Video: Red Hat OpenShift's Under-the-Covers Secret Sauce

A couple of days ago, Matt Hicks sat down with me to talk about some of the cool ways that Red Hat's OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service offering is making seriously heavy-duty use of features like SELinux, cgroups, and AMQP messaging in underlying Red Hat products. It makes you appreciate just how much rocket science goes into running the infrastructure for Platform-as-a-Service. Matt's the Managing Principal Architect for Red Hat who is responsible for much of what goes into keeping OpenShift running. Have a look!

Links for 10-24-2011

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 v. Battlefield 3. | Entertainment | TIME.com - "But it’s not just the scale of it, or who wins Christmas at GameStop. The other part of it is the weirdness of the fact that we are playing games that simulate wars that the U.S. is still fighting, right now, and that real people are dying in. I mean, some of the clips from Modern Warfare 3, and Battlefield 3, look like Wikileaks just leaked them from Iraq. Is that…OK? I remember when wargames were historical only. I remember when it was considered edgy to make a Vietnam game."
• Economics in One Lesson
• VMware CEO Maritz: Get Ready For Consumption-Based Pricing - "We are going to have to move towards more of a consumption-based model. This is where we are going," Maritz said at the event Thursday, as reported by Computerworld UK. "We are trying to keep the licensing stable for as long as we can, but in 10 years from now, things will have changed quite radically."
• (403) http://antispec.com/hq/moleskine - Crowdsourced on-spec design work does feel vaguely icky to me via @cdgrams
• Gartner’s Public Cloud Fallacy and EMC’s Secret Weapon | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com - "One position that Gartner appeared to get very wrong, according to the CIOs I’ve spoken with, is to start public cloud deployments with email." << Not sure this is always true but it's absolutely true that email isn't the no-brainer "do it in a public cloud" function it's often presented as.
• lessons of the web: on vmware, cloud and what comes next – James Governor's Monkchips - Seems like a pretty good overview of Raghu's keynote at VMworld Europe.
• Details of United’s 2012 Mileage Plus program released - One Mile at a Time - United's FF program has fairly significant downgrades for mid-level miles next year

Nevada Desert (near Lake Mead)

Nevada Desert (near Lake Mead)
Originally uploaded by ghaff

It hit 111 degrees in Nevada on the August day I headed towards Las Vegas from Zion National Park.

Links for 10-20-2011

• GAMBIT: Updates: New MIT Game Research Explores Singapore Culture from the Inside Out
• Bad Pitch Blog - Good stuff!
• Mary Meeker’s 2011 Presentation On Internet Trends [Slides] | TechCrunch - The obligatory annual Mary Meeker Internet trends preso
• HP And Cisco Bury The Hatchet To Accommodate Customers – Everyone Wins? | Forrester Blogs - "So what drove this seeming rapprochement? The coined word “coopetition” lacks the flavor of the German “Realpolitik,” but the essence is the same – both sides profit from accommodating a real demand from customers for Cisco network technology in HP BladeSystem servers.
• Apple's R&D spending hits bottom as percentage of revenue | ZDNet - Don't see much puzzle in AAPL's relatively low R&D % Massive volumes of small # of high margin products
• fcheblog » using systemtap better
• Brendan's blog » Using SystemTap
• There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe - Scott Hanselman - There is only one cloud icon:

General social media and contacting me update

I've been making some tweaks to where and how I publish and how I use various social networking and communications services over the past few months. Here's the current status:

Blogging:

I have two primary blogs.

Connections is my "personal" blog. It's personal in the sense that no one else has any control over what I publish here. That said, it's mostly (75%+) devoted to topics that fall generally under the umbrella of "tech." I generally keep the blog going with short link-comments when I'm not pushing out anything longer. In a new development, I expect to be publishing more posts that directly pertain to my activities at Red Hat here.

The Pervasive Datacenter is my CNET Blog Network blog. I typically publish once or twice a month on technology topics, nominally with an emphasis on enterprise IT although I do posts on photography and other consumer tech of interest from time to time. I am especially careful about topics that could be perceived as in any way a conflict of interest because of my day job at Red Hat and therefore mostly avoid getting into individual companies, strategies, and products.

