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!