Links for 05-27-2008

• James Governor’s Monkchips » On blogging, AR, Adobe Getting It, David Mendels and “Rich Internet Apps: How We Live Now” - Interesting things happening in the way applications are evolving. Existing taxonomies may not be especially interesting or enlightening--which is one of the reasons that we use taxonomies.
• Economist.com-Down on the server farm - Discussion of the siting of Internet datacenters.
• Sometimes Crowds Aren't That Wise - ReadWriteWeb - "Last year, we laid out a set of rules to get the most out of a crowd. It might be a good idea to revisit those here:"
• tecosystems » The Social Networking Implications of Social Networking Tools - I agree with pretty much everything here. At the end of the day you have to filter how much "stuff" flows by you. I have a few thoughts here I need to post on.
• Cover Story - Emily Gould - Exposed - Blog-Post Confidential - Gawker - NYTimes.com - "What I gained — and lost — by writing about my intimate life online."
• The URL Is Dead, Long Live Search - ReadWriteWeb - This is certainly true for me. "These are called "navigational" searches -- searches done when the user already knows exactly where he or she wants to end up -- and they make up a surprising large number of total sea[r]ches."

Links for 05-22-2008

• In the next evolution of the web public interaction will be less important « Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior - Not sure I agree, but interesting post.
• See « Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats - I Can Has Cheezburger? - Good one.
• Macs account for two-thirds of sales of PCs costing $1,000 or more | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com - Data shows that Macs are 66% of >$1K PCs (and 14% overall). Wow. Part of this I think is that Apple has ended up capturing a slice of the market that people once thought would go to Linux. (Although as stshank notes this is retail--which skews the data somewhat esp. wrt Dell.)
• shimenawa - On owning books - And my biggest problem with the Kindle. [via William Patry]
• The Patry Copyright Blog: First Sale Victory in Vernor - U.S. District Court in Seattle "first sale doctrine" decision goes against Autodesk. This judgment basically held that it's OK to resell used software.
• Computer Programs Decide Humans' Fates, Set Social Policy, Panelists Say | Threat Level from Wired.com - Rather thought provoking post wrt Google. As "reading" mail to display ads becomes more sophisticated when does it become something akin to understanding with all sorts of implications?
• Official Google Blog: Introduction to Google Search Quality - Got to love this line: "For something that is used so often by so many people, surprisingly little is known about ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design."
• The Dvorak Keyboard Controversy: Interesting Thing of the Day - "The QWERTY keyboard layout is weird and hard to learn. A competitor, the Dvorak layout, may be superior, but arguments on both sides are so full of hype and bias that it's hard to determine who to believe."
• tecosystems » When is Open Open? And When is Open Closed? - Good discussion of this topic--including in the comments.
• Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World - Fascinating article.
• TuneGlue° | Relationship Explorer - A very cool looking music relationship explorer. [via VSL]

A PR Rant

It seems that, if possible, I'm getting more and more PR mail that, if not quite spam, certainly is starting to get in the neighborhood. I'm speaking of the press releases and PR missives that concern trivial announcements or events associated with trivial companies that are typically not even associated with anything I cover.

Let me give you a case in point. I'm not naming names because this is, unfortunately, but one random example among countless and I have no interest in embarrassing any specific individuals. (With the aid of Google, you can probably figure out the guilty party but I'm not going to.)

So let's start with the subject line.

ACME Recognized for Application Acceleration Innovation

Seeing that this is going to be about some sort of "recognition" or award has already started started my finger rapidly moving towards the delete key. Other leading candidates include CEO speeches, sales office openings, new Board of Directors members, random conferences, and new white papers on the company Web site.

I wanted to provide you with an update on ACME, a leading provider of solutions that accelerate dynamic web applications. Over the last week ACME has been recognized by three leading organizations for its innovations in the application acceleration space.

I don't especially care about accelerating dynamic web applications and I'm not sure what I've written or what it says in my bio that would make you think I do. But, then, it's hard to vet your list that carefully when this is doubtless going to thousands of your closest friends.

Most significantly, ACME received the Red Herring 100 Award given to the 100 most innovative private technology companies in North America by Red Herring magazine. Red Herring's annual list of top companies has traditionally identified new and innovative technologies and the companies responsible for them.

And this is the most significant? You see "magazine" isn't quite the operative word here because, well, there is no Red Herring magazine any longer. That went down last year. (In all fairness, because I am nothing if not fair, there is still an online edition but it's hardly the touchstone of high-tech journalism that it once was.)

