Links for 08-07-2009

• Five Great John Hughes Moments - Monkey See Blog : NPR - Of the Breakfast Club. Yeah: "See, that's the trick. I don't get it, but I know it. All of it. From many, many viewings stretching back to 1985. In many ways, I think it's the weakest of these movies creatively, because it was trying so hard and taking itself so seriously, but it might be the one I've seen the most. You see what I mean: He knew something."
• Seven alternative Flickr search engines | Webware - CNET
• Coding Horror: Software Pricing: Are We Doing It Wrong? - Some interesting thoughts in both the post and the comments.
• Putting lipstick on Microsoft’s pigs - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Brainstorm Tech - The "Microsoft doesn't innovate" theme gets overplayed. However, it's unclear what problem exactly Microsoft thinks it is solving with these stores. It does seem derivative.
• No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users - WSJ.com - Backlash against notebooks in coffee shops?
• 25 Music APIs - After my latest organizational binge I'm looking to pull as much metadata as possible into my music collection.
• Why Teens Don’t Tweet - "Twitter offers something that adults crave more than teenagers: an audience. Facebook doesn’t fulfill this need as well as Twitter does, but the offset is that teenagers turn to Facebook to communicate with their friends."
• SF Signal: MIND MELD: The Hugo Awards - Success at Picking the Best, How Well it Represents the Genre, 2009 Predictions & Overlooked Titles - "In the past, the voters were a good cross-section of fandom and so the shortlists often included what was good and exciting in sf and fantasy. But - bar the odd exception - that's not been true since the late 1970s. This is hardly surprising. Books are nominated and voted on by a small group of fans who are growing older and increasingly conservative in their tastes. Whatever attracted them to the genre all those years ago, that's what they look for in books being published today. The genre may have progressed, but it often seems those fans haven't. So we get shortlists filled with old-fashioned and dull sf, picked by people who think that novels which "entertain" are successful... despite failing in all other areas, despite not trying anything interesting."
• Why consumers won't buy tablets | Rafe's Radar - CNET News - Sensible points. I do think we'll see a tablet tweener device someday but the big question is when.
• Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog: Five Futuristic Interfaces on Display at SIGGRAPH - Interfaces are an important frontier of computing.

Links for 08-04-2009

• How Netflix gets your movies to your mailbox so fast -- chicagotribune.com - Interesting piece about a visit to a Netflix warehouse.
• Gawker vs. The Washington Post: Is Linking Stealing? - Tuned In - TIME.com - "The rules of how to do this kind of post are not set in stone, but in general, it's better to summarize an interesting article and refer readers to the original, or add some value to it with analysis or opinion or more information, and give explicit, clear credit."
• Worst Part of a Trip May Be Booking It on the Web - NYTimes.com - Not me. I really like being able to sit down and make my own tradeoffs rather than having someone else do it for me. I much prefer booking my own flightds than doing the back and forth with a corporate travel department as I sometimes have to.
• Op-Ed Guest Columnist - Twittergraphy - NYTimes.com - Maybe we need a codebook.
• Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch - NYTimes.com - Cooking shows up, actual cooking down.
• Photojournalism’s Coming Crisis | Newspaper Death Watch - I agree with a lot of this--up to a point. I don't think pubs can crowdsource everything but a microstock for editorial could indeed drive pricing down.
• The Media Equation - A Talk Magazine Party That Presaged the Decline - NYTimes.com - "There may never be another large magazine launch ever, and certainly not one that was accompanied by the fanfare of Talk." In retrospect, is easy to criticize blindness to Web's impact as myopic, but it's not so much that people didn't see the Web but they didn't appreciate the full economic impact that it would have on print. (Or they assumed could just over time move print to Web and keep everything else the same.)

Links for 08-03-2009

• Microsoft Word, RIP: 1983 - 2009 - Ars Technica - Jeremy's history with Word closely parallels mine. (I could never stand WordPerfect for DOS and I too used Ami Pro for a time.)
• Op-Ed Columnist - Swan Songs? - NYTimes.com - Interesting graphic that shows sales by music format over time.
• Amazon, Rackspace Are Top Cloud Hosts « Data Center Knowledge - Rackspace doing well against Amazin. Google AppEngine hasn't gotten much traction.
• The National Parks: America's Best Idea | PBS - is could be good.
• A short history of btrfs [LWN.net]
• Cogs: A Steampunk Puzzle Game from Lazy 8 Studios - Looks cool somewhat in the World of Goo vein.

