RT @sjvn: Open source and the National Security Agency, together again. #opensource #NSA by @sjvn

Links for 05-25-2012

"But totally personalized advertising is icky and oxymoronic. And, after half a decade or more at the business of making maximally-personalized ads, the main result is what Michael calls “the desultory ticky-tacky kind that litters the right side of people’s Facebook profiles.”"

"It's also not as if some other company has emerged as the Kodak of digital. In the company's golden age, consumers used a Kodak camera to take pictures on Kodak film, which they then had processed by a Kodak lab on Kodak paper. Today, no single company has replicated that ecosystem in digital form. There are camera manufacturers, and memory-card manufacturers, and printer companies, and photo-sharing sites--and all of these businesses benefit from healthy competition among multiple major players, rather than the monopolistic position that Kodak once enjoyed."

Cuban hits some key points. It's even harder to monetize with ads in mobile and he (I believe correctly) notes that we're moving away from all-you-can-eat mobile data which will make the situation even worse.

RT @poniewozik: Fox suing over Auto Hop ad-skipper. I have a (pre-suit) column on it this week: my life as a TV thief.

Not sure I buy that only Verizon retains text message contents. The others must store it somewhere for some length of time in order to transmit it, e.g. to phones that aren't currently on.

Some good discussion in comments here about limitations of gaining insights from even large qtys of data.

Seems to sum things up pretty well (though I'd leave out the word 'sadly'). -- "Based on testimony in the trial, and remarks from Gosling and others, it's clear that whether they meant to or not, Google very much irked people at Sun Microsystems when Google decided to bypass Java and go with a clean-room implementation of Java in the form of the Dalvik VM in Android. And "irked" is probably an understatement. But sadly, you can't really sue people for being jerks. And there's also the argument that Sun may have forced Google's hand by dual-licensing Java under the GPL and a proprietary license for commercial use. That was certainly Sun's prerogative, of course, but it doesn't completely jibe with their much-touted "Java is free" mantra."

This is very cool. You can create laptop skins with your own photos.

RT @maslett: "the entire management team and 20 percent of all Autonomy's staff have left since the HP takeover"

RT @thedailybeast: A battle for New York Public Library's (@NYPL) soul prompts the question: Who's reading the books?

Links for 05-23-2012

My take on yesterday's MIT Sloan CIO Symposium

RT @richsands: “@robilad: "The board is happy to announce that ... Simon Phipps is the new President." ” Congrats @w ...

RT @jpuppet: RT @cloudpundit Hype cycle of Vendor Briefing Requests <- hilarious .. (analysts get frustrated too ...

RT @IIAR: (Humor) The Rosetta Stone of IT Industry Analysts | ZDNet

Levelator did a nice job of fixing up a podcast I recently recorded with very uneven levels

A new (short) video about identity management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux

RT @petapixel: 30 minute video limit in digital cameras may be on its way out: << tariff related

RT @cobiacomm: RT @Virtela: #PaaS is leaving hosts and moving towards enterprise data centers. @ghaff explains @r ...

PaaS moves into the data center (by me)

"Ultimately, if it looks like middleware and acts like middleware, it probably is middleware – whatever the vendors may assert. PaaS, in other words, is the new “write once, run anywhere.”"

"While the newest open source projects such as OpenStack and OpenShift have chosen to use the Apache License, a non-copyleft or "permissive" open source license with good patent protections, I believe in time we will see the licensing trend for new open source projects targeted at commercial collaboration swing back to the center, away from either the GPL or Apache extremities. Until recently, none of the mainstream "center ground" open source licenses has been optimal. These are the Mozilla Public License (MPL -- and its many "vanity name" variants), the Eclipse license, the CDDL (used widely by projects influenced by Sun Microsystems), and of course, the LGPL."

@j0el You see this?

What a breathtakingly unprofessional response to my criticism of a marketing strategy.

Podcast interview (+ transcript) with @kurtmilne on how organizations are building clouds from survey data

"For some people, private PaaS is an oxymoron: ‘how can it be a service if my organization hosts the infrastructure’? Admittedly, to date, most of the discussion about PaaS has been purely in terms of describing a public cloud service. But the “as a service” aspect of PaaS really depends on the service consumer’s point of view. From a development team’s viewpoint, when its interface is a set of platform services, the team couldn’t care less whether its infrastructure team or an external provider such as Microsoft supplies the infrastructure."

"The true cloud is the collection of processors that exist virtually everywhere you turn, including mobile devices and sensors. That's where the definition of Cloud must go. In many ways it's returning Cloud to one of its progenitors, ubiquitous computing. By that point there won't be a Public, Private or Personal Cloud, there'll be "just" Cloud (or maybe some other term). Where your application is hosted will still remain important, but not because of any artificial reasons due to words such as 'private' or 'public'."

