Links for 01-25-2011

• The downward spiral of ownership and value « The Thingology Blog - "Does impaired, devalued digital access encourage piracy? Many ebook pundits dismiss ebook piracy. “New models” will emerge. Piracy is better than obscurity. People will pay once everything is available for a “fair” price. The arguments are familiar, and have an air of ritual now. Hip conferences urge publishers to do a swan dive into an empty swimming pool."
• The Most Emailed 'New York Times' Article Ever | The Awl
• Real World Technologies - Intel's Sandy Bridge Microarchitecture - "The insatiable desire for high frequencies unfortunately could not overcome the underlying physics – Intel’s single minded pursuit of high frequency lead to high power operation, and there is a firm economic limit of 130W for a mass market product."
• The MEI Voyageur Back-Pack - First choice of the seasoned world traveler
• The Feeling of Power
• everyone has a right to their beliefs « Manifest Density - "I love you guys, but you’re crazy. On questions of aesthetic preference there’s no particular reason that normal people should listen to a bunch of geeky obsessives who spend orders of magnitude more time on these issues than average. It’s like how you probably shouldn’t listen to me when I tell you not to use .doc files or that you might want to consider a digital audio player with Ogg Vorbis support. I strongly believe those things, but even I know they’re pointless and arbitrary for everyone who doesn’t consider “Save As…” an opportunity for political action."
• You Can Have My Double Space When You Pry it From My Cold, Dead Hands - Megan McArdle - Culture - The Atlantic - And for the counterpoint...
• Voyeuristic Blogger Portraits Put Faces to URLs | Raw File
• Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising: Pics, Videos, Links, News

Links for 01-14-2010

• What Factors Justify the Use of Apache Hadoop? – tecosystems
• Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine - I'm not sure when I broke myself of the two-space habit. 
• Which game is Bill Belichick talking about? - Boston.com - Cool use of word clouds.
• A gadget’s life: From gee-whiz to junk| The Washington Post - This is very cool.

Links for 01-13-2011

• Steve Jobs Remixed: 5 Creative Takes on the Iconic Apple Keynote [VIDEOS]
• When Booze Was Banned but Pot Was Not - Reason Magazine - "The real puzzle, as the journalist Daniel Okrent argues in his masterful new history of the period, is how a nation that never had a teetotaling majority, let alone one committed to forcibly imposing its lifestyle on others, embarked upon such a doomed experiment to begin with. How did a country consisting mostly of drinkers agree to forbid drinking?"
• Things Real People Don't Say About Advertising
• Dumb as a Blog: 22 Dumbest Things People Do on Facebook Photo Gallery - Automatically post your Twitter updates to Facebook - on truTV.com
• Greatest New York Ever - What Is the Greatest New York Musical? -- New York Magazine
• Google yanking H.264 video out of Chrome | Deep Tech - CNET News - Good dive into all the issues on both sides.
• U.S. Particle Collider Shutting Down - CBS News
• How to make your shopping cart suck less - The Oatmeal - This is hilarious (and so true).

Links for 01-11-2011

• LabSlice: Does Gartner understand cloud computing? - "But even at first glance it seemed a bit strange, with the title "Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting". Hmmmm... So this is a review of IaaS, the very epitome of cloud services, and also of traditional web hosting services?"
  
  Reading through the report you will find similar idiosyncrasies and an obvious bias towards delivering 'enterprise' cloud services
• The cloud/hosting Magic Quadrant audience « CloudPundit: Massive-Scale Computing - "I think his point is worth addressing, because it’s true that the MQ is written to an audience of such companies and is very explicit in the fact that we are rating enterprise-grade services, but not true that these companies just want to be part of the hype. That seems to be part of the confusion over what cloud IaaS is about, too. At Gartner, we’re excited by the whole consumerization-of-IT trend that intertwines with the cloud computing phenomenon. But we’re not writing for the individual dude, or the garage developers, or the rebels who want IT stuff without IT people. We’re writing for the corporate IT guy."
• NYC - Mindrelic Timelapse on Vimeo
• Netflix Reveals Challenges in the Cloud - Computerworld - "For example, Netflix must cope with hardware failures and slow response times in the cloud, where IT resources are shared with other tenants. "Co-tenancy is hard," Ciancutti said. To address that problem, Netflix developed a software architecture that it calls "Rambo," in which each application can succeed even if related systems fail, he said."
• Disappointed! (the true sad story of client hypervisor meloncholy) - Tim Mangan - BrianMadden.com - Browser-centric application access & app stores seem to be reducing the urgency/relevance of client-side virtualization for a lot of scenarios.
• Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
• New ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Edition Does Disservice to a Classic - NYTimes.com - Looks pretty spot on. There are borderline cases but this isn't one of them.
• The Fallacies of Distributed Computing Reborn: The Cloud Era « New Relic Blog
• The Case Against Chasing Scoops - Tuned In - TIME.com - "Still, it would be great, as news outlets are forced to cut back ever more, for some prominent organizations to publicly and vocally decide that they're going to let the other guy confirm the news Washington already knows first from now on, and conserve their resources for discoveries that will matter for more than an afternoon. That, at least, would be a really newsworthy development."
• INSANELY awesome solar eclipse picture | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine - Transit of ISS in front of sun during solar eclipse.
• How Does the Internet Work?
• Quora will be bigger than Twitter - Telegraph - "Of course, the flipside of Quora's apparently massive inflection is that it will soon face challenges with spam and automated noise, a problem that has essentially crippled Yahoo! Answers (well, that and the breathtaking stupidity of the people who use Yahoo!'s service)."

Links for 01-05-2011

• The Blog of Stickles: Doctorin' the Tardis
• Academic Earth | Online Courses | Academic Video Lectures
• iPad Magazine Sales Drop Steeply As iPad Sales Soar - SVW - IMO, pricing models are a big part of the issue. I'll be interested to see how often I read my new print+digital sub to The Economist online.
• Nikon mirrorless interchangeable lens camera | Nikon Rumors - I've been holding off on buying a camera of this type in part waiting for Nikon and Canon to make their plays. "More professional" sounds expensive though given the prices of the current entrants.
• Bits or pieces?: Review of Mystic Me 3.0 - "There will be no let-up in end user confusion surrounding cloud computing: Whether it's surveys of Canadian Executives or Technology Resellers, confusion over cloud continues unabated. Score: 1"
• How Facebook killed the Christmas card - The Week - "But now, with Facebook so thoroughly insinuated into our lives, we already know where our friends (and our "friends") went on vacation, what they look like right now, and whether they've recently switched jobs.... In 2010, people don't need to wait for December to brag. They've been doing it all year."
• Channel impact of cloud computing - 21 Dec 2010 - CRN UK Opinion - "All of this will simply reduce rather than eradicate the risks, however. So there is a natural limit to the degree of shift to cloud services that will take place in most organisations.Having said that, as we discuss in the aforementioned paper, cloud computing is creating both choice and complexity for customers, so it cannot be ignored by those in the IT channel. Skilling up will be necessary to maintain account control and exploit the spin-off business. There may also be some incremental margin to be gained from hosted service resales or referrals. For small customers in particular, it may be possible to meet needs through hosted services in areas such as messaging, collaboration and CRM that would otherwise not be feasible for commercial or practical reasons on-premise."
• AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com
• Cloud computing: Security fears mean IT stays in-house | Finance | silicon.com - "But IT bosses questioned by Forrester had misgivings about using public cloud services, with 64 per cent expressing concerns about whether corporate data would be secure inside cloud service providers' datacentres."