Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Links for 05-26-2010

Monday, May 24, 2010

Links for 05-24-2010

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Links for 05-20-2010

  • I want choice, but only if I agree with your choice | thomas fitzgerald.net - "I think Ted’s problem, like that of many analysts/bloggers/journalists/geeks etc on the issue is that they’re confusing fundamental flaws with not liking something. People like Ted don’t like the closed nature of the App store, but that doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally flawed, or a lack of choice."
  • Irving Wladawsky-Berger: What are the Key Qualities of a Great City?
  • Six Degrees of Black Sabbath #6dobs - Cool app showing the relationships between two musicians.
  • The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : From the mailbag - "The times they are a changing, and very soon the all-purpose computer, where you can buy and run any software you want, will be obsolete, replaced by the iPad, which costs more and does less and only runs software made by Apple or approved by Apple and sold through Apple’s store. This is the future and it will be way better than what we’ve had so far, which is why legacy PC companies are freaking the fuck out. They see their messy “open” world slipping away and being replaced by the neat, tidy world where everything works seamlessly because, frankly, there are no seams."
  • Diary Of An x264 Developer » The first in-depth technical analysis of VP8 - Very in-depth analysis and this: "Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today’s overly litigious day and age. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. Until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be extremely cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem."
  • Stack Wars: What Is The Enterprise Stack? « Wikibon Blog - "The pending enterprise stack wars pit highly vertically integrated companies against a virtually integrated whole. In theory, the vertical approach can be more easily managed because its owned by a single company. However the virtual approach is more open and potentially has more industry reach."
  • Why IBM, Microsoft and SAP Like Oracle’s Apple Strategy With Sun — Datamation.com - Worth reading.
  • Web Browsers Leave 'Fingerprints' Behind as You Surf the Net | Electronic Frontier Foundation - I participated in this a while back and my browser was easily unique. It's hard to evaluate the actual risk here but correlation can be quite powerful.
  • S4 - Super Simple Storage Service - It look me a minute to realize this was a joke because I could actually imagine a pricing scheme for cloud-based backups where making the backup was cheap but there was a significant charge for doing a restore.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Links for 05-18-2010

Monday, May 17, 2010

Links for 05-17-2010

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Links for 05-13-2010

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Links for 05-11-2010

Monday, May 10, 2010

Links for 05-10-2010

Friday, May 07, 2010

Links for 05-07-2010

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Links for 05-05-2010

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Links for 05-04-2010

Monday, May 03, 2010

What the Millionth iPad Means

From Michael Gartenberg:
Apple has validated this market. As i’ve talked in the past, there’s a worldwide market for 50,000 of anything. Try to sell 500,00 that’s another story. Get to a million and you’re a success by any measure. I suspect that in the history of ‘tweener devices, if you added up all the efforts over the last decade they likely didn’t app to a million units sold. The market is real and it’s a new line of business.
I concur. Maybe there's a worldwide market for 100,000 of anything from Apple. But nonetheless, I largely agree with Michael.

The iPad costs more than I want to spend for where it is technologically. I'm looking for something lighter, cheaper, and more readable in sunlight. In other words, something that could replace my Kindle when traveling rather than be an additional device to carry.

But that's more of a comment on the state of the art of components than a knock on Apple who (the Flash mess aside) has, I think, generally done as good a job as they could have with what theey had to work with. It's also not a commentary on take on tablets being a legitimate tweener category. In fact, I'm a big believer.

Links for 05-03-2010

Sunday, May 02, 2010

Photos from Tuscany

Before I got started with my new job at Red Hat, I took a two week trip to Tuscany--beating the volcano back by about 24 hours. I spent time in Florence, some of the Sienese hill towns, the mountains near Barga, and the Cinque Terra (which is actually in the Liguria region just north of Tuscany). My photos are now up on Flickr and you can see them here.