Social Networks:

I am active on twitter as @ghaff. As with my blogs, I concentrate on tech topics but no guarantees that I won't get into other topics from time to time.

I mostly view LinkedIn as a sort of professional rolodex. If I've met you and you send me a LinkedIn invite, I'll probably accept though it might help to remind me who you are. I'm most likely to ignore you if you appear to be someone just building up a big network for spammy purposes.

I'm a pretty casual user of Facebook and I limit it to friend friends. That's not to say that some of them aren't professional acquaintances as well. But if you just met me at a conference somewhere and want to friend me, please understand if I ignore you.

I'm not sure where I stand with Google+ at this point. I'm on it, generally like the interface, and some of my friends are active. But I don't feel a great hole in my social media sphere that's calling out for a Google+ to fill. We'll see.

PR pitches, etc:

Lord, do I get a lot of crap sent my way. The redeeming aspect of this is that I periodically get some gem that gives the PR group at Red Hat a chuckle (after any embargo is off of course). If you work for a Red Hat competitor or their agency, you might also want to think twice about offering to pre-brief me on some new announcement.

With that out of the way, I'm interested in a wide variety of tech topics. However, for obvious reasons, I tend to avoid writing about specific companies that closely intersect with my day job whether as competitors or partners. It's also a matter of my bandwidth. I have less time for blogging than when I was an analyst but if I write about one company in a space, it's not really fair to turn down all the inevitable requests that come in from other companies doing something similar.

Links for 10-12-2011

• No More Servants - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - Interesting discussion. I think one of the main reasons is that, as a number of commenters note: 1. Past a certain income, people do tend to have personal assistants for a combination of business and personal matters, and 2. For a variety of reasons, people across a wide range of income brackets use lawn services, etc.
• redhat.com | Where's Red Hat This October? - “@RedHatNews: Blog: Where's Red Hat This October? #redhat” << I'll be keynoting DC cloud tour on 19th
• Siri security flaw? - iPhone, iPad, iPod Forums at TiPb.com - “@cchristiansen: Discusses bypassing passcode & Siri implications” <- good question. Could be showstopper f lots of us
• redhat.com | Red Hat to Acquire Gluster - Brian Stevens (Red Hat CTO) blogs on the Gluster acquisition:
• Amazing Reuters Photo of Rebel Firing RPG was Not Photoshopped - RT @petapixel: Amazing Reuters photo of rebel firing RPG was not Photoshopped:

