
How the TOP500 list has evolved

Listen to MP3 (6:57)

Listen to OGG (6:57)

Links for 11-29-2011

2011-11-29T08:14:00.001-05:00

Ranked: Martin Scorsese Films from Worst to Best | Nerve.com - Pretty good list IMO.
The Great Cloud Computing Pricing Debate CIO.com - "A continuing controversy in cloud computing is its putative cost benefits; specifically, whether public cloud computing can provide cost advantages over computing carried out within a company's own data center."
Holiday Gift Guide 2011: Video Game Edition - Megan McArdle - Entertainment - The Atlantic - "Modern Warfare 3 Yes, it's absurdly over the top, and yes, the story, which I think has something to do with a Russian terrorist's war on Europe and America, makes less sense than a Rick Perry debate response. But if you're a fan of the Michael Bay Theory of the World -- explosions now, more explosions later -- this is the game for you. Like MW2, the game fetishizes military firepower; you can think of it as a virtual commercial for defense spending. Also like MW2, the game makes expert use of digitally mocked-up real-world locations -- there are massive setpiece shootouts on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and the streets of Paris. Indeed, its only real curiosity about the world comes down to a single question: Wouldn't this place make an awesome location for an action scene? Fortunately, the answer is always yes."
The Closed, Unfriendly World Of Wikipedia - Yeah, it's just one case but pretty damning and not at all some freak occurrence.
50 reasons not to date a photographer - Funny! Sample: "If you ask them if you look fat, they’ll say “don’t worry I can photoshop you later.”"
Samsung Galaxy S II Commercial - This Samsung smartphone app is hilarious
PEPPER SPRAYING COP - Pepper spray cop tumblr. Some of these Photoshopped images are very well done.
For HP, a tough road ahead | Business Tech - CNET News - Seems like a pretty good analysis.
How to Destroy Your House With One Five Pound Bag of Flour - RT @Samibouni: How to Destroy Your House With One 5-Pound Bag of Flour (VIDEO) << Hilarious if it's not your house

Links for 11-22-2011

2011-11-22T11:14:00.001-05:00

An Open Letter to Chip and Dan Heath about Second Life « It’s All Virtual - A counterpoint to the latest Second Life is dead argument. A lot depends on your perspective. It didn't come close to living up to the initial hype but it plods along at a certain level.
Google Drops The Price Of Chromebooks to $299 And Polishes The Interface | TechCrunch - Chromebooks never made much of an impact, did they?
Farage: The Euro is a Failure - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - Quite the video.
What cloud boils down to for the enterprise — Cloud Computing News - "What you do bring to the table–er, service–is code, data, configuration metadata and/or policies that are, in fact, what makes any cloud service valuable to you as an individual or an organization. Your task in consuming a cloud service is to deliver those elements to a service that turns them into functionality that drives business value. Thus, a new order of operations has to evolve in order to meet the demands of this new model."
Cloud Computing's Vendor Lock-In Problem: Why the Industry is Taking a Step Backward - Forbes - "Only one thing will eliminate or reduce the risk of vendor lock-in in the long run: if end-user customers start demanding standardization and interoperability, just as they have in the past with on-premises applications. “Once it dawns among organizations that use third-party clouds that they need to demand this from cloud providers, then the cloud providers will fall in line.”"

Links for 11-21-2011

2011-11-21T11:43:00.001-05:00

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

The Best Couple of Paragraphs Written About Tablets

2011-11-18T09:44:00.001-05:00

The context of these paragraphs written by Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, is a negative review of the Kindle Fire. But they also capture why so many people either: 1.) Think anyone who buys an iPad must be some sort of uncritical Apple fanboi or 2.) Think anyone who isn't wowed by the iPad must be some sort of uncritical Apple hater.

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.

Links for 11-15-2011

2011-11-15T12:19:00.001-05:00

5 key trends in cloud computing's future | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld - "As we gain experience with the cloud, expect to see centralized trust systems, amazingly large databases, and more." << Short piece but a good list.
Apple's iTunes Match Pitch: Pay Up, Stick Around - Peter Kafka - Media - AllThingsD - This strikes me as a pretty spot-on summation.
Patient BW, DOB 2/16/1971 - Very good!
Pam Moore: Stop the Social Puppetry for Klout and Other Influence Metrics! – Influencer Marketing Review - Pretty good although author seems to have more faith than I that such a metric can be broadly meaningful.

Links for 11-14-2011

2011-11-14T11:03:00.001-05:00

The Likability of Angry Birds - The Oatmeal - The Likability of Angry Birds Outstanding!
How Long Is This Hot Wheels Track? | Wired Science | Wired.com - From the comments: "The video is what happens in a world without women. Fun, yet pitiable." :-)
Mobile Opportunity: Lessons From the Failure of Flash: Greed Kills - Not sure I agree with everything here but well worth a read.
Polaroid Z340: A Futuristic Digital Instant Camera That Spits Out ZINK Prints - A digital instant printing camera. Kinda cool in an anachronistic sort of way. via @petapixel
Internet Evolution - Gordon Haff - Google's TV Plan Evokes Bad Memories - I could keep dusting my "XYZ interactive TV projects will fail" piece w different names every couple of years
Logitech confesses to 'gigantic' mistake with Google TV | Digital Media - CNET News - Ref: Until interactivity model w TVs that ppl want to use (I'm skeptical), efforts will continue #fail

Links for 11-11-2011

2011-11-11T14:05:00.001-05:00

Oracle Pitches Solaris as 'First Cloud OS' | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com - "Cantrill, like many of Sun’s freewheeling engineers, really didn’t mesh with Oracle’s top-down culture. “I have never encountered an entity with less empathy or humanity or complexity than Oracle,” he says. “It was soulless at its deepest level.”"
How to best fight the rise of rogue IT services? Compete - Learn - "While many IT organizations will decide to fight these cloud services from encroaching on their turf – the reality is that without onerous monitoring and swift enforcement such plans are futile. In fact, they are probably futile with those controls in place. No, the best approach is probably not so draconian. In my opinion the most optimal way to defeat internally acquired rogue IT services is to compete."
(404) http://t.co/eWpP4gTU%E2%80%9D - “@VanityFair: "It's the perfect play!" Kim Cattrall on playing Amanda in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives.” should be gr8t
Buy More Experiences and Less Stuff — PsyBlog - RT @the_saltworks: RT @davidahood Buy more experiences & less stuff: cc @collcons <-- wow I just had this exact ...
EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM TEST FAILS - Well, I guess this is why you test things. Better than "Oops. We were sure it would work."
Jobs Was Right: Adobe Abandons Mobile Flash Development, Report Says | Gadget Lab | Wired.com - RT @TheTechScribe: RT @nonprofit_tech: Jobs Was Right: Adobe Abandons Mobile Flash Development, Report Says <- ...
Is Klout crossing the line when it comes to privacy? — Tech News and Analysis - "it’s hard to see why Klout should be criticized for collecting information about people based on their public web activity. How is this any different from what Google does when it uses the behavior of users to assign a PageRank to the ads and links it shows in search results? And when I look at Google+ or Facebook, both show me people I might want to add based on my history of interacting with them in a variety of ways, again based on my public activity on the web. They may not be creating a profile for me or assigning me a Klout rank, but it fundamentally amounts to the same thing."
The Big, Honking Problems With The TV Market, According To Steve Jobs - Nice pulling together of Apple discussions over years around TV. Example from 1998: "In this fuzzy video, Jobs explains what's wrong with "convergence" of the TV and the PC. The TV is used when we want to turn off our brains. The PC is used when we want to turn on our brains. The TV is for leaning back. The PC is for leaning in. How do you make these two gadgets play nice when they're designed for two totally different uses?" Not sure the fundamentals have changed all much.
Simon Crosby, the godfather of Xen, on virtualization, security and wimpy private clouds
Calxeda hurls EnergyCore ARM at server chip Goliaths • The Register - Typically good TPM writeup.

From Building a Cloud to Operating It

2011-11-11T11:44:00.001-05:00

First you build your cloud. A week back, I shared my thoughts on how best to do so based on my keynote from the Red Hat Cloud Tour. But that's just the first step. Once your cloud is in place, you need to operate it.

What makes this less than straightforward in a typical enterprise IT environment is that there's a balancing act in play.

Users want the simplicity they get from public cloud providers. They want self-service. They want to be in control. They don't want to think about underlying infrastructure. They want things to just work. In short, they have expectations set by the consumer Web and by the plethora of "magical" iDevices that they increasingly bring to their day jobs.

Historical enterprise IT sat largely in opposition to these user desires. Applications focused on business processes rather than user interaction. Minimizing risk and cost was equated to minimizing user choice of user choice. And a myriad of unavoidable regulatory, compliance, security, and audit needs meant that laissez faire attitudes to where applications ran and data was stored were a non-starter.

Balancing these two sets of desires and requirements requires four capabilities, all of which Red Hat provides:

Self-service with rich policy
Application lifecycle management designed for the cloud
Application portability across clouds
Proven stack and ecosystem delivering enterprise-class SLAs in the cloud

Self-service is a sine qua non of cloud computing. It's fundamental to eliminating friction between users requesting a service and the IT infrastructure providing that service. Business processes and workflows also need to support rapid servicing provisioning of course; associated manual approval requirements adding days or weeks blunt any positive technology impact. However, even reasonably automated provisioning processes that require admin intervention can add significant latency and limit scalability.

The key in an enterprise context is pairing this self-service to a rich set of policies. Policies specify which standard operating environments (SOE) a user or group of users have access to. They specify where those SOEs may physically run, perhaps based on whether they're being deployed for dev/test or whether they're being put into production. Thus, for example, policies could allow a service to be deployed to a public cloud while it's being developed--using test data--but require that production applications working with customer data be run on-premise.

Traditional enterprise management was "heavyweight." It focused on relatively static environments that had, as their core, large, proprietary legacy servers ministered too by a cadre of specialized sys admins. A cloud environment, on the other hand, is highly dynamic. Workloads are more typically scale-out. They are mobile, often running at different locales at different points in their lifecycle. Application lifecycle management for the cloud needs to take these differences into account. The System Engine component within Red Hat's CloudForms Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud management software was designed with such cloud requirements in mind.

One of the ways that portability breaks down is that public clouds encourage ad hoc development that doesn't necessarily comply with an organization's standards for applications run on-premise. This may be fine for prototyping or other work that is throwaway by design. However, it's far too easy for prototypes to evolve into something more—as often happened in the case of early visual programming languages—and the result is applications that either have to be rewritten or that may have support, reliability, or scalability issues down the road.

One approach to addressing this problem is to provide consistent runtimes across public and private clouds. Red Hat does this through its Certified Cloud Provider program that provides access to certified Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on public clouds. (Pay-as-you-go RHEL is initially available on Amazon. Cloud Access provides a way to transfer on-premise RHEL subscriptions to Premier Certified Cloud Providers.) By running the same runtime across physical servers, multiple virtualization platforms, and public clouds, application certifications and testing need happen only once.

Finally, just because the "cloud" word is getting thrown around doesn't change the needs of either the IT department or the users when it comes to quality-of-service (QoS), security, or reliability. Users may fixate on the simplicity of consuming external computing resources but they expect the high level of availability that they're (hopefully) accustomed to IT providing. And, as an organization starts building a cloud, the goal needs to be to meet or exceed traditional IT operational benchmarks.

This requires no-compromise infrastructure. Cloud management may abstract this infrastructure and it may span multiple underlying technology stacks. But the capabilities of that underlying infrastructure still matter--more than ever. Dynamism and multi-tenancy (whereby disparate users share physical resources) are fundamental to clouds and they amplify any underlying infrastructure weakness. Red Hat has a long history of providing platform software for the most demanding IT environments. The cloud is simply the latest such.

Cloud computing operations requires blending the new and the old. Our expectations as consumers come to the fore. The "Consumerization of IT" phrase is often taken as synonymous with bringing your own iDevice to work. But it equally applies to user expectations of IT as shaped by Google and Facebook. Yet cloud computing doesn't suddenly void all legal, security, customer data, and uptime requirements. Those organizations that hit the right balance will be the most successful ones.

Portable computing creates scalable private clouds that can be federated to a public cloud provider under a unified management framework. Portable applications mean that developers can write once and deploy anywhere, thereby preserving their strategic flexibility and keeping their options open, while lowering maintenance and support costs. Portable services simplify development and operations by eliminating the need to re-implement frequently needed functions in private clouds and enable the movement of data and application features across clouds. Portable programming models let existing applications be brought over to cloud environments or evolved incrementally.

Three Approaches to Building a Cloud

2011-11-04T13:59:00.000-04:00

In the course of preparing for the Red Hat Cloud Tour, I (along with many others on the Red Hat cloud team) gave a lot of thought as to how best to articulate the value delivered by cloud computing, what's needed for a private or hybrid cloud environment, why you'd want to build a cloud in the first place, and which approach delivers the greatest value.

Let's talk about that last point with the aid of a few slides from my keynote presentation from the Cloud Tour.

