Links for 06-26-2008

• Intel stays behind the curve … again | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com - I still have a nagging suspicion that there's more resistance to and less interest in Vista than one would normally expect from a major upgrade. However, I agree with Ed that a lot of what we're hearing now we heard when XP came out.
• Facebook: Better Cloud Servers Needed - Data Center Knowledge - Computers in shipping contaienrs do seem to be a legit trend--at least for a few mega-scale service providers.
• North Carolina will pay IBM $750,000 for 10 jobs | The Register - Leaving aside Ashlee's customary snark, I found the small staffing numbers for next gen datacenters interesting. This reinforces some of Nick Carr's more negative ponderings in The Big Switch.
• The Long Tail: Where to run the One Machine? - Location matters in the cloud. Three strategies.
• Megan McArdle (June 26, 2008) - The vast neo-con conspiracy turns its eyes to Europe - "I am reminded of PJ O'Rourke's comment that America is like the most popular (and hated) girl in the class. Canada and Europe, particularly, seem to be prone to the illusion that we spend all of our time thinking up ways to make them feel bad, when in truth we barely think about them at all. "
• The Mouse Is Dead - I don't especially buy the "mouse is dead" meme. But, as I've written about, I do think that there's plenty of opportunity for new input devices to come on the scene.
• louisgray.com: Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter. - Amen. Speed is not always your friend. "Whether you're writing a blog post or entering something on Twitter, it absolutely makes sense to take a cue from traditional media and check your facts."
• Monospace/Fixed Width Programmer's Fonts - If you're tired of using Courier for your monospaced font needs.
• Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant -
  "So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package. The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind."

Links for 06-25-2008

• Yapta: Tracking Airfare Changes Made Easy - ReadWriteWeb - I should probably look at some of these travel booking sites a bit more closely.
• Black Star Rising - The Case Against Photo Illustrations - I'm inclined to agree with this comment: "A "photo illustration" must be clearly fake or else it is not acceptable."
• Morning Conundrum: DIY Wedding Albums - Shoot The Blog - I've used Blurb and LuLu. I'll probably try MyPublisher the next time I put together a book of my photography.
• tecosystems » Question for Cloud Campers: The Cloud and Standards - I need to think some about how to most usefully organize the cloud computing space.
• Pajamas Media » Why Trains Just Don’t Work in America - Sadly, I think Charlie's right. I much prefer rail to air but US distances are just too big outside of a few limited regions (e.g. Northeast).
• In Energy-Stingy Japan, an Extravagant Indulgence: Posh Privies - "High-end toilets can also sense when someone enters or leaves the bathroom, raising or lowering their lids accordingly. Many models have a "learning mode," which allows them to memorize the lavatory schedules of household members.These always-on electricity-guzzlers (keeping water warm for bottom-washing devours power) barely existed in Japan before 1980. Now, they are in 68 percent of homes, accounting for about 4 percent of household energy consumption. They use more power than dishwashers or clothes dryers."
• Marginal Revolution: My favorite song - What to do if you end up in Europe in 1000 AD--set to music :-)
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Encryption and the law - Good thought. Implication is that we're probably going to move towards encrypting data in the cloud in a way that the service provider can't decrypt it.
• Photos: How UPS Next Day delivers | CNET News.com - I find the scope of today's big logistics operations REALLY impressive.
• Digital politics: The future is broadband, not Facebook | The Social - CNET News.com - In other words, as in business, a lot of the most important action happens in the backroom blocking and tackling.
• Bert P. Krages Attorney at Law Photographer's Rights Page - A downloadable PDF flyer describing the rights of photographers.
• Microsoft Watch - Corporate - A Month of Gates #6 - Interestingly, the monopoly not really discussed here is AT&T--which was broken up and then reconstituted in different form after a generation of technology.
• How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine - Interesting read, but I'm not sure how you square simultaneous advice to be brief and to be thoughtful and comprehensive.