Links for 09-30-2011

• Selling Is Not About Relationships - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson - Harvard Business Review – "This finding — that Challengers win and Relationship Builders lose — is one that sales leaders often find deeply troubling, because their organizations have placed by far their biggest bet on recruiting, developing, and rewarding Relationship Builders, the profile least likely to win."
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The remains of the book – "Up until now, there's been a fairly common assumption that a divide would emerge in the presentation of different kinds of electronic books. Reference works would get the full web treatment, tricked out with multimedia and hypermedia, while fiction and literary nonfiction would be shielded from the web's manifest destiny. They'd go digital without losing their print nature; they'd retain their edges. That assumption always struck me as naive, and Bezos's choice of a novel for his demo of X-Ray makes me even more dubious that literary works will remain exempt from webification."
• You Are Who You Build For – tecosystems – "When enterprises were able to impose their will upon their employees, enterprise vendors enjoyed barriers to entry sufficient to shield them from the likes of Apple. Businesses only bought the products that they wanted, which in turn were the products enterprise vendors built for them. "
• You Are Who You Build For – tecosystems – Consumerization of IT makes it more challenging f businesses to focus from @sogrady << Harder to segment
• Pan Amorama | Blogs | Vanity Fair – "But where fashion runway models are unsmiling, robotic in their militant march steps, these stews smile like mod angels, their wings pinned to their snazzy blue jackets. No, Pan Am has none of the stomach-acid accidie of Mad Men--for primetime TV, it’s a far more formula drive--but it’s a wonderful throwback to Jean Negulesco films such as Three Coins in the Fountain and The Best of Everything. (Margot Robbie’s Laura Cameron, a flight attendant who lands on the cover of Life, is the Suzy Parker figure.) Nothing about Pan Am demands to be taken seriously and the espionage angle is an absurdity (even given the Cold War era), but everything was nicely done, and the crosscutting between adjoining hotel rooms of undressing lovers about to meet smack in the middle was elegantly, Europeanly sexy."
• Ex-Fed CIO Vivek Kundra’s Cloud First policy trashed - The Troposphere – "According to the study, 92% of feds believe cloud is a good idea for federal IT, but just 29% are following the administration’s mandated “Cloud First” policy. And almost half (42%) say they are adopting a “wait-and-see” approach related to cloud. Respondents cite numerous challenges including security issues (64%), cultural issues (36%) and budget constraints (36%) as barriers to cloud computing."
• Freakonomics » The Myth of Common Sense: Why The Social World Is Less Obvious Than It Seems – "What these results suggest is that in the real world, where social influence is much stronger than in our artificial experiment, enormous differences in success may indeed be due to small, random fluctuations early on in an artist’s career, which then get amplified by a process of cumulative advantage—a “rich-get-richer” phenomenon that is thought to arise in many social systems."
• Autonomy's reaction to Oracle's statement | Business | guardian.co.uk – "Oracle seems a little confused about the sequence of events and origins of the data it has received, something that would suggests it needs better management of and insight into the unstructured data on its internal systems. We would be delighted to help."
• Connections: Podcast with Red Hat's Carl Trieloff on oVirt – Check out my latest podcast. I talk oVirt (open source virt mgmt) with #redhat's Carl Trieloff:
• AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure | ZDNet – "The re-launch of social link sharing site Delicious, now under the stewardship of YouTube founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley under their AVOS startup banner, is nothing short of a complete, mind-boggling disaster. How AVOS took a beloved social sharing site and ruined it from stem to stem, and up to this minute have a complete, angry user PR explosion on their hands, is as enlightening as it is hard to watch."
• redhat.com | Survey Results and Conclusions: Evolving to the Cloud – Here are results and my commentary from a survey that Red Hat conducted at VMworld
• Daring Fireball: Amazon's New Kindles – "Amazon built an alternative to the iPad, rather than a direct competitor. It’s a different market segment. As Steve Jobs explained back in 2010 at the introduction of the original iPad, there’s unexplored territory between smartphones and laptops." << Agree. It remains to be seen how viable the segment is but sometimes less really is more.
• Assess enterprise applications for cloud migration – Good, albeit probably overly academic, overview of how to think about enterprise application suitability for cloud.
• Bezos Portrays Kindle Fire as Service, Not Tablet- Bloomberg – RT @iwantmedia: Jeff Bezos: "We don't think of Kindle Fire as a tablet. We think of it as a service" <
• Cisco Blog » Blog Archive » Re-Thinking Pork Bellies. Why There are No Commodity Clouds, Only Commodity Thinkers. – "Don’t confuse platform with commodity." << The "commodity" term makes me uncomfortable in a lot of contexts.
• Workshop | oVirt Project – RT @mestery: 5 weeks until #ovirt kickoff meeting @ Cisco campus in San Jose. Have you RSVP'd yet?
• Delicious.com - Discover Yourself! – is being relaunched. It does look prettier. But it seems to have broken existing APIs and tagging system.
• The myth of standardisation – "We have to accept that. It’s evolutionary, in our genes. We wouldn’t have existed without this primordial urge to grow and divert whenever we can. Evolution means upward growth, based on a firm rock bottom. Don’t you think it’s funny that we now all have mobiles, yet download apps onto those like madmen? I do. A splendid opportunity for Cloud web apps, and what happens? Install local."
• How to create an OpenShift github quick start project | Red Hat Openshift Forum – RT @gshipley: Check out my new blog post on creating #openshift quick start projects. #cloud #paas

