Deal acceleration by fine wine wager (from Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance) (Taken with instagram)

“It occurred to me that if this is the creative energy that supposedly renders the U.S. immune to foreign competition we might be in some trouble.”

jessethorn:

HELLO, COMPUTER!

As one of my old managers used to say, “I read this five times and I’m still not sure if it’s in English.” (Taken with instagram)

Just in case you forgot. And: steak knives.

My tie was the symbol of how serious and important a year this was, and I wore it every day to show this.

Livin’ the dream (by cote)

“They drilled that into you. They said, “This is what we’re teaching you is how to basically be a leader,” and that leadership meant being proactive, not being passive. It meant getting in, if you will, on the discussion. I got that. I got it. It made sense to me because, yeah, in the meeting, if you sit there and say nothing, probably no one pays attention to you. You won’t go anywhere in life.”

I drove clear across Austin on Monday last week to meet Barton at The Domain and pick up the new machine. Saying this sounds strange, but the experience unboxing this laptop was significantly different than any other computer I’ve ever opened. The packaging itself was elegant, even beautiful.

To be clear, it's just a project, not a product. But, hey, check it out!

Taken with Instagram at Dell Round Rock 1

We are installing this on all the shards today
allspaw, instagr.am

I’d love to see a chart like this for computers and software.

(via Fascinating chart from new BofA auto report showing pace of t… on Twitpic)

21 percent of Ultrabooks purchased by midmarket companies were bought in big box retail stores such as Best Buy, in part because the purchasers could actually handle the product before plunking down the cash. Because Ultrabooks are touted as lightweight and highly portable, the ability to handle the merchandise gives retail channels have an advantage over online channels, where the greatest advantage is often a lower price.

When it comes to operating-system-specific details and solutions, the text exclusively describes Linux. At no time will it contain any information about other OSes. The author has no interest in discussing the implications for other OSes. If the reader thinks s/he has to use a different OS they have to go to their vendors and demand they write documents similar to this one.

I used to spend a lot of time diagramming out stuff like this. Coding!

Finally, I do not think the economic case is settled. The thing to bear in mind is that service providers operate their DCs as profit centers (its what they do), which is different from most enterprises, which operate their data centers as costs centers (support what they do). This is an important distinction, because the it guides how organizations fund and invest in their IT infrastructure—for the former you optimize you data center to maximize revenue generation capability, for the latter, you optimize to minimize expense. If you are looking to drive revenue, the only hurdle is to show you can effectively monetize the investment—give me $1.00 and I will give you a $1.50 back in a meaningful period of time. If you are looking to optimize for expenses, its a bit more challenging—while there is no inherent limit to how much revenue you can generate, this is a natural limit to how much money you can save (you cannot drive costs below 0). Often, if you have sunk cost in infrastructure that is otherwise up and running well, the best course of action is to do nothing—I find that if you are going to make an “invest-to-save” argument to a customer, you better have some solid, empirical data to back it up. The reality is that all this SDN stuff might end up being amazingly cool and useful but not really do anything meaningful for TCO. In recent history, both cloud and server virtualization were introduced with much heralded costs savings. As we have gained experience with these technologies, we have found them quite useful, but the economic angle has not always played out as expected.

#winning

In a word: yuh!

(via A brief history of Microsoft’s e-reader efforts — Mobile Technology News)

(via Karelian Pie with Egg Butter | Flickr - Photo Sharing!)

From the saturation app, the “garden swimming pool” colors

Justin Fox
By Justin Fox, wired.com

It’s an age of unprece­dent­ed, stag­ger­ing tech­no­log­i­cal change. Busi­ness mod­els are being trans­formed, lives are being upend­ed, vast new hori­zons of pos­si­bil­i­ty opened up. Or some­thing like that. These are all pret­ty com­mon…

“We have no colonies on Mars, we still can’t get by without prehistoric fuel, the dishwasher still doesn’t get all the dishes clean, and very few of us have personal jetpacks. You call this progress?”

BYOD Still Blocked for Official Work Tasks
Isha Suri, siliconangle.com

A recent sur­vey by Mime­cast, a sup­pli­er of cloud-based email archiv­ing, con­ti­nu­ity and secu­ri­ty for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, has revealed that BYOD – Bring Your Own Device is becom­ing a hot topic among enter­pris­es, espe­cial…

The dark horse of BYOD is that employee’s equipment is just better than corp issued equipment (which is viewed as a place to cut costs, not boost worker moral and productivity, never mind all that “mobile worker” stuff.

Lou Montulliusesthis.com

Who are you, and what do you do?

I think of myself as an engi­neer pri­mar­i­ly, but I spend most of my time orga­niz­ing, plan­ning and meet­ing with peo­ple. I am cur­rent­ly the cofounder and chief sci­en­tist at Zetta.net, an enter­prise clo…

Splunk now at $3.3B market cap

DrunkAndRetired.com Podcast Downloads since circa 2006. This actually includes all my “personal” podcasts, but most of them are DrunkAndRetired.com ones. The new Back of the Envelope ones are doing nicely too.

