Links for 01-22-2010

• The Truth About Robotic's Uncanny Valley - Human-Like Robots and the Uncanny Valley - Popular Mechanics - Questioning the "uncanny valley."
• Posthumous Hosting and Digital Culture – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report - I agree this is a serious issue via @timbray
• Cookbook/Matplotlib/Maps - - Basemap toolkit for plotting data on map projections.
• OkTrends - Lots of fascinating sociological data here.
• Identifont - Identify fonts by appearance, find fonts by name - Includes designer, copyright, etc.
• The History of Development of Norton Commander - I used Norton Utilities way, way back. (Although I actually had my own product that competed against the file manager. To my tastes, NC & XTree were a bit big.)
• Could A Cloud Computing Exchange Work? « Data Center Knowledge - It didn't work in the P2P days. Not clear to me why things would be different now.
• Study: SaaS Pricing Is Still Opaque And Freemium Is Rare - ReadWriteEnterprise - Nice survey of SaaS pricing plans.
• If Hollywood Decided to Give Everything a Gritty Reboot | Cracked.com - Some of these are pretty good.
• Althouse: "Why would you hand the keys to the car back to the same guys whose policies drove the economy into the ditch and then walked away from the scene of the accident?" - I am going to hell but this is funny.
• Dialing in a Plan: The Times Installs a Meter on Its Future - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com - "It is not the job of The New York Times or any other mainstream media company to give away its content until it can no longer afford to do so."
• The Watcher: The 'Lost' lowdown: Part 1 of a long interview with Cuse and Lindelof (no spoilers) - Good long interview with the Lost executive producers. "There are sort of fundamental elements of mystery and magic to the show that are unexplainable, and any attempt to explain them would actually harm the show, and in our opinion, the legacy of the show. So we’re trying to find the right blend of answering questions, but also leaving the things that should be mysterious mysterious."