Podcast with Red Hat's Carl Trieloff on oVirt

oVirt is the newly announced project focused on open source virtualization management, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduler, and more. Earlier this week, I had a chance to sit down with Carl Trieloff, Red Hat's technical director for cloud, to discuss the ins and out of oVirt. Among the topics we cover are:

• What is oVirt?
• How does oVirt relate to the Open Virtualization Alliance and the KVM hypervisor?
• How will licensing and code contributions work?
• What's the governance model?
• What comes next?

Listen to MP3 (9:06)

Listen to OGG (9:06)

 

Links for today seems to be broken

With the, ahem, less than elegant relaunch of the delicious bookmark saving tool, I'm back on pinboard. Alas, the Javascript I've been using to format JSON feeds into a form I could use to easily generate daily postings is now broken on both sites. (The delicious version never worked on pinboard.) My very inexpert eyes don't spy the problem immediately. I may fix this or I may, at least for the moment, continue to experiment with different ways of sharing content. One of my considerations here is that, while I'm all in for posting on the social media darling of the moment, I also want to largely mirror on a site I control or can at least easily export in a meaningful form--in this case, Blogger.

Links for 09-26-2011

• auntie pixelante › get lamp - I see the point--though don't really agree. Jason's film did focus on the players who ultimately made the most impact. It's a choice and not necessarily a bad one.
• Voting to Hire a Chief Without Meeting Him - NYTimes.com - "...when the search committee of four directors narrowed the candidates to three finalists, no one else on the board was willing to interview them. And when the committee finally chose Mr. Apotheker and again suggested that other directors meet him, no one did. Remarkably, when the 12-member board voted to name Mr. Apotheker as the successor to the recently ousted chief executive, Mark Hurd, most board members had never met Mr. Apotheker."
• Why I’m Stepping Down from TechCrunch | The Reformed Broker - The sad thing is, as one commenter noted, that it takes a while to realize this is humor unless someone tells you going in.
• Bryce's Ramblings: Board Games on the iPad

Links for 09-16-2011

• How Whole Foods "Primes" You To Shop | Fast Company - "The prices for the flowers, as for all the fresh fruits and vegetables, are scrawled in chalk on fragments of black slate--a tradition of outdoor European marketplaces. It's as if the farmer pulled up in front of Whole Foods just this morning, unloaded his produce, then hopped back in his flatbed truck to drive back upstate to his country farm. The dashed-off scrawl also suggests the price changes daily, just as it might at a roadside farm stand or local market. But in fact, most of the produce was flown in days ago, its price set at the Whole Foods corporate headquarters in Texas. Not only do the prices stay fixed, but what might look like chalk on the board is actually indelible; the signs have been mass-produced in a factory."
• Bill Poole's Creative Abrasion: Business-IT Alignment - A nice feedback diagram.
• Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
• The Agonies of Picking a Product Name - Fog Creek Blog - "Picking a product name is all agony and no ecstasy. It’s also a giant time-slurping vortex. And in the end, it kind of doesn’t matter."
• How many photos have ever been taken? | 1000memories
• R&D is Important, But For Whom? – tecosystems - "What the above suggests, however, is that R&D is relatively independent of financial performance for companies that conduct it, with the caveats that this is merely a five year sample and that the selection of vendors is arbitrary and cross-industry. Which in turn implies that Palmisano is correct, and that we should consider research and development separately, because the two may actually have little to do with one another."
• The books business: Great digital expectations | The Economist - "TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read."
• Photos, Copyrights, and the “Mechanical Representation of Facts” - I lean towards the narrower view of copyright here. Anything else strikes me as a very steep slippery slope.
• Fountainhead: IT-as-a-Service: Models for Consumption, Operations, Technology - "The market is equating virtualization with cloud, and worse, equating cloud with IT Transformation."
• Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT - Perspectives: CA Technologies corporate blog - CA Technologies - "Consumer-driven IT extends beyond the enterprise (fire)walls too. Like all consumers, your customers are rapidly becoming used to accessing cloud services whenever it suits them; they are connecting with product and service vendors online; they are interacting with businesses through social media and portable cloud-connected apps. Yet none of this means that employees are inherently correct in their sourcing decisions."
• CrunchFund? No Matter What You Call It, It's Business as Usual in SV. - Kara Swisher - Media - AllThingsD - "By early evening, after my kids told me to chillax, my dark mood had changed to accept that the transaction — however profoundly distasteful to me — was part and parcel of the insidious log-rolling, back-scratching ecosystem that has happened in every other center of power in the universe since the beginning of time."
• Be warned: cloud, virtual apps can magnify the cost of wasted software licenses | ITworld
• Red Hat's Aeolus to 'out-Linux' Rackspace's cloud • The Register
• Nikon: we don't need mirrorless cameras | News | TechRadar UK

