Links for 12-15-2011

• Fountainhead: Predictions: What You WON'T See in IT For 2012 - Good list. Would quibble here and there but don't really disagree with any of the basic assertions.
• Envelope Please... Announcing the Winners for the 2011 Washies | CIO's Guide to Cloud Computing and On-Demand | Appirio - The 2011 cloudwashing winners.
• From the comments - This sums up my take pretty well: "The “class warfare” comment shows Josh is missing the point on this one. It’s not that the Mercedes is “empirically better” and certainly not “because it’s more expensive.” That’s not what Siegler is saying. He’s saying the experience of driving a merc is better (he doesn’t give any reasons it’s better) in a way which not everyone can appreciate. I don’t know if what Siegler is saying about the Nexus is right. I haven’t used it. But I can appreciate the metaphor. There is a level of attention to detail which is paid to some products that some people simply do not care about, and for other people it absolutely MAKES the product. For instance, BMW engineers the sound of the closing car door. This is something that subtly affects the experience of driving a BMW. I think this sort of thing is what Siegler was (admittedly poorly) describing."
• Horseshit | The Verge Forums - I mostly disagree about this. Yes, the original article generalized. But there are indeed aspects of experience that large groups of people just don't care about--or "get" if you would--or, as in the case of cars, dismiss as not worth the cost.
• How Much Does Facebook Know About You? [Video]
• IN-DEPTH PHOTO ANALYSIS OF THE SUPPOSED RQ-170 SENTINEL DRONE IN IRANIAN HANDS | aviationintel
• Infochimps Blog - RT @JoMaitlandSF: Oh boy I could get lost in data sets in here for hours! << I blame u f new productivity suck:-)
• Logo Evolution of 25 Famous Brands

Podcast: Red Hat's Tushar Katarki talks grid

I sat down last week with Red Hat's product manager for grid products, Tushar Katarki, who joined us recently. In this interview, Tushar talks about:

• What grid is
• How it's evolving
• What's new with Red Hat's MRG Grid product
• How Dreamworks uses grid
• What's coming

Listen to MP3 version (6:00)

Listen to OGG version (6:00)

Links for 12-14-2011

• How American food got so bad — Marginal Revolution - "I think there is a very bad period for American food. It runs something like 1910 through maybe the 1980’s. And that’s the age of the frozen TV dinner, of the sugar donut, of fast food, of the chain, and really a lot of it is not very good. If you go back to the 19th century and you read Europeans who’ve come to the United States, they’re really quite impressed by the freshness and variety that is on offer."
• Ten things your kid will never see | Sync™ Blog - I'm totally off to get my Geritol now.
• Banking on Change: Software IT Spending Predictions for 2012 | Sandhill - “Increases in IT spending in 2012 for large enterprises will be concentrated in cloud, mobile and Big Data solutions. As enterprises realize the power of a cloud infrastructure combined with Big Data solutions that can use this infrastructure, new analytical solutions will be possible and will be pursued. Mobile solutions will continue to have an impact on large enterprise IT, and spending will increase as more new solutions are deployed."
• Top 10 Presentations on Cloud Computing
• When Truth Survives Free Speech - NYTimes.com - "In the pre-Web days, someone like Ms. Cox might have been one more obsessive in the lobby of a newspaper, waiting to show a reporter a stack of documents that proved the biggest story never told. The Web has allowed Ms. Cox to cut out the middleman; various blogs give voice to her every theory, and search algorithms give her work prominence."
• An Office Designed To Keep Employees Working From Home | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation - RT @marcosluis2186: An Office Designed To Keep Employees Working From Home << interesting concepts

Links for 12-12-2011

• Print - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics - Very details and sobering read. From a design perspective, the way Airbus averages two opposing flight control inputs is particularly striking.
• Open-source webOS is dead on arrival | ZDNet - "The bottom line is HP appears to be not so much contributing webOS to the open-source community as it is abandoning it to open source. Neither Google with Android nor Apple with iOS will need to worry about webOS being a competitor. Unless HP shows that they’ll be a lot more serious about supporting open-source webOS than it has to date, webOS is dead as the Indianapolis Colts’ Super Bowl hopes."
• In Defense of Kitchen Gadgets - Megan McArdle - Life - The Atlantic - In defense of kitchen gadgets: Need to keep this one handy :-)

Links for 12-09-2011

• Cloud computing history lesson | Technology Spectator - (Primarily focused on public clouds.)
• Why An Investment Firm Was Awarded $2.5 Million After Being Defamed By Blogger - Forbes - People are still free to disagree but seems a rather more in-depth view of situation than the usual uncritical Internet mob.
• Top Ten Virtualization Risks Hiding in Your Company
• Untitled (http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-08/) - Today's Dilbert is great:
• Print - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics
• Spam sinks to lowest level in almost three years, says Symantec | Security - CNET News - RT @amcafee: Spam is down... to 70% of all email - (HT @adamthierer ) << But uptick social media etc attacks
• Why Siri had to start in beta | Benoit Maison's blog - Good perspective on the importance of lots of data in speech recognition.
• Siri Is Apple's Broken Promise - The Siri backlash: . OTOH, have heard positive comments. Voice recognition has been a long road.