In addition, ACME's BIT SCRAMBLER was named a finalist for the Best of TechEd 2008 IT Professional Award. The Best of Tech-Ed 2008 Awards recognize companies who offer innovative products in the industry. Winners will be selected by Window IT Pro and SQL Server magazines and announced at TechEd in June.

More magazine awards. Nothing personal, but I find most of these pretty bogus. I've even been involved in judging a few "Best of the Year" type things and I've found it all horribly arbitrary once you get away from products that have actually been hands-on comparison-tested. Oh, and I see they're just a finalist--which for all I know means they just entered themselves for the award.

Finally, the British Colombia [sic] Technology Industry Association (BCTIA) selected ACME as a finalist for the Most Promising Start-Up and Excellence in Product Innovation categories in its annual Technology Impact Awards, the premier awards program devoted to promoting and celebrating innovation and high-tech excellence in the province of British Columbia, Canada. Winners will be announced at the BCTIA's awards gala in June.

British Columbia is a very nice place. Vancouver, Victoria, Whistler--great destinations all. But with all due respect to my friends from British Columbia, now we're really starting to stretch. I'm sure the BCTIA awards gala is an affair not to be missed and all that, but--how do I put this nicely--did ACME really have to survive insurmountable odds to become, again, a finalist for this particular award?

I feel better now.

(Again. I have no desire to pile on this particular company. They're probably nice people, are kind to dogs, and may even make an interesting product. But this kind of email does not raise my estimation of them.)

[Update: And BTW. Unless our allies across the sea have invaded a certain South American country, I believe that the proper spelling for BC is "Columbia."]

Too much information is as bad as too little

There's a great point in this comment:

Not surprisingly, people develop strong filters for what information they're going to take in, let alone process. When you say oh it does no harm to provide people with more information, you're totally missing this. It certainly may do them harm, because, as a rule, all of our information bandwidth is presently occupied -- very few of us are standing around, in line at fast-food joints or not, wondering how we can find something to read or think about because our brain is just bored, bored, bored.

I ran into a situation just this weekend. My power went out Sunday morning. I have various outdoor cookery thingies out in the garage but that's sort of a pain. How about firing up my propane-powered stove? What could be the issue?  But the manual has this scary warning about NOT operating the stovetop.

I know the electrical spark thingies won't work but I'm OK with that. And the on/off lighting indicators won't work. OK as well.

And as far as I can determine those were the only reasons the stern warning was in the manual. Which decreases respect and observance for any other warnings that have a serious basis. Of course, many of the other warnings involve admonitions about warming up your gasoline on the stovetop and the like. Not that these aren't things to guard against but the conflating of the basic common sense with the the non-obvious but important doesn't do anyone a favor.

Links for 05-20-2008

• Oracle Confirms $285M Utah Data Center - Data Center Knowledge - Although this datacenter is for several purposes, this article highlights Oracle's On Demand business. It's logical/inevitable that large ISVs are getting into SaaS one way or another.
• How to Make Facebook Useful Again - ReadWriteWeb - "For true Facebook'ers, though, real email is for business only. Using Facebook (and MySpace) is how you talk to your friends. (The frightening implications of what this means to an I.T. department that is charged with email archiving for compliance purposes and yet doesn't block Facebook.com is a subject for another article!)" A lot of good thoughts in this post.
• 10 things you can do when Windows XP won’t boot | 10 Things | TechRepublic.com - A nice list--even if, in my experience, you spend a lot of time fiddling with this sort of thing and then you have to end up rebuilding the system from scratch anyway.
• Megan McArdle (May 19, 2008) - Nature, nurture, or what? - A lot of interesting discussion in the comments. I found myself going a lot "He's right" and, then. a minute later "No, he's right."
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Cloud may squeeze margins, says Microsoft exec - "In five years, 50 percent of our Exchange mailboxes will be Exchange Online," said [Microsoft SVP] Capossela, who expects a portion of Exchange Online customers to come from customers switching from International Business Machines' Lotus Domino system."
• Distractions: Why Solitaire is Still Addictive - To be honest, I find the "mindless" computer games less interesting than I did before there was so much stuff on the Web I could waste time with :-)
• The Volokh Conspiracy - Dartmouth VRWC Yadda Yadda: - Todd Zywicki, who was elected as a petition trustee, on various matters related to the current fight over Dartmouth Board of Trustees representation.

New pics from Nevada

Earlier this month, I had a few days off between events in Las Vegas and San Francisco so I decided to rent a car and spend the time exploring some ghost town and semi-ghost towns in Nevada--as well as Great Basin National Park (the former Lehman Caves National Monument). My Nevada photos (99% from this trip) are in this Flickr set. (Photo on the left is from Pioche.)