The typical IT operation can be thought of as consisting of a set of silos. Some of these silos may be the result of deliberate plan--perhaps to meet some regulatory need to keep internal businesses completely separate. However, more commonly, they come about through the accretion of new technologies, products, and organizations. All these silos create complexity. One goal of implementing a cloud should be to reduce this complexity.

How best to proceed?

This first approach essentially attempts to translate the "Greenfield" methodology used by service providers into an enterprise environment. The thinking is that throwing out existing infrastructure and replacing it with a grounds-up, homogenous, standardized computing foundation is a dramatic simplification relative to the typical enterprise IT infrastructure as it exists today.

In fact, this approach does dramatically simplify. It's also naively simple. For the vast majority of organizations, IT assets tarred with the pejorative "legacy" are also critical and core to the business. More broadly, IT infrastructures advance in an evolutionary way rather than through wholesale replacement. Doing so keeps both risk and cost down. Cloud computing is no different. While infrastructure standardization, modernization, and simplification are frequently good practices, they can usually only be taken so far.

Suppose, instead, we tackle just part of the problem. There are a couple of different ways to go about this.

We could, for example, decide to add some self-service and automation to a specific virtualization platform. This is VMware's approach to cloud. vCloud Director essentially just extends the vSphere virtualization platform and therefore requires that the underlying platform, whether in a private or public environment, be running a VMware technology stack. Alternatively, we could roll in a dedicated cloud appliance for some single purpose, such as a database.

Whichever of these two paths we take, the result is the same. Our IT infrastructure now has another silo. Hardly a reduction in complexity!

This is not to say that we can't start our journey to a cloud on a subset of infrastructure. In most cases, a pilot project or proof-of-concept using a subset of applications will indeed be the prudent path. The difference is that a proof-of-concept is a first step; a new silo is a dead end.

The final approach, and the one that Red Hat advocates, is to enable bringing the broadest set of IT assets under a cloud management framework. Certain existing--often static--workloads may be kept separate for a variety of reasons. But such decisions should come about because they make the most sense from an IT operational perspective, not because of restrictions imposed by a technology stack.

Supporting these capabilities requires a cloud management product that can span multiple virtualization platforms, a variety of public cloud providers based on a variety of underlying technologies, and even physical servers. While most clouds will have a virtualized foundation of some sort, we have spoken with a number of customers who require blending physical and virtual environments for different types of workloads or use cases.

The Red Hat product that makes this approach possible is CloudForms, which provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service management for private and hybrid clouds. It works across virtualization platforms such as vSphere and the KVM-based Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and a variety of public clouds starting with Amazon. Its key interoperability component is the Deltacloud API, an incubator project under the governance of the Apache Software Foundation.

I've covered just a small part of our our Cloud Tour content. However, it's an important part because fundamental differences in approach to building clouds lead to fundamental differences in the business value that can be extracted from them.

Links for 11-04-2011

2011-11-04T10:26:00.001-04:00

Apple's Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers - Businessweek - "“Operations expertise is as big an asset for Apple as product innovation or marketing,” says Mike Fawkes, the former supply-chain chief at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and now a venture capitalist with VantagePoint Capital Partners. “They’ve taken operational excellence to a level never seen before.”"
Can a Commercial Be Too Sexy For Its Own Good? Ask Axe - Martin Lindstrom - Business - The Atlantic - "However, the brand's early success soon began to backﬁre. The problem was, the ads had worked too well in persuading the Insecure Novices and Enthusiastic Novices to buy the product. Geeks and dorks everywhere were now buying Axe by the caseload, and it was hurting the brand's image. Eventually (in the United States, at least), to most high-school and college-age males, Axe had essentially become the brand for pathetic losers and, not surprisingly, sales took a huge hit. "
Tarmac delays traced to lack of buses to ferry fliers - USATODAY.com - Rt @flight_status10: Tarmac delays traced to lack of buses to ferry fliers << airports too dependent on jetbridges
Daring Fireball: The Type of Companies That Publish Future Concept Videos - "I’m not arguing that making concept videos directly leads to a lack of traction in the current market. I’m arguing that making concept videos is a sign of a company that has a lack of institutional focus on the present and near-present. Can you imagine a sports team in the midst of a present-day losing season that makes a video imagining a future championship 10 years out?" << Mostly agree.
How Groupon Was Founded - Nice, detailed rundown on groupon history.

How to Browse the Amazon Kindle Lending Library from a PC

2011-11-04T10:23:00.001-04:00

One of my complaints about Amazon streaming for Prime Members is that they don't make it easy to search and browse only within the stuff you can get for free. This seems to be the case with their new Kindle Lending Library as well. Here's a recipe for browsing the list (currently at 5,379 results) from this Amazon discussion thread:

Follow these steps to browse books that are in the new Kindle lending Library on your PC.
1) When on the front page of Amazon take a look at the search function near the top of the page.
2) Don't put anything in the search box. Select "Books" in the department drop down box. Click on the "Go" button.
3) You will now see pretty much all of Amazon's books. All 34+ Million of them. Select "Kindle Edition" in the Formats you see up at the top of the results list.
4) Now you have all 1+ Million Kindle books. Over on the left side of the screen is further filters. Go all the way near the bottom of the long list of filters is a check box for "Prime Eligable". Click on it.
5) There ya go. All 5,377 Kindle books that are in the new Prime Lending Library. This is all of them as that is the same number of books that I got when I was looking at them on my Kindle.

Apparently this only works if you're already a Prime member. It also appears as if you then need to use your Kindle device (the lending library only works with Kindle hardware--not the apps for devices like the iPad) to actually download the title.

Links for 10-31-2011

2011-10-31T23:25:00.001-04:00

The original iPod, 10 years later: a re-review - Cool that it still works with iTunes. It's worth noting though that it took the iPod quite a while to set the world on fire. At the time, the original was just another MP3 player that got, as I recall, middling reviews.
Aeolus | Manage Your Cloud Deployments with Ease - @swardley Much of the CloudForms upstream is at Project Aeolus

Links for 10-28-2011

2011-10-28T14:06:00.003-04:00

http://dartreview.com/dartlog/2011/10/28/hilarious-occupy-wall-street-quotes.html - "A protester comments on the power of greed:“It’s weird protesting on Bay Street. You get there at 9 a.m. and the rich bankers who you want to hurl insults at and change their worldview have been at work for two hours already. And then when it's time to go, they're still there. I guess that's why they call them the one per cent. I mean, who wants to work those kinds of hours? That's the power of greed.” – Jeremy, 38"
Daring Fireball Linked List: HP to Keep PC Division - "You know what HP should do? They should acquire Netflix. Then a week later back away and say “Never mind.” Then a month later go ahead and buy Netflix. Those two are made for each other."
Bloggers Selling Links to Marketers? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - "Well, I certainly got a wake-up call this morning. You can imagine my shock and horror when I learned (via Google Reader and Twitter) that some bloggers may have actually accepted money to mention companies and commercial products such as our fantastic 50-inch Panasonic Viera plasma television." << Good discussion, amusingly written.

You Had Klout

2011-10-27T18:16:00.001-04:00

I confess to having a few good belly laughs yesterday over the minor tempest that was Klout revising its algorithms. For the 99%+ of the population that has no idea what a "Klout" is, it's a site that purports to measure online influence as calculated by a user's activity on twitter, for example.

Klout recently revised its scoring algorithms. And, apparently, various self-styled social media experts saw their scores drop dramatically. Outrage ensued.

One user (no names used in the interest of protecting the terminally self-important) in a reply to Klout's blog announcing the changes:

Very unhappy with this change. My score went from 73 down to 53. 20 point drop. I've been working for months to increase my Klout score. Please fix this.

Really. Seems like a good use of time. This video captures the concept perfectly.

Another social media "guru" (and I use the term sardonically) is now faced with explaining to clients that he might have been, umm, wrong in getting them to put a lot of faith in this proprietary metric:

Not only have I used Klout to measure my score, but I've instructed my social media beginner consulting clients to use it too- as an easy way to market their progress as they begin Tweeting and using Facebook. Thank you for making my job harder- now I have to explain why, with all of their hard work, some their scores went DOWN.

Paraphrasing: "I blindly pimped Klout and now they've screwed me":

Unfortunately, I have been promoting Klout to clients as one of the various metrics to use in measuring the impact of social media campaigns. This change has already caused me to lose clients, and I have to start over using PeerIndex instead. Pity they hit us so hard after we helped make KLOUT influential.

I could go on. The whole comment thread to Klout's blog makes for an amusing read.

It's hard to feel much in the way of sympathy for those affected. It would seem that they've been among the most responsible for promoting Klout, a score based on a proprietary algorithm, as something companies ought to weigh heavily. I'm also suspicious that many of these social media "experts" busily working to increase their Klout have probably been engaging in the sort of reciprocal linking and retweeting behavior that Google fights to keep out of its search rankings.

That was fun.

More seriously, though, was this a good or bad move on the part of Klout? I'm just going to throw a few thoughts out there.

Self-styled social media mavens getting their comeuppance is a feature, not a bug.

If a dramatic one-time change was needed to clear a backlog of gaming behaviors, so be it.

Although Klout published a graph showing how users were affected by this change in the aggregate, they haven't said anything--even at a very high level--about the sorts of behaviors that resulted in large swings. Even Google does this to a degree.

Most to the point though, OK maybe Klout needed to make a one-time change. But their business is predicated on the idea that their score means something. That complaints about this change aren't akin to complaining that your horoscope wasn't specific enough, as Jared Sprool remarked on Twitter. And this, in turn, implies continuity of results modulo ongoing changes needed to address specific types of behavior that Klout perceives as gaming their system.

Whether or not you think that there is any connection between a measure of influence derived from social media metrics and objective business results, that is Klout's mission in life. (Personally, I think the connections are tenuous but so are lots of measures that companies around the world make decisions based on every week from pageviews to clickthrough rates.) And therefore, it is also in Klout's interest to avoid making changes that amount to saying that its measurements last week didn't mean anything.

Links for 10-27-2011

2011-10-27T14:17:00.001-04:00

Productivity Future Vision - From John Gruber: "This video encapsulates everything wrong with Microsoft. Their coolest products are imaginary futuristic bullshit. Guess what, we’ve all seen Minority Report already. Imagine if they instead spent the effort that went into this movie on making something, you know, real, that you could actually go out and buy and use today."
Adobe Premiere Pro: What are the best export settings? « Crooked Path Blog - Some good tips. I'm still learning this stuff.
Saturday Night Live's 'painfully accurate' Steve Jobs sketch - The Week - Unaired sketch. Quite good!
A VC: OccupyAppStore - "Just because an app was the most popular six months ago, doesn't mean it should be the most popular now. But a leaderboard model is a self reinforcing action. The most popular stay the most popular. The new upstart doesn't stand a chance at unseating the aging category leader."
The Fifty Greatest Cult Movies of All Time | Nerve.com - Pretty good list.
The Pot of Gold in Red Hat’s Gluster Acquisition « IT Depends - Good Gluster overview from ESG.

Links for 10-26-2011

2011-10-26T15:26:00.002-04:00

The "GE Flight Simulator" gets some solid improvements | Google Earth Blog
Steve Jobs: The iPad Almost Had Intel Inside - Techland - TIME.com - "Jobs goes on to criticize Intel in Isaacson's book: "There were two reasons we didn't go with them," says Jobs in the authorized biography. "One was that they are just really slow. They are like a steamship, not very flexible. We're used to going pretty fast. Second is that we just didn't want to teach them everything, which they could go and sell to our competitors.""
The X Factor Live: It’s Not Idol. And That’s Not a Compliment | Entertainment | TIME.com - "Seriously, it was as if the show was designed on the philosophy, “Like an Oscars production number, but more over-the-top.”"
Steve Jobs biography: The new book doesn’t explain what made the Apple CEO tick. - Slate Magazine - "There are several admiring Steve Jobs stories in Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s much-anticipated authorized biography, but they’re overshadowed by the many, many more instances in which Jobs comes off as a world-class jerk. Jobs was rude, mean, abusive, and often neglectful to everyone in his life; the people he hated got it bad, but the people he loved sometimes got it worse. Some of this isn’t surprising. Jobs’ arrogance, his monumental self-regard, his irresponsibility, and his unremitting cruelty to those who failed to live up to his expectations have always dogged his image."

