Links for 06-14-2010

• "Suddenly...": Seven different salutes to the Odessa Steps scene. - Indie Eye - Blogs - IFC.com
• 468 – Crime Topography of San Francisco « Strange Maps
• furtwangler beethoven - Public domain MP3s
• YouTube - usbtypewriter demo - This is incredibly cool!
• Economic View - Recipes for Ruin, in the Gulf or on Wall St. - NYTimes.com - Thaler was a professor of mine at Corness
• The Mother of All Invention - Magazine - The Atlantic - The 50th anniversary of the Xerox 914 photocopier.
• What Makes Private Cloud Private « Wikibon Blog - Video interview with Marketing VP for the CTOs office at EMC/RSA.
• Bits or pieces?: A life less cloudy - Simon Wardley has joined CSC LEF.
• Blogger Buzz: Blogger Template Designer Now Available To Everyone - I've tuned blogger templates by hand. This could well make things easier.
• Looking Back at SCO - ConsortiumInfo.org
• Department of Energy - Data Summary from Deepwater Horizon - "As part of the Obama Administration's ongoing commitment to transparency surrounding the response to the BP oil spill, the Department of Energy is providing online access to schematics, pressure tests, diagnostic results and other data about the malfunctioning blowout preventer."

Links for 06-11-2010

• Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies? - Community - ComputerworldUK - "Indeed, I would go so far as to say that very few open source startups will ever get anywhere near to $1 billion. Not because they are incompetent, or because open source will “fail” in any sense. But because the economics of open source software – and therefore the business dynamics – are so different from those of traditional software that it simply won't be possible in most markets. Red Hat stands a chance because it has (wisely) colonised the biggest sector, that of enterprise infrastructural products - “we are plumbers”, as Whitehurst put it with brutal frankness. "
• Top Ways to Start and Expand Your Virtualization Deployments | Andi Mann – Übergeek - Good piece.
• BP (Logo Redesign Contest) LogoMyWay.com ™ - This is funny. Sad, but funny.
• Dave Eggers on America and the World Cup. - By Dave Eggers - Slate Magazine - This is also a good piece.
• The Rest-of-the-World Cup - TIME - An oldie but goodie by Joel Stein.
• Lazy, Hazy, Crazy: The 10 Laws of Behavioral Cloudonomics - Good piece on what behavioral economics mean for cloud adoption.
• Be a better interviewer in 14 steps | Article | Homepage articles

Links for 06-10-2010

• Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps
• John Nack on Adobe: Brief thoughts (and a question) on tablets & styluses - "When did my finger start resembling a giant breadstick? More on that in a moment."
• ignore the code: Gestures - "In a way, gestural user interfaces are a step back, a throwback to the command line. Gestures are often not obvious and hard to discover; the user interface doesn’t tell you what you can do with an object. Instead, you have to remember which gestures you can use, the same way you had to remember the commands you could use in a command line interface."
• Locals and Tourists - a set on Flickr - Fascinating maps of local vs. tourists in many cities using geotagged photo data.
• Urban Photo Data Uncovers Local Hot Spots - Yet another interesting example of the sort of information that can be mined from widespread "instrumentation"
• The 'Cloud Computing Bill of Rights': 2010 edition | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - "Possibly the best thing cloud vendors can do to extend their community, and encourage innovation on their platform from community members is to open their platform as much as possible. By making themselves the "reference platform" for their respective market space, an open vendor creates a petrie dish of sorts for cultivating differentiating features and successes on their platform. Protective proprietary vendors are on their own."
• Balkinization - "The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines."
• Session videos from Google I/O 2010 now available | Google Earth Blog - I've been wanting to get back to playing with Google Maps again but I haven't had the time.
• Lessons from Apple on Advertising and Aesthetics | Smarterware - "They aim for your heart, and show you how technology can make your life better during its most important moments. Contrast this with the Droid ads, which actually scare my friend's two-year-old daughter away from the TV when they come on. The dark, rainy background, the spinning globe of glowing apps, the robot hands poking at them, nary a human in sight. Droid does. Does what? Show, don't tell."

