Links for 05-26-2011

• Top 10 Programming Fonts - A list of monospaced fonts.
• Real World Technologies - Poulson: The Future of Itanium Servers - Nice deep dive on Itanium history and Poulson microarchitecture.
• The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - The Information Sage - LOng article about Edward Tufte.
• What's the most epic photo ever taken? - Quora - Some amazing pics here.

Links for 05-24-2011

• Is the Launch Speed in Angry Birds Constant? | Wired Science | Wired.com - A system dynamics analysis of Angry Birds.
• Dorsey's Square tries to eliminate the card swipe by bringing back the tab - Fortune Tech - Hey guys. Watch the "many generations ago" thing. I can remember accounts with local stores when growing up. "They call it opening a tab, a high-tech homage to the pad-and-paper accounting that barkeeps, druggists and general store clerks were accustomed to many generations ago."
• Tom West; engineer was the soul of Data General’s new machine - The Boston Globe
• ...but rarely anyone else's. MIT fields teams in a record - 05.26.75 - SI Vault
• The Culture Crash by James Panero, City Journal 20 July 2009 - "The reductions in arts endowments reported over the past year have been significant, raising the question of how they have been managed. If the investment goal of arts endowments is the preservation of capital, how can they now face decreases of 35 percent, aside from the criminal actions of investors like Bernard Madoff?"
• Column: When You Shouldn't Listen to Your Critics - Harvard Business Review - "If businesses all try to please the same segment of reviewers, they risk forgoing the differentiation that comes from targeting specific markets. As we’ve learned this lesson in our business, we’ve increased our investment in traditional focus groups to ensure that we respond to the needs of our core market. That doesn’t mean we ignore online feedback—indeed, we even welcome it from one-shot customers, who may someday come to appreciate our premium niche. But when a reviewer says that the price of a $6 sandwich is “seriously whacked,” I have a better understanding of what—and who—is behind it."
• Watch: John Lithgow performs a dramatic reading of Newt Gingrich's press release | Nerve.com
• Open Virtualization Alliance Aims to Challenge VMware - "We were a bit surprised to see that only a small number (29%) were satisfied with a single virtualization mechanism (see chart below). An almost equal number (26%) were using four or more different virtualization packages, and almost half of them were using two or three."
• The Twitter Trap - NYTimes.com - "Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.”"
• Ranked: Woody Allen Films from Worst to Best | Nerve.com - Strongly disagree with the position of a few films on this list but overall pretty good.

Links for 05-16-2011

• Why Don’t We Video Chat More Often? | Singularity Hub - "Ten years ago if someone had told you that in 2011 everyone would have a webcam in their home or in their pocket, and that the cost of video chat was going to be zero, how many of us would have predicted that people still wouldn’t use it?"
• Louisiana River Control
• Michael Bay’s Scenario « xkcd - This is actually a good rundown on what's going on with the Mississippi River diversions going on in Louisiana.
• How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet"
• The IT Coffin Corner: Caught Between Virtualization Stall and the Cloud Barrier « Scott Crawford
• The story of the classic font Futura | Art and design | guardian.co.uk - "The news that Swedish design giant Ikea has decided to ditch the classic typeface Futura from its corporate branding has caused outrage among typophiles worldwide. But what does Futura look like? And why does it matter?"
• The cost benefit myth of the public cloud | Andi Mann – Übergeek - This has been perhaps the biggest surprise as cloud computing has developed.
• Why al-Qaida Hopes Osama bin Laden Did a Backup, and Other Cautionary Tales - Yottabytes: Storage and Disaster Recovery - Have to love lede: "Granted, it’s not every IT administrator who has to deal with a C-level executive in a remote office losing confidential company data because an elite armed military force broke into the place he was staying and took it. That said, there’s a number of lessons that IT administrators can take away from this week’s news."
• VMware’s CloudFoundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift – Compare and Contrast | The Virtualization Practice - "These are both works in progress and their scope will doubtless grow massively.  It would be nice if the two initiatives could somehow come together, since there is a lot of overlap, but in the real world we assume they won’t.  OpenShift seems to offer broader language options – notably PHP and Python, to be more serious about IaaS-cloud neutrality, to offer better J2EE support, and also to be more mature. CloudFoundry seems more unified and to offer a better route from development to production irrespective of whether the choice is made to use private or public clouds."
• When We Tested Nuclear Bombs - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic
• The New York Times Adjusts Printing on The Fly - FishbowlNY

Links for 05-01-2011

• Half Pregnant Is No Way To Live: What We Learned From Iron Mountain Digital - Wikibon - "Iron Mountain’s biggest struggle with its digital business was an inability to extend these products beyond their core customer base. The reality here is OEM partners never really wanted them to be anything more than the “Iron Mountain” for physical records. Anything that looked or smelled like a business that was competitive to its partners was going to be an uphill battle. That is, unless the company wanted to disrupt its broader go-to-market strategy, invest heavily in its direct digital sales force, and compete head on with these OEMs. Unwilling to go all in, they were stuck in a box."
• A historical look at Cloud Computing - Inside Enterprise IT - Enterprise - Dell Community
• Summary of the Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS Service Disruption
• Under the Radar Introduces New Set of Fresh-Idea Companies - Cloud Computing - News & Reviews - eWeek.com
• AVOS - So del.icio.us has a new home. Glad to hear it. I use delicious a lot.
• Stop Blaming the Customers - the Fault is on Amazon Web Services - ReadWriteCloud
• Amazon EC2 outage: summary and lessons learned « RightScale Blog - Very good analysis of the outage.
• Cloud hosting vs colocation - Chris Chandler's posterous - Good cost analysis. Of course, the results will vary by your assumptions.
• If Ikea sold cars | Eduardo Porter