links for 2008-11-04

one perspective on Azure

another perspective on Azure

hahaha…i demand that this call be recorded and integrated into Lodo Conversations

"We can (and will) have debates about the relative openness of Azure and AWS and Force.com and all the other "cloud platforms" that are available or will be available. And those will be important debates. But in this early stage of the cloud's development, openness means little to the buyer (or user). The buyers, particularly those in big companies, are nervous about the cloud even as they are becoming increasingly eager to reap the benefits the cloud can provide. What they care about right now is security, reliability, features, compatibility with their existing systems and applications, ease of adoption, stability of the vendor, and other practical concerns. In the long run, they may come to regret their lack of stress on openness, but in the here-and-now it's just not a major consideration. They want stuff that works and won't blow up in their faces." – agreed

"The Free Software Foundation has released the GNU Free Document License version 1.3. Section 11 of that license now (essentially) permits certain wikis to be relicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (v3.0) license, so long as the relicensing is completed by August 1, 2009. That means, the Wikipedia community now has the choice to relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license. (Here's the FAQ for the amendment.)" – interesting news indeed

"The GNOME Foundation announced today that Motorola and Google are joining the GNOME Advisory board and sponsoring the GNOME Foundation." – interesting news, to say the least. damn them, though, for not staggering the news 🙂

"Very early on when we started work on Drizzle the plan was to focus web applications. When we looked at cutting features, one of the criteria was "is this needed for web deployment". In many cases we have leaned toward keeping functionality when it was clearly well designed and had a general usefulness. To give an example, ROLLUP for instance is not typically used for web applications, but it is a well written feature that provides us with functionality that we find is handy."

"This is a smartish move by Microsoft. It will make, thanks to Miguel's prescience, MS Office available on the GNU/Linux desktop. However it will cost Microsoft a fortune in server hardware and electricity, and there are formidable problems around metering and managing the live service, particularly against a leaner, simpler free (beer) rival in Google. Of course, as soon as the half of computer users with laptops go dis-connected, or catch a flight (when can we expect high-bandwidth, low latency transatlantic internet services ? or even ubiquitous in-seat power ?) – they will have to use OpenOffice anyway, oh, and their portable hardware will need to be beefy enough to be capable of running that, so – why not author it there in the first place ?" – Michael Meeks view on the hosted Office release

"If the entire EC2 service is down a cumulative four hours and twenty minutes, customers must furnish proof of the outage to Amazon to be eligible for the 10% credit. This seems like an onerous process for very little compensation, and isn't in-line with Amazon's famous "Relentless Customer Obsession"." – getting to this late, but worth a read

"While there have been various responses to the analysis—including this LWN comment thread—there has, as yet, been no real counter-analysis that comes to a different conclusion." – this is the answer to a previous question i received on why i considered Meeks' post interesting.

"Telecommuting's foes couldn't be more misguided. When gasoline costs $4 a gallon, companies shouldn't just be doing all they can to expand telecommuting — they should be scrapping their offices entirely. No, not turning them into toy-filled communal spaces, as advertising titan Chiat/Day infamously did in the early-'90s, but abandoning them outright."

neat. even commercialized, it leaves the problem of greenhouse gas emissions, but still, fascinating.

i won't go quite this far, but it's certainly the direction i'm headed

this is one peninsula up from me. i could very much do without rogue waves, as could – presumably – our dock.

i love my manual, and i absolutely loathe auto-shifters (at least every one i've driven), so i hope this is wrong