Links for 10-25-2011

2011-10-25T19:09:00.001-04:00

IPads Change Economics, and Speed, of Hotel Wi-Fi-On the Road - NYTimes.com - "The iPad represents the “final nail in the coffin” for the idea that all Internet is free, Mr. Garrison said. Amy Cravens, a market analyst with the mobile Internet group of In-Stat, a technology research and consulting company, agreed that tablets “have had a huge influence on bandwidth consumption.”"
Lead Bullets | TechCrunch - "As I excitedly reviewed the plan with my engineering counterpart, Bill Turpin, he looked at me as though I was a little kid who had much to learn. Bill was a long-time veteran of battling Microsoft from his time at Borland and understood what I was trying to do, but remained unconvinced. He said: “Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.”"
Brave New Thermostat: How the iPod’s Creator Is Making Home Heating Sexy | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
NSM: Often the Weakest Link in Business Availability - "Gartner research shows that an average of 80 percent of mission-critical application service downtime is directly caused by people or process failures. The other 20 percent is caused by technology failure, environmental failure or a disaster. The complexity of today's IT infrastructure and applications makes high-availability systems management enormously difficult (see "Making Smart Investments to Reduce Unplanned Downtime," TG-07-4033)."
(503) http://www.amazon.com/Palm-1048NA-Z22-Handheld/dp/B000BI2180/ref=dp_ob_title_ce - Not sure how many of these still manufactured but (a few) ppl seem to still buy PDAs as if it's 1999
Microsoft to bump Apple into sync-hole? - ZDNet Asia News - ""Certainly by...2005, possibly by the end of 2003, Linux will pass Mac OS as the No. 2 operating environment," said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky."
The Jobs backlash begins | Real Dan Lyons Web Site - "I’ve always felt that people did Steve a disservice by portraying him as a holy man, some kind of silicon saint leading us into the promised land. It seemed to me that Steve had a deep reservoir of darkness inside him, and that this dark energy was what fueled his genius. WIthout it, he would have been just another Silicon Valley marketing guy in a pair of khakis and an Oxford shirt. His challenge was to harness that dark energy and use it without being consumed or destroyed by it."

Video: Red Hat OpenShift's Under-the-Covers Secret Sauce

2011-10-25T18:22:00.001-04:00

A couple of days ago, Matt Hicks sat down with me to talk about some of the cool ways that Red Hat's OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service offering is making seriously heavy-duty use of features like SELinux, cgroups, and AMQP messaging in underlying Red Hat products. It makes you appreciate just how much rocket science goes into running the infrastructure for Platform-as-a-Service. Matt's the Managing Principal Architect for Red Hat who is responsible for much of what goes into keeping OpenShift running. Have a look!

Links for 10-24-2011

2011-10-24T14:55:00.001-04:00

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 v. Battlefield 3. | Entertainment | TIME.com - "But it’s not just the scale of it, or who wins Christmas at GameStop. The other part of it is the weirdness of the fact that we are playing games that simulate wars that the U.S. is still fighting, right now, and that real people are dying in. I mean, some of the clips from Modern Warfare 3, and Battlefield 3, look like Wikileaks just leaked them from Iraq. Is that…OK? I remember when wargames were historical only. I remember when it was considered edgy to make a Vietnam game."
Economics in One Lesson
VMware CEO Maritz: Get Ready For Consumption-Based Pricing - "We are going to have to move towards more of a consumption-based model. This is where we are going," Maritz said at the event Thursday, as reported by Computerworld UK. "We are trying to keep the licensing stable for as long as we can, but in 10 years from now, things will have changed quite radically."
(403) http://antispec.com/hq/moleskine - Crowdsourced on-spec design work does feel vaguely icky to me via @cdgrams
Gartner’s Public Cloud Fallacy and EMC’s Secret Weapon | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com - "One position that Gartner appeared to get very wrong, according to the CIOs I’ve spoken with, is to start public cloud deployments with email." << Not sure this is always true but it's absolutely true that email isn't the no-brainer "do it in a public cloud" function it's often presented as.
lessons of the web: on vmware, cloud and what comes next – James Governor's Monkchips - Seems like a pretty good overview of Raghu's keynote at VMworld Europe.
Details of United’s 2012 Mileage Plus program released - One Mile at a Time - United's FF program has fairly significant downgrades for mid-level miles next year

Nevada Desert (near Lake Mead)

2011-10-22T09:11:00.001-04:00

Nevada Desert (near Lake Mead)
Originally uploaded by ghaff

It hit 111 degrees in Nevada on the August day I headed towards Las Vegas from Zion National Park.

Links for 10-20-2011

2011-10-20T10:52:00.001-04:00

GAMBIT: Updates: New MIT Game Research Explores Singapore Culture from the Inside Out
Bad Pitch Blog - Good stuff!
Mary Meeker’s 2011 Presentation On Internet Trends [Slides] | TechCrunch - The obligatory annual Mary Meeker Internet trends preso
HP And Cisco Bury The Hatchet To Accommodate Customers – Everyone Wins? | Forrester Blogs - "So what drove this seeming rapprochement? The coined word “coopetition” lacks the flavor of the German “Realpolitik,” but the essence is the same – both sides profit from accommodating a real demand from customers for Cisco network technology in HP BladeSystem servers.
Apple's R&D spending hits bottom as percentage of revenue | ZDNet - Don't see much puzzle in AAPL's relatively low R&D % Massive volumes of small # of high margin products
fcheblog » using systemtap better
Brendan's blog » Using SystemTap
There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe - Scott Hanselman - There is only one cloud icon:

General social media and contacting me update

2011-10-12T21:56:00.001-04:00

I've been making some tweaks to where and how I publish and how I use various social networking and communications services over the past few months. Here's the current status:

Blogging:

I have two primary blogs.

Connections is my "personal" blog. It's personal in the sense that no one else has any control over what I publish here. That said, it's mostly (75%+) devoted to topics that fall generally under the umbrella of "tech." I generally keep the blog going with short link-comments when I'm not pushing out anything longer. In a new development, I expect to be publishing more posts that directly pertain to my activities at Red Hat here.

The Pervasive Datacenter is my CNET Blog Network blog. I typically publish once or twice a month on technology topics, nominally with an emphasis on enterprise IT although I do posts on photography and other consumer tech of interest from time to time. I am especially careful about topics that could be perceived as in any way a conflict of interest because of my day job at Red Hat and therefore mostly avoid getting into individual companies, strategies, and products.

Social Networks:

I am active on twitter as @ghaff. As with my blogs, I concentrate on tech topics but no guarantees that I won't get into other topics from time to time.

I mostly view LinkedIn as a sort of professional rolodex. If I've met you and you send me a LinkedIn invite, I'll probably accept though it might help to remind me who you are. I'm most likely to ignore you if you appear to be someone just building up a big network for spammy purposes.

I'm a pretty casual user of Facebook and I limit it to friend friends. That's not to say that some of them aren't professional acquaintances as well. But if you just met me at a conference somewhere and want to friend me, please understand if I ignore you.

I'm not sure where I stand with Google+ at this point. I'm on it, generally like the interface, and some of my friends are active. But I don't feel a great hole in my social media sphere that's calling out for a Google+ to fill. We'll see.

PR pitches, etc:

Lord, do I get a lot of crap sent my way. The redeeming aspect of this is that I periodically get some gem that gives the PR group at Red Hat a chuckle (after any embargo is off of course). If you work for a Red Hat competitor or their agency, you might also want to think twice about offering to pre-brief me on some new announcement.

With that out of the way, I'm interested in a wide variety of tech topics. However, for obvious reasons, I tend to avoid writing about specific companies that closely intersect with my day job whether as competitors or partners. It's also a matter of my bandwidth. I have less time for blogging than when I was an analyst but if I write about one company in a space, it's not really fair to turn down all the inevitable requests that come in from other companies doing something similar.

Links for 10-12-2011

2011-10-12T21:19:00.001-04:00

No More Servants - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - Interesting discussion. I think one of the main reasons is that, as a number of commenters note: 1. Past a certain income, people do tend to have personal assistants for a combination of business and personal matters, and 2. For a variety of reasons, people across a wide range of income brackets use lawn services, etc.
redhat.com | Where's Red Hat This October? - “@RedHatNews: Blog: Where's Red Hat This October? #redhat” << I'll be keynoting DC cloud tour on 19th
Siri security flaw? - iPhone, iPad, iPod Forums at TiPb.com - “@cchristiansen: Discusses bypassing passcode & Siri implications” <- good question. Could be showstopper f lots of us
redhat.com | Red Hat to Acquire Gluster - Brian Stevens (Red Hat CTO) blogs on the Gluster acquisition:
Amazing Reuters Photo of Rebel Firing RPG was Not Photoshopped - RT @petapixel: Amazing Reuters photo of rebel firing RPG was not Photoshopped:

Links for 09-30-2011

2011-09-30T23:24:00.001-04:00

Selling Is Not About Relationships - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson - Harvard Business Review – "This finding — that Challengers win and Relationship Builders lose — is one that sales leaders often find deeply troubling, because their organizations have placed by far their biggest bet on recruiting, developing, and rewarding Relationship Builders, the profile least likely to win."
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The remains of the book – "Up until now, there's been a fairly common assumption that a divide would emerge in the presentation of different kinds of electronic books. Reference works would get the full web treatment, tricked out with multimedia and hypermedia, while fiction and literary nonfiction would be shielded from the web's manifest destiny. They'd go digital without losing their print nature; they'd retain their edges. That assumption always struck me as naive, and Bezos's choice of a novel for his demo of X-Ray makes me even more dubious that literary works will remain exempt from webification."
You Are Who You Build For – tecosystems – "When enterprises were able to impose their will upon their employees, enterprise vendors enjoyed barriers to entry sufficient to shield them from the likes of Apple. Businesses only bought the products that they wanted, which in turn were the products enterprise vendors built for them. "
You Are Who You Build For – tecosystems – Consumerization of IT makes it more challenging f businesses to focus from @sogrady << Harder to segment
Pan Amorama | Blogs | Vanity Fair – "But where fashion runway models are unsmiling, robotic in their militant march steps, these stews smile like mod angels, their wings pinned to their snazzy blue jackets. No, Pan Am has none of the stomach-acid accidie of Mad Men--for primetime TV, it’s a far more formula drive--but it’s a wonderful throwback to Jean Negulesco films such as Three Coins in the Fountain and The Best of Everything. (Margot Robbie’s Laura Cameron, a flight attendant who lands on the cover of Life, is the Suzy Parker figure.) Nothing about Pan Am demands to be taken seriously and the espionage angle is an absurdity (even given the Cold War era), but everything was nicely done, and the crosscutting between adjoining hotel rooms of undressing lovers about to meet smack in the middle was elegantly, Europeanly sexy."
Ex-Fed CIO Vivek Kundra’s Cloud First policy trashed - The Troposphere – "According to the study, 92% of feds believe cloud is a good idea for federal IT, but just 29% are following the administration’s mandated “Cloud First” policy. And almost half (42%) say they are adopting a “wait-and-see” approach related to cloud. Respondents cite numerous challenges including security issues (64%), cultural issues (36%) and budget constraints (36%) as barriers to cloud computing."
Freakonomics » The Myth of Common Sense: Why The Social World Is Less Obvious Than It Seems – "What these results suggest is that in the real world, where social influence is much stronger than in our artificial experiment, enormous differences in success may indeed be due to small, random fluctuations early on in an artist’s career, which then get amplified by a process of cumulative advantage—a “rich-get-richer” phenomenon that is thought to arise in many social systems."
Autonomy's reaction to Oracle's statement | Business | guardian.co.uk – "Oracle seems a little confused about the sequence of events and origins of the data it has received, something that would suggests it needs better management of and insight into the unstructured data on its internal systems. We would be delighted to help."
Connections: Podcast with Red Hat's Carl Trieloff on oVirt – Check out my latest podcast. I talk oVirt (open source virt mgmt) with #redhat's Carl Trieloff:
AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure | ZDNet – "The re-launch of social link sharing site Delicious, now under the stewardship of YouTube founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley under their AVOS startup banner, is nothing short of a complete, mind-boggling disaster. How AVOS took a beloved social sharing site and ruined it from stem to stem, and up to this minute have a complete, angry user PR explosion on their hands, is as enlightening as it is hard to watch."
redhat.com | Survey Results and Conclusions: Evolving to the Cloud – Here are results and my commentary from a survey that Red Hat conducted at VMworld
Daring Fireball: Amazon's New Kindles – "Amazon built an alternative to the iPad, rather than a direct competitor. It’s a different market segment. As Steve Jobs explained back in 2010 at the introduction of the original iPad, there’s unexplored territory between smartphones and laptops." << Agree. It remains to be seen how viable the segment is but sometimes less really is more.
Assess enterprise applications for cloud migration – Good, albeit probably overly academic, overview of how to think about enterprise application suitability for cloud.
Bezos Portrays Kindle Fire as Service, Not Tablet- Bloomberg – RT @iwantmedia: Jeff Bezos: "We don't think of Kindle Fire as a tablet. We think of it as a service" <
Cisco Blog » Blog Archive » Re-Thinking Pork Bellies. Why There are No Commodity Clouds, Only Commodity Thinkers. – "Don’t confuse platform with commodity." << The "commodity" term makes me uncomfortable in a lot of contexts.
Workshop | oVirt Project – RT @mestery: 5 weeks until #ovirt kickoff meeting @ Cisco campus in San Jose. Have you RSVP'd yet?
Delicious.com - Discover Yourself! – is being relaunched. It does look prettier. But it seems to have broken existing APIs and tagging system.
The myth of standardisation – "We have to accept that. It’s evolutionary, in our genes. We wouldn’t have existed without this primordial urge to grow and divert whenever we can. Evolution means upward growth, based on a firm rock bottom. Don’t you think it’s funny that we now all have mobiles, yet download apps onto those like madmen? I do. A splendid opportunity for Cloud web apps, and what happens? Install local."
How to create an OpenShift github quick start project | Red Hat Openshift Forum – RT @gshipley: Check out my new blog post on creating #openshift quick start projects. #cloud #paas

Podcast with Red Hat's Carl Trieloff on oVirt

2011-09-30T10:30:00.001-04:00

oVirt is the newly announced project focused on open source virtualization management, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduler, and more. Earlier this week, I had a chance to sit down with Carl Trieloff, Red Hat's technical director for cloud, to discuss the ins and out of oVirt. Among the topics we cover are:

What is oVirt?
How does oVirt relate to the Open Virtualization Alliance and the KVM hypervisor?
How will licensing and code contributions work?
What's the governance model?
What comes next?

