The Bit Picture blog covers the recent transit of Venus between the Sun and the Earth. While looking through those photos I realized that these were some of the best photos of the Sun that I’ve ever seen. Venus nearly spoils them by being a tiny black dot.
Matt Mullenweg, insightful as always:
While the tech press often likes to paint companies in a similar market as competing in a zero sum game, the reality is that all are growing rapidly and services feed each other and cross-pollinate more than anyone gives them credit for. Tumblr built a dashboard reader product that has tons of pageviews and lots of followers, which can provide distribution for blogs much in the same way Facebook and Twitter do. (Its 85%-on-dashboard-centric usage looks more like a social network than a blogging network, actually.) WordPress has fantastic content that people on Tumblr love, and Tumblr has a rich and diverse content and curation community that can drive new visitors to WordPress — it’s like peanut butter and chocolate.
It’s true that we’re becoming simpler and more streamlined and it’s a process driven by our design vision and our community, not what any particular competitor is doing. WordPress has always flourished because it’s a hassle-free digital hub — a home on the web you can control, customize, and truly own due to the fact that it’s Open Source software. WordPress is the antidote to walled gardens.
Habrahabr.ru runs an excellent post (in Russian, but with lots of pictures), showcasing some really cool designer QR codes. I’ve tried scanning them with my Android mobile and not all of them worked, but quite a few did. Like this one, for example.
After years of battling Linux as a competitive threat, Microsoft is now offering Linux-based operating systems on its Windows Azure cloud service. The Linux services will go live on Azure at 4 a.m. EDT on Thursday. At that time, the Azure portal will offer a number of Linux distributions, including Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2, OpenSuse 12.01, CentOS 6.2 and Canonical Ubuntu 12.04. Azure users will be able to choose and deploy a Linux distribution from the Microsoft Windows Azure Image Gallery and be charged on an hourly pay-as-you-go basis.
Microsoft has been known to use Linux before, but this, I think, is one of those major milestones in accepting that Linux ain’t that bad after all. All these years, Open Source advocates have been known to quote Gandi (arguably):
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
And they were right. I hope now we can close that chapter and move on to the next holy war. Vim vs. emacs anyone?
Two hours of non-stop joy for any fan …
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDIO-AhiSqo]