Links for 07-29-2009

• World of Goo - Drew Davidson | ETC-Press (Beta) - Nice overview of World of Goo.
• The Volokh Conspiracy - 100 Best Movie Lines in 200 Seconds:
• Amazing Lunar Lander Game Using Google Earth | Google Earth Blog
• Kindle and the future of reading : The New Yorker - Although a lot of the criticisms are valid to various degrees, this seems to go out of its way to find the negative IMO. (And has lots of subtle snark like only a New Yorker writer could do it.)
• HP plans electronic whiteboarding tool | Beyond Binary - CNET News - Potentially interesting. The ability to do "napkin sketches" and the like easily is one of the things that seems really missing when you're working remotely.

Links for 07-23-2009

• 'Waterproof' Camera Group Test (Q2 2009) Review: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review - Nice set of reviews. Is it too much to ask that someone put an optical viewfinder on a waterproof camera?
• Open Source to Go!: The Real FLOSS Community and the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists" - "I've come to think of these people over the past several days as the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists"." A lot of truth in this although there are certainly community people who are very ideological as well.
• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule - Some good thinking here. As an analyst I have to be somewhat interrupt-driven and take a lot of 30 min-1 hr briefings. Sometimes it's OK, especially as I've shifted to a heavier concentration of shorter pieces that I can crank out in between 30 mins and 2 hrs. However, more in-depth research and writing takes focus. It's hard for me to totally isolate myself but I do try to reduce the interrupt frequency, especially of lower-priority interrupts (e.g. twitter).
• How The Times' Home Page Gets Made | The New York Observer - Interesting piece. Note especially the discussion about the use (or non-use) of Web stats.
• Lobster in the rough - The Boston Globe - I'd add Young's in Belfast, ME and I find Harraseeket in S. Freeport, while in a great location, a bit inconsistent on non-lobster items but overall seems a good list.
• Nina Munk on Hard Times at Harvard | vanityfair.com - Hugely damning. I don't really have a feel for how fair it is overall.

Links for 07-22-2009

• PUNKADIDDLE: Hugos 2009 - A rant about the Hugos shortlist. I don't read nearly as much SF as I used to. I think there's truth to the assertion that fandom as a whole tends to favor the predictable--just look at the endless padded series out there. OTOH, I confess to often being lukewarm on more "literary" works favored by many professional critics and writers.
• Amazon is not Big Brother - Telegraph - Amazon did a dumb thing (which they've acknowledged) but this piece has the outrage about right.

Hands-on with an HP dv2 Notebook

A few weeks ago, AMD sent me an HP dv2 notebook, the first system to use their “Yukon” mobile processor. The dv2’s basic concept can be summed up as ultraportable experience at a value price point—it starts at $700. Put another way, it aims to avoid some of the compromises associated with netbooks while getting within at least sight of netbook price points.

So how does it do? Read on. This won’t be a full review but after playing around with the system for a few weeks, I think I have a pretty good feel for its capabilities.

Let me start by saying that my overall experience is quite positive. It’s small. It’s light. The touchpad doesn’t drive me crazy like many do. (My pointer tastes are a bit idiosyncratic. I favor trackpoints on notebooks and trackballs on desktops.) And the processor has been fast enough for what I’ve thrown at it.

This last point is worth digging into a bit deeper given that it’s pretty central to the dv2’s concept. I didn’t do formal benchmark comparisons, but I did open up a CPU meter on Vista’s sidebar and cranked up multimedia applications to see if things would stutter or otherwise go unresponsive on me.

I started music playing using AMD’s Fusion Media Explorer. Then I opened Firefox to Hulu and started some video playing. To round out the experience, I fired up another browser Window and went off Web surfing sites with the usual mix of Flash and other multimedia.

All this drove the CPU pretty hard as indicated by the CPU meter but both the music and the video continued to play smoothly and the system always felt responsive. I’ve no doubt that heavy-duty image or video processing would bog down the system but it seems to have plenty of performance for the sort of Web usage and general productivity work that I tend to use an ultraportable for while out of the office.

The 12-inch screen and almost full-sized keyboard were easy enough to view and type on although my personal preference is something just slightly larger. (My other notebook is a 13-inch Lenovo ThinkPad x200; the x200 is also on the order of 50 percent more expensive than the dv2.)

