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.