Links for December 4th through December 7th

A little something extra…

I should probably put down the laptop over the weekend, but who can help it? And then there’s the iPhone with Google Reader all wired up on it. Some of my weekend reading is bookmarked below, and it follows the usual path of catching up on Austin news and what I call “meat-space news,” news about the non-tech world.

The notion that China is looking around Africa to off-shore manufacturing is fascinating and, I’ll admit, feels like a bit karmic as someone who used to freak out about my job getting off-shored (in software development) and had my dad (pictured above from them times) live through manufacturing off-shoring.

Related, but not below, see this short tour of a USB thumb-drive factory in Shenzhen from GearCrunch’s John Biggs.

The Links

• Can I get a price check on this AMI?
  William Vambenepe hunts down how much it costs to run Tivoli in the cloud
• IBM thinks outside the box with containerized data centres
• Private cloud: Self-service IT at your command
  Brief customer case of setting up a (beta) private cloud for self-service.
• Google Analytics Gets An Upgrade With Annotations, New API And More
• Eclipse Development using the Graphical Editing Framework and the Eclipse Modeling Framework
• The Habits of Heavy Mobile Web Users
  Some consumer-oriented survey percentages for what people do on mobile phones over 2007, 2008, and 2009: obviously, use to look stuff up on the internet is rising.
• EclipseRT Usage « EclipseSource Blog
  Looks like an interesting use of EclipseRT by some folks in Texas.
• Dell to set up mobile business unit
• Novell to mashup management tools
  Novell pulling together its IT Management portfolio. Also, working on a packaging for SUSE based cloud computing for 2010.
• 2009's Top Netbooks
  El Reg likes the Toshiba NB200-11L.
• Exascale Computing Requires Chips, Power and Money
  "Now, though, new challenges have presented themselves. The researchers say that moving data from the supercomputer's thousands of processors into its memory will require them to design new architectures that reduce the need to move data around. 'Some people say that flops are almost free, that really what you are paying for is moving the data,' Dosanjh said."
• An Invenient Truth: Intel Larrabee story revealed
• Intel puts cloud on single megachip
  Seems like Intel is re-framing "parallel programming" as "cloud," at least in this context: "In other words, the SCC ran off-the-shelf, real-world software thanks to its IA compliance, and functioned in the Hadoop demo as a datacenter-on-a-chip. 'The move to Intel Architecture–compatible cores gives us an opportunity to make more ambitious efforts on the programming side,' Rattner said." Kind of nice re-framing: parallel programming is scary and new, while cloud computing is fun and new.
• The Cloud is Raining on ITIL
• Goodbye noughties, hello . . . tens? Twenty-tens? Teens?
  Well, obviously "the teens."
• Low-key Houston mayor hopes his hometown popularity translates statewide
  Intro piece to Houston mayor who's running for Texas governor in 2010.
• Eric Schmidt: Government Too Slow For Me, Comcast Made A Pretty Smart Move
  Interesting SMB affinity. That segment probably makes up the majority of Google's revenue?
• NSFW: Sleepless in London. It’s scary outside the bubble
• Cap Metro rail testing suspended
• Free swine flu shot now open to all in Travis
  I thought this thing was supposed to ravage the country side: and now they're having to give it away.
• China 'wants to set up factories in Africa'
  China gets its own off-shoring threat: "'There is not only willingness but strong interest among some in China, and I've discussed with the minister of commerce, Chen Deming, that there may be possibilities of moving some of the lower-value manufacturing facilities to sub-Saharan Africa, toys or footwear,' Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, told the Financial Times."
• Solid Waste Services: Toward a greener future
  "When the international recycling market collapsed last year, wholesale prices dropped below processing costs, so Austin now owes Greenstar roughly $2.3 million in fees. However, Leffingwell argued that the overall program still succeeded by increasing recycling by 50%, and, he said, 'We didn't lose money overall because we saved so much money by shifting to single-stream.' (The savings came primarily from reduced transport costs from running fewer collection trucks.)"
• Properties of Networked Publics | varnelis.net
• the white white lights
  This band played at the Blanton last night.
• Apple buys internet music site Lala.com

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.