Links for 05-19-2008

• Amazon Web Services Blog: Lots of Bits - Amazon Web Services now consume more bandwidth than Amazon.com retail sites.
• Marginal Revolution: The Uncanny Valley - "It was well known that as depictions of humans became more lifelike, audiences would perceive them as more appealing -- until the realism reached a certain point, close to human but not quite, when suddenly the depictions would be perceived as repulsive. "
• ivan krstić · code culture » Sic Transit Gloria Laptopio - Not a disinterested observer but an in-depth look at what is increasingly looking like the OLPC debacle.
• Five Reasons -- Wait, Six! -- to Start Considering WiMax Today - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership - So I guess the betting money is that wimax may actually happen one of these days.

Links for 05-16-2008

• Smithereens: It's like your mother always said, if you play your music too loud in those earphones, you'll get killed by fallen aircraft... wait, was that it? - "Now I certainly agree that it is just common sense to make sure you can hear when you are going to be near moving vehicles, but let's be serious here, this kid was not hit by a city bus, it was a lightweight aircraft, keyword being air, where it ought to have stayed."
• Coding Horror: Where Are All the Open Source Billionaires? - This is from last year but I've been thinking about some of these issues again. WRT some of the comments, while it's certainly true that open source is not a business plan, it does effectively constrain associated business plans in some important ways.

Links for 05-15-2008

• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Gilligan's web - "Despite the party-pooperism of the Deletionists, the true glory of Wikipedia continues to lie in the obscure, the arcane, and the ephemeral. Nowhere else will you find such painstakingly detailed descriptions of TV shows, video games, cartoons, obsolete software languages, Canadian train stations, and the workings of machines that exist only in science fiction. "
• Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web - ReadWriteWeb
• Watching a new word spread through the blogosphere - Duke Listens! - This is, in a sense, the dark side of online advertising. A HUGE number of people scrape content in the hope (I'd guess largely futile) of making a quick buck.
• Coast Guide Online - Massachusetts Coast Guide to Boston & the North Shore provides maps and descriptions of not only the spectacular beaches found on major road maps, but smaller, little-known coastal treasures too.
• Google vs. Microsoft may not be zero sum, but... | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs - "I suspect that OpenOffice wasn't disruptive enough. It's not purely a question of license cost: It's also a question of training and deployment costs." Bingo. Cloud computing deployments costs aren't zero either, but they're lower.
• Wi-Fi Networking News: EarthLink Will Shutter Philadelphia Network, Company Says - And the telcos wanted to FIGHT muni wi-fi?
• Cleaning Camera Sensors - Good overview of cleaning DSLR sensors by Jeff Greene.
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: HP rolls up EDS - Although Nick Carr (of all people) disagrees. "In a conference call this morning, he [Hurd] highlighted "a leaner cost structure" as one of the major benefits of the merger. "There's a tremendous leverage you get from scale," he said. With this buy, Hurd doesn't have his head in the clouds. His concerns are altogether earthly."
• HP-EDS: It’s About The Clouds, Baby! - GigaOM - This echoes some of my thoughts about the deal. Whether people buy computers or computing, HP wants a seat at the table.
• 60 Photography Links You Can’t Live Without at CameraPorn - Some I know, a few I don't care for, but some good stuff here to check out.

Links for 05-13-2008

• HP’s bid for EDS: Opportunity costs loom | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com - Overall, I'm probably a bit more positive (mostly because of Mark Hurd) but I basically agree with Larry's analysis.
• When Crowdsourcing Fails: Cambrian House Headed to the Deadpool - From the comments: "A key assumption for us, which proved out NOT true: given a great idea with great community support and great market test data, we would be able to find (crowdsource) a team willing to execute it OR we could execute it ourselves. We needed amazing founding teams for each of the ideas – this is where our model fell short." i.e. execution trumps ideas.
• Why Yelp Works - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - Egoboo apparently survives as part of a viable business model given the right conditions.
• The Canon FD Documentation Project - Main Menu - Very comprehensive archive of Canon FD manuals.
• Are Americans Afraid of the Outdoors?: Scientific American - Although the data is intriguing, drawing a correlation with video games is very bad statistics.
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Why Dell will not bounce back - This is really funny--with just enough truth to be really brilliant.
• Megan McArdle - "The Brijit concept is similar: take people who have time but no money, and marry them to people who have money but no time. Or rather, pay the people who have a lot of time on their hands to read stuff, and then tell the people who have money but no time what they really need to look at, and what they can safely skip."
• Tiki: Interesting Thing of the Day - "in keeping with the modern “retro is good” meme, Tiki is experiencing a renaissance. I couldn’t be happier. I missed the Tiki fad the first time around, and of all the imaginary cultures I’ve experienced, Tiki is among my favorites. "

Links for 05-07-2007

• Annals of Innovation: In the Air: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - Malcolm Gladwell on innovation and invention.


