links for 2009-10-01

"But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing…For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade."

i'm late with this – i've had it clanking around my browser for weeks – but it's awesome

he always has called it like he's seen it

Rackspace on its investments in Cassandra

reactions to websitespark

Joel on the ultimate anti-Architecture Astronaut

how Github planned for its migration

"As an informational point, Google's has 4 times as much inbound RPC traffic as compared to REST traffic. And that may underestimate the difference, as RPCs can contain more than one request in a batch." – interesting

some really useful suggestions out there for folks working for themselves

the tools definitely have their limitations, but a lot of that is lifecycle rather than intrinsic flaws in the approach

i agree. GNOME Shell's very alpha-ish right now, but it's a neat project.

a really interesting – and positive – look at Silverlight from the perspective of some Mac devs

i could get behind altdb

just what it says