Listen to MP3 (9:06)

Listen to OGG (9:06)

Links for today seems to be broken

2011-09-30T00:32:00.001-04:00

With the, ahem, less than elegant relaunch of the delicious bookmark saving tool, I'm back on pinboard. Alas, the Javascript I've been using to format JSON feeds into a form I could use to easily generate daily postings is now broken on both sites. (The delicious version never worked on pinboard.) My very inexpert eyes don't spy the problem immediately. I may fix this or I may, at least for the moment, continue to experiment with different ways of sharing content. One of my considerations here is that, while I'm all in for posting on the social media darling of the moment, I also want to largely mirror on a site I control or can at least easily export in a meaningful form--in this case, Blogger.

Links for 09-26-2011

2011-09-26T09:12:00.001-04:00

auntie pixelante › get lamp - I see the point--though don't really agree. Jason's film did focus on the players who ultimately made the most impact. It's a choice and not necessarily a bad one.
Voting to Hire a Chief Without Meeting Him - NYTimes.com - "...when the search committee of four directors narrowed the candidates to three finalists, no one else on the board was willing to interview them. And when the committee finally chose Mr. Apotheker and again suggested that other directors meet him, no one did. Remarkably, when the 12-member board voted to name Mr. Apotheker as the successor to the recently ousted chief executive, Mark Hurd, most board members had never met Mr. Apotheker."
Why I’m Stepping Down from TechCrunch | The Reformed Broker - The sad thing is, as one commenter noted, that it takes a while to realize this is humor unless someone tells you going in.
Bryce's Ramblings: Board Games on the iPad

Links for 09-16-2011

2011-09-16T12:48:00.002-04:00

How Whole Foods "Primes" You To Shop | Fast Company - "The prices for the flowers, as for all the fresh fruits and vegetables, are scrawled in chalk on fragments of black slate--a tradition of outdoor European marketplaces. It's as if the farmer pulled up in front of Whole Foods just this morning, unloaded his produce, then hopped back in his flatbed truck to drive back upstate to his country farm. The dashed-off scrawl also suggests the price changes daily, just as it might at a roadside farm stand or local market. But in fact, most of the produce was flown in days ago, its price set at the Whole Foods corporate headquarters in Texas. Not only do the prices stay fixed, but what might look like chalk on the board is actually indelible; the signs have been mass-produced in a factory."
Bill Poole's Creative Abrasion: Business-IT Alignment - A nice feedback diagram.
Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
The Agonies of Picking a Product Name - Fog Creek Blog - "Picking a product name is all agony and no ecstasy. It’s also a giant time-slurping vortex. And in the end, it kind of doesn’t matter."
How many photos have ever been taken? | 1000memories
R&D is Important, But For Whom? – tecosystems - "What the above suggests, however, is that R&D is relatively independent of financial performance for companies that conduct it, with the caveats that this is merely a five year sample and that the selection of vendors is arbitrary and cross-industry. Which in turn implies that Palmisano is correct, and that we should consider research and development separately, because the two may actually have little to do with one another."
The books business: Great digital expectations | The Economist - "TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read."
Photos, Copyrights, and the “Mechanical Representation of Facts” - I lean towards the narrower view of copyright here. Anything else strikes me as a very steep slippery slope.
Fountainhead: IT-as-a-Service: Models for Consumption, Operations, Technology - "The market is equating virtualization with cloud, and worse, equating cloud with IT Transformation."
Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT - Perspectives: CA Technologies corporate blog - CA Technologies - "Consumer-driven IT extends beyond the enterprise (fire)walls too. Like all consumers, your customers are rapidly becoming used to accessing cloud services whenever it suits them; they are connecting with product and service vendors online; they are interacting with businesses through social media and portable cloud-connected apps. Yet none of this means that employees are inherently correct in their sourcing decisions."
CrunchFund? No Matter What You Call It, It's Business as Usual in SV. - Kara Swisher - Media - AllThingsD - "By early evening, after my kids told me to chillax, my dark mood had changed to accept that the transaction — however profoundly distasteful to me — was part and parcel of the insidious log-rolling, back-scratching ecosystem that has happened in every other center of power in the universe since the beginning of time."
Be warned: cloud, virtual apps can magnify the cost of wasted software licenses | ITworld
Red Hat's Aeolus to 'out-Linux' Rackspace's cloud • The Register
Nikon: we don't need mirrorless cameras | News | TechRadar UK

Quick Review: La Cave, Wynn Las Vegas

2011-08-28T21:14:00.001-04:00

I was looking for a light but nice bite to tide me over to dinner after suffering through a 45 minute check-in line at the Wynn. Self-service kiosks--even if just as a backup. Join the 21st century people. I know you want to give the personal touch and all that but, if the personal touch involves handing water bottles to people who have been standing in line for a half hour, you'd be better off trying something else.

But I digress.

Anyway, La Cave piqued my interest. The advertising copy describes it justly: "With its low-slung ceilings and cozy nooks, La Cave is the ideal retreat for indulging in Chef Bill DeMarco’s savory small plates, oven-fired flatbreads, charcuterie and modern specialties that are perfect for sharing and pairing with wine. In addition to the innovative wine program, La Cave features an extensive selection of hand crafted beers and fine spirits, making this the ultimate spot for lunch, dinner or late night revelry."

Which sounds about right. Although the space towards the back--that opened up into a garden area (though at 110 degrees, no one seemed much interested in outdoor seating)--was actually pretty light and airy.

I ordered a mixed sausage flatbread pizza (and a Doghead IPA). Seemed about right for a light lunch. The surprise came when, after a frankly not very long delay, the manager came in to apologize for the wait and present me with their bacon-wrapped dates with a blue cheese fondue sauce (pictured).

The flatbread when it (soon) arrived was good enough with just the right amount of heat. Though, in truth, it wasn't all that different or better than other good flatbread pizzas I've had. The dates were extremely flavorful however. A nice blend of textures and flavors with the bacon perfectly cooked. I may have to try to recreate that one.

Strongly recommended with the service a big plus.

I would point to the restaurant website but it's embedded in one of those horrible Flash things that Las Vegas casinos are even more inexplicably attached to than restaurants and hotels as a whole are.

How the mobile era changes TV

2011-08-24T09:32:00.000-04:00

Access to information and communications has changed so radically that storylines dependent on them not being available have to explain why they're not rather than the other way around. If I were plopped down 20 years ago, I would feel incredibly frustrated by how difficult it would be to track down information and people.From James Poniewozik of Time Magazine:

As it turns out, back in 1976, people would practice tennis on courts that happened to have landline phones perched next to the net. Indeed, maybe the most striking thing about comparing this old segment to modern action shows is how much mobile technology has changed the contemporary drama. In the new Charlie's Angels—as on any thriller/espionage show now—characters are constantly getting cellphone calls, checking tablets computers, generally relying on a constant access to information that, from the standpoint of the 1970s, is something close to psychic ability.

Open clouds isn't a license question

2011-08-23T16:05:00.002-04:00

From Marten Mickos Says: Keep the Cloud Open:

The problem is that it's tougher to define "share and share alike" in the cloud space. It's not just about code, it's also about data, APIs and company policies that affect whether use of cloud services are open or not. "The border line between me and the one serving me is different. If I'm a Facebook user, I don't need the GPL to protect me... I need the right to withdraw my data.
The definition of open needs to change, says Mickos. "Though the GPL is a great thing... as we move into the cloud, it's not enough. We need to extend the definition of open for code, data and APIs." Mickos closed the keynote saying that the community needs to protect the principles of "sharing and sharing alike" for the next generation to enjoy it in the cloud the same way the current generation has enjoyed it with Linux and open source.

I'm certainly all on board with the idea of cloud interoperability and portability. And so are most of the users I speak with. In fact, I just finished co-presenting a Red Hat-sponsored webinar in which we included a poll question asking viewers how important portability was to them. The results? Overwhelmingly somewhat or very important.

There's no disputing that figuring out what sort of freedoms and portability are the most important to maintain in the cloud is an ongoing process. I discuss some of the issues in this piece I wrote while still an industry analyst a few years back.

However, I'm less convinced about encoding freedoms in licenses. And, in fact, the trend seems to be headed in the opposite directions. The Affero GPL--which essentially extends the copyleft provisions of the GPL to the case where software is delivered over the network in the form of a service--has not been widely adopted. Furthermore, there seems to be an overall trend toward the use of more permissive licenses such as BSD, Apache, and MIT rather than strong copyleft licenses like the GPL. (This post of mine on CNET has some more background on both the trend and the way the various licenses work.)

It is indeed right and good to promote open and interoperable clouds. I also firmly believe it's going to be the winning side just as it has (often) been elsewhere. But partly for that reason, I'm unconvinced that the open source license landscape is the right place to look for answers even if the overall success and values of open source is.

"Just do it" works better for Nike than private clouds

2011-08-22T11:58:00.003-04:00

From AGIMO and cloud - when aloof is good | Cloud CIO -

Moving workloads to the cloud without considering the other cross dependencies such as data, integration, compliance, security, identity, continuity, workflow, licencing, business process, application support, service management, service assurance and the service catalogue, will only mean that it wont take long before something breaks and it might be very hard to fix.

Enterprise adoption of cloud is not a race, it is a journey of transformation, there is too much to be considered in the portfolio approach to a cloud transformation to see it as anything else but a long term transition that needs a program management approach.

Those are a couple of great paragraphs. While focusing on process always has the potential to go off the deep end into some ITIL swamp, the "just do it" approach doesn't cut it for private clouds either.

One of my favorite quotes in this context comes Michael Hammer who wrote: "Automating a mess yields an automated mess." At Red Hat, we've been finding that there's a huge appetite among customers for getting through the knothole from managing IT systems to managing IT as a service--a transformation which is as much about organization and process as it is about technology.

Links for 08-20-2011

2011-08-20T00:19:00.001-04:00

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Losing the HP Way - Cringely on technology - "Software is a big part of IBM’s profits and it is growing rapidly. IBM and Oracle have been on buying sprees, picking up one software firm after another. HP has not. Software is only three percent of HP’s business. Are there any good buys out there for HP? Again it could be a matter of timing. HP is late getting started. The best deals may already be gone."
Unedited Thoughts About Technology Better Left Unposted - "A lot of other companies
I really fucking hate the way you cede so much ground to Apple. You just let them do the shit they do. Why couldn't you launch a decent tablet before the iPad? Why are your tablets still shittier than the iPad, for the most part? Why do your laptops still, by and large, look and feel crappier than MacBook Pros? (Exception: ThinkPads.) Why are most of your phones the same fucking way? Does Apple have some secret monopoly on making well designed, well constructed, easy-to-use gadgets? I want to love your products. I really really really do. Just make amazing shit. That's the only rule. Make. Amazing. Shit."
Amy Wohl's Opinions on Cloud Computing and SaaS: What is HP Thinking? - "HP has been trying for some time to move into the arena of enterprise software and services, but they have yet to be a big enough player to gain critical mass and buying another niche software vendor is unlikely to give them the traction they're looking for. "
Apple Final Cut Pro X Reviewed: Not Ready for Professionals on Onlinevideo.net – Online Video Strategies, Platforms, News, and Tips
Taking The 'Lug' Out Of Luggage - Forbes
Canned Platypus » Blog Archive » Don’t Be a Jerk - "We need to stop enabling the jerks by applauding when they act in deliberately offensive ways on HN, on Twitter, in conference presentations, etc. We need to stop pretending that the combative style prevalent on HN or LKML is the best way to facilitate progress; there’s no empirical evidence that “culling the herd” or “honing one’s weapons” or other such bloody metaphors really apply. We need to stop encouraging young techies to expend their energy emulating those styles instead of developing real people skills. Social skills really do serve a useful purpose, and anyone can improve them."