Links for 06-08-2010

• My iPad? A Great Bundle of Sticks : Andrew McAfee’s Blog - Cory Doctorow gets Andrew McAfee riled up. I pretty much agree with Andrew on this.
• Open Reasoning: This thing called cloud - "The trick is to focus on what is underpinning all of the noise in terms of fundamental trends and developments. When you do this, it becomes clear that cloud computing in its various forms is not the ‘cause’ of anything; it is rather a marketing friendly word used to label certain ‘effects’ of the ongoing evolution of capability in some key areas." << I may think things aren't quite as vague as Dale does but this generally seems about right.

Links for 06-07-2010

• The Macalope Weekly: I want to believe! | Phones | MacUser | Macworld - "Rob works in crazy like other artists work in clay or pastels. "
• Data Center Dialog: Is your organization ready for an internal cloud? - From a little while back but still relevant.
• only rainwater and pure grain alcohol: On 'On Android Compatibility' - The bad old world of the carrier-controlled experience.
• Distortion Article: 1. Page 1: Digital Photography Review - Interesting piece on computational photography--designing lenses with post-capture image correction in mind.
• Careers In The Clouds - Chuck's Blog - How cloud computing intersects with IT skill sets.
• xkcd: Worst-Case Scenario - As is always the case with xkcd at its best, there's a layer of specialist knowledge below the surface. (Plus it's just pretty funny.)
• Daring Fireball: The Good and the Bad Regarding AT&T's New Data Plans - Great analysis of AT&T's changes.

Links for 06-02-2010

• The Oil Drum | What caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster? - The best technical analysis I've seen to date.
• What is data science? - O'Reilly Radar
• Top Of The Food Chain: Hanger Steak – Eat Me Daily
• Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code
• Incomplete Thought: The DevOps Disconnect | Rational Survivability - "In many presentations promoting DevOps, developers are shown to have evolved in practice and methodology, but operators (of all kinds) are described as being stuck in the dark ages. DevOps evangelists paint a picture that compares and contrasts the Agile-based, reusable componentized, source-controlled, team-based and integrated approach of “evolved” development environments with that of loosely-scripted, poorly-automated, inefficient, individually-contributed, undisciplined, non-source-controlled operations. You can see how this might be just a tad off-putting to some people."
• Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture? - Advertising Age - Digital - Interesting--although any such relationships are inevitably complicated and diffuse.
• Are you still in a "fog" over cloud computing? - CA on Service Management - "Cloud computing is about bringing together many existing technologies and approaches in a new way for delivering and consuming technology as services."
• 'Zero clients' promise to replace fat clients but have downsides
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Experiments in delinkification - I actually struggle with this with respect to footnotes as well. I tend to favor inline footnotes for context and parentheticals but, for one thing, this format doesn't fit well with digital formats.
• Can Asus take on iPad with Eee Pad, Eee Tablet? | Crave - CNET - Styli seem to have been almost written off at this point and I think that's premature.

Links for 06-01-2010

• BP, the oil spill, and the urge to crucify…. somebody - Agree with the general sense of this piece although it remains to be learned whether reasonable best practices were followed throughout this operation.
• I've Changed My Mind About The iPad - I concur with all this.It's not that the iPad has unique capabilities but that it does some things more naturally than the alternatives.
• Sales Venn diagram - This is optimistic. You'll spend way more than four hours and what's sold won't necessarily intersect with what the technology can provide.
• ABC adding confusing images to 'Lost' finale: Dumbest move ever? Take the poll - The Watcher - Wow. Just dumb. The images don't actually invalidate the ending but they do open a big door to "It was all a dream."
• Keeping Cloud Computing's Prospects Safe and Sunny - IEEE on cloud security and work with CSA.