Quick Review: La Cave, Wynn Las Vegas

I was looking for a light but nice bite to tide me over to dinner after suffering through a 45 minute check-in line at the Wynn. Self-service kiosks--even if just as a backup. Join the 21st century people. I know you want to give the personal touch and all that but, if the personal touch involves handing water bottles to people who have been standing in line for a half hour, you'd be better off trying something else.

But I digress.

Anyway, La Cave piqued my interest. The advertising copy describes it justly: "With its low-slung ceilings and cozy nooks, La Cave is the ideal retreat for indulging in Chef Bill DeMarco’s savory small plates, oven-fired flatbreads, charcuterie and modern specialties that are perfect for sharing and pairing with wine.  In addition to the innovative wine program,  La Cave features an extensive selection of hand crafted beers and fine spirits, making this the ultimate spot for lunch, dinner or late night revelry."

Which sounds about right. Although the space towards the back--that opened up into a garden area (though at 110 degrees, no one seemed much interested in outdoor seating)--was actually pretty light and airy.

I ordered a mixed sausage flatbread pizza (and a Doghead IPA). Seemed about right for a light lunch. The surprise came when, after a frankly not very long delay, the manager came in to apologize for the wait and present me with their bacon-wrapped dates with a blue cheese fondue sauce (pictured).

The flatbread when it (soon) arrived was good enough with just the right amount of heat. Though, in truth, it wasn't all that different or better than other good flatbread pizzas I've had. The dates were extremely flavorful however. A nice blend of textures and flavors with the bacon perfectly cooked. I may have to try to recreate that one.

Strongly recommended with the service a big plus.

I would point to the restaurant website but it's embedded in one of those horrible Flash things that Las Vegas casinos are even more inexplicably attached to than restaurants and hotels as a whole are.

How the mobile era changes TV

Access to information and communications has changed so radically that storylines dependent on them not being available have to explain why they're not rather than the other way around. If I were plopped down 20 years ago, I would feel incredibly frustrated by how difficult it would be to track down information and people.From James Poniewozik of Time Magazine:

As it turns out, back in 1976, people would practice tennis on courts that happened to have landline phones perched next to the net. Indeed, maybe the most striking thing about comparing this old segment to modern action shows is how much mobile technology has changed the contemporary drama. In the new Charlie's Angels—as on any thriller/espionage show now—characters are constantly getting cellphone calls, checking tablets computers, generally relying on a constant access to information that, from the standpoint of the 1970s, is something close to psychic ability.

Open clouds isn't a license question

From Marten Mickos Says: Keep the Cloud Open:

The problem is that it's tougher to define "share and share alike" in the cloud space. It's not just about code, it's also about data, APIs and company policies that affect whether use of cloud services are open or not. "The border line between me and the one serving me is different. If I'm a Facebook user, I don't need the  GPL to protect me... I need the right to withdraw my data.

The definition of open needs to change, says Mickos. "Though the GPL is a great thing... as we move into the cloud, it's not enough. We need to extend the definition of open for code, data and APIs." Mickos closed the keynote saying that the community needs to protect the principles of "sharing and sharing alike" for the next generation to enjoy it in the cloud the same way the current generation has enjoyed it with Linux and open source.