One thing that may bother some people is that the dv2 doesn’t have an internal optical drive. The external USB Blu-ray drive that I received with the notebook works well, but it’s one more thing to carry and and is a bit awkward if you’re balancing everything on your lap. Personally I’m largely indifferent to whether an ultraportable has an internal optical drive or not—I generally don’t travel with one—but I know it’s a sticking point for some.

As for aesthetics, it’s black and silver and shiny. To be honest, my tastes lean more towards the muted finishes of my ThinkPad that, among other things, doesn’t attract fingerprints to nearly the same degree. But it’s hard to criticize such sleekness too much.

Bottom line? If you want a budget ultraportable that’s closer to the look, feel, and experience of full-featured notebooks than it is to even a 10-inch netbook then the dv2 looks to be a pretty good choice.

Links for 07-21-2009

• Internet Evolution - Andrew Keen - It's Time to Bust the Beta Cult - "But I’m worried about the increasing centrality of the beta product and the beta ideal in the digital economy. Beta is a creditable practice -- as long it exists in parallel with the more adult world of finished products. But when it becomes the thing-in-itself, when there are no finished products, when everything is in perpetual flux, then the Internet economy has a serious problem."
• Tech Tips - The Digital Journalist - "In the realm of compact digital cameras, there is no question that the high end of the market is looking for better image quality than current cameras provide, especially at high ISOs. But I'll bet that the eventual solution to that request is going to be larger image sensors with high resolution rather than small sensors with reduced resolution. Time will tell!"
• tweetbook.in - Get all your tweets in PDF form.
• Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Where’s Twitter’s past, and what’s it’s future? - "Blogs privilege the “now.” New stuff always goes on top. But they also create a durable record of “then” — as I have learned in spending the last couple of years digging through the back catalog of blogging. One of the great contributions of blogging software is to organize the past for anyone who writes frequently online. Before blogs, with each new addition to a website we had to think, where does this go, and how will I find it later? Blog tools, as personal content management systems, ended that era."

Links for 07-20-2009

• The Technium: Was Moore's Law Inevitable?
• Web fonts. Where are we? Will web fonts ever be a reality? | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog - A good overview of where things stand with fonts for the Web.
• Too Many Words « Slice of MIT by the Alumni Association - "When I use a blackboard, the material flows out at about the speed at which it can be absorbed. Students not only see it, they think about it. Speaking as an MIT-educated Electrical Engineer, there is a good impedance match."
• Lessons from Amazon's 1984 Moment | Freedom to Tinker - Lack of transparency, yes, but this also seems closely related to cloud computing in that you only control certain aspects of the environment.

Links for 06-04-2009

• Time says Twitter will change our lives; I Tweeted that I puked | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com - "Twitter may be doomed. Time put Twitter on the cover and dished out thousands of words of fluff about it. This Twitter love-fest is getting out of hand. Can the Time jinx be worse than the Sports Illustrated one? Why am I getting flashbacks about that Transmeta cover Red Herring did back in the day? You know the one where Transmeta was going to change everything. You’re probably asking who the hell Transmeta was? My point exactly."
• Hewlett-Packard's Move Into Software - Forbes.com - "HP's software group was a moneylosing mess when Hogan arrived at the company three years ago. "It was being run by engineers," recalls Robin Purohit, a vice president under Hogan. The group had few compelling products and no sizzle. Flamboyant sales meetings were scarce. So were outsize bonuses." Ouch.
• Five things Cassatt taught us about cloud computing | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - Some good perspective from James.
• Sexy hybrid LCD/E-paper display seen in the wild | Crave - CNET - A display technology such as this is the sort of thing I imagine being a nice fit for the tablet/ebook-on-steroids device I think could be very interesting once the technology gets there.
• Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology: Your Questions Answered - Intel® Software Network - Some technical background on Hyper-Threading.
• Why do we need "Software" client hypervisors? - Gabe Knuth - BrianMadden.com - Some of the challenges around client hypervisor adoption.
• Why Robert Scoble Is Wronger About “2010 Web”: A BoomTown Translation! | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD - "At Web 5.0, of course, a self-aware Google (GOOG) will have begun its inevitable war with the human race, sending back a cyborg to terminate you before you wrote that post, thereby making this rebuttal moot."

