Links for October 12th through October 13th

A little something extra…

Speaking of gear, my friend Charles got a new LCD Apple Cinema Display yesterday (see above, and this series of photos). It’s a fantastic piece of equipment, and for a $1,000, expensive but not as outrageous as I’d assume an Apple monitor would be.

Aside from the monitor itself, the wiring that comes with it is well thought out: it has a laptop charger built in (so you can plug your laptop in via the monitor) and provides a 4 port USB hub (you plug a USB cord into your computer, the ports on the monitor become a hub). I mean, come on, that’s just really smart.

Being a whacky-programmer, Charles says it’s good for pair programming, which is actually an excellent point. And, you know, it’s just beautiful to look at.

Next time I have a spare $1,000 banging around <rolls eyes>, I need to get one. I imagine video editing on it is awesome, and reading Twitter stupendous ;>

The Links

• IBM Extends Cloud Presence Beyond IBM Servers
• Kick me in the nuts: Apache Board Should Consider Dumping Java Development
  this guy doesn't like the IBM/Oracle power duo.
• Amazon's iPhone app gets barcode scanning update
  One of those obvious but still really cool things. I already comparison shop with the Amazon app when I'm out (books mostly), and this will make it easier.
• PaaS Strategy: Data not Code
  Bob makes the case for data being a big part of a PaaS – analytics (more horse power, storage at your disposal for cheaper), integration, aggregation (crowd-sourcing over previously impossible to pool data), etc.
• Lloyds Banking Group cuts 4,500 IT and operations jobs
  Without knowing the details, its sketchy to speculate: but there's a trend of 100's if not 1,000's of IT people getting axed from big companies and government. Perhaps, part of that "technical debt" (the new term for "legacy") is the need for people to take care of legacy IT instead of being able to automate it.
• LinkedIn's Data Infrastructure
  "Much of LinkedIn's important data is offline – it moves fairly slowly. So they use daily batch processing with Hadoop as an important part of their calculations. For example, they pre-compute data for their "People You May Know" product this way, scoring 120 billion relationships per day in a mapreduce pipeline of 82 Hadoop jobs that requires 16 TB of intermediate data. This job uses a statistical model to predict the probability of two people knowing each other. Interestingly they use bloom filters to speed up large joins, yielding a 10x performance improvement."
• There’s a Dark Cloud over Microsoft–Cloud Computing
  Two references of folks moving to the cloud, both for consumer/external facing apps, though – moving their "web apps," as it were to Amazon, it seems.
• YouTube – catechnologies's Channel
• Anna Chapman’s shiny new bank job
  As always, Bruce Sterling keeps us up-to-date on the consumerization of spies.
• VMware preps vCenter management client for the iPad
  More from the IT Management for iOS front.
• A Search Market Craters – Welcome to the App Diaspora
  While stealing revenue from closed source is fine, halving you market size must present its own problems. Still, in this case, it's just part of the market: the OEM market (selling to other ISVs), not the corporate market.
• AbleBrains: Can Marketo Give Marketers Some Cred?
• MindQuilt Q&A Now Available with EventBrite | MindQuilt
  Use the Q&A service MindQuilt around conferences and such done through Eventbrite.
• Product launch: a checklist
  A list of (mostly) PR-related things to do before launching a tech release, product, service, etc.
• Gay Talese Travels Well « 1 L
  "Perhaps because a majority of passengers, even those flying first class or business, are shabbily-attired on airplanes—people dress for comfort, caring little about being eyesores—those few of us who bring fashion to frequent flying are treated like royalty, or so has been my experience."
• Financial Times’ iPad App Brings In £1 Million
  "The Financial Times’ new iPad app has generated more than £1 ($1.59) million in advertising revenue since it was launched in May" off 400,000 subscribers.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.