I'm certainly all on board with the idea of cloud interoperability and portability. And so are most of the users I speak with. In fact, I just finished co-presenting a Red Hat-sponsored webinar in which we included a poll question asking viewers how important portability was to them. The results? Overwhelmingly somewhat or very important.

There's no disputing that figuring out what sort of freedoms and portability are the most important to maintain in the cloud is an ongoing process. I discuss some of the issues in this piece I wrote while still an industry analyst a few years back.

However, I'm less convinced about encoding freedoms in licenses. And, in fact, the trend seems to be headed in the opposite directions. The Affero GPL--which essentially extends the copyleft provisions of the GPL to the case where software is delivered over the network in the form of a service--has not been widely adopted. Furthermore, there seems to be an overall trend toward the use of more permissive licenses such as BSD, Apache, and MIT rather than strong copyleft licenses like the GPL. (This post of mine on CNET has some more background on both the trend and the way the various licenses work.)

It is indeed right and good to promote open and interoperable clouds. I also firmly believe it's going to be the winning side just as it has (often) been elsewhere. But partly for that reason, I'm unconvinced that the open source license landscape is the right place to look for answers even if the overall success and values of open source is.

 

"Just do it" works better for Nike than private clouds

From AGIMO and cloud - when aloof is good | Cloud CIO - 

Moving workloads to the cloud without considering the other cross dependencies such as data, integration, compliance, security, identity, continuity, workflow, licencing, business process, application support, service management, service assurance and the service catalogue, will only mean that it wont take long before something breaks and it might be very hard to fix.

Enterprise adoption of cloud is not a race, it is a journey of transformation, there is too much to be considered in the portfolio approach to a cloud transformation to see it as anything else but a long term transition that needs a program management approach.

Those are a couple of great paragraphs. While focusing on process always has the potential to go off the deep end into some ITIL swamp, the "just do it" approach doesn't cut it for private clouds either.

One of my favorite quotes in this context comes Michael Hammer who wrote: "Automating a mess yields an automated mess." At Red Hat, we've been finding that there's a huge appetite among customers for getting through the knothole from managing IT systems to managing IT as a service--a transformation which is as much about organization and process as it is about technology.

Links for 08-20-2011

• I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Losing the HP Way - Cringely on technology - "Software is a big part of IBM’s profits and it is growing rapidly.  IBM and Oracle have been on buying sprees, picking up one software firm after another.  HP has not.  Software is only three percent of HP’s business.  Are there any good buys out there for HP?  Again it could be a matter of timing.  HP is late getting started.  The best deals may already be gone."
• Unedited Thoughts About Technology Better Left Unposted - "A lot of other companies
  I really fucking hate the way you cede so much ground to Apple. You just let them do the shit they do. Why couldn't you launch a decent tablet before the iPad? Why are your tablets still shittier than the iPad, for the most part? Why do your laptops still, by and large, look and feel crappier than MacBook Pros? (Exception: ThinkPads.) Why are most of your phones the same fucking way? Does Apple have some secret monopoly on making well designed, well constructed, easy-to-use gadgets? I want to love your products. I really really really do. Just make amazing shit. That's the only rule. Make. Amazing. Shit."
• Amy Wohl's Opinions on Cloud Computing and SaaS: What is HP Thinking? - "HP has been trying for some time to move into the arena of enterprise software and services, but they have yet to be a big enough player to gain critical mass and buying another niche software vendor  is unlikely to give them the traction they're looking for. "
• Apple Final Cut Pro X Reviewed: Not Ready for Professionals on Onlinevideo.net – Online Video Strategies, Platforms, News, and Tips
• Taking The 'Lug' Out Of Luggage - Forbes
• Canned Platypus » Blog Archive » Don’t Be a Jerk - "We need to stop enabling the jerks by applauding when they act in deliberately offensive ways on HN, on Twitter, in conference presentations, etc. We need to stop pretending that the combative style prevalent on HN or LKML is the best way to facilitate progress; there’s no empirical evidence that “culling the herd” or “honing one’s weapons” or other such bloody metaphors really apply. We need to stop encouraging young techies to expend their energy emulating those styles instead of developing real people skills. Social skills really do serve a useful purpose, and anyone can improve them."