Links for 06-23-2008

• Rob Galbraith DPI: Firefox 3, released today, supports colour managed web browsing - Enabling color-managed Web browsing in Firefox.
• Zoomii.com - The "Real" Online Bookstore - An attempt to replicate the look and feel of a real bookstore online. Intriguing idea though I'm not sure it's responsive enough to really work.
• SomaFM: Listener Supported, Commercial-Free Internet Radio - A recommendation from Simon Phipps. I'll have to check it out.
• Analyst predictions :) « Technobabble 2.0 - Funny. [via carterlusher]
• Link by Link - Delaying News in the Era of the Internet - NYTimes.com - "In the case of Wikipedia, this is emphatically not what the site was meant to do. One of the principles of the site is No Original Research — every fact must have appeared somewhere reputable before it can be repeated...Yet, time and again Wikipedia has been the place where news has broken, usually from anonymous writers who report a death on a person’s article page, like that of the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin in 2005, or, a year later, the killing of the film director and actress Adrienne Shelley in Greenwich Village."
• Cody's, landmark Berkeley bookstore, closes - Sad. Harvard Square is pretty slim pickings these days too with the Coop the only major store left. (Though it was good to see the Globe Corner Bookstore reopen in a new location much tomy pleasant surprise.)
• 10 Reasons Why The Black Hats Have Us Outgunned | HaveMacWillBlog (aka Robin Bloor’s Blog) - Scary stuff.
• Reason Magazine - The Wealth of LibriVox - Reason article about the LibriVox audiobooks project.
• Book Review - 'The Pixar Touch,' by David A. Price - Review - NYTimes.com - Nice article about the history of Pixar.
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Two aphorisms and a few notes - "Blogging is the soapbox in the park, the shout in the street; Twitter is the whispering of a clique."
• Pipl - People Search - It's surprising (and a bit scary) some of the things that this turns up.
• bbum’s weblog-o-mat » Blog Archive » What is good tequila? - Good overview.
• Charles and Ray Eames and the Polaroid SX-70 - Shoot The Blog - Cool video of Charles and Ray Eames explaining the SX-70 camera.
• Mad Men - Very Short List - "...[last season] watching TV became a depressing exercise. The saving grace? AMC’s gleaming 1960’s-era drama Mad Men." Fully agree. It tries a bit too hard at times to look and act period but well worth watching.
• Delicious founder leaves Yahoo | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - "Yahoo believes there are plenty other folks to keep Delicious healthy" Seems rather optimistic presumption on the part of Yahoo to presume that there was anything about del.icio.us especially helthy to begin with--other than healthy share of mind in a product category that they've helped to make a backwater.
• ASCII by Jason Scott: Midphase's New Goat Herders - Bad customer service is forever.

Links for 06-17-2008

• tecosystems » Open Source: Thinking Outside the Glass Box - Interesting piece by SOG. He makes good points though I wonder if such a broad definition of Open Source is so broad as to be not particularly useful (i.e. everything as Open Source).
• Schneier on Security: LifeLock and Identity Theft - Not something I'm particularly expert on but seems a thorough and fair rundown on the whole LifeLock business.
• The AP v. Everybody: Not So Clearly Fair Use | CenterNetworks - And, finally, I think it fair comment that a lot of blogs out there--even those who don't gratuitously scrape posts and stories--often resort to relatively long excerpts with comparatively short doses of commentary of any kind.
• Why Saul Hansell is wrong on AP » mathewingram.com/work | - A couple more comments here/ As a conceptual matter, "fair use" makes a great default starting point. In practice, it's horribly vague so I do think that explicit guidelines would be welcome. However, AP has done a horrible job; some guidelines that they've at least implicitly suggested fall way short of what's widely considered good fair use practice by the most principled and thoughtful users.
• The A.P., Hot News and Hotheaded Blogs - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - Probably the most thoughtful piece I've read on the AP dustup.

Links for 06-16-2008

• ongoing · Deletionist Morons - As Nick Carr has noted, one area where Wikimedia shines especially brightly is in its embrace of the obscure. Wikipedia is less good dealing with the clearly notable and well-established.
• The Secret Diary of [Steve Jobs] Jerry Yang: The first great battle of the Internet is over, and I'm delighted to announce that we've finished in second place - "Do we even have any PR people? I have no idea. Whatever we're paying them, it's 100% too much. Who else could go into a PR battle against Microsoft and come out looking like the low-IQ side of the equation?"
• Boat Ramps for Trailer Sailors - New Englad boat ramps
• Firefox 3: Google Browser Sync Discontinued, No Firefox 3 Support - I can't say that this either surprises or bothers me. But Google really needs to add cloud bookmarking to its portfolio.

Links for 06-13-2008

• PhotoshopDisasters: Washington Post: Unlikely - The really weird thing is that if you read through the comment thread and consider the evidence, it appears that this is not, in fact, a Photoshop job but just a weird optical illusion.
• Standalone OSS revenue to reach $4.83 billion by 2012 | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - This is not a lot of money--even if it's only a portion of the revenues related to Open Source.
• Scalent strokes physical to virtual to whatever you like play | The Register - Brilliant line from Ashlee! "Start-ups in the systems management arena tend to scare us. They promise the world and usually deliver a rundown village mired in a drought."
• NewsFactor Network | What Will It Take To Put Apple Back on Top? - It's nice to at least sometimes be able to predict the future with some accuracy.
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips » HDR Tidbits (links, news, inspiration) - A lot of HDR is overdone but I've been meaning to try it.
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The multi-tasking virus - "That minds wander is not news - "wandering" may well be the default setting for our brains - but the scale of it today does seem to be something new and remarkable."
  
