Links for 10-31-2008

• The 20 Greatest Political Campaign Ads of All Time, Featuring Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis, Richard Nixon and More - Nerve.com - Back when I was an undergraduate, a lecturer in media at MIT had a wonderful collection of political commercials on this new-fangled videotape thing. Now that kind of thing is all online.
• Apple hires top IBM chip designer and blade server guru | Latest Apple Computer News - CNET News - A bit hard to see Apple getting seriously back into the server game. They've completed such a successful transition into a consumer electronics company that it's hard to imagine--though one should never discount opportunistic efforts.
• Some Shed Their Gadgets by Turning to One: iPhone - WSJ.com - At first I thought this had to be the Onion: "Lower-income households are turning in force to Apple Inc.'s iPhone and may be doing so to save the cost of a separate broadband connection and music devices, according to the media measurement firm comScore Inc." I also like "Others believe that the surge in popularity of the iPhone among lower-income consumers is related more to the decline in price to about $200." Apparently lower-income consumers also can't do math as the per-month fees went up for a net price increase.

Links for 10-30-2008

• Netflix Lands on TiVo! - From the comments: "Big picture: this is the death of premium cable. Why pay an extra $5, $10 a month for HBO and Cinemax? Buy the one or two shows you want to watch (DVD, unbox, AppleTV), and get the crappy movies from Netflix." I've never felt that that premium cable was worth it. Certainly as options increase, become even less so.
• October Surprise: TiVo to Stream Netflix « NewTeeVee - Very nice. I care less about either the TiVo or the Xbox partnership now that I also reattached a Shuttle PC to my TV. But streaming to a television, rather than just a computer, is a big win in any case.
• Azure manages to avoid a Hailstorm of criticism | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News - "But businesses now have to evaluate not just the theory of whether allowing others to hold their data is a good thing. The reality is that, in many cases, large third parties may be able to do more to protect a company's data than some mid-size firms can do on their own."Organizations have come to say, 'let's compare it to practical alternatives as opposed to some Utopian ideal," O'Kelly said."

Links for 10-29-2008

• Pyrrhic Victory - I'm not sure how much relates to the writer's strike in some way, but I do know that there is a grand total of one new show that I've followed this season--and that one ("Fringe") I'm pretty lukewarm about.
• Neary Consulting » Jerry Maguire on the future of the free software industry - I agree with the general gist that pure open source businesses may well remain fairly small.
• Propeller Beanies: Interesting Thing of the Day - The history of the propeller beanie.
• More Network Effects and Cloud Profitability | Techy Pundit - "The bottom line is that business, even in the cloud, requires more interlocking parts."
• Blu-ray is dead - heckuva job, Sony! | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com - Not dead but ailing. I agree with a lot of this. Robin's right about upsampling DVD being a big factor--more so, probably, than downloads.
• Edward Weston - The Most Influential American Photographer of the Twentieth Century - Good site for Weston photos--not of course that the monitor really does them justice.
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: What Tim O'Reilly gets wrong about the cloud - The question of what are the natural scale points for cloud computing seem to me an important question. I think I agree with Nick wrt Google not being a particularly good example of network effects.
• Twitter / Kathy Sierra: The Big Question is not "h ... - "The Big Question is not "how can we make this a game?" but, "what is it that makes games fun, and how can [this experience] have that?"" Great observation. And one that a lot of commentary and attempts to make learning more "fun" misses.
• Download critical data recovery software - computer data recovery with ZAR. - Just recovered a bad SD card using ZAR. Worth trying out.
• Using the Cloud to build highly-efficient systems - All Things Distributed - From Amazon's CTO.
• Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Reports of blogging’s death are… - Generally agree with this take on the mini-storm over this. I think it misleading to make generalizations about "blogging" based on the commercialization of a certain type of blog.

Head of the Charles 2008 Pics

Another nice year for photography at the Head of the Charles in Cambridge. Here's a link to my better photos from the event.

Links for 10-21-2008

• Serena: Taking the Cloud Seriously | HaveMacWillBlog (aka Robin Bloor’s Blog) - "Arteaga’s opinion - and it seems sound to me - is that a company that offers its products from the cloud needs to live in the cloud itself, to some degree. The company will then understand the practical aday-to-day cloud issues and will also be able to speak authoritatively on how cloud operation impacts the way you work."
• HipMojo.com » 20 Dumb Things About Web 2.0 - I agree with a lot of the stuff here--such as "Much the same way that loose money and easy credit created the real estate and housing bubble, open source software and cheap hardware created an environment of over-supply of me-too products that have absolutely no bargaining power in M&A or fundraising."
• valhenson: To SSD or not to SSD? - An argument against buying SSD-based laptops.
• The Politics of the Retouched Headshot - The Atlantic (October 16, 2008) - What it means to not be retouched isn't necessarily straightforward.
• tecosystems » Break for the Clouds: Top 5 Reasons The Cloud Benefits from a Recession - Another good piece on cloud computing from Stephen.
• Freemium is Not a Business Model | Mark Evans - "The problem is freemium doesn’t work for the vast majority of companies, especially ones focused on the consumer market. In theory, it sounds good but in practice few people actually pay for more features. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule but those are few and far between."
• Download Incendia - Multiprocessor Fractal Engine - I've seen some very nice artwork created with this.
• Music Ally | Blog Archive » Exclusive: Warner Chappell reveals Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ pot of gold - Meh. 1.) Still no actual data; 2.) Given it was high profile experiment, is essentially impossible to extrapolate results. So, interesting anecdote but doesn't really tell us anything about business models.