Mad Ave Blues

Very funny and well worth watching. It's well done technically and whoever put this together obviously knows the business. My only criticism is that this very good nine minute video could have been a truly excellent five minute one with some tightening up and fewer choruses.

Links for 06-02-2009

• PMA Interview: Olympus: Digital Photography Review - Long interview with Olympus on Four Thirds format.
• Research tools: information in depth | The Economist | Economist.com - Some of this seems a bit overly pedantic even if technically correct.

Links for 06-01-2009

• Building a music map « Music Machinery - Interesting post on graphing music similarity.
• Cassatt Data Center Dialog: Old habits die hard: the bad news on data center energy efficiency - Not much change in whether datacenter operators are willing to turn idle servers off.
• tecosystems » Amazon: Perfect is the Enemy of Good - SOG makes a great point here. There was a lot of criticism of Amzon early on e.g. because they didn't have an SLA.
• Roger Ebert's Journal: Archives - Brand dilution is a potentially dangerous step. Starbucks is another company that skates close to the line.
• Strobist: How to Photograph Water Drops with One Speedlight

Links for 05-28-2009

• Open-source software in the recession: Born free | The Economist - Good layman's overview on where open source stands today.
• Slacker Personal Radio - Listen to Free Internet Radio Stations - This looks pretty good.
• Cool Tools: Theo Gray's Mad Science - Dangerous home experiments. Whee!
• Decoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still can't be read - life - 27 May 2009 - New Scientist
• Flashonomics: Buying Flash Memory - James Duncan Davidson - James Duncan Davidson - Good writeup on buying flash memory. Would love to see actual data though as opposed to a somewhat circular argument about buying name brands. (Though that's basically what I do as well.)
• Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling - The Big Picture - Boston.com - This is hilarious.
• Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Farmers Didn't Invent Tractors. They Were Busy Farming. - "But a lot of innovation doesn't come from the people who know the industry the best. That's because the closer you are to how something works now, the harder it is to imagine a new and better way of doing things."

Links for 05-27-2009

• VC perspective: Can enterprise software companies do SaaS? | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.com - "To some degree, economics and culture militate against large, established enterprise software players transitioning smoothly to SaaS delivery. However, in the end, I believe investment capability is the factor that trumps all others."
• eBay Dying Because It’s No Longer Fun? Hogwash! « SmoothSpan Blog - This strikes me as an informed analysis of eBay's problems. They comport pretty closely with some of my feelings as an eBay user.
• With Virtual Iron, Oracle Bought a Big Loss - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - "The documents indicate that Virtual Iron had just $3.4 million in revenue last year. That’s a big rise over $1.5 million in 2007. But Virtual Iron sure spent a lot of money to get that revenue. Its sales, marketing, research, development and administrative costs were $17.7 million last year, up from $13.6 million in 2007. So, in 2008, Virtual Iron posted a loss of $15.3 million."
• 10 Swear Words or Curse Words You Don’t Know | HaveMacWillBlog (aka Robin Bloor’s Blog)
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The 2009 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium - Thoughtful discussion on cloud computing.
• ongoing · The Web vs. the Fallacies - Read this.
• Seesmic Adds Facebook Comments, Now I’m Looking For A Raft (Or A Boat) - I agree. No home runs yet on really managing feeds effectively.
• Barack Obama's biggest critic: Charles Krauthammer - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com - Don't agree on a number of points but worth reading.
• PIP - Online Classifieds.pdf (application/pdf Object) - Pew Report on classifieds.
• Advertising Expenditures - Newspaper Association of America: Advancing Newspaper Media for the 21st Century - If I get a chance, I'd like to do a bit deeper analysis of this data.
• Intel drags feet on Itanium quad-core (again) • The Register - A good rundown on the Tukwila slippage situation. I'm less negative than Timothy on IBM's high-end Power situation but otherwise a pretty accurate if snarky analysis.
• Fault Tolerance (Re)Discovered - News - eWeekEurope.co.uk - Discussion (from Stratus POV) of hardware-based FT vs. software-based.
• I.B.M. Unveils Software to Find Trends in Vast Data Sets - NYTimes.com
• Freeform Comment: A(nother) Take on Cloud: ‘Nothing to Worry About’ - "None of this really matters if all you care about is the outcome you want to achieve from a third party service provider. For practical purposes today it might be easier to consider ‘The Cloud’ as simply a consolidation term, an umbrella term under which all the different types of third party service providers that existed in more narrowly defined boxes in the past now live."
• Counting Down to the End of Moore’s Law - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - "“We’re looking at a brick wall five years down the road,” Eli Harari, the chief executive of SanDisk, said to me earlier this week." We've heard this before of course. And it's not clear that our demand for denser/cheaper flash is going to necessarily have the same imperative going forward. But Moore's Law drives so much in IT that these trends are worth pondering.
• James Governor’s Monkchips » Cloud Computing: On Structural Advantages and Lessons From History #EMCWorld - Generally agree with James here. AT&T is probably the best counter-example but even that is week.
• Forrester's five phases of open-source success | The Open Road - CNET News - Somewhat amusing but pretty accurate in my experience.