RT @webmink: Got an old version of OpenOffice (3.3 or 3.4 beta)? Time to upgrade:

RT @pgillin: I never, ever get tired of "Yours is a Very Bad Hotel." Always good for a laugh.

" “The Itanium situation is one of our most closely guarded secrets,” wrote Martin Fink, the head of HP’s high-end server business, to another executive."

"It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, be­cause apps are the fu­ture. Wait! Apps are doomed be­cause HTML5 is the fu­ture. I see some­thing al­most every day say­ing one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong."

RT @matteastwood: Nice looking agenda at ODCA Forecast 2012: cc @benkepes @RaejeanneS @GeorgeReese @Beaker @ghaff @ ...

RT @DanJuengst: The Rebels built their own Death Star to battle the evil empire. #PaaS

Links for 05-15-2012

"The Internet is, among other things, a massive, chaotic marketplace. Too much information, it turns out, is a lot like no information. “If we researched every single purchase, we wouldn’t have time to make any purchases,” says Anna Kirmani, a marketing professor at the University of Maryland. “I have better things to do with my time.” Signaling can be a shorthand to identify whom you want to buy from. That’s why we may need it now more than ever."

BTW, if you're averse to podcasts, also a transcript of my architectures & APIs interview w @jamesurquhart

"Ten years later, at the Ethel Barrymore, I found myself squirming in my seat from boredom and exasperation, amazed at how much glaringly conventional stagecraft “Salesman” was able to pack into its two acts. The rising action, the dramatic irony, the laborious, grandstanding speeches (“Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing…When you’re rotting somewhere beside the railroad tracks, remember, and don’t you dare blame it on me”)—I kept wanting to exclaim, “It sounds like a play!”"

Quite the read, though IMO somewhat overstated.

RT @RedHatNews: Red Hat Celebrates 10 Years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Reaffirms Strategic Direction #redhat

So many "column inches" in the online tech press is devoted to endlessly regurgitating these sorts of rumors. Cheap clicks.

"“Those of you who know our products deeply know that they don’t fit as well together as they need to,” Herrod told the VMUG attendees. “Some have multiple databases. Some don’t look the same. Some install differently. And what I can’t stand is that currently Site Recovery Manager doesn’t work with vCloud Director.”"

I checked in at Sandrine's (8 Holyoke St) on #Yelp

More domestic flying than international in summer Euro airfare this summer was really $$ when I looked

Expensify is apparently trying to bridge to offering a Tripit-like service

Links for 05-11-2012

RT @mathewi: how the owner of the Harvard bookstore figured out a way to compete with Amazon: <<will have to check out

RT @zeekayinfo3: "Some Basics of #Cloud Computing in 10 Minutes" @redhat @nethawk @ghaff

"Time heals all wounds. Except at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), where old wounds fester with remarkable persistence and where there seems to be a deep bench of executives unfamiliar with the concept of a bygone."

Nice PaaS "infographic" from #redhat announcement yesterday

Links for 05-12-2012

"Freemium is fantastic when it works. Problem is, it doesn’t work all that often."

"Your comments are being live-blogged," one employee told her defiantly. Whitman challenged the man. "You all have taken leaking to a new art form," she said. "It's a sign of an unhappy company. You wish HP ill." The tapping suddenly stopped, and as the room fell silent, the mobile devices were lowered.

I'll be on a couple of panels at ODCA Forecast 2012 in New York in June

"The first time I saw PandoDaily, I was convinced it was unfinished, or a spoof. Now it’s been running for a while, I’m aghast. Were one to crowdsource the ten most anachronistic WordPress theme features from the last five years and jam them together with horse glue, you would struggle to come up with something uglier or more difficult to navigate." << Amusing in a high school fighting cliques sort of way.

RT @screnshaw: "Red Hat is the leader in open source and cloud computing"
@seekingalpha

"If Sterling is right, and he is one of the deans of high performance computing, it seems likely that we'll never reach the next milestone in supercomputing in silicon. Physicist Michio Kaku says Moore's Law will collapse in about ten years. Sterling agrees, and says it comes down to the basic physical restrictions of working with atoms."

RT @bryanwche: Why #OpenShift is the ultimate cloud application platform for enterprise developers #PaaS #redhat

Here's video of @matthicksj explaining how #redhat infrastructure products used to support @openshift PaaS

Long day of webinars about implementing an open cloud. Stop by if you get a chance!

RT @joefern1: Red Hat Unveils Enterprise PaaS Strategy << Multiple PaaS operations models

Kicking off a day of webinars

Here's a video of my cloud trends presentation from #opencloudconf