Links for 08-17-2011

• Daring Fireball: Balls - "That’s not to say it wasn’t a bold, brash move, or even to say it wasn’t the right move for Google and for Android as a platform. But that’s all relative to the position Google was in — and that position was a weak one, and to pretend otherwise is to deny the obvious. And don’t forget that it leaves Google in a tenuous situation with the two leading Android handset makers, Samsung and HTC. I think Apple and Microsoft probably feel pretty good, competitively, about having forced Google into spending $12.5 billion for Motorola — a handset maker with rapidly declining sales, no recent profits, and misguided management."
• Welcome to the Cloud - "Your Apple ID has been disabled." - Scott Hanselman - "The most valuable companies have your valuable data in the cloud. We may think the cloud is decentralized, but it's not. It's totally centralized. All the valuable data is now in one place with one password that's connected to your one bank account. We've centralized and simplified fraud and the public pays for it."
• Performing Security Testing in the Cloud | RightScale Blog
• Direct and Indirect Causality « Wild Webmink - Nice discussion of philosophies underpinning GNU-ish vs. BSD-ish licensing.
• NIST Cloud Computing Standards roadmap
• Mark Hurd Descends Into Hell - Forbes - "Hurd’s job these days, managing the Sun hardware business at Oracle, is positively punk by comparison.  Being in charge of a waning hardware unit at a company run by software dude Larry Ellison can’t be a lot of fun. With revenues in the $10 billion range when it was acquired by Oracle, the Sun unit has continued to lose traction in the marketplace, ceding customers to rivals, particularly IBM, faster than trees here in New England lose their leaves in late October.  Revenues are practically in free fall.  The losses, already at the severed-aorta level at the time of purchase, have accelerated as the unit wastes away."
• SPECIAL REPORT: Hybrid transformation of the cloud - Minerals and Metals Group (MMG), hybrid cloud, HP, hitachi data systems, EMC, datacentre, cloud computing, Citrix, Cisco, CA Technologies, Brocade Communications - ARN - Good piece on hybrid clouds and tailoring for verticals.
• Caterina.net» Blog Archive » Anonymity and Pseudonyms in Social Software - "To my mind there are three categories of Pseudonymous behavior, and they should be treated differently."
• IDC White paper - "While 88% of IT consumers surveyed use a desktop PC to access the Internet for business or personal reasons and 91% use a laptop, fully 80% access the Internet using a smartphone, and 36% – over one-third – access it via a tablet (e.g., iPad)"
• Freakonomics » The Costco Effect: Why Does the Wholesaler Cause Inflation? - "They concluded that the proliferation of Walmart Supercenters may explain 10.5% of the rise in the obesity rate since the 1980s."
• The Chemistry Between Us - mlkshk - Amazing crossword puzzle.
• Borders bankruptcy: Done in by its own stupidity, not the Internet. - By Annie Lowrey - Slate Magazine - "Barnes & Noble may well not be around in five years. But at least it has built a business that recognizes the trends in bookselling—toward the Internet, toward e-readers, toward a more boutique retail experience, away from big-box stores. It is remarkably similar to the strategy Borders laid out in its bankruptcy filing."