Links for 05-21-2009

• Sharing Where You Are When You Care to Share | Nick Wingfield | Personal Technology | AllThingsD - All the new geo-related stuff coming online could get me really paranoid if I wanted to. We're heading into an era where there's the potential for much closer linkages between our online identity and our physical presence.
• Blogola: The FTC Takes On Paid Posts - BusinessWeek - The beginning section of the article seems to grossly overstate what is actually being talked about. The scenario discussed is standard practice for all sorts of reviews from well before blogging even began--and often without the disclosure that was made in this case (e.g. a good proportion of the book and album reviews ever written). [Apparently, if you read the comments, the problem is that the writer seriously misrepresented the situation here. To his credit, it's now been corrected but it's now a pretty lousy example to lead off the story.]
• Gawker's Nick Denton: 'Original Reporting Will Be Rewarded' - Advertising Age - Digital - "Remember the dream of micropublishing? A few years ago, we still believed that costs were so low and online advertising so magical that the most arcane of subject matters could attract a viable audience. That dream is dead. We'll spend our time and money on sites such as Gizmodo, Kotaku and Gawker -- where we already have the scale or soon will. " This was much what happened with cable TV as well. I'm less comfortable--though I'm not sure he's wrong--with the implication in this interview that it's not clear that "serious" news has a profitable audience.
• Wild IIlusions: The economics of the $9.99 ebook - There's not much here that I agree with. For example, it's not clear to me how disaggregating functions necessarily makes the cost go down at the same level of overall quality. Sure, you can cut out design, editing, and so forth or spend less time/money on them but you don't get something for nothing.
• Op-Ed Columnist - In Praise of Dullness - NYTimes.com - "What mattered, it turned out, were execution and organizational skills. The traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness and the ability to work long hours."
• MySQL forking heats up, but not yet to the benefit of non-GPLed storage engine vendors | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services - The interaction between MySQL and storage engines would appear to be one of those corner cases where reasonable people can disagree as to whether GPL MySql required GPL storage engine.
• How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com - I also wonder book length will be affected. The author of this article doesn't discuss this aspect, but shorter books seems a very possible outcome of a lot of the dynamics he mentions.
• BookFinder.com Journal: Breakdown of book costs - This is interesting. Note how relatively small the slice that's eliminated in an ebook is--under 20 percent in this example (I assume the Wholesaler costs are eliminated as well as the printing).

Links for 05-14-2009

• Sizing Up "Code" with 20/20 Hindsight | Freedom to Tinker - "It seems to me that the Internet is rather less malleable than Lessig imagined a decade ago. We would have gotten more or less the Internet we got regardless of what Congress or the FCC did over the last decade. And therefore, Lessig's urgent call to action—his argument that we must act in 1999 to ensure that we have the kind of Internet we want in 2009—was misguided. In general, it works pretty well to wait until new technologies emerge and then debate whether to regulate them after the fact, rather than trying to regulate preemptively to shape the kinds of technologies that are developed."
• Spirits of The Times - Absinthe Is Back, but Is It Good? - Review - NYTimes.com - Review of 20 absinthes.
• TC-Oh No « GartenBlog - "As an analyst, I am often asked what platform has the lowest TCO. My answer is always the same, “a yellow pad and a pencil.” "
• Oracle VM Blog: Basics of Oracle VM (Oracle's Virtualization Blog) - Some technical details on Oracle VM.