Links for 05-26-2010

• HP outperforms IBM in Q1 server sales - Servers - ComputerworldUK - The shift towards x86 at the high end does seem to be accelerating.
• The Wrong Way to Cloud-Enable A Data Center « Data Center Knowledge - This is good!
• 'Lost' finale: All the unanswered questions, courtesy of College Humor - From Inside the Box - Zap2it - Pretty good!
• Home - Cloud Commons
• CloudStandards - A wiki litng various standardization efforts going on around cloud computing.
• IBM's Moffat, Chiesi Were `Intimate,' U.S. Says - Bloomberg - Can't say this story is a shocker. It's the only thing that ever made any sense to me.
• An analysis of WebM and its patent risk | carlodaffara.conecta.it - This post is more optimistic about patent risk in WebM because of apparent deliberate(?) "sub-optimal" choices.
• IPad Rivals Encounter Delays - Forbes.com - Not that I had any regrets, but makes me feel that much better about not waiting for whatever the "ideal" device coming down the pike turns out to be.
• HP explains why printer ink is so expensive - Computerworld Blogs
• Practical Analysis: The Slog Toward Private Clouds -- Cloud Computing -- InformationWeek - "SaaS is simply better understood than the other forms of cloud computing, including internal private clouds, and that comes through in our survey." << Consistent with what I see as well. And only gets more pronounced among less IT-savvy audiences.
• Internet Evolution - Midmarket Clan Editor's Blog - Midmarket Favors Local Cloud Support - "While your average midmarket company may do massive amounts of business with larger suppliers, they are more likely to favor cloud computing service and support from smaller vendors located closer to their own businesses." << Another reason why public clouds aren't just about mega-providers.
• There is No Such Thing as Mass Culture Any More - Business - The Atlantic - "We live in a different world, one where there's something for almost everyone--but not the same thing."

Links for 05-24-2010

• Logitech’s big plans for Google TV | VentureBeat - Although it's only a part of the problem, input devices for the 10 ft experience are sorely deficient. But Logitech comes among the closest today.
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Another Foxconn jumper, and you know who’s the real victim? Me - This is in such poor taste. I will not laugh. I will not laugh.
• Sayonara, iPhone: Why I'm Switching to Android - Techtonic Shifts Blog - Newsweek.com - Smack down by Dan Lyons aka FSJ.
• Could cloud computing get any more confusing? | ZDNet - This seems to specirfically refer to public clouds.
• Apple Marketing's Top 10 Dumb Mistakes | Sales Machine | BNET - I disagree with most of this.
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : “One man, one company” - It's FSJ but the quote is real. Google and Apple are officially at war. “If we did not act, we faced a draconian future, where one man, one company, one carrier was the future.”
• Top 10 LOST Twists « The Bottom Shelf
• RIP: Tech That Will Die this Decade | ConceivablyTech - I disagree about PC/Mac though I suspect that's there at least partly to be provocative. The rest I mostly (though not entirely) agree with for loose enough definitions of dead and with stated qualifications.

Links for 05-20-2010

• I want choice, but only if I agree with your choice | thomas fitzgerald.net - "I think Ted’s problem, like that of many analysts/bloggers/journalists/geeks etc on the issue is that they’re confusing fundamental flaws with not liking something. People like Ted don’t like the closed nature of the App store, but that doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally flawed, or a lack of choice."
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: What are the Key Qualities of a Great City?
• Six Degrees of Black Sabbath #6dobs - Cool app showing the relationships between two musicians.
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : From the mailbag - "The times they are a changing, and very soon the all-purpose computer, where you can buy and run any software you want, will be obsolete, replaced by the iPad, which costs more and does less and only runs software made by Apple or approved by Apple and sold through Apple’s store. This is the future and it will be way better than what we’ve had so far, which is why legacy PC companies are freaking the fuck out. They see their messy “open” world slipping away and being replaced by the neat, tidy world where everything works seamlessly because, frankly, there are no seams."
• Diary Of An x264 Developer » The first in-depth technical analysis of VP8 - Very in-depth analysis and this: "Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today’s overly litigious day and age. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. Until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be extremely cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem."
• Stack Wars: What Is The Enterprise Stack? « Wikibon Blog - "The pending enterprise stack wars pit highly vertically integrated companies against a virtually integrated whole. In theory, the vertical approach can be more easily managed because its owned by a single company. However the virtual approach is more open and potentially has more industry reach."
• Why IBM, Microsoft and SAP Like Oracle’s Apple Strategy With Sun — Datamation.com - Worth reading.
• Web Browsers Leave 'Fingerprints' Behind as You Surf the Net | Electronic Frontier Foundation - I participated in this a while back and my browser was easily unique. It's hard to evaluate the actual risk here but correlation can be quite powerful.
• S4 - Super Simple Storage Service - It look me a minute to realize this was a joke because I could actually imagine a pricing scheme for cloud-based backups where making the backup was cheap but there was a significant charge for doing a restore.

