Links for 10-29-2008

• Pyrrhic Victory - I'm not sure how much relates to the writer's strike in some way, but I do know that there is a grand total of one new show that I've followed this season--and that one ("Fringe") I'm pretty lukewarm about.
• Neary Consulting » Jerry Maguire on the future of the free software industry - I agree with the general gist that pure open source businesses may well remain fairly small.
• Propeller Beanies: Interesting Thing of the Day - The history of the propeller beanie.
• More Network Effects and Cloud Profitability | Techy Pundit - "The bottom line is that business, even in the cloud, requires more interlocking parts."
• Blu-ray is dead - heckuva job, Sony! | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com - Not dead but ailing. I agree with a lot of this. Robin's right about upsampling DVD being a big factor--more so, probably, than downloads.
• Edward Weston - The Most Influential American Photographer of the Twentieth Century - Good site for Weston photos--not of course that the monitor really does them justice.
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: What Tim O'Reilly gets wrong about the cloud - The question of what are the natural scale points for cloud computing seem to me an important question. I think I agree with Nick wrt Google not being a particularly good example of network effects.
• Twitter / Kathy Sierra: The Big Question is not "h ... - "The Big Question is not "how can we make this a game?" but, "what is it that makes games fun, and how can [this experience] have that?"" Great observation. And one that a lot of commentary and attempts to make learning more "fun" misses.
• Download critical data recovery software - computer data recovery with ZAR. - Just recovered a bad SD card using ZAR. Worth trying out.
• Using the Cloud to build highly-efficient systems - All Things Distributed - From Amazon's CTO.
• Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Reports of blogging’s death are… - Generally agree with this take on the mini-storm over this. I think it misleading to make generalizations about "blogging" based on the commercialization of a certain type of blog.