Linked List: December 4, 2009

Friday, 4 December 2009

NYT: Apple to Buy Music Start-Up Lala 

The NYT’s Brad Stone confirms Bloomberg’s scoop from earlier today; reports that it’s a talent acquisition.

VMware Fusion 3 

My thanks to VMware Fusion for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. VMware Fusion 3 is a great update to what was already the best virtualization software for Mac OS X. It lets you run over 140 different x86 operating systems — including everything from DOS to Windows 7 to Google Chrome OS — within Mac OS X, alongside all your usual Mac apps.

VMware Fusion 3 has a great Mac interface and a new 64-bit engine. It works great on both Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6. New licenses are $79.99; upgrades from VMware Fusion 1 or 2 are only $39.99.

EtherPad to Shut Down After Google Acquisition of Parent Company AppJet 

No more new accounts, and the existing EtherPad service is scheduled to shut down March 31. The team is joining Google’s Wave team. If you want my opinion, it ought to be the other way around: keep EtherPad going and abandon Wave. As Glenn Fleishman writes:

I’ve been using [Google Wave] for some weeks, and still find it baffling, where EtherPad was instantly explicable and useful. I hope the AppJet team brings its approach with them.

Droid Video Recalls Duncan Davidson’s iPhone Debut Photo 

Duncan’s photo from Macworld Expo 2007, showing people examining the for-display-only original iPhones, truly is an iconic image. The original iPhone was awe-inspiring. There’s no other way to put it. His photo captures that.

Mark Coleran, Designer of Fictional UIs for Movies 

Some great work. (Via Metafilter.)

Kottke on Google Public DNS 

Surely there’s some good reason why Google is providing free DNS servers. Why? I say Jason Kottke nailed it: it’s about speed speed speed. Every tenth of a second matters. Faster DNS makes for a faster web experience. The faster your web experience, the more you use Google web services. The more you use Google web services, the more money Google generates from ads.

I totally understand why people are wary of trusting too much to Google. But their DNS privacy policy strikes me as utterly reasonable. It is not in any way tied to your Google web accounts.

Bad Numbers 

Apparently they don’t teach arithmetic in journalism school.

Update: Alas, they don’t teach WordPress caching in blogging school, and Nat Friedman’s site is down. Update 2: It’s back up.