Links for 07-28-2010

• CONELRAD | DAISY: THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF AN INFAMOUS AND ICONIC AD - PART ONE
• Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit - Enterprise Integration Patterns - Messaging in the context of how Starbucks takes coffee orders.
• ongoing by Tim Bray · Five Pictures of OSCON - Tim's OSCON wrapup.
• Does the Web remember too much — or too little? — Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard - A thoughtful counterpoint to the end of forgetting.
• Last Kodachrome roll processed in Parsons - "McCurry told Dwayne's vice president Grant Steinle how he had chosen to shoot the last roll of "Kodachrome produced by Eastman Kodak by capturing images around New York. "Then we went to India, where I photographed a tribe that is actually on the verge of extinction. It's actually disappearing, the same way as Kodachrome," he told Steinle."

Links for 07-23-2010

• Dead Tree Alert: Mad Men Returns; Plus, What Is a Spoiler? - Tuned In - TIME.com - "The implicit request: thanks for all of your rave reviews of our show. We want you to write about the new season in advance. Preferably positively! But without any detail, quotation or concrete substantiation!
  Uh, no. Criticism doesn't work that way. Journalism doesn't work that way--you don't just make assertions without evidence." << Sounds a lot like some NDAs.
• Daring Fireball: Sorry, No, I'm Not Going to Write a Piece Arguing That Dan Lyons Is a Jackass - Have to laugh when journos start pissing on each other.
• Apple's iPad, iPhone and an enterprise halo effect | ZDNet - At least as interesting as formal evaluation and adoption is the many examples of "consumerization of IT" (i.e. people buying personally and using for work) examples that I see out there.
• NASA and Rackspace open source cloud fluffer • Channel Register - "But Kemp also said that the scalability of the product and other issues with Eucalyptus (including the inability by NASA to get some of its enhancements into the Eucalyptus code base) compelled Kemp to take the entire Nebula team and dedicate it – for the past six months – to creating a new fabric controller, called Nova, from scratch."
• The Web Means the End of Forgetting - NYTimes.com - "When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. " << My (mild) counterpoint to this meme is that the norm in history has been living where everyone knows your name (and your past).
• Why GPS voices are so condescending - CNN.com
• Grey beards seize power at Big Blue • The Register - "In the moves announced yesterday, a number of independent IBM groups were consolidated, giving certain IBM executives more power and others less. Most of the executives who have increased power at Big Blue are not much younger than Palmisano, who turns 59 in July and is approaching the traditional 60 retirement age for IBM chairmen, so the reorganization is not meant to anoint a successor to Palmisano. If anything, it makes it pretty clear that there really isn't a successor to Palmisano and that the whole team may just stay together and keep working past retirement age."
• E-Books: The Future Is Here - Business - The Atlantic - Interesting discussion of how the success of the Kindle could end up affecting book pricing (especially hardcover vs. paperback) more broadly.
• NASA drops Ubuntu's Koala food for (real) open source • The Register - "NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders."
• VMware Knows the Cloud Doesn’t Need Server Virtualization - This is really an argument about a level of abstraction different from that of the operating system (which VMware happens not to own).

Links for 07-20-2010

• Amazon Media Room: Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Hardcover Books - "Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com's entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher. " Striking given that my perception of the Kindle is that's it's somewhat of a niche device. Of course, Amazon is hardly the only source of hardcovers but still...
• ‘I’m Going to Go Call Ralph and Yell at Him.’ - "For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck. “They tried to have that conversation with us a number of times,” says someone from Apple who was in the meetings. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”"
• VMware Project Redwood = Dead Wood? » ocb - Citrix Community - The always quotable Mr. Crosby.
• We have met Antennagate, and it is us - Good piece. Not that there's an answer.
• Cloud Computing in the Public Sector | Andi Mann – Übergeek - Nice summary and analysis of subject topic.
• Google and the Value of Social Networking - More on the Google doesn't do social meme making the rounds.
• Technology Review: Blogs: Guest Blog: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
• How Will You Measure Your Life? - Harvard Business Review - By Clayton Christensen