• Black Star Rising - Stock Photographers Keep Playing the Hits - "Like popular songs manufactured from a formula, stock photo "hits" aren't necessarily the photos you'd choose as the best representatives of your heart or talent -- but they sure can pull in dollars for you while you are laboring to survive in the stock photo industry."


• Fairness, idealism and other atrocities - Los Angeles Times - "Commencement advice you're unlikely to hear elsewhere." from P.J. O'Rourke [via Marginal Revolution]


• 25 WYSIWYG Editors Reviewed | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine - When it comes to coding editors, it's damn hard a get clear overview of all the benefits and functionalities different editors have offer. However, in end everybody needs one, so important know which editor is


• A How-to Guide to How-to Videos | Katherine Boehret | The Mossberg Solution | AllThingsD - "It's not always easy to learn from the information you find online, and how-to videos can be a big help -- especially when they're well-made and discoverable using sites featuring instructional clips."


• It's official: The future of Sun/MySQL is open...and closed | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs - I agree with Matt. Sun has clarified--if in a somewhat offhand way--what its "hybrid" software strategy going forward is. There have been consistently uttered codewords.


• Megan McArdle (May 06, 2008) - What's wrong with chain restaurants? - I try to avoid most chain restaurants but I guess I agree with this more than not.


• Happy spamiversary! Spam reaches 30 - tech - 25 April 2008 - New Scientist Tech - A bulk advertising message sent on the precursor to the internet 30 years ago spawned a phenomenon that now accounts for 90% of all email


• Delta Rolls Out Fancy Seats for Plebeians | Popular Science - Looks interesting.


• Trendpedia (beta) - Social media monitoring, buzz tracking, brand measurement and blog trend search - I'm not sure how much stock to put in these trends tools but I've used them to backup some intuitive impressions about "buzz" levels.


• Reason Magazine - Huzza for Commerce! - "Hotels, then and now, are a material manifestation of a world that prizes free mobility and peaceful exchange."


• OGC unveils new logo to red faces - Telegraph - Very funny.


• There is No Web 3.0, There is No Web 2.0 - There is Just the Web - ReadWriteWeb - I pretty much agree, if only because "web 3.0" seems to encompass a variety of at least somewhat orthogonal things.


• Sun chum Oracle pushes database buyers to IBM | The Register - Per-core pricing and power factors are such a fricking mess. I had to deal with this sort of customized pricing for each new system generation back in the bad old days.


• Linux 2 6 25 - Linux Kernel Newbies - Summary of the changes and new features merged in the Linux Kernel during the 2.6.25 development.

Links for 04-25-2007

• View from the Wing » Blog Archive » Air Traffic Delays Are Awful, Everything Else is Worse - "So in the end we’re left with piecemeal tinkering, and a recognition that in a politically constrained world we have tradeoffs — and the current world is better than the one of thirty years ago."
• EconLog, Loose Mortgage Credit, Arnold Kling: Library of Economics and Liberty - "Keep this in mind when people say that better regulation could have prevented this problem. It sounds like what they are talking is that lenders charged exorbitant interest rates to hapless borrowers. In fact, lenders were guilty of charging borrowers too little for loans, as well as approving too many unqualified borrowers. If you think that alert regulators would have cracked down on lenders for providing too many home ownership opportunities to Americans, especially minorities, then you believe in a different political environment than what I remember."
• Tilt Shift Photography Comes to Advertising - Shoot The Blog - I love how these look like miniatures-- I guess because we associate that sort of out-of-focusness with pictures of small things.
• Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll: The myth, science and craft of music discovery - "The dynamics of discovery include a whole ecology of social recommendations, automated recommender systems, happenstance and serendipity — and the interactions between all of these influences."
• Man discovers his net wasn't neutered | The Register - "So why wasn't accidental downtime the first suspect? That's the first sign that the mob is in charge. The most rational explanation becomes the least obvious. Occam's Razor has been put away and forgotten."
• Ten things to know about Microsoft’s Live Mesh | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com - Nice overview of Microsoft's Live Mesh.
• How Is New York Like a Japanese Farm Stand? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog - I confess that I'm shocked the number is so high.

