MIT Burton House 60th Reunion

I do a brief appearance on a panel.

Links for 03-30-2011

• New Cloud Reference Architecture From NIST | Andi Mann – Übergeek
• The Existential Dread of '3eanuts': Peanuts Minus the 4th Panel - ComicsAlliance | Comic book culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews
• COLOR.XXX PITCH DECK!! - This faux pitch deck for color is pretty funny.
• ‘RomneyCare’ Facts and Falsehoods | FactCheck.org - Looks like a pretty good look at where Mass Healthcare stands.
• The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium • The Register - "To me, this is the reality of what Ellison meant when he said that Oracle wants to be the IBM of the 1960s. Oracle wants to have the incredible margins that IBM enjoyed back then. It wants to have that lock-in that IBM had in the days when there were few alternatives and even fewer standards that would allow customers to easily move from vendor to vendor."
• Microsoft points to Target for private cloud but gets it embarassingly wrong - The Troposphere - "But that would be HARD, you see. Any of those options, which would qualify as legit exercises in cloud computing, would require a hell of a lot more work than simply trimming infrastructure. They redecorate the bathrooms every once in a while too, and they aren’t touting “next-gen on-demand potty usability”, are they?"
• HP Supports Customers Despite Oracle’s Anti-customer Actions - Battle by press release. 

Links for 03-23-2011

• Why I Left Rackspace and What About Openstack « Deprecation - "One thing that I think has been wrong from the start of Openstack is the definition of community.  Community is not a list of partners.  In fact, the participation of most of the companies listed on the openstack community webpage started and ended with a press release."
• GSA: Cloud Computing Is Safer Than You Think -- Government Clouds -- InformationWeek - "The Office of Management and Budget has taken "an aggressive stance on the cloud," she wrote. "We're all on the hook to move three systems to the cloud by 2012. I'm here to tell you that it can be done intelligently and securely.""
• Impossible world: Articles: M.C. Escher: More Mathematics Than Meets the Eye
• RIP Digg. - "Startups in Silicon Valley are like old generals. They don’t die anymore, buoyed on life-rafts of lingering venture capital and modest revenues. They just fade away, eventually purchased for assets that are a shadow of their former promise. It’s pretty clear that Digg is on that path. The company isn’t dead, but it’s been fading away for a while, and its soul is all but gone. The company can spin it however it wants– the final nail in the coffin is news that founder Kevin Rose– long Digg’s greatest asset– is leaving."
• New Rules for the New Internet Bubble « Steve Blank - "We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What are they, how do they differ and what can startup do to take advantage of them?"

Links for 03-18-2011

• Consumerization of IT: 95% of Information Workers Use Self-Purchased Technology for Work - Interesting data from IDC.
• Delivering Competitive Advantage through IT - Some potentially useful numbers from Intel here.
• NPR Sting: Edited Video Makes Schiller, O'Keefe Look Bad - TIME - "The full video hardly clears Schiller. His opining about liberals' education and conservatives' anti-intellectualism, for instance, still comes off as smug and would have hurt NPR regardless. (The network was still feeling backlash from firing Juan Williams last fall after he said on Fox that some Muslims on planes made him nervous.) But the full picture shows O'Keefe's partisan hit job — trying to link NPR to liberal elitism and scary Muslims — was manipulative too. And it shows how sadly easy it is to take advantage of the attention span and metabolism of media today."
• True or False? An example of Internet illiteracy – Laziness or just plain stupidity? | Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange
• Steve Jobs in a Box - Has Apple peaked? (from 2007).
• SCM Marchant Cogito 240SR Calculator - The first "computer" that I used.
• WeatherSpark | Interactive Weather Charts - Nice visualization of weather history for a locale.
• The Rolodex Logo Shock | Logo Designer - Wow. I assume that this was an attempt to get away from the company's brand image of being the guys who made the round thing for holding addresses. But the new logo looks like something thrown together in 10 minutes using clip art.
• The Mad Genius of “Modernist Cuisine” : The New Yorker
• Marco.org - Moving on from iPad "office productivity" apps - Sounds about right. A lot of things that you CAN do on an iPad, you don't necessarily want to except in the most limited ways.
• A Chef’s Fine Art, Now Available in Homes Near You - NYTimes.com - Sous vide from the NY Times.
• Huge incoherent failures: A doomed mansion, "The Great Gatsby" and Fitzgerald's America - "As for America, "its greatest promise is that something is going to happen," Fitzgerald wrote in a letter. That essential restlessness, that search for the new, can yield beauty just as readily as a condo subdivision. Often, in our history, it has yielded both."
• Cutting Through the Bother of City Parking - NYTimes.com - Good overview of parking apps for Smartphones.