Links for 05-12-2009

• Why Sync Is So Difficult - When you sell a sync product, you sell magic... But once it’s implemented, there’s no magic anymore, and the engineer is left to deal with asynchrony, slow bandwidth, third-party applications, and file systems that have different semantics.
• Survey: Consumers prefer DVDs to downloads | Digital Media - CNET News - But a lot of people still prefer the physical stuff.
• Why Physical Media Is Archaic « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing - I see anecdotal examples here and there that more people are willing to rent and/or own digital-only than in the past.
• Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives | Printer-friendly version - I do like B&H (and Adorama) but I'm not sure to what degree you can apply lessons from cream-of-the-crop NY photo store to national electronics retailer. I also tend to think that people who aren't schooled in the, um, social graces of New York City might not find B&H etc. to be such an appealing environment.
• Technology Review: Blogs: Jason Pontin's blog: How to Save Media - "The comparative advantage of mainstream media is not the ownership of presses, but the collaboration of professionals. The creation of good journalism is a tremendously laborious process, requiring an infrastructure more expensive than any press."
• Gawker - David Simon: Dead-Wrong Dinosaur - David Simon - No newspapers often don't do a great job and bloggers/etc. do cover local nitty-gritty news that they're interested in. But I see precious little evidence that ad hoc coverage is anything but very spotty.
• Forget Kindle DX. How about the ZuneBook? | Tech Broiler | ZDNet.com - A full-blown OS and LCD display present certain issues. But if there's a "tweener" device (between smartphone and ultraportable notebook) that might find a real ecological niche, it could well be a tablet of some sort.
• Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Fifteen years of epochal pronouncements - I'm still trying to figure out where in the middle I sit on all this.

Links for 04-27-2009

• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Cloud - the Emergence of a New Model of Computing - "We should view computing models much more like forests than trees. These computing model forests have a variety of different trees, and the transition between them is gradual, not abrupt. With the passage of time, as you walk around them you begin to see new trees, but the old ones are still around. But one day you realize that the forest you are now walking through is markedely different from the one you were in twenty years ago. It is therefore now time to give this forest a new name, while you keep on walking and looking for new trees."
• Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » The Economic Case Against the GPL - I'm not sure I agree with all the details of the argument but the basic point makes sense to me--if open source fundamentally works, then copyleft isn't generally needed.
• Wolfram Blog : Droste Effect with Mathematica - This looks fun.
• Coding Horror: Has The Virtualization Future Arrived? - I'm guessing that this is something they're doing with the tech they acquired from Kidaro.
• Make: Online : Retro Photos in the Library of Congress - Color photos fropm a period normally seen in B&W.
• Heavy Boots - Amazing. Just amazing.
• newsmap - Interesting news visualization
• The Medium - Comment Is King - NYTimes.com - Especially (although certainly not exclusively) in the political sphere, comments have an almost ridiculously bad S/N ratio.
• Journalists: Where do you add value? « BuzzMachine - "Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore."
• Are record shops worth saving? (Part 1) | MP3 Insider - CNET Reviews - "For the devoted, stepping into a great music store is like stepping into a temple. For these people, downloading music is like worshiping at an online church--there's no ritual to it, no pageantry, no reason to dress up. In light of the inherently private experience of actually listening to music, there's something balancing about discovering and purchasing new music in a comfortable public space that reaffirms your identity as a music lover. " Most of all it's the mostly-used places like Amoeba that I'll miss.
• Reporter's notes: Cloud Computing conference | Webware - CNET - Writeup on Under the Radar: Cloud Computing event.

Links for 04-24-2009

• For many companies, client power management not yet a priority | GreenTech Pastures | ZDNet.com - "Forrester Researcher has released some new data from a first quarter survey of IT professionals about power management policies, and the big aha is that only about 15 percent of them have adopted any kind of strategy that addresses energy waste for their client desktops or notebooks."
• The Great Netflix-"Crash" Mystery - The Screengrab - " to make any broad assumptions about how many people have "seen" Crash based on how many people have rented Crash might be kind of a broad leap. Lots of people who had been barely cognizant of the movie's existence prior to the 2006 Academy Awards ceremony probably automatically stuck it in their queues as soon as it won the Oscar. And a lot of other people probably did the same thing at some point, not because they could barely contain their excitement at the prospect of having Thandie Newton and Don Cheadle demonstrate to them the folly of racism, but because they picked up some vague signs in the atmosphere that this was a worthy movie that they should see. It may be that one of the major advances in the culture for which Netflix can take a bow is that, rather than actually going to see such films, people can now stick them on their rental queues, and then, when the discs arrive, procrastinate for weeks and even months before returning them unseen."
• Whatever Happened to the Top 15 Web Properties of April, 1999? | Technologizer - Good recap of how the top Web sites have shifted position.
• When GeoCities Grabbed the Web’s Golden Ticket–A Trip Down Silicon-Valley-Has-No-Memory Lane | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD - "GeoCities was, in its way, the Facebook of its time. But, instead of “friends,” its users were “homesteaders,” since the Web then was a place to be pioneered and settled. As Cher so eloquently sings: Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end."
• Why Time and Newsweek Will Never Be The Economist: Matt Pressman | Vanity Fair - "The Economist is like that exotic coffee that comes from beans that have been eaten and shat out undigested by an Indonesian civet cat, and Time and Newsweek are like Starbucks—millions of people enjoy them, but it’s not a point of pride."
• Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits - Sounds about right to me wrt the InDenver Times (attempted online newspaper).

