Links for 08-23-2010

• Five years after Katrina, New Orleans' charm calls again - CNN.com - One of the more positive articles I've seen. I lived in New Orleans for three years; it would be nice to have an excuse to visit.
• Critical Shopper - J.C. Penney - Playing to the Middle - NYTimes.com - More Cintra Wilson venom.
• The Downfall of American Apparel -- The Cut - Cintra Wilson has such a great writing style. "Dov Charney, the company's incorrigible scamp of a CEO and founder, had a designer's knack for catching the trend-wave du jour by recycling just the right historical wardrobe references — all the French-cut leotards, metallic headbands, stretch lace tank tops, and elastic belts that could turn a nice girl from Akron into a not-so-nice girl from Akron. The gay shopper, too, felt naughty in colored briefs and gym shorts"
• Fly Right Eat Well The Best Airport Dining Options - Business Travel - Portfolio.com - Interesting piece on what airports have learned about what people are looking for in restaurants, e.g. one exec says "People want better food, not fancier food, and we may have confused the two."
• Ann Coulter: The Gay Speech Flap - The Daily Beast - I knew Ann at Cornell. And, yes, some of the outrageiusness is a bit of an act.
• Faster Forward - No, Wired, the Web is not 'dead' - "The popularity of smartphone apps reflects some temporary competitive imbalances. Many Web sites have yet to see the kind of smartphone-aware redesign that makes the iPhone- and Android-compatible versions of the Facebook and Twitter sites such a pleasure to use."

Links for 08-17-2010

• For the Class of 2014, No E-Mail or Wristwatches - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - "Another insight that shows how quickly things change is this one: The class of 2014 has “never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.” They don’t own watches and instead use their cellphones to tell the time."
• Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain : Pharyngula - "There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius, when he's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti."
• NeuroLogica Blog » Banning Wi-Fi From Schools - Alas, some nutcases actually buy the WiFi is killing us meme.
• Miscellanea » Archive » The Truth About Wireless Devices - Priceless.
• Rumored iTV Could Pave Way for Apple-Connected Television | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD - If Apple succeeds with v2 of Apple TV, heads should roll over at Xbox (some of which admittedly already have).
• No Yak Shaving! - TheOpenForce.com - Oh my. I've had this happen a lot of times when I've needed to do something on my computer and, before you know it, I'm rebuilding the system.
• Headius: My Thoughts on Oracle v Google
• Robo-James’ Time Machine: M-M-M-Max Headroom - Tuned In - TIME.com - I've been waiting for this.
• Talking Business - The Real Reason for Ousting H.P.’s Chief - NYTimes.com
• BW Online | May 21, 2001 | Commentary: Sorry, Steve: Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work - Interesting blast from the past via HN.
• If Historical Events had Facebook Statuses | Cool Material

Links for 08-13-2010

• Get Outdoors with The North Face Trailhead iPhone App - Need to check this one out.
• Design for Hackers: Why You Don’t Use Garamond on The Web
• Networking Showdown: UCS vs. HP Virtual Connect (Updated) — Define The Cloud
• Mercury News editorial: HP board must be far more forthcoming about Hurd scandal - San Jose Mercury News - Yup. Those are exactly the questions that haven't been answered.
• From 1890: The First Text Messages | Sunday Magazine
• Amazon APIs as cloud standards? Not so fast | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - Good piece. De facto standard is a term that tends to get thrown around in the vein of "of course, XYZ is a standard."
• Don’t Be Ugly By Accident! « OkTrends - Photo attractiveness by the (EXIF) numbers.
• Airing Private Cloud’s Dirty Laundry… | Rational Survivability - The best post ever on private vs. public clouds :-)

Links for 08-09-2010

• YouTube - The Misunderstanding - Presented by AMD - Arguably in poor taste, but still pretty funny.
• Sharpie’s Liquid Pencil Becomes Permanent After Three Days - Techland - TIME.com - This looks interesting.
• VMware: VMware vCloud Blog: A Big Cloud Challenge: Cross Stack Portability - A Big Cloud Challenge: Cross Stack Portability
• Dear StorageMojo: low-cost archive storage? - "The question is whether or not someone can design a commercially viable system for home and SOHO use. It is obvious that drive vendors have the cost advantage, especially with the advent of easy and cheap USB drive docks, if they build a disk drive designed for that purpose."
• On the Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only - WSJ.com - Impressive.
• Barnes & Noble: The Titanic Goes On Sale - 24/7 Wall St. - "The company will explore “strategic options” which means that the value of Barnes & Noble’s priced peaked some time ago along with its prospects. The board of directors understands Barnes & Noble cannot properly be a public company. It needs to be private which would allow fools who believe in the retail book business to run the firm without damaging shareholders."

Links for 08-04-2010

• Red Eye - Abstract City Blog - NYTimes.com - Really funny virtual diary.
• New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what Chris Dixon or Ron Conway or Paul Graham say | AdGrok - Lots of broad brush generalizations (and some points that are IMO quite overstated) but a good read nonetheless.
• The Lifespan of Every TV Show Ever [COMIC] | Cracked.com - Pretty accurate actually.
• OpenStack, an IaaS Platform from Rackspace, NASA and Citrix | The Virtualization Practice - A variety of commentary here that I found interesting.
• Haphazard Firefighting Might Have Sunk BP Oil Rig - The Center for Public Integrity
• Tom Shales - Tom Shales reviews Christiane Amanpour's lackluster debut on ABC's 'This Week' - "With pomp and panoply befitting a visit from a foreign dignitary, ABC raised the curtain on its newly revamped "This Week" program and introduced in a big way the superstar who's taken it over in a big, big way: Christiane Amanpour, veteran CNN foreign correspondent now uneasily relocated to a desk job." I watched pretty regularly in the Brinkley days. Haven't seen it in ages.
• Ping - In School Systems, Slow Progress for Open-Source Textbooks - NYTimes.com - Interesting piece on the (slow) progress of open source textbooks.
• The State of Open Source: Startup, Growth, Maturity or Decline? – tecosystems - Typically good analysis by Stephen.
• Typecasting - I wonder if Mad Men has all its typography correct?
• Steve Ballmer on the iPad: The transcript - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech - "But to get the full flavor of the train wreck that is Steve Ballmer in 2010 -- a salesman whose only answer to technological change seems to be the operating system he inherited from Bill Gates -- you might want to hear the quotes in context."
• Reading on E-Book Devices: the user experience - Lots of good stuff about the good and bad of ebooks.
• Flamethrower Versus Fire Extinguisher at 1000 Frames per Second - "Lets say you had an uber-expensive Phantom slow motion camera, a flamethrower, and a fire extinguisher at your disposal. What would you do?"
  
  Well… probably this!