Links for 05-18-2010

• Is PaaS Just Outsourced Application Server Platforms? - How PaaS relates to app servers.
• Marginal Revolution: Questions that are rarely asked - "If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its function be and what would it look like?"
• Cloud Computing and Electricity: Beyond the Utility Model | May 2010 | Communications of the ACM - Some good analysis of the limits of the utility model in cloud computing.
• Marco.org - The iPad doesn’t need to do everything - Absolutely 100% spot-on.

Links for 05-17-2010

• Harvard International Review - "His argument is constructed on the premise that there are four competing explanations for weak victory in asymmetric wars, each of which has weaknesses in predicting outcomes or explaining the trend of increasing weak actor victories."
• Chronicles of Conflict: the History of Adobe vs. Apple — RoughlyDrafted Magazine - Good history of Adobe and Apple.
• Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight - Great head. Good article too.

Links for 05-13-2010

• Lost and Heroes: In Defense of Arrogance - Tuned In - TIME.com - " "Awesome" and "awful" are actually closer to each other on the continuum of quality than either is to "meh." "
• Why Ma Bell Got the Ill Communication | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD - "Nearly one in four U.S. households has abandoned traditional landline telephones in favor of their wireless brethren. " Knew it was a trend but had no idea it was this high.
• Special Report: Can That Guy in Ironman 2 Whip IBM in Real Life? - ABC News - ""The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed," said Ellison. "Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.""
• What Makes a Data Center a Private Cloud? . Datacenter Blog . Blogs . IDC Insights Community - IDC: What makes a private cloud.
• Does Virtualization Security Really Matter? | Andi Mann – Übergeek - Andi makes the case that interest levels in pure-play virtualization security have waned.
• James Hamilton on cloud economies of scale | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - I'm not at all convinced that anyone yet has a good understanding of how the economics of well-run enterprise-class private clouds stack up against those of a provider like Amazon.
• Marginal Revolution: Are you an asker or a guesser? - Fascinating.
• Hitsville » The case against non-profit news sites - Good read.

Links for 05-11-2010

• First-ever test of public cloud management wares
• How to Save the News - Magazine - The Atlantic - "That goal is a reinvented business model to sustain professional news-gathering. This is essential if the “crowd sourcing” and citizen journalism that have already transformed news coverage—for instance, the videos from inside the Iranian protests last summer—are not to be the world’s only source of information. Accounts like those are certainly valuable, but they will be all the more significant if they are buttressed by reports from people who are paid to keep track of government agencies, go into danger zones, investigate and analyze public and private abuse, and generally serve as systematic rather than ad hoc observers. (I am talking about what journalism should do, not what it often does.) "
• ASCII by Jason Scott / DistriWiki: A Proposal - Interesting discussion but ultimately distribution suggests to me the Web as a whole rather than Wikipedia whether in multiple forms or not.
• The Lost Tribes of RadioShack: Tinkerers Search for New Spiritual Home | Magazine - I confess that I've tended to view Radio Shack as the source of last resort but a long-term trend seems to be intensifying.
• Your Virtual Machine Teleporter is ready Are you? - Virtual Geek

Links for 05-10-2010

• Multi-Tenant, Silver: On-Demand/Hosted, Tinsel « The Applicator - I read this as a long-winded rant that private clouds are bad without using that term.
• Say Goodbye to the Computer Keyboard and Mouse | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD
• VIDEO: Your Light Saber and You - Vintage instructional film. Good stuff!
• DODOcase - Welcome - Looks nice. My only concern was also voiced by Macgirl that the foam in the corners might well wear out/compress over time.
• best of craigslist: Contest to be my boss! - I feel uncomfortable about those "compete to design my logo for $200" sites.
• The Full ‘Metropolis’ - NYTimes.com - Yah. Not especially a film I agreee with politically but nevertheless a brilliant piece of work.