Links for 04-23-2009

• Game Developers and Porn Stars | Kill Ten Rats - Funny but probably sadly true.
• So Why Not 29? | American Journalism Review - Theories about why -30- was typed at the end of news stories.
• Why is Matrix important? Innovation, integration and execution - Eye on Blades Blog: Trends in Infrastructure - HP blades blog and why HP is excited about Matrix.
• The Good and Bad Kinds of Crowds : Andrew McAfee’s Blog - McAfee's approach here is in the same vein to how I do my Oscar ballot every year. I mostly go with the consensus view of various Internet sites that roll up all the predictions out there--and then I look for one or two plausible upsets.
• The True Cost of Amazon's New Kindle - BusinessWeek - The e-ink display is the most costly component. But the wireless module is also about 20% of the total cost.

How and Why I Use Twitter

I confess that I am more than a little tired of Twitter meme in the mainstream media (aka MSM) and elsewhere at the moment. And I try my best to resist the siren call of making-my-opinion-known under such circumstances.

However, the MSM buzz has a variety of non-techie friends asking me about Twitter and why I find it useful. So here goes. This is not a generic "Why Twitter is God" but, rather, what I find particularly useful about it in my specific circumstances.

Thus, before getting into Twitter, what are those circumstances?

In a nutshell, I'm an IT industry analyst. This means that I write about and provide advice to companies that produce and consume enterprise technology such as servers, virtualization, cloud computing and so forth. Typical daily activities include researching the space, writing, doing advisory engagements, and attending conferences and the like. When I'm not traveling, I mostly work from home although my fairly small company does have an office about 45 minutes away.

With that as context, here's how I use Twitter:

• I use it mostly, although not exclusively, for professionally-related matters--or at least topics connected to technology in some way.
• I use it to monitor breaking news, links, opinion, and so forth in my professional areas of coverage.
• Given that I'm often working by myself at home, it offers me a sort of "virtual watercooler" with professional colleagues and others. It thus offers some of the casual interchange that one gets in an office.
• It helps me to maintain an ongoing relationship with and visibility to a variety of my clients.
  
• I can promote links to pieces that I have written or that I otherwise would like to gain broader attention.
  
• It offers a forum to do casual research.
• I am reasonably selective about who I follow. I like to keep my feed to a manageable volume on a typical in-office day although I don't hesitate to turn things off if I need to go heads down. I eagerly await applications that do a better job of managing groups and otherwise help me to prioritize reading (as I do with RSS).
• Of course, there's an element of fun as well and being exposed to serendipitous stuff that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with tech.
  

PSD hatred

(For those not familiar, PSD is the file format used by Adobe's Photoshop image editing program.)

The following rant (in a source code comment block) tells of one programmer's frustration:

At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.

If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included. Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD, of course, uses all three, and more.

Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.

Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun.

PSD is not my favourite file format.

[via @Photocritic]

Twittering as Distraction

From Andrew McAfee's The Good and Bad Kind of Crowds:

So I told them that class on the 20th would be an exception to HBS’s standard ’screens down’ policy (i.e. no use of digital devices during class), and that they could tweet using whatever device they preferred.

I’ll ask my students what they thought about the experience, but I thought it was miserable. Class discussion limped along at well below its normal levels of engagement, interest, and insight. I thought it was due to my bad class plan, a comparatively weak case, and/or the fact that the 20th was the last day before spring break.

Any or all of these could have been part of the explanation, but I’m quite sure that another part was the tweeting that went on. When I reviewed students’ tweets after class, I found that a lot of them remarked on how difficult it was to pay attention to what was going on in the room and on their screens. And it was very clear that the screens won.

