Linked List: September 2, 2009

Wednesday, 2 September 2009

I’ll Show You Fickle 

Michael Hickins argues, among other asinine things, that Apple is screwing AT&T by courting relationships with Verizon and perhaps other U.S. carriers. So AT&T fucks up with poor coverage, poor customer service, tons of dropped calls in major metro areas, no MMS, no tethering — and Apple is doing them wrong by looking elsewhere?

Jim Dalrymple: No New Apple TV Next Week 

Jim Dalrymple:

The Loop has learned through very reliable sources that an updated Apple TV will definitely not be introduced at next week’s event in San Francisco. Apple’s invitation states, “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it,” solidifying the theme for the event will be music.

(My hunch is that the event title, being a Stones song, means no Beatles news.)

Petabytes on a Budget: How to Build Cheap Cloud Storage 

Backblaze’s Tim Nufire on how they built out their storage infrastructure:

The result is a 4U rack-mounted Linux-based server that contains 67 terabytes at a material cost of $7,867, the bulk of which goes to purchase the drives themselves. This translates to just three-tenths of one penny per gigabyte per month over the course of three years. Even including the surrounding costs — such as electricity, bandwidth, space rental, and IT administrators’ salaries — Backblaze spends one-tenth of the price in comparison to using Amazon S3, Dell Servers, NetApp Filers, or an EMC SAN.

Abandon Ship 

The WSJ:

With less than three weeks before Microsoft launches another salvo in digital music players, the marketing executive overseeing the company’s Zune device is headed for the exit.

Monoscope Smells a Conspiracy Regarding the Ikea Futura/Verdana Situation 

Makes more sense than the idea that anyone at Ikea thinks this is actually a good move.

Super Friends Guide to HTML 5 Hiccups 

Thoughtful criticism, suggestions, and praise regarding the current HTML 5 draft spec from Jeffrey Zeldman and friends.

Harry McCracken on the One-Year Anniversary of Chrome 

In one year they’ve expanded the scope from just a web browser to an entire PC OS, but still no official Mac version.

Google on Yesterday’s Gmail Outage 

There aren’t too many web apps where a 100-minute outage is major news. Gmail is one of them. (It was just the web interface that went down, but that is Gmail for most users.)

MacHeist, From the Perspective of Participating Developers 

This one’s been on my to-link-to list for a while: Simone Manganelli, who has been a somewhat vocal critic of MacHeist, decided to conduct extensive interviews with a bunch of developers who have included their apps in the MacHeist bundle. Fascinating look at the indie Mac developer market and the experience of participating in a promotion like MacHeist.

While They Last 

Paul Thurrott:

I met with the Zune folks today and one bit of information than I can discuss immediately is that the Zune HD will be the only device type going forward: The current Zune models, the Zune 8, 16, 80, and 120, have all been discontinued. So if you want a classic Zune device, buy it now, as they’ll only be around while supplies last. The Zune HD goes on sale September 15 in 16 GB and 32 GB variants.

Guess I’d better get in line.