Links for 08-17-2011

2011-08-17T17:34:00.002-04:00

Daring Fireball: Balls - "That’s not to say it wasn’t a bold, brash move, or even to say it wasn’t the right move for Google and for Android as a platform. But that’s all relative to the position Google was in — and that position was a weak one, and to pretend otherwise is to deny the obvious. And don’t forget that it leaves Google in a tenuous situation with the two leading Android handset makers, Samsung and HTC. I think Apple and Microsoft probably feel pretty good, competitively, about having forced Google into spending $12.5 billion for Motorola — a handset maker with rapidly declining sales, no recent profits, and misguided management."
Welcome to the Cloud - "Your Apple ID has been disabled." - Scott Hanselman - "The most valuable companies have your valuable data in the cloud. We may think the cloud is decentralized, but it's not. It's totally centralized. All the valuable data is now in one place with one password that's connected to your one bank account. We've centralized and simplified fraud and the public pays for it."
Performing Security Testing in the Cloud | RightScale Blog
Direct and Indirect Causality « Wild Webmink - Nice discussion of philosophies underpinning GNU-ish vs. BSD-ish licensing.
NIST Cloud Computing Standards roadmap
Mark Hurd Descends Into Hell - Forbes - "Hurd’s job these days, managing the Sun hardware business at Oracle, is positively punk by comparison. Being in charge of a waning hardware unit at a company run by software dude Larry Ellison can’t be a lot of fun. With revenues in the $10 billion range when it was acquired by Oracle, the Sun unit has continued to lose traction in the marketplace, ceding customers to rivals, particularly IBM, faster than trees here in New England lose their leaves in late October. Revenues are practically in free fall. The losses, already at the severed-aorta level at the time of purchase, have accelerated as the unit wastes away."
SPECIAL REPORT: Hybrid transformation of the cloud - Minerals and Metals Group (MMG), hybrid cloud, HP, hitachi data systems, EMC, datacentre, cloud computing, Citrix, Cisco, CA Technologies, Brocade Communications - ARN - Good piece on hybrid clouds and tailoring for verticals.
Caterina.net» Blog Archive » Anonymity and Pseudonyms in Social Software - "To my mind there are three categories of Pseudonymous behavior, and they should be treated differently."
IDC White paper - "While 88% of IT consumers surveyed use a desktop PC to access the Internet for business or personal reasons and 91% use a laptop, fully 80% access the Internet using a smartphone, and 36% – over one-third – access it via a tablet (e.g., iPad)"
Freakonomics » The Costco Effect: Why Does the Wholesaler Cause Inflation? - "They concluded that the proliferation of Walmart Supercenters may explain 10.5% of the rise in the obesity rate since the 1980s."
The Chemistry Between Us - mlkshk - Amazing crossword puzzle.
Borders bankruptcy: Done in by its own stupidity, not the Internet. - By Annie Lowrey - Slate Magazine - "Barnes & Noble may well not be around in five years. But at least it has built a business that recognizes the trends in bookselling—toward the Internet, toward e-readers, toward a more boutique retail experience, away from big-box stores. It is remarkably similar to the strategy Borders laid out in its bankruptcy filing."

Links for 07-21-2011

2011-07-21T16:55:00.002-04:00

HP’s Tortured WebOS Positioning | Monday Note - "The reality is simpler — and harder: HP decided to enter the smartphone/tablet fray. It thus competes with Android and iOS. The consumerization of IT renders the “enterprise-only” pivot null and void. In this new world, Google and Apple wage an ecosystem war: devices + apps + distribution. Add marketing, if you want, but Word Of Mouth is still more potent than ad dollars. Or merely reinforces it."
TidBITS Networking: The Future is Disposable - "But that world is coming to an end. In the future our digital lives won’t be defined by and centered on our devices, but on our information itself. Everything from our data to our applications will be portable, accessible, and persistent. Our devices, including our computers, will become disposable. Their value becomes nothing more than the cost of the hardware, and we will never fear physical loss or failure."
Today's real life is yesterday's science fiction. : raldi
Why Not Tumblr - "Tumblr treats content more like a social network does than a writing/publishing/archiving tool should—with an emphasis on easy sharing and reblogging, but not enough care paid to hosting that content in a place where ideas and conversations can live and grow over time, a place where search engines of the future can find it."

Links for 06-16-2011

2011-06-16T16:29:00.002-04:00

Photos of Vancouver rioting - The Globe and Mail - The first photo is pretty funny in a way.
The “Post-PC” Era: It’s Real, But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does | Forrester Blogs
Most Common iPhone Passcodes | iPhone | Daniel Amitay - "Most of the top passcodes follow typical formulas, such as four identical digits, moving in a line up/down the pad, repetition. 5683 is the passcode with the least obvious pattern, but it turns out that it is the number representation of LOVE (5683), once again mimicking a very common internet password: “iloveyou.”"
world subways at scale - fake is the new real
Dogs Make Employees More Productive At Work
Photopic Sky Survey - Finger Lakes ML-8300 monochrome
DARPA’s Regina Dugan on “The Nation’s Elite Army of Futuristic Techno-geeks” – AllThingsD
Welcome to Pyongyang on the Behance Network
Should We Care if People Don't Pay Their Debts? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - "People really underweight the role that norms play in sustaining a modern economy."

Links for 06-09-2011

2011-06-09T15:14:00.000-04:00

Facebook's face recognition strategy may be just the ticket - O'Reilly Radar - "This is part of my general thinking about privacy. We need to move away from a Maginot-line like approach where we try to put up walls to keep information from leaking out, and instead assume that most things that used to be private are now knowable via various forms of data mining. Once we do that, we start to engage in a question of what uses are permitted, and what uses are not."
“It Just Works.” - "Files are something Microsoft worries about. Files in the cloud are something Google and Amazon worry about. Apple’s iCloud is about opening an application and the thing you want to access being there."
She texted. We kicked her out. : Blog : Austin : Alamo Drafthouse Cinema - "Ma'am, you may be free to text in all the other theaters in the Magnited States of America, but here at our "little crappy ass theater," you are not. Why you may ask? Well, we actually do give a f*$k."
WoodITWork.com » Why VMwaorld vCloud Director Isn't for Today's Private Cloud - Generally agree with respect to automation/service catalog but isolation and security are important even in private cloud context.
451 CAOS Theory » The trend towards permissive licensing
announcing olduse.net
Short logic (Groupon IPO: Pass on this deal) - "Losing billions for years is generally not a winning strategy, despite the odd exception."

Links for 06-03-2011

2011-06-03T09:39:00.001-04:00

Apple Retail commemorates 10th anniversary with emotive poster - Apple - "Speaking of T-shirts, we’ve learned more than you can imagine about our own. We’ve found that when we wear black T-shirts, we blend in. And when we wear too many colors it’s confusing. But blue shirts are just right. We’ve also learned that it takes precisely 4,253 stitches to embroider the Apple logo on those blue shirts. And we even figured out which direction the stitches should go in."
Greenpoint Gazette:An Open Letter from Eugene Mirman to Time Warner Cable - "However, overall your company is run like an ill managed Soviet factory. I bet if Ayn Rand was still alive, she’d write a fun to read, but poorly argued book about how appalling and inefficient your company is. Please cut it out. Thank you."
Workplace Culture – DEC’s Role Model « Perspectives
Is Cloud Computing Really Killing IT Pro Jobs?
The Incompleat Known Space Concordance
Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea « Locklin on science
The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse - BusinessWeek
zBX and the Next IBM Hypervisor « DancingDinosaur

Links for 05-26-2011

2011-05-26T09:41:00.002-04:00

Top 10 Programming Fonts - A list of monospaced fonts.
Real World Technologies - Poulson: The Future of Itanium Servers - Nice deep dive on Itanium history and Poulson microarchitecture.
The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - The Information Sage - LOng article about Edward Tufte.
What's the most epic photo ever taken? - Quora - Some amazing pics here.

Links for 05-24-2011

2011-05-24T09:55:00.002-04:00

Is the Launch Speed in Angry Birds Constant? | Wired Science | Wired.com - A system dynamics analysis of Angry Birds.
Dorsey's Square tries to eliminate the card swipe by bringing back the tab - Fortune Tech - Hey guys. Watch the "many generations ago" thing. I can remember accounts with local stores when growing up. "They call it opening a tab, a high-tech homage to the pad-and-paper accounting that barkeeps, druggists and general store clerks were accustomed to many generations ago."
Tom West; engineer was the soul of Data General’s new machine - The Boston Globe
...but rarely anyone else's. MIT fields teams in a record - 05.26.75 - SI Vault
The Culture Crash by James Panero, City Journal 20 July 2009 - "The reductions in arts endowments reported over the past year have been significant, raising the question of how they have been managed. If the investment goal of arts endowments is the preservation of capital, how can they now face decreases of 35 percent, aside from the criminal actions of investors like Bernard Madoff?"
Column: When You Shouldn't Listen to Your Critics - Harvard Business Review - "If businesses all try to please the same segment of reviewers, they risk forgoing the differentiation that comes from targeting specific markets. As we’ve learned this lesson in our business, we’ve increased our investment in traditional focus groups to ensure that we respond to the needs of our core market. That doesn’t mean we ignore online feedback—indeed, we even welcome it from one-shot customers, who may someday come to appreciate our premium niche. But when a reviewer says that the price of a $6 sandwich is “seriously whacked,” I have a better understanding of what—and who—is behind it."
Watch: John Lithgow performs a dramatic reading of Newt Gingrich's press release | Nerve.com
Open Virtualization Alliance Aims to Challenge VMware - "We were a bit surprised to see that only a small number (29%) were satisfied with a single virtualization mechanism (see chart below). An almost equal number (26%) were using four or more different virtualization packages, and almost half of them were using two or three."
The Twitter Trap - NYTimes.com - "Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.”"
Ranked: Woody Allen Films from Worst to Best | Nerve.com - Strongly disagree with the position of a few films on this list but overall pretty good.

Links for 05-16-2011

2011-05-16T12:13:00.001-04:00

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

Links for 05-01-2011

2011-05-02T11:01:00.003-04:00

Half Pregnant Is No Way To Live: What We Learned From Iron Mountain Digital - Wikibon - "Iron Mountain’s biggest struggle with its digital business was an inability to extend these products beyond their core customer base. The reality here is OEM partners never really wanted them to be anything more than the “Iron Mountain” for physical records. Anything that looked or smelled like a business that was competitive to its partners was going to be an uphill battle. That is, unless the company wanted to disrupt its broader go-to-market strategy, invest heavily in its direct digital sales force, and compete head on with these OEMs. Unwilling to go all in, they were stuck in a box."
A historical look at Cloud Computing - Inside Enterprise IT - Enterprise - Dell Community
Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption
Under the Radar Introduces New Set of Fresh-Idea Companies - Cloud Computing - News & Reviews - eWeek.com
AVOS - So del.icio.us has a new home. Glad to hear it. I use delicious a lot.
Stop Blaming the Customers - the Fault is on Amazon Web Services - ReadWriteCloud
Amazon EC2 outage: summary and lessons learned « RightScale Blog - Very good analysis of the outage.
Cloud hosting vs colocation - Chris Chandler's posterous - Good cost analysis. Of course, the results will vary by your assumptions.
If Ikea sold cars | Eduardo Porter

Links for 04-25-2011

2011-04-25T15:50:00.003-04:00

Hard economic lessons for news « BuzzMachine - Agree with a lot here.
How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse « SmugMug's Don MacAskill
Ranked: Stanley Kubrick's Films from Worst to Best | Nerve.com - Agree with this about 60%.
The King's Speech: good movie, very bad history. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine
What The Scandal Of "Three Cups of Tea" Author Greg Mortenson Is Really About | Fast Company - "And upon visiting 30 of the 141 schools that CAI claims to have built, they found half of them were empty, being used for storage, or hadn't received any outside support for years. But while that's deplorable, it's not simply a function of CAI focusing on Mortenson's publicity instead of development. This happens to many development projects around the world, no matter who is building them."
A Whole Foods Fight in Boston - Reason Magazine
Working Best at Coffee Shops - Conor Friedersdorf - Business - The Atlantic
Open Source Report: Should Oracle be blamed for OpenOffice.org pullout? - "Depending on how Oracle actually handles the community transition, the irony is that Oracle could have been lauded a year ago for handing OpenOffice.org over in full to the community. Now it's just an admission of failure, since real energy for open office suite development has moved over to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. Of course Oracle will now receive a big raspberry over its announcement. It's too little, too late and it didn't have to be that way."

Links for 04-15-2011

2011-04-15T09:25:00.002-04:00

Why customer needs don’t always matter — On Product Management - "Product Management is not about satisfying customer needs and wants. Product Management is about ensuring business goals are met and business success delivered."
CentOS 5.6 Finally Arrives: Is It Suitable for Business Use? | Linux Magazine - "The other half of “enterprise-class” is that updates arrive in a timely fashion, which is notably false for the 5.x series. If I understand correctly, there have been a handful of updates prior to the release of CentOS 5.6 for the 5.x series — but nothing else. So, if you consider timely updates a requirement for “enterprise-class,” we can count CentOS out now."
Build Your Own NASA Apollo Landing Computer (no kidding) - Space & Sci-Fi Blog - Galaxiki, the Sci-Fi Galaxy that anyone can edit
Coté's People Over Process » VMWare Cloud Foundry – Quick Analysis and Press Pass - "The most critical thing for VMWare to do is to let this “open is best” philosophy play out in their application development strategy. VMWare’s current fortunes were built on distinctly not that philosophy and it’d be easy for the kernel geniuses who must hold much of the corporate power to derail the appdev strategy, which is a much different beast than virtualization and other business models closer to the metal than the glass."