• Yahoogle?: Microsoft Will “Let Loose the Dogs of War” | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD - "While I have never much liked Microsoft’s thuggish tendencies and think it’ll use particularly sneaky techniques here since they’re smarting over really blowing their attempted takeover of Yahoo, with true repercussions still to come, such pressure on a Yahoo-Google link-up is much deserved."
• Linux Hater's Blog - This is really funny. Thanks Miguel!

Links for 06-10-2008

• Beautiful Black and White Photography | Monday Inspiration | Smashing Magazine - Like the headline says.
• Is Google Making Us Stupid?--Nick Carr - Well wortht the read--even if it's fairly long. (That's a joke as you'll see after reading the piece."Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading."
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Confession: I secretly despise the idiots who camp out overnight for my keynotes - When Lyons is good, he's good.

Links for 06-09-2008

• Delicious 2.0: We’ve Been Waiting 9 Months - Delicious 2/0 apparently not well...
• Michael Gartenberg - The importance of AAPL's event on Monday isn't a new iPhone - This is a really perceptive post. The i{hone doesn't have the usual chicken/egg problem.
• elliott.org | Unbelievable! American Airlines charges $15 for first checked bag - This seems an especially boneheaded move. Second checked bag, OK. (Though that causes some problems ytoo.) But, as many commenters say, it's hard to believe that this won't increase the amount of luggage that people try to carry on.
• Cassini Nears Four-year Mark - The Big Picture - Boston.com - Awesome Cassini pics.
• Icon War - Pretty cool. [via robinbloor]
• Gates-Ballmer Clash Shaped Microsoft's Coming Handover - WSJ.com - "Some major decisions got stuck due to the impasse, Messrs. Gates and Ballmer said. In one case, two vice presidents clashed over the future of NetDocs, a promising effort to offer software programs such as word processing over the Internet. The issue: Because NetDocs risked cannibalizing sales of Microsoft's cash-cow Office programs, some executives wanted NetDocs killed. Messrs. Gates and Ballmer were unable to settle on a plan. First, NetDocs ballooned to a 400-person staff, then it got folded into the Office group in early 2001, where it died."
• A VC: Hyperlocal Has To Be Peer Produced - I'm not convinced that all this hyperlocal content will just appear through volunteer efforts. Especially if you're talking about politics and other topics that take some real digging. OTOH, there's a lot of volunteer energy in local communities.

Links for 06-04-2008

• SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » SkyNet Lives! (aka EC2 @ SmugMug) - SmugMug stores over half a petabyte of data on S3 (before replication). And lots of great details in this post about SmugMug's architecture.
• Amazon Web Services Blog: The Emerging Cloud Service Architecture - Interesting post about the buildout of the Amazon Web Services ecosystem.
• Trouble at eBay - ReadWriteWeb - Suggestions that online auctions are dead are perhaps hyperbolic, but it's clear that eBay's general direction is generally away from the "world's biggest flea market" towards a much more Amazon-esque ecommerce playform.
• Coding Horror: Whatever Happened to UI Consistency? - Great post. I've linked previously to a great talk about the Office 2007 UI from MIX08 but it's fair comment that such is an isolated and un-integrated example.
• Going Medieval: Time-Warner Begins Metered Bandwidth Testing - I'm of mixed feelings about this. The trend is certainly away from metered use. OTOH, to the degree that P2P creates a hugely bimodal distribution it may make sense to draw a line somewhere.
• Electronic Device Stirs Unease at BookExpo - NYTimes.com - Books and, to a lesser degree, movies have been protected because the technology for low-friction copies doesn't exist (as it does with music). Could e-books change that?
• U Try Being UTube! : NPR - UTube.com getting YouTube traffic. People are confused. People are morons. "As the lawsuit puts it, these unwanted visitors, "often fill out Plaintiff's sales request form, seeking more information in a vulgar and belligerent manner. Exhibit 1 is a message left by one visitor who asks, 'WHERE THE F*** ARE THE VIDEOS??? 1.5 BILLION DOLLARS FOR THIS PIECE OF S*** WEBSITE? GOOGLE GOT TAKEN.'""
• High gas prices promote 'digital nomad' lifestyle | Computerworld Blogs - I suspect that part of the issue here is that "green" is popular primarily when it saves money. But, in the case of telecommuting, it's the employees' money, not the companies--unless you start talking about really large scale remote work approaches as in the case of Sun.
• Applications for the Masses by the Masses: Why Engineers Are An Endangered Species - Nice presentation from Java One by Sun's Todd Fast about how application development is changing. via @ritam