Links for 05-07-2010

• Carcassonne Board Game Coming to IPhone, IPad - PCWorld - I've been wanting to try out this game for ages. Sounds like a good opportunity.
• Inconvenient Questions - Game developers bitch, at least privately, but, yeah, the technorati to the degree that they think about it at all seem to accept that the closed development environments of gaming consoles is just the way things are.
• What iPads Did To My Family - Chuck's Blog - Anyone who refers to "the family NAS server" and the household support escalation process is definitely a geek! Otherwise, this post does make me go hmm. I've been thinking of the iPad as a replacement for a Kindle or as a travel device. Maybe that's wrong.
• A Note on Newsweek (long) (updated) - Culture - The Atlantic - Pre the full richness of today's Web, I found weekly news mags (typically Time) a good way to make sure I was somehow getting synced up with important happenings, trends, etc.; I was not a big reader of daily newspapers or the evening news. That function is, of course, long gone.
• Awesome one-man reenactment of Downfall "Hitler Bunker" scene - Boing Boing
• Analyst: Netbook Sales Growth Declining Since Apple iPad Announced | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD - Some correlation does seem probable as both devices can be thought of as being in an "supplementary low-end mobile device that isn't a full-fledged notebook" category.
• Cloud Computing Trends and Services | Walt Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD - One of the things that causes a lot of confusion is that what consumers think of as the "cloud" (SaaS, Web 2.0, etc.) actually has very little to do with cloud computing infrastructure.

Links for 05-05-2010

• Darwin's Finches, 20th Century Business, and APIs - Cool slide show.
• Why is Business Writing So Awful? - Not really fair for a variety of reasons, but very true.
• from dc to light : Disable autocomplete in OpenOffice - This comment says it all. "That function is the absolute worst ever in the history of horrible functions. I nearly deleted open office."

Links for 05-04-2010

• Cloud.com | The Power Behind Your Cloud - I just found out that Peder Ulander (who I know from Sun) now runs marketing here.
• Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909 - Recombu
• Understanding Cloud Datacenter Economies of Scale | Cloudscaling - James Urquhart disputes the claims around networking but this post gives a good overview of economies of scale. It's an important point because some early cloud assumptions posited very high scale points needed for economies.
• 1,000,000 iPads. 28 days. First Take « GartenBlog - "Apple has validated this market. As i’ve talked in the past, there’s a worldwide market for 50,000 of anything. Try to sell 500,00 that’s another story. Get to a million and you’re a success by any measure. I suspect that in the history of ‘tweener devices, if you added up all the efforts over the last decade they likely didn’t app to a million units sold. The market is real and it’s a new line of business."

What the Millionth iPad Means

From Michael Gartenberg:

Apple has validated this market. As i’ve talked in the past, there’s a worldwide market for 50,000 of anything. Try to sell 500,00 that’s another story. Get to a million and you’re a success by any measure. I suspect that in the history of ‘tweener devices, if you added up all the efforts over the last decade they likely didn’t app to a million units sold. The market is real and it’s a new line of business.

I concur. Maybe there's a worldwide market for 100,000 of anything from Apple. But nonetheless, I largely agree with Michael.

The iPad costs more than I want to spend for where it is technologically. I'm looking for something lighter, cheaper, and more readable in sunlight. In other words, something that could replace my Kindle when traveling rather than be an additional device to carry.

But that's more of a comment on the state of the art of components than a knock on Apple who (the Flash mess aside) has, I think, generally done as good a job as they could have with what theey had to work with. It's also not a commentary on take on tablets being a legitimate tweener category. In fact, I'm a big believer.