Links for 04-23-2008

• Exodus of key figures from OLPC a troubling sign for project - "Although OLPC may be close to going on life support, it's important to note that its efforts so far have have contributed much to budget computing and open technology. The organization's vision largely influenced the emergence of competition in the budget subnotebook market." Sounds about right.
• The Constant Siege - I spent a lot of time in B&W darkrooms once upon a time even though I was never anything like this obsessive.
• HipMojo.com » eBay and Craigslist - Why Companies Who Invest Ask for Control" - '“Put the bong down, the honeymoon is over' is the only message I can walk away from this news that eBay is suing Craig Newmark." (of craigslist)
• implemented » Web 3.0 - The Semantic, Implicit, Mobile or Distributed Web? - A comprehensive study of the various definitions of Web 3.0 that people have used in the past, including the Semantic, Mobile, Implicit and the proposed Distributed Web.
• Google's festering problem with the AGPL | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs - Not especially surprising that Google doesn't want to go anywhere near licenses that treat Web services as a form of software "distribution" from a license perspective.
• VMware placates Wall Street with 70 per cent Q1 revenue surge | The Register - It's worth noting that VMware leads in x86 virtualization revenue--by far (as in roughly two orders of magnitude).
• Airlines to Charge for Second Bag - New York Times - Five major airlines plan to start charging coach passengers as much as $25 next month to check a second bag. Uggh but probably inevitable. This doesn't affect me on business but will on personal trips when I'm lugging a lot of camping gear.
• WebUrbanist » 7 Abandoned Wonders of the Former Soviet Union: Deserted Cities, Buildings, Bases and More - I found this fascinating.
• Cloud Vendors A to Z (Revised) | John M Willis ESM Blog - A long list of cloud computing players--mostly those on the infrastructure side in one form or another. There are a few true SaaS (application) companies listed but it's just a sampling. I'd quibble with some of the specifics but a good view of the landscape.
• How Valid Are T.V. Weather Forecasts? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog - "no forecaster is ever better than just assuming it won’t rain. If you think that’s bad, sadly it gets worse"

The Best Simple Explanation to the Monty Hall Problem

The Monty Hall problem is always good for an argument. For me, though, the basic version is pretty straightforward. Well, after I found the right way to visualize it anyway. (Basically if he knows where the prize is and will always open one of his two doors without the prize, you're effectively being given the opportunity to trade your one door for his two.) However, the question of whether the assumption that Monty knows where the prize is affects the benefit of switching. It does and it's not intuitive--at least to me. The below comment does a good job of succinctly explaining.

There are a lot of people arguing that Monte not knowing still makes it worth switching. It doesn't. Here's why. (From here on I'm spelling it Monty.) If Monty knows, the possibilities are:
1. You picked car. Monty opens a goat. Switching bad.
2. You picked goat A. Monty opens a goat. Switching good.
3. You picked goat B. Monty opens a goat. Switching good.

Two good switch, one bad switch. 2/3 chance it's worth switching.

If Monty doesn't know, the possibilities are:
1. You picked car. Monty opens Goat A. Switching bad.
2. You picked car. Monty opens Goat B. Switching bad.
3. You picked goat A. Monty opens Goat B. Switching good.
4. You picked goat A. Monty opens car. No switch option.
5. You picked goat B. Monty opes Goat A. Switching good.
6. You picked goat B. Monty opens car. No switch option.

So in this case there is 2/6 chance switching is bad, 2/6 chance switching is good, and 2/6 chance you don't have the option to switch. If you *do* have the option, that leaves you 2/4 and 2/4 good or bad. (Fractions not minimised to avoid confusing people.)

Posted by: RavenBlack | April 15, 2008 at 05:56 PM

Links for 04-21-2008

I'm trying out ma.gnolia.com as an alternative to del.icio.us. One advantage is that it doesn't truncate notes at a fairly limited character count. While twitter-ish enforced brevity isn't necessarily a bad thing for some of us, having more spce to play with can be handy sometimes.

• tecosystems » Ask RedMonk: Open Source Indemnification - the Q&A - "no software - open or closed - is risk free." See e.g. some recent stories around end-user lawsuits related to IBM's WebSphere.


• A wireless world | Our nomadic future | Economist.com - "Digital nomadism will liberate ever more knowledge workers from the cubicle prisons of Dilbert cartoons. But the old tyranny of place could become a new tyranny of time, as nomads who are “always on” all too often end up—mentally—anywhere but here (wherever here may be)."


• NOVELL: John Dragoon’s Blog » Blog Archive » All in One - I'm still not sure how appliance OSs will play out. It remains to be seen if they'll remain a sideshow or develop into a "Big Thing."