Links for 03-09-2011

• Introducing Zite, the iPad's Smartest Magazine Yet - "“What’s broken is there’s so much stuff out there, and I don’t know how to get to it,” says Ali Devar, Zite’s founder and CEO. “There’s no automatic system that’s catching the important stuff I miss every day. Search doesn’t solve it. Social doesn’t solve it. A lot of [Zite beta testers] came back to us and said, ‘Thank goodness, here’s something that gives me my content and more, but filters it for me.’ People are feeling the pain, and they need it resolved.”"
• Gambling on the future... | In-Depth Analysis | Marketing Week - "Three-quarters of marketing chiefs plan to restructure their departments this year to keep pace with the demands of digital media, according to research exclusive to Marketing Week. To help marketers keep ahead of the wave of change, there are four key areas of reorganisation."
• InfoQ: IBM’s Reference Architecture for Creating Cloud Environments
• High Scalability - High Scalability - Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing? - Interesting stuff if a bit all over the place. It also seems to lack a discussion of memory used within existing storage paradigms.
• IBM100 - Good Design is Good Business - "IBM’s focus on design has its roots in a stroll down Fifth Avenue in New York that Thomas J. Watson Jr. took in the early 1950s. He stopped at an Olivetti shop where typewriters were set out on sidewalk stands for passersby to try out. The machines had sleek designs and a variety of colors. Inside, the shop was bright and modern looking. In contrast, the display areas in IBM’s offices in those days were dimly lit and its computers were drab and boxy. The lobby of the headquarters on Madison Avenue had been designed to please Thomas Watson Sr.’s early 20th century aesthetic: it looked, his son wrote, like the “first-class saloon on an ocean liner.” A few years later, as Watson Jr. was preparing to take over as IBM’s chief executive, he decided, “I could put my stamp on IBM through modern design.” Later, in a 1973 lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Watson Jr. declared that “good design is good business.”"
• Digital Watches and Pet Rocks  - Technology Review - "So take that as a lesson when you encounter a new technology: the first incarnations might be clunky, but that's no real indicator of its staying power."
• Cinema Redux - "This explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment . This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time."
• moviebarcode - Cool way of looking at films' palette.
• Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com
• Pictures Of Cats Winning: Pics, Videos, Links, News - Hilarious!
• Shackleton’s Antarctica in colour, 1915 « How to be a Retronaut

Links for 03-04-2011

• Daring Fireball: The Chair - "The biggest difference, though, was this: last year Apple didn’t yet understand the iPad. They knew it was good. They knew it had potential. But they didn’t know what it was. They had a sense that in the conceptual space between an iPhone and a MacBook there was uncharted, fertile territory. And they set for themselves a wise metric: the iPad would only succeed if it could do some of the same things a Mac can do, but do them better. If it wasn’t better in several important ways for several common tasks, it would not succeed. What they didn’t know last year was how people would use it, for real. They know now."
• Shaded Relief Archive
• Charlie Sheen Quotes As New Yorker Cartoons: Pics, Videos, Links, News
• Maps Over Time
• Hacker News | Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video) - Impressive. Fun to read the comments about backward compatibility too.
• The Moral Crusade Against Foodies - Magazine - The Atlantic
• When bad websites happen to good restaurants - The Boston Globe - "Restaurant websites are famously bad. They are easy targets for mockery — often user-unfriendly tools that feature Flash animation, embarrassing techno music, and menus that turn out to be PDF files, as you realize only once they start downloading. Meanwhile, basic information about location and hours is hard to come by, daily specials lists date to 2006, pages are permanently “under construction,’’ and the darn things won’t load on your iPhone."
• The Information by James Gleick: Review by Nicholas Carr - The Daily Beast
• 10 Old Ads That Would Be Banned Today | Business Blogs

