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)."