• Whimsley: Linux Grows Up and Gets a Job - Some additional good commentary on the Linux contribution numbers.


• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Open source as corporate joint venture - "the development of the Linux operating system - has shifted from being a volunteer effort to being a corporate initiative. Of the many thousands of changes that have been made to the Linux kernel over the past three years, fully 73.2% came from employees working on behalf of their companies."


• Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > Not the Strongest Possible Argument - This is either Photoshop, a joke, or someone who should have paid more attention in history class.


• My Life on Facebook as a Woman and Why Social Network Advertising Doesn't Work - "Since day 1 with Facebook, I've been shocked at how poor the ad quality is. For a company that has a $15B valuation, their ad sales teams plain suck."

Links for 04-18-2008

• Open Reasoning: Some data points on social media - To very briefly summarize: Except for reading blogs there's very little use of social media for work/education purposes. Not especially surprising.


• Let's Tell a Story Together - Detailed history of interactive fiction.


• ASCII by Jason Scott: Twilight of the Area Code Master - "Once I could stand there and recite these numbers and their locations with the greatest pride. They were my geography teacher and my sage-like awareness of the lands around me. But those times are gone."


• Kevin Kelly: Digital Things I've Been Wrong About - "I believe no one can always be right about what will work because the number of variables determining success are too high. The details of execution for each idea matter greatly."


• Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Waxy.org


• Megan McArdle (April 17, 2008) - Ms Fix-it speaks "Apparently, customers can now offer Starbucks suggestions on how to improve their service. My humble offering: tell the whoever runs the flamethrower they use on their coffee beans to throttle back on the oxygen and leave some actual flavor in the roast."


• Our Daily Bleg: Did I.B.M. Really See a World Market For About Five Computers? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog - (Supposedly) the truth behind the famous Watson "there's a world market for five computers" quote.


• Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > I've Got Two Words for You: Lawn Darts - I bought lawn darts a few years ago (via Yahoo auctions). I could never have them as a child. Parents probably thought I'd toss them at my brother. Probably true :-)


• Bruce Schneier's Security Matters: Prediction -- RSA Conference Will Shrink Like a Punctured Balloon - We're seeing much the same trend in virtualization. People don't want to assemble a whole lot of complicated piece parts.


• WebUrbanist » 10 Impressive Parkour and Free Running Videos: Urban Buildering and Building Jumping in Action


• Slides to JPEG Files [DIGITIZESLIDES] - $0.35 : Slides in a Flash, A New Alternative to Slide Scanning - Haven't tried them but another economical slide digitization option.


• Kevin Kelly -- The Technium - "The web is the initial OS of this new global machine, and all the many gadgets we possess are the windows into its core."


• Presentation Zen: Latest "Steve Jobs" keynote best yet: watch and learn - Spoof Steve Jobs keynote. This is pretty funny.

Links for 04-16-2008

• Megan McArdle (April 16, 2008) - Taxes done: now, the fun - "It's the annual contemplation of what, exactly, is the stupidest question I was asked while filling out my taxes...New York swung back at the last minute with a roundhouse punch: did I engage, at any point during the year, in the production of maple syrup?"


• The charmed dot-com life of Jeff Bezos - Apr. 15, 2008 - Good piece on Bezos and Amazon.


• Psystar says rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated, still selling Open Computers - OTOH, possibly legitimate but very small scale.


• So exactly who or what is Psystar? We dig a little.. | Technology | Guardian Unlimited - Some good reporting from the Guardian. The whole PsyStar thing is looking... odd.


• Megan McArdle (April 14, 2008) - Will downloading kill the music business, part 3,980,876,312 - "Depending on concert revenue is limiting in terms of market size, and also, it seems to me, puts a time limit on an act; once your core demographic hits thirty, you'd better start looking for another job."


• Say It Ain’t Slow: Much Ado About Website Performance: Making the Font Game - Making the Rather Difficult Font game.


• Blue Jeans Cable Strikes Back - Response to Monster Cable — Audioholics Home Theater Reviews and News - Looks like Monster picked on the wrong company.


• The News Business: Out of Print: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - "Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive."


• Fold-Ins, Past and Present - The New York Times - An interactive history of the Mad back-cover fold-in — a defining feature of a defining magazine since 1964. Very cool. [Via Very Short List]

Links for 04-10-2008

• The Ships That Cut the Undersea Internet Cables - Cool animation about how undersea cables are repaired.


• A VC: We Need A New Path To Liquidity - To paraphrase: Individual Web services don't necessarily benefit from being gobbled up by something larger. But it's not clear what the other viable alternatives are.