Links for 04-12-2011

2011-04-12T15:14:00.003-04:00

Data Center Dialog: Right place, right time, right cloud partners - "One of the things that has been frustrating about the cloud market to date is the ad hoc, shoot-from-the-hip approach. It’s great for testing the waters and there is, indeed, an important role for “good enough” computing, but as enterprises get more serious about cloud, they need to make sure they are thinking about something near and dear to my heart: management."
The Joy of Not Cooking - Magazine - The Atlantic - "So we have something of a mystery. Just when our labor in the kitchen has fallen, we have seen the rise of the gourmet kitchen: the high-end retailers like Williams-Sonoma … the Sub-Zero refrigerators … the $10,000 Viking stoves … the $250 Breville toaster ovens … the Japanese knives with their own display stands. Why are we spending so much money on a place where we spend so little time?"
Groundhogs! - "Having groundhog trouble is like living in the Bill Murray movie of the same name. You go to bed and wake up to the same exact thing every morning—in this case, a giant furry butt on legs eating your landscape to the ground. But this picture is NOT a comedy. Although weather-guessing Punxsutawney Phil has made this giant squirrel—yes, that’s what they are—seem cute and cuddly, they are actually a serious menace that people often underestimate until it’s too late."
ProductCamp Boston’s Presentations on SlideShare - ProductCamp Boston 2011.
Game Over In The CPU Wars? - Chuck's Blog - "For me, it's the final sign that -- yes -- the era of Big Unix on proprietary RISC processors is finally coming to a close."

Links for 04-06-2011

2011-04-06T08:21:00.002-04:00

Amy Ziari - The Newsroom - PR Case Study: Where Color Went Wrong - "MISTAKE #3: Using hyperbolic, if not misleading, messaging. Everyone wants to say his or her product is the best thing ever. Sometimes it is, but more often than not, it isn't. In working with entrepreneurs, a huge role of the PR team needs to be striking a balance between staying true to the broader vision a founder wants to get across while not making journalists pull out the barf bag. Color's press release has astoundingly bold messaging that also positions the app as something that currently lives up to the larger vision, when all you have to do is download it to see otherwise."
Rational Survivability - THE Cloud & Virtualization Security Blog - I actually agree with this for the most part. While it's important to maintain portability across environments--and at some future point may want to dynamically arbitrage resource pricing--the use case where you dynamically shift resources associated with a single application from private to public seems a stretch.
Feature: The Database Revolution - With an IBM slant, but still worth reading.
postpcmag.com
Locked in again? Customers must face their responsibility and take action « NinaLytton.com - "Open systems are your insurance policy. Open systems promote competition. Competition among your suppliers gives you business choices. Choices give you fair prices and reasonable business policies. Choices prevent anti-competitive vendor behavior like Oracle’s."
Bacon Butty - Saveur.com - Yum. Bacon.
MapIncrease | Apache Hadoop for the Enterprise | Cloudera

MIT Burton House 60th Reunion

2011-03-31T20:30:00.014-04:00

I do a brief appearance on a panel.

Links for 03-30-2011

2011-03-30T15:11:00.001-04:00

New Cloud Reference Architecture From NIST | Andi Mann – Übergeek
The Existential Dread of '3eanuts': Peanuts Minus the 4th Panel - ComicsAlliance | Comic book culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews
COLOR.XXX PITCH DECK!! - This faux pitch deck for color is pretty funny.
‘RomneyCare’ Facts and Falsehoods | FactCheck.org - Looks like a pretty good look at where Mass Healthcare stands.
The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium • The Register - "To me, this is the reality of what Ellison meant when he said that Oracle wants to be the IBM of the 1960s. Oracle wants to have the incredible margins that IBM enjoyed back then. It wants to have that lock-in that IBM had in the days when there were few alternatives and even fewer standards that would allow customers to easily move from vendor to vendor."
Microsoft points to Target for private cloud but gets it embarassingly wrong - The Troposphere - "But that would be HARD, you see. Any of those options, which would qualify as legit exercises in cloud computing, would require a hell of a lot more work than simply trimming infrastructure. They redecorate the bathrooms every once in a while too, and they aren’t touting “next-gen on-demand potty usability”, are they?"
HP Supports Customers Despite Oracle’s Anti-customer Actions - Battle by press release.

Links for 03-23-2011

2011-03-23T11:15:00.001-04:00

Why I Left Rackspace and What About Openstack « Deprecation - "One thing that I think has been wrong from the start of Openstack is the definition of community. Community is not a list of partners. In fact, the participation of most of the companies listed on the openstack community webpage started and ended with a press release."
GSA: Cloud Computing Is Safer Than You Think -- Government Clouds -- InformationWeek - "The Office of Management and Budget has taken "an aggressive stance on the cloud," she wrote. "We're all on the hook to move three systems to the cloud by 2012. I'm here to tell you that it can be done intelligently and securely.""
Impossible world: Articles: M.C. Escher: More Mathematics Than Meets the Eye
RIP Digg. - "Startups in Silicon Valley are like old generals. They don’t die anymore, buoyed on life-rafts of lingering venture capital and modest revenues. They just fade away, eventually purchased for assets that are a shadow of their former promise. It’s pretty clear that Digg is on that path. The company isn’t dead, but it’s been fading away for a while, and its soul is all but gone. The company can spin it however it wants– the final nail in the coffin is news that founder Kevin Rose– long Digg’s greatest asset– is leaving."
New Rules for the New Internet Bubble « Steve Blank - "We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What are they, how do they differ and what can startup do to take advantage of them?"

Links for 03-18-2011

2011-03-18T09:33:00.001-04:00

Consumerization of IT: 95% of Information Workers Use Self-Purchased Technology for Work - Interesting data from IDC.
Delivering Competitive Advantage through IT - Some potentially useful numbers from Intel here.
NPR Sting: Edited Video Makes Schiller, O'Keefe Look Bad - TIME - "The full video hardly clears Schiller. His opining about liberals' education and conservatives' anti-intellectualism, for instance, still comes off as smug and would have hurt NPR regardless. (The network was still feeling backlash from firing Juan Williams last fall after he said on Fox that some Muslims on planes made him nervous.) But the full picture shows O'Keefe's partisan hit job — trying to link NPR to liberal elitism and scary Muslims — was manipulative too. And it shows how sadly easy it is to take advantage of the attention span and metabolism of media today."
True or False? An example of Internet illiteracy – Laziness or just plain stupidity? | Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange
Steve Jobs in a Box - Has Apple peaked? (from 2007).
SCM Marchant Cogito 240SR Calculator - The first "computer" that I used.
WeatherSpark | Interactive Weather Charts - Nice visualization of weather history for a locale.
The Rolodex Logo Shock | Logo Designer - Wow. I assume that this was an attempt to get away from the company's brand image of being the guys who made the round thing for holding addresses. But the new logo looks like something thrown together in 10 minutes using clip art.
The Mad Genius of “Modernist Cuisine” : The New Yorker
Marco.org - Moving on from iPad "office productivity" apps - Sounds about right. A lot of things that you CAN do on an iPad, you don't necessarily want to except in the most limited ways.
A Chef’s Fine Art, Now Available in Homes Near You - NYTimes.com - Sous vide from the NY Times.
Huge incoherent failures: A doomed mansion, "The Great Gatsby" and Fitzgerald's America - "As for America, "its greatest promise is that something is going to happen," Fitzgerald wrote in a letter. That essential restlessness, that search for the new, can yield beauty just as readily as a condo subdivision. Often, in our history, it has yielded both."
Cutting Through the Bother of City Parking - NYTimes.com - Good overview of parking apps for Smartphones.

Links for 03-09-2011

2011-03-09T09:02:00.002-05:00

Introducing Zite, the iPad's Smartest Magazine Yet - "“What’s broken is there’s so much stuff out there, and I don’t know how to get to it,” says Ali Devar, Zite’s founder and CEO. “There’s no automatic system that’s catching the important stuff I miss every day. Search doesn’t solve it. Social doesn’t solve it. A lot of [Zite beta testers] came back to us and said, ‘Thank goodness, here’s something that gives me my content and more, but filters it for me.’ People are feeling the pain, and they need it resolved.”"
Gambling on the future... | In-Depth Analysis | Marketing Week - "Three-quarters of marketing chiefs plan to restructure their departments this year to keep pace with the demands of digital media, according to research exclusive to Marketing Week. To help marketers keep ahead of the wave of change, there are four key areas of reorganisation."
InfoQ: IBM’s Reference Architecture for Creating Cloud Environments
High Scalability - High Scalability - Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing? - Interesting stuff if a bit all over the place. It also seems to lack a discussion of memory used within existing storage paradigms.
IBM100 - Good Design is Good Business - "IBM’s focus on design has its roots in a stroll down Fifth Avenue in New York that Thomas J. Watson Jr. took in the early 1950s. He stopped at an Olivetti shop where typewriters were set out on sidewalk stands for passersby to try out. The machines had sleek designs and a variety of colors. Inside, the shop was bright and modern looking. In contrast, the display areas in IBM’s offices in those days were dimly lit and its computers were drab and boxy. The lobby of the headquarters on Madison Avenue had been designed to please Thomas Watson Sr.’s early 20th century aesthetic: it looked, his son wrote, like the “first-class saloon on an ocean liner.” A few years later, as Watson Jr. was preparing to take over as IBM’s chief executive, he decided, “I could put my stamp on IBM through modern design.” Later, in a 1973 lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Watson Jr. declared that “good design is good business.”"
Digital Watches and Pet Rocks - Technology Review - "So take that as a lesson when you encounter a new technology: the first incarnations might be clunky, but that's no real indicator of its staying power."
Cinema Redux - "This explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment . This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time."
moviebarcode - Cool way of looking at films' palette.
Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com
Pictures Of Cats Winning: Pics, Videos, Links, News - Hilarious!
Shackleton’s Antarctica in colour, 1915 « How to be a Retronaut

Links for 03-04-2011

2011-03-04T12:45:00.002-05:00

Daring Fireball: The Chair - "The biggest difference, though, was this: last year Apple didn’t yet understand the iPad. They knew it was good. They knew it had potential. But they didn’t know what it was. They had a sense that in the conceptual space between an iPhone and a MacBook there was uncharted, fertile territory. And they set for themselves a wise metric: the iPad would only succeed if it could do some of the same things a Mac can do, but do them better. If it wasn’t better in several important ways for several common tasks, it would not succeed. What they didn’t know last year was how people would use it, for real. They know now."
Shaded Relief Archive
Charlie Sheen Quotes As New Yorker Cartoons: Pics, Videos, Links, News
Maps Over Time
Hacker News | Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video) - Impressive. Fun to read the comments about backward compatibility too.
The Moral Crusade Against Foodies - Magazine - The Atlantic
When bad websites happen to good restaurants - The Boston Globe - "Restaurant websites are famously bad. They are easy targets for mockery — often user-unfriendly tools that feature Flash animation, embarrassing techno music, and menus that turn out to be PDF files, as you realize only once they start downloading. Meanwhile, basic information about location and hours is hard to come by, daily specials lists date to 2006, pages are permanently “under construction,’’ and the darn things won’t load on your iPhone."
The Information by James Gleick: Review by Nicholas Carr - The Daily Beast
10 Old Ads That Would Be Banned Today | Business Blogs

Links for 03-02-2011

2011-03-02T08:56:00.001-05:00

CEOs Want Better Sales Forces | Forrester Blogs - "In my recent travels, I have been asking tech CEOs a simple question: "Are you satisfied that your sales force is advancing your strategy?" The answer has been a resounding "No!" They give it a C- grade."
MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences | MAS.531 Computational Camera and Photography, Fall 2009 | Home - Computational photography course at OCW.
The Coffee Table Book of Man Caves by Johanna Schlegel — Kickstarter
Netflix Switches Over To Convenient New Physical Locations | The Onion - America's Finest News Source - "LOS GATOS, CA—Officials at Netflix announced Thursday that the company has finally reached its long-term goal of constructing a chain of easily accessible stores. "Having actual physical locations was always our ultimate intent, and we are proud to provide our customers with the convenient option of driving to a nearby Netflix store and renting any available movie for just $3.99 per title," said Netflix spokesman Henry Regis, adding that the ease of physically walking through aisles and picking out DVDs will more than make up for the stores' minimized selection of titles. "We will also be implementing late fees to help ensure films are returned on time—that way no one misses a chance to rent the hottest new releases." Regis confirmed that the new physical locations will be open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and include easy after-hours drop-off boxes."
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Sex, math, code - "I'm going to title my next book "The Code of Sex: Ten Secrets for Using Math to Keep Her Satisfied and Hungry for More." I promise you that it's going to be the most pirated book of all time."
Zooming in With Computational Photography | CSAIL
McNealy: Sun could have won out over Linux | The Industry Standard - InfoWorld
The Colour Clock
Six Brands That Don't Mean What They Used To - Woot
Why is IT governance so difficult to implement? - O'Reilly Radar - "What is the core value that ensures IT governance will work? The ability to compromise."
Ranked: Every Oscar Best Picture Winner from Worst to Best | Nerve.com - As might be expected, I agree with a lot of this while also disagreeing with a fair bit.
Fashion, Qaddafi-Style | Politics | Vanity Fair
Books Beyond Borders - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - From the comments: "The bricks-and-mortar retailers that have the best chance of survival are sellers of: 1) perishables, like grocery stores; 2) really cheap stuff (e,g., "dollar store" types of stuff), where the cost of shipping would add too much to the price; 3) really expensive stuff (like jewelry) that can be risky to ship, even if insured; 4) stuff that really does need to be seen and handled and tried out before buying (some, but not all, clothing, and some other things); 5) stuff that may be subject to legal prohibitions against shipping across state lines, or anywhere; 6) stuff that is too bulky to send via mail or UPS, and too expensive to ship by freight (much home improvement stuff, for example); and 7) convenient combinations of many different kinds of stuff, thus sparing consumers some time and shipping costs."
A Visitors Guide to Silicon Valley « Steve Blank
Video Of My CSA Presentation: “Commode Computing: Relevant Advances In Toiletry & I.T. – From Squat Pots to Cloud Bots – Waste Management Through Security Automation” | Rational Survivability
The REAL Death Of The Music Industry - "Digital really does appear to have brought about the era of the single"
Jeopardy! Champ Ken Jennings - The Washington Post - "When anyone mentions 2001 to them (or Terminator, or Matrix, or Tron, or...) IBM prefers to bring up the helpful question-answering computer on Star Trek. C'mon IBM! You just invented SkyNet! Own it!"
Reelizer - Some very nicely done alternate movie posters.

