Links for 08-07-2009

• Five Great John Hughes Moments - Monkey See Blog : NPR - Of the Breakfast Club. Yeah: "See, that's the trick. I don't get it, but I know it. All of it. From many, many viewings stretching back to 1985. In many ways, I think it's the weakest of these movies creatively, because it was trying so hard and taking itself so seriously, but it might be the one I've seen the most. You see what I mean: He knew something."
• Seven alternative Flickr search engines | Webware - CNET
• Coding Horror: Software Pricing: Are We Doing It Wrong? - Some interesting thoughts in both the post and the comments.
• Putting lipstick on Microsoft’s pigs - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Brainstorm Tech - The "Microsoft doesn't innovate" theme gets overplayed. However, it's unclear what problem exactly Microsoft thinks it is solving with these stores. It does seem derivative.
• No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users - WSJ.com - Backlash against notebooks in coffee shops?
• 25 Music APIs - After my latest organizational binge I'm looking to pull as much metadata as possible into my music collection.
• Why Teens Don’t Tweet - "Twitter offers something that adults crave more than teenagers: an audience. Facebook doesn’t fulfill this need as well as Twitter does, but the offset is that teenagers turn to Facebook to communicate with their friends."
• SF Signal: MIND MELD: The Hugo Awards - Success at Picking the Best, How Well it Represents the Genre, 2009 Predictions & Overlooked Titles - "In the past, the voters were a good cross-section of fandom and so the shortlists often included what was good and exciting in sf and fantasy. But - bar the odd exception - that's not been true since the late 1970s. This is hardly surprising. Books are nominated and voted on by a small group of fans who are growing older and increasingly conservative in their tastes. Whatever attracted them to the genre all those years ago, that's what they look for in books being published today. The genre may have progressed, but it often seems those fans haven't. So we get shortlists filled with old-fashioned and dull sf, picked by people who think that novels which "entertain" are successful... despite failing in all other areas, despite not trying anything interesting."
• Why consumers won't buy tablets | Rafe's Radar - CNET News - Sensible points. I do think we'll see a tablet tweener device someday but the big question is when.
• Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog: Five Futuristic Interfaces on Display at SIGGRAPH - Interfaces are an important frontier of computing.

Links for 08-04-2009

• How Netflix gets your movies to your mailbox so fast -- chicagotribune.com - Interesting piece about a visit to a Netflix warehouse.
• Gawker vs. The Washington Post: Is Linking Stealing? - Tuned In - TIME.com - "The rules of how to do this kind of post are not set in stone, but in general, it's better to summarize an interesting article and refer readers to the original, or add some value to it with analysis or opinion or more information, and give explicit, clear credit."
• Worst Part of a Trip May Be Booking It on the Web - NYTimes.com - Not me. I really like being able to sit down and make my own tradeoffs rather than having someone else do it for me. I much prefer booking my own flightds than doing the back and forth with a corporate travel department as I sometimes have to.
• Op-Ed Guest Columnist - Twittergraphy - NYTimes.com - Maybe we need a codebook.
• Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch - NYTimes.com - Cooking shows up, actual cooking down.
• Photojournalism’s Coming Crisis | Newspaper Death Watch - I agree with a lot of this--up to a point. I don't think pubs can crowdsource everything but a microstock for editorial could indeed drive pricing down.
• The Media Equation - A Talk Magazine Party That Presaged the Decline - NYTimes.com - "There may never be another large magazine launch ever, and certainly not one that was accompanied by the fanfare of Talk." In retrospect, is easy to criticize blindness to Web's impact as myopic, but it's not so much that people didn't see the Web but they didn't appreciate the full economic impact that it would have on print. (Or they assumed could just over time move print to Web and keep everything else the same.)

Links for 08-03-2009

• Microsoft Word, RIP: 1983 - 2009 - Ars Technica - Jeremy's history with Word closely parallels mine. (I could never stand WordPerfect for DOS and I too used Ami Pro for a time.)
• Op-Ed Columnist - Swan Songs? - NYTimes.com - Interesting graphic that shows sales by music format over time.
• Amazon, Rackspace Are Top Cloud Hosts « Data Center Knowledge - Rackspace doing well against Amazin. Google AppEngine hasn't gotten much traction.
• The National Parks: America's Best Idea | PBS - is could be good.
• A short history of btrfs [LWN.net]
• Cogs: A Steampunk Puzzle Game from Lazy 8 Studios - Looks cool somewhat in the World of Goo vein.