Links for 05-03-2010

• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Realtimesink - "There's been much written about how the Web provides new opportunities for people to express themselves. That's true, and welcome. But the Web is also an enormous global timesink, sucking up massive amounts of time that might have gone into more productive, thoughtful, and fulfilling activities."
• Hardwood-Roasted Bone Marrow » Craigie On Main
• Europe.view: Redrawing the map | The Economist
• The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash - Charlie's Diary - "My take on the iPhone OS, and the iPad, isn't just that they're the start of a whole new range of Apple computers that have a user interface as radically different from their predecessors as the original Macintosh was from previous command-line PCs. Rather, they're a hugely ambitious attempt to keep Apple relevant to the future of computing, once Moore's law tapers off and the personal computer industry craters and turns into a profitability wasteland."
• tecosystems » Mobile is the New Desktop: The HP/Palm Q&A - This hits the "why" pretty well. I'm not sure anyone (including the parties involved) can truly know how well this will play out at this point.
• H.P. and Palm – P.D.A. Powerhouses Unite - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - I remember the time when everybody just HAD to have a PDA.
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : We are removing Flash support from OS X - Oh, this is really a good one!
• Steve Jobs’ Apple-Adobe Letter: A Bullshit-Free Translation - This is pretty funny (and pretty accurate).
• Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War - PowerPoint - NYTimes.com - This "death by Powerpoint" article has been getting a lot of press.
• Helping To Avoid A Really Bad Day - Chuck's Blog - Chuck makes a lot of great points.

Photos from Tuscany

Before I got started with my new job at Red Hat, I took a two week trip to Tuscany--beating the volcano back by about 24 hours. I spent time in Florence, some of the Sienese hill towns, the mountains near Barga, and the Cinque Terra (which is actually in the Liguria region just north of Tuscany). My photos are now up on Flickr and you can see them here.

Links for 04-29-2010

• What the Windows desktop will look like in 2015: Brian's vision of the future - Brian Madden - BrianMadden.com - Seems a realistic view.
• Android Developers Blog: Multitasking the Android Way - Very good and detailed post on how Android handles multitasking.
• Illuminata » HP Buys Palm: Huh?! - "But even if HP wants to contend in the mobile device or smartphone space, the real questions are: “Can it? Really? And if so, is Palm the route to doing so?”" << This is the crux. Just because Palm was perhaps the most available purchase doesn't make it a good buy.
• Linux Hater's Blog: A year later - "Why are y'all _still_ focused on random niche desktop thick client apps. Linux's problem is not a lack of thick client apps. Hardly anyone uses them, other than Office."
• VMware: The Console: VMforce and VMware’s “Open PaaS” Strategy - Blog post by Steve Herrod.
• Why Will Consumers Pay More (For A Mac)? | Forrester Blogs - A good illustration from Macs by @forrester 's @jgowdner on persuading consumers to pay more

Links for 04-27-2010

• Constant Touch: a Global History of the Mobile Phone - Have to love the pic!
• Backpacking | Cracked.com - A lot of this is pretty true.
• Twitterfountain.com - HP used this for their "twitter fountain" on a monitor at their HP Analyst Summit. May be what I'm looking for in my sunroom.
• Will Cloud Hype, Reality Meet Somewhere in Middle? | Interviews | ITBusinessEdge.com - I sorta get the point he's making about "operations as a service" but it sounds a lot like infrastructure-as-a-service with just a somewhat different pricing model.
• The New DevOps Designers: Cloud and The Big Rethink - Good presentation from James Urquhart.
• Forecast: Expect More Clouds - Chuck's Blog - "If there's one anecdote that perfectly captures the essence of private cloud thinking, it'd be Geir Ramleth's before-and-after story. If you think about it, Bechtel's nomadic population of knowledge workers are a perfect use case for private clouds -- and what lays beyond." Bechtel is very forward looking with desktop virtualization and BYOPC thinking as well for the same reasons.

Links for 04-26-2010

• The Echo Nest Song API « Music Machinery
• SF Signal: Awesome Futuristic Short Film: The Raven
• Five reasons iPhone vs Android isn't Mac vs Windows - O'Reilly Radar - You can probably argue with some of the specific assertions but, overall, a good look at some of the dynamics of the mobile market--and how they're different from Mac vs. Wintel.
• Docs: 2006 ROzzie@UW In Pursuit of Social Productivity

Links for 04-23-2010

• tecosystems » VMware’s Database Play: Will Red Hat Follow?
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Economics After the Crisis - "As often happens, disruptive events like our ongoing financial crisis leave in their wake a number of unanticipated consequences. It seems that one of the most interesting such consequences will be that the field of economics is finally becoming a true empirical science. "
• iCyte - Home - Browser add-on the save web pages.
• As We May Think - Magazine - The Atlantic - Vannevar Bush's amazing prescient 1945 article in The Atlantic that presaged hypertext/WWW.