Links for 12-06-2011

• The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2011
• If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come You're Not Rich? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - "And in fact, if management of all these large public companies really were the staggeringly malevolent yet totally hapless lackwits that so many seem to believe, it should be really, really easy to get rich by outwitting them.  Oh, sure, they'd probably get all their rich friends in Congress and Kiwanis to gang up on you, but since, according to the internet, almost all those people are also too dumb to come in out of the rain, you should be able to defeat them with a couple of well-placed banana peels."
• All.I.Can’s Kootenay Street Segment Goes Viral | Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine - "It’s definitely one of the coolest street ski segments you will ever see on film. Not only that, it might just be one of the best ski segments ever caught on film. And it all goes down on the streets of Trail, Rossland and Nelson in crappy, grey, wet, gravelly conditions. Shot by Dave Mossop of Sherpas Cinema, and starring JP Auclair, one of the most legendary freeskiers in the world, the segment was recently cracked to the world online and has since gone viral. Surprise, surprise."
• Why Siri Can't Find Abortion Clinics & How It's Not An Apple Conspiracy - Seems a pretty good rundown of Siri weaknesses in real world
• When will we have IaaS Cloud Standards? Not till 2015 | Forrester Blogs - "If you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for IaaS to become more standardized, stop it. You’ll be waiting there till 2015, while everyone else is building fundamental skills and ramping up their cloud knowledge. So jump in the game already!"
• Your LED Light Bulb Holiday Shopping Guide - Forbes

Links for 12-02-2011

• Building a Spotify App « Music Machinery
• Red Hat Gordon Haff: from open source to cloud computing - Computer Business Online - Me on Chinese TV.
• The 5 Best Toys of All Time | GeekDad | Wired.com - RT @jyarmis: the 5 best toys of all time (from @berkson0) i played with all 5 #nostalgia
• The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum
• Sous Vide for the Holidays | Michael Ruhlman - I bought a PID controller for my crockpot this year and I like the results.
• IDC - Press Release - prUS23177411 - "One year ago, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that the IT industry's next dominant platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies, would begin its transition into the mainstream. Today, spending on these technologies is growing at about 18% per year and is expected to account for at least 80% of IT spending growth between now and 2020. With future market revenues at stake, IDC predicts that 2012 will be marked by some of the first high-stakes battles as companies seek to position themselves for leadership in these critical and fast-growing technology areas."

Links for 12-01-2011

• Top 10 Cloud Predictions for 2012: The Awkward Teenage Years Are Upon Us | Forrester Blogs - Like the analogy. Wish I had thought of it :-)
• As Cloud Becomes a Teenager, It Is Time for Adult Supervision! | Andi Mann – Übergeek - "As a toddler, cloud was not expected to have any maturity, discipline, self-control, or to understand the real world. So we all just did our best to help it grow, resigned in the process to just clean up after it and at least to prevent any life-threatening injuries. However, as cloud becomes a teenager, I think a key to building real maturity (as in real life) is in giving our budding teen the benefit of adult experience and supervision, while expecting it to show a growing level of responsibility. We need to give our teens the benefit of our ‘grown-up’ experience in the real world, provide them with a positive role model, be a ‘responsible adult’ for them, and expect them to show an increasing degree of self-discipline."
• Analyst: Pay TV Industry to Lose 200,000 Subscribers in 2012 - The Hollywood Reporter - If I could get basic HD OTA, I'd probably drop my cable sub. I don't use it much but I don't want to give up broadcast HD entirely either.
• Going Beyond PUE for Data Center Efficiency » Data Center Knowledge - Good rundown of the issues with PUE.
• The Big Green Egg | Michael Ruhlman - Cool toy :-)
• Where in the World? A Google Earth Puzzle - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic
• Don't Trust Your Gut With Assortment Planning - Marshall Fisher - Harvard Business Review - "Retailers periodically update their product assortments, deleting slow sellers and adding new products in response to shifts in consumer demand or to accommodate new offerings from suppliers. Assortment-planning processes vary greatly across retailers and product segments but have one thing in common: They rely too much on human judgment and not enough on hard data that might allow a retailer to predict how customers will react to a change in the assortment."