Links for 02-18-2011

2011-02-18T13:05:00.003-05:00

No-Knead Bread: A Convert’s Story | Michael Ruhlman
SF Signal: 10 Literary Novels for Genre Readers
Kodak Is Apple in Reverse - MarketWatch - "Consider: In 1997, Kodak was worth $28 billion to Apple's $2 billion. Today, a single quarterly profit for Apple is enough to buy all of Kodak's shares--six times over."
Watson wins it all, humans still can do some other cool things -- Engadget - Tjis is actually a pretty good summation of what Watson is and is not.
Singularity: Kurzweil on 2045, When Humans, Machines Merge - TIME
NASA and Census Bureau offer tips for cloud computing success - FierceGovernmentIT
Links List 2.11.11 | ScienceLogic - Good set of cloud computing-related links.
Web Ink Now: An open letter to journalists: You have an amazing career opportunity on the Dark Side - I agree with this... up to a point. This seems to suggest however a greater degree of editorial independence than is likely the case most of the time.
Robert's Reader | Uncategorized | In Which I Take Issue With Felix Salmon - fully agree.
StatusNet | Your Network - Microblogging software.
Rest in Peace, Kenneth Harry Olsen - Linux Magazine Online
Moving to IPv6: Now for the hard part (FAQ) | Deep Tech - CNET News - Good piece on the move to IPv6.
The Map Room: Daniel Huffman and His River Maps - The Mississippi River system in the style of a transit map.

Links for 02-03-2011

2011-02-03T14:45:00.001-05:00

'Death by GPS' in desert - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee - "In Death Valley, many roads shown on some GPS systems are no longer passable. Some have been officially closed. Others are simply too rough for most vehicles and pose serious danger. "People are so reliant on their GPS that they fail to look out the windshield and make wise decisions based on what they're seeing," said Alley."
Data Center Dialog: A cloudy look forward at 2011 - Good trends summary.
1948 Mayor to MIT: Use Flamethrowers to Melt Snow? « Slice of MIT by the Alumni Association
Photo of Cars Abandoned In The Snow on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive
Quora Backlash Slams Head First Into Quora Backlash Backlash - Seems like a pretty balanced look at the whole thing. Personally, I consider it an open question how effectively Quora will deal with a broader set of users, many of whom will do their best to pervert it for self-promotion or otherwise personal agendas.
A tale of two qubits: how quantum computers work
Why Bacon Is A Gateway To Meat For Vegetarians : Shots - Health News Blog : NPR - "Recently, an old friend who's been a vegetarian for more than 15 years shocked us with a story: Last weekend, she ate bacon. Several strips. Straight out of the frying pan where her boyfriend was cooking it. This wasn't the first time she'd encountered it sizzling there, in all its glistening glory. But for some reason, this time it overpowered her. She was guilty yet gleeful when she told us that she'd allowed bacon back into her life."
LinkedIn to Offer Free Business Card Scanning With CardMunch Acquisition - "CardMunch, the iPhone app that helps import business cards into a digital format, has announced that it has been bought by LinkedIn. While that's good news for CardMunch, its even better news for you, its potential users. "Starting today," writes the company, "the current version of the CardMunch app will be completely free!"
25 Years of Digital Vandalism - NYTimes.com - "In short, the road to our present universe teeming with viruses, worms and Trojan horses was paved, a quarter-century ago this month, with the Alvi brothers’ good intentions of securing their intellectual property."
Review: My Amazon Kindle Single publishing experiment | ZDNet
Why the Long Lost Google Book Pact Still Matters - Peter Osnos - Technology - The Atlantic - "In certain respects, however, technology and commerce have overtaken the original dispute. Digitized books can be programmed so that they cannot be copied or printed more than once, which limits the notion of a free-for-all in which authors and publishers lose control of the material. Many books in the public domain (the vast majority of works that have been digitized) are increasingly available from a variety of sources, which reduces Google's omnipotence. Given the extraordinary growth in the use of eBook reading devices (which were barely a factor when the lawsuits against Google were originally filed), the interests of authors and publishers have shifted to getting a fair share of revenues rather than the prospect of receiving no revenues at all."

Links for 01-25-2011

2011-01-25T09:29:00.003-05:00

The downward spiral of ownership and value « The Thingology Blog - "Does impaired, devalued digital access encourage piracy? Many ebook pundits dismiss ebook piracy. “New models” will emerge. Piracy is better than obscurity. People will pay once everything is available for a “fair” price. The arguments are familiar, and have an air of ritual now. Hip conferences urge publishers to do a swan dive into an empty swimming pool."
The Most Emailed 'New York Times' Article Ever | The Awl
Real World Technologies - Intel's Sandy Bridge Microarchitecture - "The insatiable desire for high frequencies unfortunately could not overcome the underlying physics – Intel’s single minded pursuit of high frequency lead to high power operation, and there is a firm economic limit of 130W for a mass market product."
The MEI Voyageur Back-Pack - First choice of the seasoned world traveler
The Feeling of Power
everyone has a right to their beliefs « Manifest Density - "I love you guys, but you’re crazy. On questions of aesthetic preference there’s no particular reason that normal people should listen to a bunch of geeky obsessives who spend orders of magnitude more time on these issues than average. It’s like how you probably shouldn’t listen to me when I tell you not to use .doc files or that you might want to consider a digital audio player with Ogg Vorbis support. I strongly believe those things, but even I know they’re pointless and arbitrary for everyone who doesn’t consider “Save As…” an opportunity for political action."
You Can Have My Double Space When You Pry it From My Cold, Dead Hands - Megan McArdle - Culture - The Atlantic - And for the counterpoint...
Voyeuristic Blogger Portraits Put Faces to URLs | Raw File
Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising: Pics, Videos, Links, News

Links for 01-14-2010

2011-01-14T11:07:00.002-05:00

What Factors Justify the Use of Apache Hadoop? – tecosystems
Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine - I'm not sure when I broke myself of the two-space habit.
Which game is Bill Belichick talking about? - Boston.com - Cool use of word clouds.
A gadget’s life: From gee-whiz to junk| The Washington Post - This is very cool.

Links for 01-13-2011

2011-01-13T12:44:00.002-05:00

Steve Jobs Remixed: 5 Creative Takes on the Iconic Apple Keynote [VIDEOS]
When Booze Was Banned but Pot Was Not - Reason Magazine - "The real puzzle, as the journalist Daniel Okrent argues in his masterful new history of the period, is how a nation that never had a teetotaling majority, let alone one committed to forcibly imposing its lifestyle on others, embarked upon such a doomed experiment to begin with. How did a country consisting mostly of drinkers agree to forbid drinking?"
Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising
Dumb as a Blog: 22 Dumbest Things People Do on Facebook Photo Gallery - Automatically post your Twitter updates to Facebook - on truTV.com
Greatest New York Ever - What Is the Greatest New York Musical? -- New York Magazine
Google yanking H.264 video out of Chrome | Deep Tech - CNET News - Good dive into all the issues on both sides.
U.S. Particle Collider Shutting Down - CBS News
How to make your shopping cart suck less - The Oatmeal - This is hilarious (and so true).

Links for 01-11-2011

2011-01-11T14:09:00.002-05:00

LabSlice: Does Gartner understand cloud computing? - "But even at first glance it seemed a bit strange, with the title "Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting". Hmmmm... So this is a review of IaaS, the very epitome of cloud services, and also of traditional web hosting services?"

Reading through the report you will find similar idiosyncrasies and an obvious bias towards delivering 'enterprise' cloud services
The cloud/hosting Magic Quadrant audience « CloudPundit: Massive-Scale Computing - "I think his point is worth addressing, because it’s true that the MQ is written to an audience of such companies and is very explicit in the fact that we are rating enterprise-grade services, but not true that these companies just want to be part of the hype. That seems to be part of the confusion over what cloud IaaS is about, too. At Gartner, we’re excited by the whole consumerization-of-IT trend that intertwines with the cloud computing phenomenon. But we’re not writing for the individual dude, or the garage developers, or the rebels who want IT stuff without IT people. We’re writing for the corporate IT guy."
NYC - Mindrelic Timelapse on Vimeo
Netflix Reveals Challenges in the Cloud - Computerworld - "For example, Netflix must cope with hardware failures and slow response times in the cloud, where IT resources are shared with other tenants. "Co-tenancy is hard," Ciancutti said. To address that problem, Netflix developed a software architecture that it calls "Rambo," in which each application can succeed even if related systems fail, he said."
Disappointed! (the true sad story of client hypervisor meloncholy) - Tim Mangan - BrianMadden.com - Browser-centric application access & app stores seem to be reducing the urgency/relevance of client-side virtualization for a lot of scenarios.
Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
New ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Edition Does Disservice to a Classic - NYTimes.com - Looks pretty spot on. There are borderline cases but this isn't one of them.
The Fallacies of Distributed Computing Reborn: The Cloud Era « New Relic Blog
The Case Against Chasing Scoops - Tuned In - TIME.com - "Still, it would be great, as news outlets are forced to cut back ever more, for some prominent organizations to publicly and vocally decide that they're going to let the other guy confirm the news Washington already knows first from now on, and conserve their resources for discoveries that will matter for more than an afternoon. That, at least, would be a really newsworthy development."
INSANELY awesome solar eclipse picture | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine - Transit of ISS in front of sun during solar eclipse.
How Does the Internet Work?
Quora will be bigger than Twitter - Telegraph - "Of course, the flipside of Quora's apparently massive inflection is that it will soon face challenges with spam and automated noise, a problem that has essentially crippled Yahoo! Answers (well, that and the breathtaking stupidity of the people who use Yahoo!'s service)."

Links for 01-05-2011

2011-01-05T06:44:00.002-05:00

The Blog of Stickles: Doctorin' the Tardis
Academic Earth | Online Courses | Academic Video Lectures
iPad Magazine Sales Drop Steeply As iPad Sales Soar - SVW - IMO, pricing models are a big part of the issue. I'll be interested to see how often I read my new print+digital sub to The Economist online.
Nikon mirrorless interchangeable lens camera | Nikon Rumors - I've been holding off on buying a camera of this type in part waiting for Nikon and Canon to make their plays. "More professional" sounds expensive though given the prices of the current entrants.
Bits or pieces?: Review of Mystic Me 3.0 - "There will be no let-up in end user confusion surrounding cloud computing: Whether it's surveys of Canadian Executives or Technology Resellers, confusion over cloud continues unabated. Score: 1"
How Facebook killed the Christmas card - The Week - "But now, with Facebook so thoroughly insinuated into our lives, we already know where our friends (and our "friends") went on vacation, what they look like right now, and whether they've recently switched jobs.... In 2010, people don't need to wait for December to brag. They've been doing it all year."
Channel impact of cloud computing - 21 Dec 2010 - CRN UK Opinion - "All of this will simply reduce rather than eradicate the risks, however. So there is a natural limit to the degree of shift to cloud services that will take place in most organisations.Having said that, as we discuss in the aforementioned paper, cloud computing is creating both choice and complexity for customers, so it cannot be ignored by those in the IT channel. Skilling up will be necessary to maintain account control and exploit the spin-off business. There may also be some incremental margin to be gained from hosted service resales or referrals. For small customers in particular, it may be possible to meet needs through hosted services in areas such as messaging, collaboration and CRM that would otherwise not be feasible for commercial or practical reasons on-premise."
AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com
Cloud computing: Security fears mean IT stays in-house | Finance | silicon.com - "But IT bosses questioned by Forrester had misgivings about using public cloud services, with 64 per cent expressing concerns about whether corporate data would be secure inside cloud service providers' datacentres."