Links for 07-21-2011

• HP’s Tortured WebOS Positioning | Monday Note - "The reality is simpler — and harder: HP decided to enter the smartphone/tablet fray. It thus competes with Android and iOS. The consumerization of IT renders the “enterprise-only” pivot null and void. In this new world, Google and Apple wage an ecosystem war: devices + apps + distribution. Add marketing, if you want, but Word Of Mouth is still more potent than ad dollars. Or merely reinforces it."
• TidBITS Networking: The Future is Disposable - "But that world is coming to an end. In the future our digital lives won’t be defined by and centered on our devices, but on our information itself. Everything from our data to our applications will be portable, accessible, and persistent. Our devices, including our computers, will become disposable. Their value becomes nothing more than the cost of the hardware, and we will never fear physical loss or failure."
• Today's real life is yesterday's science fiction. : raldi
• Why Not Tumblr - "Tumblr treats content more like a social network does than a writing/publishing/archiving tool should—with an emphasis on easy sharing and reblogging, but not enough care paid to hosting that content in a place where ideas and conversations can live and grow over time, a place where search engines of the future can find it."

Links for 06-16-2011

• Photos of Vancouver rioting - The Globe and Mail - The first photo is pretty funny in a way.
• The “Post-PC” Era: It’s Real, But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does | Forrester Blogs
• Most Common iPhone Passcodes | iPhone | Daniel Amitay - "Most of the top passcodes follow typical formulas, such as four identical digits, moving in a line up/down the pad, repetition. 5683 is the passcode with the least obvious pattern, but it turns out that it is the number representation of LOVE (5683), once again mimicking a very common internet password: “iloveyou.”"
• world subways at scale - fake is the new real
• Dogs Make Employees More Productive At Work
• Photopic Sky Survey - Finger Lakes ML-8300 monochrome
• DARPA’s Regina Dugan on “The Nation’s Elite Army of Futuristic Techno-geeks” – AllThingsD
• Welcome to Pyongyang on the Behance Network
• Should We Care if People Don't Pay Their Debts? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - "People really underweight the role that norms play in sustaining a modern economy."

Links for 06-09-2011

• Facebook's face recognition strategy may be just the ticket - O'Reilly Radar - "This is part of my general thinking about privacy. We need to move away from a Maginot-line like approach where we try to put up walls to keep information from leaking out, and instead assume that most things that used to be private are now knowable via various forms of data mining. Once we do that, we start to engage in a question of what uses are permitted, and what uses are not."
• “It Just Works.” - "Files are something Microsoft worries about. Files in the cloud are something Google and Amazon worry about. Apple’s iCloud is about opening an application and the thing you want to access being there."
• She texted. We kicked her out. : Blog : Austin : Alamo Drafthouse Cinema - "Ma'am, you may be free to text in all the other theaters in the Magnited States of America, but here at our "little crappy ass theater," you are not. Why you may ask? Well, we actually do give a f*$k."
• WoodITWork.com » Why VMwaorld vCloud Director Isn't for Today's Private Cloud - Generally agree with respect to automation/service catalog but isolation and security are important even in private cloud context.
• 451 CAOS Theory » The trend towards permissive licensing
• announcing olduse.net
• Short logic (Groupon IPO: Pass on this deal) - "Losing billions for years is generally not a winning strategy, despite the odd exception."

Links for 06-03-2011

• Apple Retail commemorates 10th anniversary with emotive poster - Apple - "Speaking of T-shirts, we’ve learned more than you can imagine about our own. We’ve found that when we wear black T-shirts, we blend in. And when we wear too many colors it’s confusing. But blue shirts are just right. We’ve also learned that it takes precisely 4,253 stitches to embroider the Apple logo on those blue shirts. And we even figured out which direction the stitches should go in."
• Greenpoint Gazette:An Open Letter from Eugene Mirman to Time Warner Cable - "However, overall your company is run like an ill managed Soviet factory. I bet if Ayn Rand was still alive, she’d write a fun to read, but poorly argued book about how appalling and inefficient your company is. Please cut it out. Thank you."
• Workplace Culture – DEC’s Role Model « Perspectives
• Is Cloud Computing Really Killing IT Pro Jobs?
• The Incompleat Known Space Concordance
• Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea « Locklin on science
• The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse - BusinessWeek
• zBX and the Next IBM Hypervisor « DancingDinosaur

Links for 05-26-2011

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

Links for 05-24-2011

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

Links for 05-16-2011

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

Links for 05-01-2011

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