Links for 07-13-2010

• The 'false cloud' is false | Apps Meet Ops - CNET News - "If cloud computing is going to mean something practical, important, and central to enterprise IT over the next few years, cloud must be broad enough to include privately-owned and operated infrastructure. Cloud's benefits must be accessible to enterprise apps. That will often mean implementing the benefits with heavier performance, availability, and other guarantees than available in today's version 1.x cloud environments."
• Hacker News | Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications - Interesting article and comments about the difference between what Google does and what good social does--even if it is overloaded with various mixed metaphors. I think it's also hard to dispute that Google doesn't even use social to augment search especially (except to the degree that Page Rank has an inherent social element). The comments on HN are as interesting as the original article.
• Amazon Web Services: The De Facto Cloud API? « SmoothSpan Blog - However, a number of folks out there are arguing something a bit different--more along the lines that the de facto standard begins and ends with AWS.
• Google - the Moscow-Vladivostok: a virtual journey on Google Maps

Links for 07-09-2010

• tecosystems » A Swing of the Pendulum: The Shift Towards Specialized Hardware and Software - Agree more on software side. Record of specialty hardware vs. "commodity" is not good: SiCortex, Azul, InfiniBand, etc.
• Matter/Anti-Matter - A blog on product design and innovation from Frog Design - CNET News - Nice piece about the intersection of craft and mass manufacturing.
• Aktiv Grotesk, Bruno Maag’s Would-Be Helvetica Killer - For the type geeks in the audience.
• Inside IBM's sex and trading scandal - Jul. 6, 2010 - All the sordid dirt.
• Peter Paul Biro, fingerprints, and a lost Leonardo : The New Yorker
• To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery - NYTimes.com - I went "Just, wow" at some of this.
• CNN, Twitter and Why Hiding Journalists’ Opinions Is (Still) a Bad Idea - Tuned In - TIME.com - "If an organization wants to set parameters for acceptable expression, that's its prerogative, but if that organization is in the information business, it has a responsibility to be transparent about it."

Links for 07-08-2010

• The Real Life Social Network v2 - As @stshank noted, this illustrates the problem of professional and personal separation on social networks.
• Sun’s Lost Intel-Chip Killer - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - Great line! "Sun stood out because it so often oscillated between lovable bravado and insanity."
• Microsoft Rank And File Felt "Embarrassment All Over Campus" From Kin Failure - "We had a huge launch party on campus and I bet that party cost more than the amount of revenues we took in on the product. As an employee, I am embarrassed. As a shareholder, I am pissed. It's one thing to incubate products and bring them to a proof-of-concept to see what works, but it's something else to launch."
• Google Makes the iPhone YouTube App Obsolete - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - I was just thinking how handy it would be to put a bookmark on my iPhone as an "app."

Links for 07-07-2010

• Free movies on your iPad from the National Film Board | iPad Atlas - CNET Reviews
• Zucchini and Summer Squash with Chili, Mint and Toasted Almonds - Blog - food52 - StumbleUpon
• The knowledge factor in Silicon Valley - O Say Can You See? - "Terman’s goal was to import the Cambridge-MIT model of regional innovation to the West Coast. For Terman, marrying the knowledge of the university to the practical concerns of industry was critical to the formation of a self-sustaining high-technology and knowledge region."
• Presentations: Red Hat Summit 2010 - JBossWorld 2010
• Unlocking The Value Of The Cloud - Forbes.com - Nice piece from Forbes that mentions the Red Hat announcements at Summit.
• BuzzWhack: The Buzzword Compliant Dictionary
• A hard look at the Web's 'shallows' | Relevant Results - CNET News - Carr's provocative although his long-form writing is generally more nuanced than the soundbite is.
• Mitch Albom: iPhone crazies need a major wake-up call | freep.com | Detroit Free Press - "And when the doors opened, you'd have thought Justin Bieber was waiting inside. People applauded. They screamed. Some actually squealed. This, for a phone... Never mind that the device would be for sale the next day, too. Never mind that there's a reason it's called iPhone 4 -- because there have already been three iPhones before it."
• OpenOffice at the crossroads - The H Open Source: News and Features - Without really disagreeing with much of what Michael Meeks has to say, there's also the matter of "Who pays?" Lots of people like having a free alternative to Microsoft Office, but there aren't companies out there with the self-interest and the money to fund the level of development needed for OpenOffice to shine.
• Did VMware just cancel their client hypervisor outright? - Brian Madden - BrianMadden.com - Don't know anything here beyond Brian's speculations. However, a few salient points: 1.) Client-side virtualization is about portfolios of solutions; 2.) I've been skeptical in the past about the depth of VMware's commitment here; and 3.) Does browser-based (or at least lightweight) client computing largely make all this irrelevant for many purposes.