• Technology Review: Microsoft's Shiny New Toy - The combination of technologies like Photosynth with geotagging could be very interesting.


• Cool Tool: Zamzar - Online document format conversion: I find this sort of thing far less important as time goes on but it crops up every now and then.


• The Volokh Conspiracy - First Amendment and Photography/Writing/Publishing/Book Distribution for Money: - Is wedding photography protected first amendment expression?


• Gartner: Windows collapsing under its own weight; Radical change needed | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com - "Valley of despair" parts of cycles and all that, some qualitatively different dynamics seem to be going on.

Links for 04-09-2008

• IBM offers 4,000 frequent flyer miles per core to abandon HP | The Register - As Ashlee snarkily suggests, likening trade-in credits to frequent flyer miles is perhaps not the analogy I would have chosen.


• Netcraft: Google Offers Free Web Application Hosting - Web hosting is really a simple, specialized case of Cloud Computing.


• IDC Virtualization Forum West - Part 2 at Brian Berliner’s Brain - Further data points that the nature of the desktop client is changing but the exact nature of the shift(s) hasn't really played out yet.


• Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to write Facebook apps - A good post (together with others it links to) discussing the tension between third-party platform extenders and the tendency of the platform to usurp the function for its own use.


• Poker Cheating and Casino Cheating Blog: American Roulette: Poker Bots Continue Online Cheat Gains - A less noted face of the ongoing battle against "bad guys" on the Internet.


• Woot : Book Scavenger: The New Joys of Jell-O (1973) - "The New Joys of Jell-O radiates a certain naive charm, with its optimistic belief in the power of Jell-O and its cheerful disregard for the limitations of the human digestive system."


• Vegetarians are Evil - Official Homepage - A link to send to all your vegetarian friends.


• Milgram, the Torturers of New Haven and the Truth of that Obedience Experiment - The Medium - Magazine - New York Times Blog - I saw the actual films back in school. The shorthand summary of the experiment oversimplifies, but the overall results still seem notable. However, as the films show, subjects did hesitate to greater or lesser degrees.

Links for 04-07-2008

• TinkerX » Trends: neither heads nor tails - Is the "Tipping Point" largely random?


• A VC: The Declining Power Of The Firm - In the context of cloud computing it's worht not completely losing sight of why we outsource tasks (or don't).


• What Newspapers and Journalism Need Now: Experimentation, Not Nostalgia -Britannica Blog - "What’s worth saving, as a critical function, is investigative journalism. We need someone, many someones, to do long, deep, boring research, for stories that may not even pan out."


• Should anonymous people be allowed to conduct business? — My Infocalypse - In this case, legal action is involved, so I would say "no." But the more general answer seems less clear.


• PC World's Techlog The Frustratingly Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears - Is Gears deficient, is adding offline capability to Web apps particularly difficult, or is the basic idea flawed?


• Map Channels Hotel Directory Availability Search - A mashup with hotel listings and a map. Looks like it could be handy when you're looking for hotels near a specific location.


• New York Times: blog trolling 101 - mathewingram.com/work - I generally agree with Matthew's take. But there's also truth in Paul Kedorsky's comment: about the "...emergence of a piecework occupation where there is an economic incentive to produce 24x7."


• Marginal Revolution: Predictions about 2008 - Predictions about computers fundamentally missed how small and cheap they would be--and hence distributed and used for so many frivolous things.


• Cloud computing is well and good, but it can't beat the desktop computer. - By Paul Boutin - Slate Magazine - A skeptical look at cloud computing.


• Doc Edgerton Films on MIT TechTV - The Edgerton Center is putting a lot of Doc's work online--including, eventually, his lab notebooks. Quite a few videos are here.

Links for 04-02-2008

The late winter/early spring travel craziness that I seem to have settled into the past few years is winding down so I should be shifting back into a more normal writing schedule.

• xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe - An ultimatelygnurdy cartoon.


• ASCII by Jason Scott: Scanning Infocom - Steve's a bigger packrat than I am.


• How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong - "by Google's definition, Apple is irredeemably evil, behaving more like an old-fashioned industrial titan than a different-thinking business of the future." (Although they're both secretive.)


• Why (most) authors and publishers need not fear online piracy - Topic Powered by eve community - Some good discussion. As with movies, I suspect that it's mostly a matter of time (and therefore technology improvements) before this becomes more of an issue.


• Lulu Forums - Lulu.com - Long thread on LuLu about Amazon's ongoing changes about how they deal with non-Amazon Print on Demand (POD).