Links for 12-16-2010

2010-12-16T15:13:00.002-05:00

Why TV Lost - "About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers." Mostly true--although this speaks just to the delivery mechanism rather than the content.
Marten Mickos Talks Red Hat, OpenStack and M&A: Cloud «
CloudSwitch: Traitor To the [Public Cloud] Cause… | Rational Survivability
“What Font Should I Use?”: Five Principles for Choosing and Using Typefaces - Smashing Magazine
The Value of the Freedom to Leave the Cloud: Salesforce and Heroku – tecosystems
The PC Industry's Forgotten Market: Grandpa | ZDNet - "The only benefit to him having a Mac is that he could drag the thing into an Apple store and torture some poor bastard in a blue t-shirt at the Genius Bar, and they can charge him some ridiculously expensive surcharge to bring it back from death each time."
Risk and Reward in the Cloud | Andi Mann – Übergeek - "It is just another risk to evaluate and manage. As I have already published – and it clearly remains exceedingly relevant – downtime is endemic in the public cloud – but it is not unique to public cloud."
Project Food Blog Entry: Final Reflections - Boston in food.

Links for 12-13-2010

2010-12-13T13:01:00.001-05:00

Richard Thaler’s Rejoinder to the TOTM Free to Choose Symposium « Truth on the Market - "The philosophy of libertarian paternalism that Cass and I advocate in Nudge, could accurately titled Free to Choose, 2.0. If people would read with care what we have written, they will see that this is accurate. We do not advocate a larger role for government, just a more efficient, smarter way of achieving a government’s goals, whatever the democratic process determines that they should be."
Christmas Dinner Recipes from Around the World - Saveur.com
Heavenly Grease - A Pork Nativity Scene - Slashfood
Words of the World by The University of Nottingham
Infinity Blade Raises Standard for iOS Games | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD - Some impressive advances on the gaming front.

Links for 12-09-2010

2010-12-09T12:43:00.002-05:00

Beef or Chicken? A Look at U.S. Meat Trends in the Last Century - NYTimes.com - Interesting data but I'm not convinced by the explanations.
Dartblog: "For a Flexible Drinking Age" - This was of course the norm when I was in school even after Massachusetts increased the drinking age.
10 Cloud Predictions for 2011 from Forrester -Bime - SAAS Business Intelligence (BI) by We Are Cloud - Generally agree with these. May do a followup.
Google's Chrome Web store and the future blurring of Web, app design | ZDNet
Most Popular Top 10s of 2010
250 Free Online Courses from Top Universities | Open Culture
Top 10 RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2010 - Agree about Flipboard; interesting suggestion on how to use it. I'm going to check out some of the other suggestions. I haven't changed my RSS habits in a while.
SimpleGeo
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Interactive storytelling: an oxymoron - The long-running failure of interactive TV is another (non)-existence proof.
How the iPad Is Influencing Web Apps

Links for 12-08-2010

2010-12-08T09:28:00.003-05:00

Debating subway map form and function :: Second Ave. Sagas - "The venerable Vingelli took the floor first. While the angular subway schematic that divided the city’s subway riders remains Vingelli’s most iconic New York piece, the subways are replete with the 79-year-old Italian designer’s imprint. The relatively clear signage and the unified use of Helvetica was a part of Vingelli’s Graphics Standard manual that the TA adopted in the late 1960s."
Someday, Nobody Will Ask “PC or Mac?” - Techland - TIME.com - "But something good has been happening lately: The decision has gotten simpler and less risky. Both Windows PCs and Macs are, on some level, primarily boxes that run the Web browsers we do much of our work in--once you're inside your favorite browser, it doesn't matter all that much which operating system your computer uses. And a high percentage of peripherals--cameras, printers, and many phones--don't care whether you connect them to a Windows computer or a Mac."

Links for 12-07-2010

2010-12-07T10:09:00.001-05:00

Canned Platypus » Blog Archive » Caching vs. Replication II
Nimbula rips pages from Microsoft's announcement strategy book | ZDNet - "Microsoft is noted for a media relations strategy that persuades otherwise jaded analysts, journalists and consultants to write about products and services long before they’re really available for public consumption. It appears that Nimbula is in the process of executing a similar strategy. That being said, the company has some really interesting ideas about making cloud-based applications transportable that are worthy of consideration."
Tips to Stop Sucking at PowerPoint
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The cloud press - I'm still not sure that WikiLeaks isn't an extreme enough example that it doesn't say much about the cloud in general. But this piece does shine a little more light on how journalism intersects the cloud.
Ten Great Movies that Reimagine Shakespeare - The Tempest, 10 Things I Hate About You, West Side Story | Nerve.com
a sea of lead, a sky of slate: Abandoned on Everest
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The attack on Do Not Track - "There may be valid arguments to make against a Do Not Track program - some of the technical details remain fuzzy, and government regulation, if done clumsily, can impede innovation - but the suggestion that people shouldn't be allowed to make informed choices about their privacy because some businesses may suffer as a result of those choices is ludicrous and even offensive."
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Hate-spewing “Christians” need to listen up - I should not laugh. (Though Dan should have quit while he was ahead. It gets preachy after a bit.)
Nelson's Weblog: culture / information-wants-to-be-free - Good, succinct summary.
WikiLeaks: 6 quirky revelations you may have missed - The Week - Priceless!
41Latitude - Google Maps & Label Readability - Really interesting low-level look about legibility of Google maps.
Public Cloud Computing is NOT For Everyone | Andi Mann – Übergeek - Good counterpoint to the everything-should-migrate-to-public-cloud crowd.
Understanding the Novell Deal (and when we'll learn more) - ConsortiumInfo.org - Lots of info on the deal mechanics.
CA Technologies - 7-11: 7 Virtualization Predictions for 2011 : VMblog.com - Virtualization Technology News and Information for Everyone

Links for 12-02-2010

2010-12-02T12:30:00.002-05:00

Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2011 and Beyond - "By 2013, 80 percent of businesses will support a workforce using tablets.
The Apple iPad is the first of what promises to be a huge wave of media tablets focused largely on content consumption, and to some extent communications, rather than content creation, with fewer features and less processing power than traditional PCs and notebooks or pen-centric tablet PCs. Support requirements for media tablets will vary across and within enterprises depending on usage scenario. At minimum, in cases where employees are bringing their own devices for convenience, enterprises will have to offer appliance-level support with a limited level of network connectivity (which will likely include access to enterprise mail and calendaring) and help desk support for connectivity issues."
13 Vintage Computer Ads Show How Far We've Come (PHOTOS)
Flickr: The Flickr Developer Guide
Where the Silicon Meets the Road - Interesting discussion. And also highlights how workable AI remains largely compute and data driven.
Lightroom, Storage Space, and Big Catalogs | Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips - I should probably think about deleting more of my photos in Lightroom. Disk is cheap but there are a lot of hidden costs associated with managing photos I'm never going to have the remotest use for. Good workflow suggestions in the comments too.
Fritinancy: How Prohibition Changed Branding and Language - Lots of fascinating trivia.
Ovum StraightTalk | Novell is acquired, but its woes continue - Ovum's dour take on the Attachmate buy.
How IT Execs Consume - Andrew Lark - Interesting data on awareness vehicles by CIO age.
Food - Cooking and Cookbooks - Recipes - Desserts - Eggnog - Christmas - New York Times

My fave general purpose cookbooks

2010-12-02T08:03:00.002-05:00

The past year and a half saw good updates to a couple of old standby cookbooks. These aren't necessarily the sort of cookbooks you buy to read all the way through or to ogle the food porn photography--indeed there aren't many photos in any of the books listed. Nor are they designed to dive deep on a particular cuisine or food style. Rather, they're big tomes intended to give a taste (so to speak) from a wide swatch through relatively traditional American cooking. Here are four cookbooks I put in this category. Two are the aforementioned newcomers.

The publication of Ruth Reichl's new Gourmet cookbook in September of 2009 turned out to be something of a bittersweet event given that it preceded the cancellation of Gourmet magazine by just a couple of weeks. I have quite a few cookbooks from Gourmet in my collection but the two volume 1960s-vintage reference on my shelf stays there mostly for nostalgia reasons; it's not particularly relevant to me in the types of recipes and ingredients on which it focuses. And that's a general problem with older cookbooks. As Reichl puts it:

Back then things were so different that my editor insisted that I call for ground beef instead of lamb in a classic Greek moussaka; she said not many grocers actually sold lamb. She also worried about the recipe for handmade pasta (too esoteric) and a simple Chinese stir-fry of chicken (what on earth was a wok). She worried when I called for freshly grated Parmesan cheese (most people still used the stuff that came in the green can), fresh garlic (frowned upon in many places) and chiles (too hot, too hot, too hot).

I think it's also the case that the recipes in this book tend toward the simpler and the quicker. They're not dumbed down exactly but they do mostly avoid highly complex foods that require all-day preparation. And that aligns with modern lifestyles as well.

Most of the recipes in this book can be found on the Epicurious website, which is also a good place to see how readers may have modified the original recipes. Even though you can look up the recipes for free though, I find it worthwhile to have a curated and packaged version that I can keep in the kitchen (where, to be sure, the Epicurious application also resides on my iPad).

My existing New York Times cookbook wasn't quite so vintage, with a 1990 copyright date. However, this edition--edited by longtime Times food editor Craig Claiborne--seemed to be a largely incremental update of earlier versions. It was one of my more useful references nonetheless but it still dated back to what was in important ways an earlier era of cooking.

Amanda Hesser's The Essential New York Times Cookbook, like Gourmet Today, is explicitly about updating recipes for modern tastes and ingredients (albeit the modern tastes and ingredients associated with locales like Manhattan). However, the book places those updated recipes within the context of the New York Times' recipe files going back to the beginning.

Thus, while this cookbook certainly contains plenty of "modern" recipes, it also makes a point of reintroducing foods and drinks of the past that may be worth re-examining. And for fans of Craig Claiborne, many of his favorites are still well-represented. (In keeping with the season, his 1958 eggnog concoction is more of a meal than a drink.) This is both a good cookbook and a fun read.

The Cook's Illustrated crew, headed by Chris Kimball, is something of a mini-industry. They have shows on public TV, magazines, a Website that they actually succeed in getting folks like myself to subscribe to (something the New York Times would sincerely love), and a passel of cookbooks that profitably rework and repurpose large swaths of content.

The central conceit of Cook's Illustrated is that everything from recipes to techniques is tested, tested, tested. They're also probably the best-known example of the modern "cooking geek" approach in that they investigate and explain why particular techniques work or don't work. (Alton Brown is another author who focuses on the science of cooking but without the obsessiveness of Cook's Illustrated.)

The Best Recipes is an encyclopedic work and it does a great job of breaking down and illustrating how to do things in the kitchen with something over 1,000 recipes in all. Because it does so much more than just present a bunch of recipes, this has become my go to reference for how to do things in the kitchen and a starting point for how to handle a cut of meat or other ingredient.
If there's a knock on on Cook's Illustrated it's that the whole "we tried 50 different ways of boiling an egg" shtick can get a bit old after a while. More to the point, I find it can result in recipes that are a bit fussy with three types of cheeses grated three different ways and the like. Also be forewarned that large quantities of cream, butter, and the like often seem to play heavily into getting the best tasting result. Still, overall, a great reference and a good bargain given its size.

A lot of people learned cooking from The Joy of Cooking and it's still the standard kitchen reference for many. For my part, I tended to favor modern versions of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook--which traces its origins to the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cookbook.

Now, to tell the truth, I don't use this as much as I used to. If I want to figure out what to do with some leftovers or make some traditional comfort food, the Internet often has a more complete, albeit less vetted answer. And, as I noted above, Cook's Illustrated is a substantial reference work and generally does a more complete job of explaining both whys and hows. So, in short, this is a less essential reference for me than it once was. However, that said, I still use it and it continues to earn its spot on my close-to-hand bookshelf in the kitchen.

Links for 12-01-2010

2010-12-01T17:54:00.002-05:00

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.

Links for 11-10-2010

2010-11-10T12:16:00.001-05:00

What really happened between HP ex-CEO Mark Hurd and Jodie Fisher? - Fortune Tech
Debunking the myths about southpaws in sports - The Phoenix - Perhaps a more neutral source about percentage of southpaws in championship tennis.
Hockey Stick Divide - Canada Leans Left, U.S. Right - NYTimes.com - The handedness question in hockey.
Bats left, throws right (Part 1) - I got into a typically weird discussion of opposite handedness with an MIT friend of mine.
Ten questions to ask your cloud provider | Network Administrator | TechRepublic.com
From the X-Files – The Cloud in Context: Evolution from Gadgetry to Popular Culture | Rational Survivability