Cloudy Thinking

Steven Levy writes “Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode.” That’s a tall order. Is it too late?

Thomas L. Friedman writes [there's been] “a near total breakdown of responsibility at every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash. These are the wages of our sins.” It’s a good (if depressing) article. [via Thomas Hawk]

I just discovered James Urquhart’s Wisdom of Clouds, a high signal to noise ratio virtualization blog. Add it to your Google Reader if you follow virtualization.

Henry Blodget writes Another Horrifying Update About The (Sorry) State Of The US Consumer.

Yun Xie writes about using coffee grounds as feedstock for making biodiesel. [via ArsTechnica]

A mobile-savvy friend who loves his Blackberry writes: “After 15 minutes of experimentation at the Verizon store, I would say that the Storm is good hardware, but like most Blackberrys was released with feature-complete but slow software. For some reason these guys wait to tune performance until after release. (Or at least that is the experience I have had with the 8830, which now has much better performance and battery life than first release)

(more…)

Processing is a fascinating niche language. After seven years, they’ve released version 1.0.

Michael Sean Wright writes about How To Survive Change. Cool stuff, and some decent advice.

Kevin Kelly writes about Becoming Screen Literate: “A blockbuster film is a gigantic creature custom-built by hand. Like a Siberian tiger, it demands our attention — but it is also very rare. In 2007, 600 feature films were released in the United States, or about 1,200 hours of moving images. As a percentage of the hundreds of millions of hours of moving images produced annually today, 1,200 hours is tiny. It is a rounding error.”

Geoff Livingston shares fourteen observations about Twitter after sending 10,000 tweets and spending 20 months on Twitter.

Billionaire real estate investor Thomas Barrack, Colony Capital chairman & CEO said on CNBC today: “The new great is good. The new win is survive.”

John Cassidy writes about Ben Bernanke and the financial crisis. [via Paul Kedrosky]