How Not to Get a Briefing

I regularly receive emails along the lines of the following. (Redacted to protect the guilty.)

We were hoping to schedule some time with you later this month for a briefing with ACME. Your input and insight into the RANDOM TECHNOLOGY market space will provide a valuable forum for ACME's third generation product and technology offering.

Best Regards,
Buffy

I usually just ignore such, but here's the response I would like to send.

Dear Buffy,

You seem to have mixed up my mailing address with some other ghaff who is in the “business” (not that it would be much of a business) of providing free consulting and market intelligence to anyone who drops me a line. I’m sure his input and insight will be commensurate with the high value that you appear to place on it. Good luck finding the other ghaff.

I'm more than happy, in the course of a conversation, to share my views on whatever. However, to brazenly request an hour of my time with the explicit expectation that I'm going to be briefing you for free is just not going to happen.

Links for 10-15-2008

• Thank you for smoking - Roger Ebert's Journal - "This stamp honoring Bette Davis was issued by the U. S. Postal Service on Sept. 18. The portrait by Michael Deas was inspired by a still photo from "All About Eve." Notice anything missing? Before you even read this far, you were thinking, Where's her cigarette? Yes reader, the cigarette in the original photo has been eliminated. We are all familiar, I am sure, with the countless children and teenagers who have been lured into the clutches of tobacco by stamp collecting, which seems so innocent, yet can have such tragic outcomes. But isn't this is carrying the anti-smoking campaign one step over the line?"
• Linux and marketing: a rant « Elias Q. Funtybunt’s Pisspoor Pseudonym - "Apple does branding to the same extent as RMS does zealotry and ESR does guns."
• Technological comebacks | Not dead, just resting | The Economist - "American office workers’ use of paper has actually been in decline since 2001. What changed? The explanation seems to be sociological rather than technological. A new generation of workers, who have grown up with e-mail, word processing and the internet, feel less of a need to print documents out than their older colleagues did. Offices are still far from paperless, but the trend is clear."
• Google: Raise Your Data Center Temperature « Data Center Knowledge - Nice overview of some of the opportunities and challenges associated with raising datacenter operating temperatures.
• 451 CAOS Theory » Open source is not a business model - We've very much entered a pragmatic phase of open source.
• Stuff Michael Meeks is doing - A rather bleak take on the state of OpenOffice development. Based on my (much more peripheral) knowledge of what's been happening there, seems like a realistic assessment.

Links for 10-10-2008

• tecosystems » OS and Virtualization or Virtualization and OS: Red Hat Analyst Day - "Until such time as VMware is able to divorce the application development process - and more importantly the task of supporting the output of that development process - from the operating system itself, the latter will matter." I might add the application certification/support process but otherwise fully concur.
• A CEO's Sequoia Meeting Notes - Scary stuff.
• Digg's Kevin Rose: We've got to be more than a fanboy hub | The Social - CNET News - I suspect that taking certain paths effectively forecloses other ones.
• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Citizen journalism ruins the world (again) - I lean towards the biggest culprit in this case being CNN. It's inevitable that a "citizen journalism" site is going to be seen as more than a random rumor site if CNN operates it. In fact, isn't that one of the reasons that CNN is operating one?
• A.M.D. to Split Into Two Operations - NYTimes.com - Good rundown on the AMD manufacturing spinout.
• Jackson Farm Home - Sally Jackson Cheeses - I'm especially fond of the sheep cheese I got at Cowgirl Creamery.
• Republishing Email: The Great Debate - PlagiarismToday - Good precis of the legal issues--though I would think for the most part, standards of ethics and professionalism are the more important considerations in most cases.

Links for 10-01-2008

I got out of the link posting rhythm because of lots of travel and other things. Should be back on track now (at least until the end of October).

• What's In A Name? - Forbes.com - Pure venom. "Lotus Notes is far and away the most horrible software on the planet. Sure, people grumble about Microsoft products. But that's nothing compared to how people feel about Notes. People hate Notes. As in, they want to change jobs just so they can stop using it. I'm pretty sure there are shrinks who have built practices around it."
• History, focus, and technology of HP Neoview | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services - Some good detail on HP Neoview.
• Dan Heller's Photography Business Blog: Stock Photography, the Consumer, and the Future - Long post to read when I have time.
• Digital Lifestyle Girl's Place on the Web: The Internets are dangerous - Some good points in both post and comments.
• tecosystems » Is the Cloud Stupid? - "But still, in the face of end user ignorance and the impracticality of his alternative, Stallman’s quest seems - at best - quixotic. Again. Only this time, I expect him to have rather less success than in years past." Concur. As Stephen says, it's happening. Better to deal with the real issues rather than try to turn back the clock.
• Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Flickr Engineers Do It Offline - Another example of how differently you do things at mega scale points.
• Twilight of the GPU: an epic interview with Tim Sweeney: Page 1 - Graphics are often pointed to as an exception to the "general purpose wins" rule. But that exception may be coming to an end (albeit within the context of a new "general purpose."
• J.K. Rowling should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine - "Rowling might object that the fan's guide will be strewn with errors or poorly written; but it is hardly the job of copyright to protect us from bad execution."