Thera-Blem - 1971 (by rchappo2002)

Phil Wainewright, zdnet.com

Cisco’s track record with soft­ware tells us the com­pa­ny will not sur­vive the shift to software-defined net­work­ing

avc.com

In last week’s guest post Scott Kur­nit advised entre­pre­neurs to put a friend on the Board and keep co-founders off. This week we’ll con­tin­ue the theme of “who should be on your Board?” with a re-run of a post that Matt Blum­berg wrote for Bra…

The Four Hundred—AWS/400: Amazon Builds An AS/400-oid Clouditjungle.com

AWS/400: Ama­zon Builds An AS/400-oid Cloud

Pub­lished: April 23, 2012

by Tim­o­thy Prick­ett Mor­gan

OK, there is no such thing as AWS/400, but con­cep­tu­al­ly speak­ing, the col­lec­tion of 30 cloud ser­vices are the mod­ern ana­log to th…

“NoSQL databases are crazy stupid complicated, and there are literally only two things Amazon makes you think about to use it. This is what makes AWS truly revolutionary. Not its virtualization and cloudiness, not its utility computing model, but the relentless desire by Amazon’s crack staff of techies to get companies out of the infrastructure management business. IBM is talking about automating the installation and patch management of systems, operating systems, application servers, and database software on the PureSystems machines announced a week ago, and Amazon has removed every bit of complexity from using a database. Your children or grandchildren will understand DynamoDB. Heck, I might even give it a whirl.”

Feature: For today’s IT professional, the iPad is an addition, not a replacement
editors@arstechnica.com (Ars Staff), arstechnica.com

When I think about the iPad as a sysad­min’s tool, I don’t think about it in terms of can/can’t. Obvi­ous­ly, the iPad can be a sysad­min tool. Heck, I used Win­dows Mobile 6 phones as sysad­min tools. It wasn’t a lot of fun, but if you were real­…

Ben’s Blog, bhorowitz.com

Now what the hell is you lookin’ for?
Can’t a young man get money anymore?
Let my pants sag down to the floor
Really do it matter as long as I score?
—Mase, Lookin’ at me

Two years ago we invest­ed $250,000 in Insta­gram. Than…

“Ordinarily, when someone criticizes me for only making 312 times my money, I let the logic of their statement speak for itself.”

When we say that something is socially constructed, we are focusing on its dependence on contingent variables of our social selves rather than any inherent quality that it possesses in itself.

Formica - 1973 (by rchappo2002)

dpstyles:

Even if I had my own tugboat I couldn’t come up w a better name for this ferry… (Taken with Instagram at St John to St Thomas Car Ferry)

Made with Paper

cote-eclipsecon (by cote)

Trevor Pott, theregister.co.uk

VDI, BYOD, SaaS and cloud salad could free us all from vendor lock-in

Sysad­min blog Soft­ware as a Ser­vice (SaaS) com­bined with Vir­tu­al Desk­top Infra­struc­ture (VDI)-style tech­nolo­gies promise to free us from ven­dor lock-in once…

(via Amazon’s Secretive Cloud Carries 1 Percent of the Internet | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com)

We don’t think we’re special. We’re just bored and disappointed. In that order.

[T]he CEO of Instagram, 29-year-old Kevin Systrom – asked for £2bn for the company, which has 13 employees and no cash flow.

The Swanky 1960s Era Manhattan Apartment of Mad Men’s Don Draper
Rusty Blazenhoff, laughingsquid.com

Los Ange­les Times blog, L.A. at Home, recent­ly ran an arti­cle describ­ing the back­ground behind Mad Men char­ac­ter Don Drap­er’s swanky 1960s era Manhattan-based high-rise apart­ment and the ori­gin of its vin­tage…

Tag clouds in JPMC annual report!

Apple Extended Keyboard II triple threat (by Derek K. Miller)

I literally don’t have enough null to to return.

Microsoft forms new subsidiary for open source, standards
Todd Bishop, geekwire.com

Jean Paoli, pres­i­dent of the new Microsoft Open Tech­nolo­gies Inc.

Microsoft is tak­ing the unusu­al step of form­ing a new sub­sidiary that will work with open-source projects, open-standards groups and inter­op­er­abil­i­ty…

Back at DevOpsDays Austin last week, John and I sat down for a (now-a-days) rare recording. He was interested in talking about the presentation I’d given the day before on lessons learned form working on a DevOps product, Crowbar, at Dell.

(Source: http://bit.ly/IEm0d1)

Always a fun read, this guy.

Andrew Orlowski, theregister.co.uk

Accountability, disclosure rules relaxed for webtastic startups

A new Act just signed into law by Pres­i­dent Obama that relax­es account­abil­i­ty require­ments for inter­net star­tups has been called a ‘licence for fraud’. The Jump­start Our…

Experience with big analytics is costly | First Article
By: Josh Neland On: April 10th, 2012 Posted In: Business, Geekout, Innovation, delloem.com

Move over cloud. Big Data is all the rage these days.

Mar­keters are talk­ing about Big Data. CEOs are telling their prod­uct teams to go after Big Data. Reporters are try­ing to get the scoop about Big Data. Ana­lysts have entire prac­tices…

Dylan’s Desk: Why Instagram is worth $1 billion, and your startup isn’t
Dylan Tweney, venturebeat.com

A lot of peo­ple were scratch­ing their heads yes­ter­day at the news that Face­book is acquir­ing photo-sharing site Insta­gram for $1 bil­lion.

The allure of retro-styled photo fil­ters is pret­ty weak jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for a price tag that hi…