Links for 04-25-2011

• Hard economic lessons for news « BuzzMachine - Agree with a lot here.
• How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse « SmugMug's Don MacAskill
• Ranked: Stanley Kubrick's Films from Worst to Best | Nerve.com - Agree with this about 60%.
• The King's Speech: good movie, very bad history. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine
• What The Scandal Of "Three Cups of Tea" Author Greg Mortenson Is Really About | Fast Company - "And upon visiting 30 of the 141 schools that CAI claims to have built, they found half of them were empty, being used for storage, or hadn't received any outside support for years. But while that's deplorable, it's not simply a function of CAI focusing on Mortenson's publicity instead of development. This happens to many development projects around the world, no matter who is building them."
• A Whole Foods Fight in Boston - Reason Magazine
• Working Best at Coffee Shops - Conor Friedersdorf - Business - The Atlantic
• Open Source Report: Should Oracle be blamed for OpenOffice.org pullout? - "Depending on how Oracle actually handles the community transition, the irony is that Oracle could have been lauded a year ago for handing OpenOffice.org over in full to the community. Now it's just an admission of failure, since real energy for open office suite development has moved over to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. Of course Oracle will now receive a big raspberry over its announcement. It's too little, too late and it didn't have to be that way."

Links for 04-15-2011

• Why customer needs don’t always matter — On Product Management - "Product Management is not about satisfying customer needs and wants. Product Management is about ensuring business goals are met and business success delivered."
• CentOS 5.6 Finally Arrives: Is It Suitable for Business Use? | Linux Magazine - "The other half of “enterprise-class” is that updates arrive in a timely fashion, which is notably false for the 5.x series. If I understand correctly, there have been a handful of updates prior to the release of CentOS 5.6 for the 5.x series — but nothing else. So, if you consider timely updates a requirement for “enterprise-class,” we can count CentOS out now."
• Build Your Own NASA Apollo Landing Computer (no kidding) - Space & Sci-Fi Blog - Galaxiki, the Sci-Fi Galaxy that anyone can edit
• Coté's People Over Process » VMWare Cloud Foundry – Quick Analysis and Press Pass - "The most critical thing for VMWare to do is to let this “open is best” philosophy play out in their application development strategy. VMWare’s current fortunes were built on distinctly not that philosophy and it’d be easy for the kernel geniuses who must hold much of the corporate power to derail the appdev strategy, which is a much different beast than virtualization and other business models closer to the metal than the glass."

Links for 04-12-2011

• Data Center Dialog: Right place, right time, right cloud partners - "One of the things that has been frustrating about the cloud market to date is the ad hoc, shoot-from-the-hip approach. It’s great for testing the waters and there is, indeed, an important role for “good enough” computing, but as enterprises get more serious about cloud, they need to make sure they are thinking about something near and dear to my heart: management."
• The Joy of Not Cooking - Magazine - The Atlantic - "So we have something of a mystery. Just when our labor in the kitchen has fallen, we have seen the rise of the gourmet kitchen: the high-end retailers like Williams-Sonoma … the Sub-Zero refrigerators … the $10,000 Viking stoves … the $250 Breville toaster ovens … the Japanese knives with their own display stands. Why are we spending so much money on a place where we spend so little time?"
• Groundhogs! - "Having groundhog trouble is like living in the Bill Murray movie of the same name. You go to bed and wake up to the same exact thing every morning—in this case, a giant furry butt on legs eating your landscape to the ground. But this picture is NOT a comedy. Although weather-guessing Punxsutawney Phil has made this giant squirrel—yes, that’s what they are—seem cute and cuddly, they are actually a serious menace that people often underestimate until it’s too late."
• ProductCamp Boston’s Presentations on SlideShare - ProductCamp Boston 2011.
• Game Over In The CPU Wars? - Chuck's Blog - "For me, it's the final sign that -- yes -- the era of Big Unix on proprietary RISC processors is finally coming to a close."

Links for 04-06-2011

• Amy Ziari - The Newsroom - PR Case Study: Where Color Went Wrong - "MISTAKE #3: Using hyperbolic, if not misleading, messaging. Everyone wants to say his or her product is the best thing ever. Sometimes it is, but more often than not, it isn't. In working with entrepreneurs, a huge role of the PR team needs to be striking a balance between staying true to the broader vision a founder wants to get across while not making journalists pull out the barf bag. Color's press release has astoundingly bold messaging that also positions the app as something that currently lives up to the larger vision, when all you have to do is download it to see otherwise."
• Rational Survivability - THE Cloud & Virtualization Security Blog - I actually agree with this for the most part. While it's important to maintain portability across environments--and at some future point may want to dynamically arbitrage resource pricing--the use case where you dynamically shift resources associated with a single application from private to public seems a stretch.
• Feature: The Database Revolution - With an IBM slant, but still worth reading.
• postpcmag.com
• Locked in again? Customers must face their responsibility and take action « NinaLytton.com - "Open systems are your insurance policy. Open systems promote competition. Competition among your suppliers gives you business choices. Choices give you fair prices and reasonable business policies. Choices prevent anti-competitive vendor behavior like Oracle’s."
• Bacon Butty - Saveur.com - Yum. Bacon.
• MapIncrease | Apache Hadoop for the Enterprise | Cloudera