Links for 03-02-2011

• CEOs Want Better Sales Forces | Forrester Blogs - "In my recent travels, I have been asking tech CEOs a simple question: "Are you satisfied that your sales force is advancing your strategy?" The answer has been a resounding "No!" They give it a C- grade."
• MIT OpenCourseWare | Media Arts and Sciences | MAS.531 Computational Camera and Photography, Fall 2009 | Home - Computational photography course at OCW.
• The Coffee Table Book of Man Caves by Johanna Schlegel — Kickstarter
• Netflix Switches Over To Convenient New Physical Locations | The Onion - America's Finest News Source - "LOS GATOS, CA—Officials at Netflix announced Thursday that the company has finally reached its long-term goal of constructing a chain of easily accessible stores. "Having actual physical locations was always our ultimate intent, and we are proud to provide our customers with the convenient option of driving to a nearby Netflix store and renting any available movie for just $3.99 per title," said Netflix spokesman Henry Regis, adding that the ease of physically walking through aisles and picking out DVDs will more than make up for the stores' minimized selection of titles. "We will also be implementing late fees to help ensure films are returned on time—that way no one misses a chance to rent the hottest new releases." Regis confirmed that the new physical locations will be open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and include easy after-hours drop-off boxes."
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Sex, math, code - "I'm going to title my next book "The Code of Sex: Ten Secrets for Using Math to Keep Her Satisfied and Hungry for More." I promise you that it's going to be the most pirated book of all time."
• Zooming in With Computational Photography | CSAIL
• McNealy: Sun could have won out over Linux | The Industry Standard - InfoWorld
• The Colour Clock
• Six Brands That Don't Mean What They Used To - Woot
• Why is IT governance so difficult to implement? - O'Reilly Radar - "What is the core value that ensures IT governance will work? The ability to compromise."
• Ranked: Every Oscar Best Picture Winner from Worst to Best | Nerve.com - As might be expected, I agree with a lot of this while also disagreeing with a fair bit.
• Fashion, Qaddafi-Style | Politics | Vanity Fair
• Books Beyond Borders - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - From the comments: "The bricks-and-mortar retailers that have the best chance of survival are sellers of: 1) perishables, like grocery stores; 2) really cheap stuff (e,g., "dollar store" types of stuff), where the cost of shipping would add too much to the price; 3) really expensive stuff (like jewelry) that can be risky to ship, even if insured; 4) stuff that really does need to be seen and handled and tried out before buying (some, but not all, clothing, and some other things); 5) stuff that may be subject to legal prohibitions against shipping across state lines, or anywhere; 6) stuff that is too bulky to send via mail or UPS, and too expensive to ship by freight (much home improvement stuff, for example); and 7) convenient combinations of many different kinds of stuff, thus sparing consumers some time and shipping costs."
• A Visitors Guide to Silicon Valley « Steve Blank
• Video Of My CSA Presentation: “Commode Computing: Relevant Advances In Toiletry & I.T. – From Squat Pots to Cloud Bots – Waste Management Through Security Automation” | Rational Survivability
• The REAL Death Of The Music Industry - "Digital really does appear to have brought about the era of the single"
• Jeopardy! Champ Ken Jennings - The Washington Post - "When anyone mentions 2001 to them (or Terminator, or Matrix, or Tron, or...) IBM prefers to bring up the helpful question-answering computer on Star Trek.  C'mon IBM!  You just invented SkyNet!  Own it!"
• Reelizer - Some very nicely done alternate movie posters.