• Welcome to the echo chamber, Long | Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise | - "Long Zheng is shocked, shocked to discover that A-list online writers, given the choice between getting to the top of Techmeme or waiting to do some fact-checking, choose to hit Publish:"


• Corporate employee blogs: Lawsuits waiting to happen? | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - I'm not sure how broad the implications are for the case at hand which involved a senior IP person at Cisco blogging anonymously about a patent lawsuit involving Cisco.

Caineville to Goblin Valley, UT

Caineville to Goblin Valley, UT
Originally uploaded by ghaff

In between Microsoft MIX08 (in Las Vegas) and Novell Brainshare (in Salt Lake City), I took a week off to do some hiking/photography in southern Utah and some skiing up at Alta. All my Utah pics are in this set. (Some are from a previous trip to the Moab area.)

Links for 03-25-2008

It's been a while. Lots of travel!

• Battle Over: CBS gave 'Jericho' a fighting chance - From Inside the Box - Zap2it - A remarkably sane post about TV show cancellations.


• New York Photography » POD Photo Books, Bottom Line - In-depth look at the various print-on-demand photo books. Personally I've used Blurb and been happy with them.


• Q&A with Clay Shirky, author of <i>Here Comes Everybody</i> - Nerve.com Screening Room - Interview with NYU professor Clay Shirky about his new book.


• Most Controversial Campaign Ads: No. 10 - AOL Video Blog - Pretty good collection of ads.


• ClearContext Corporate Weblog - I looked at this a while back. It may be time to take a peek again.


• Disks have become tapes - O'Reilly Radar - "In short (as observed by Doug Cutting at OSCON last year), MapReduce hits the sweet spot by operating at the transfer rate of disks (growing at 20%/year) rather than seek rate (growing at 5%/year) as relational databases do."


• Marginal Revolution: All you can eat? - The specifics will probably be messy and hard to predict. But I think it fair to observe that different ways of paying for/consuming music could change the market.


• Coding Horror: The Dark Side of Extensions - It's worth remembering that customizability and extensions aren't really an answer for the vast majority of users.


• InsideTrip - Intelligent travel choices - A new air travel site.

Links for 03-03-2008

• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Confession: I love to fuck with car salesmen - Another good one.


• Megan McArdle (February 28, 2008) - The cult of the CEO - "CEOs are too often empire builders, squandering retained earnings and diluting share values in order to make dubious corporate acquisitions."


• Megan McArdle (February 28, 2008) - Odd conundrum for the day - For some reason I found this post about clothing sizes rather fascinating.


• Steve Wozniak's frustrations with iPhone, Apple TV and MacBook Air | APC Magazine - "The AppleTV has problems... the 24 hour limit once I start watching, I have to finish in 24 hours. My life is way too mobile and unpredictable for that." This is a developing quasi-"standard" that needs nipping in the bud.


• InFlightHQ » Rent someone else’s parking spot using ParkingHunter - Interesting idea although the listings look pretty skimpy for Boston at any rate.


• James Duncan Davidson > Free is not a Constant State - " Free in one market doesn’t mean free in all markets. And, by definition, if some uses shouldn’t be free, then you’ve just found some markets you can sell into even if you give your photographs away for free in others."


• Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia | The Register - Sorry, but we all need our own brand of gossip stories now and then.


• tecosystems » Utter Crap?: Matt Asay and The Linux Desktop Q&A (and Video) - Agree with many points, mildly disagree with others. That said, I have trouble believing that Linux will ever become a widely-used fat client OS in the Windows/OS X mold.


• Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: New York Times Movies Graphic - Good visualization of film box office receipts over time. Click through to the NYT to scroll back through time.


• Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong? « HighContrast - Intersting in a mostly academic kind of way. Maybe we simply shouldn't refer to more generic "network effects" as Metcalfe's Law.


• Photo industry braces for another revolution | Underexposed - CNET News.com - Good overview of digital photography trends (3D photographs, depth of field control in software, etc.)

Links fro 03-03-2008

• What's in a Font? - Virginia Postrel interviews the director of Helvetica. (Watch it BYW even if you're not a type geek. If you get Netflix, it's on Watch Instantly.


• http://www.daheshmuseum.org/ - The museum in the IBM building in NY has closed but their collection is still online. Some nice 18th and 19th century European realist art.


• Lofty Ambitions - "Today’s lofts are mere reproductions of the originals—and nothing offends architecture critics more than inauthenticity."


• The Next Slum? - Interesting article although I think its conclusions are overbroad in both intensity and geographic location.


• NYTE - I ran across this at MoMA earlier in the week. Some very cool visualizations.