Speaking to an audience that’s tweeting away is now a fact of life at most technology conferences (as clearly evidenced by this year’s South by Southwest). Laura says she likes it, and I’m eager to learn from her why this is and how I can turn live tweeting to my advantage when speaking. So far it feels to me like trying to talk to people who all have TVs in front of them. I realize that live tweeting might be beneficial to some constituencies (like the tweeters’ followers), but it feels to me like a pure negative for speakers. We’re now competing for attention with a very compelling interactive activity.

There's some good commentary in the comments section about some of the advantages and disadvantages to the speaker and audience of twittering. There's probably a distinction worth making between conference presentations and interactive discussions.

In the case of a typical presentation at a conference, I definitely get value out of the backchannel as a way to get the reaction of others in real-time. I find it often engages me more than merely being a passive observer.

And, if the speaker is really engaging with and connecting to me directly, I can just ignore the chatter. Of course, if the presentation is simply uninteresting, I can go off on the Web and do other things or simply snark on twitter.

On the other hand, in a participatory interactive discussion, I think it can indeed be a distraction--although to the degree I'm just using it to essentially record interesting snippets, it's really no different than taking notes. But, in general, if some number of a group is twittering or doing whatever on their laptops, it's pretty commonsensical that they're going to be distracted.

(I didn't know about HBS' 'screens down' policy though. Man, I can barely take usable notes by hand any longer.)

Links for 04-22-2009

• The Free Music Archive « Music Machinery - "Yes, there are tons of sites on the web that offer new music for free, but the FMA is different. The music on the FMA is curated by music experts (radio programmers, webcasters, venues, labels, collectives and so on) - so that instead of a slush pile dominated by bad music typical of other free music sites, the music at the FMA is really good (or at least one human expert thinks it is good). "
• Thoughts From a Software IT Analyst: Sun Microsystems: In Memoriam - Nice piece on Sun's history from Wayne Kernochan.
• Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Mark Penn’s fuzzy pro-blogging stats - More on the 453K using blogging as primary source of income.
• The Volokh Conspiracy - How Many Bloggers Use Blogging As Their Primary Source of Income?: - Seems like a pretty good deconstruction of the WSJ's "452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income." Orin kerr notes: "All we know is that Technorati received 1,290 responses from bloggers who responded to its query. Of the ones who responded from around the world, 2% — about 25 people — said that they relied on blogging as their primary source of income."
• tecosystems » The Oracle Predicts a Setting Sun - Agree with this very thorough analysis (as much as any analysis can be truly thorough given the information available) much more than not.
• Marginal Revolution: Why is Heinz Ketchup still so popular in Pittsburgh? - "Across 49 current leading national CPG brands, dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, we find that the current share in markets close to the city of origin, is, on average, 12 share (i.e., percentage) points higher than the national average of 22 percent."
• Novell, Inc. F1Q09 (Qtr End 01/31/09) Earnings Call Transcript -- Seeking Alpha - Interesting (because pretty baldly stated) about how Novell now sees Linux' role at company.
• Sun and Oracle: End of a beautiful dream • The Register - I'm less pessimistic overall but there are a lot of good points here.
• YouTube - Hitler's Angst EMC - This is a good one on this theme.
• Outside Innovation: Sun Cloud & Oracle Cloud to Combine - "There one main incompatibility that I see between the Sun and Oracle cultures and brand. It's not so much a hardware culture vs. a software culture. It's a predatory sales culture vs. a respectful sales culture."
• MassBike Bikeways and Trails - Seemingly about the most complete resource for bike trails in Massachusetts.
• Twitter Gets the Oprah Treatment - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - From the comments. Hee. "Must we continually be subjected to this woman’s whims? I still fail to see why she has been made the arbiter of Midwestern hausfrau culture"
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Hashmobs - "A hashmob is a purely avatarian mob, though it is every bit as prone to the rapid cultivation of mass hysteria as a nonavatarian mob."
• Can Creativity Be Crowdsourced? - Advertising Age - DigitalNext - My observation with crowdsourced logos and the like is that it's generally a pretty terrible deal for the creators (modulo possibly being a learning experience for designers starting out). Lots of people submit on spec and even the winner doesn't get paid much.
• FBI seizures highlight law as cloud impediment | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - Fully agree.