Power Grid Change May Disrupt Clocks →

And everything else, apparently:

A yearlong experiment with the nation's electric grid could mess up traffic lights, security systems and some computers — and make plug-in clocks and appliances like programmable coffeemakers run up to 20 minutes fast.

"A lot of people are going to have things break and they're not going to know why," said Demetrios Matsakis, head of the time service department at the U.S. Naval Observatory, one of two official timekeeping agencies in the federal government.

Great start to a news article...

The iCloud Will Not Be Televised →

The inability/unwillingness/indifference to integrating Apple TV into the iCloud platform has left Apple's living-room flank exposed just as competitors are marshaling their forces there.

One of those competitors being, of course, Microsoft. With Kinect, voice-control and motion largely eliminate the UI barriers to television input and with live TV integration coming in the fall, the Xbox360 will take a commanding lead in the living room as an entertainment system, not just a gaming console.

This is not to say Microsoft is unbeatable. Apple has the strategic ability to win content and deal with content providers. The hardware manufacturers like Google. But I think Microsoft has shown that its entertainment business has a cohesive strategy, supported by broad and diverse efforts within the company and partners without.

The Lego Barad-dûr →

This is insane. 50,000 lego pieces and 2 months of work:

Even more nerdy is the full Lego LOTR world others helped create along with it.

Instant Email: Hotmail 10x Faster →

Caching, prefetching, and asynchronous operations hit the Hotmail web interface, making common email operations up to 10x faster. The NextWeb goes so far as to say:

No longer can we chide Hotmail for being horrifically slow. That is now Gmail's bag to carry.

I'm one of the few people on the entire team not working on performance for the last couple of months, but this is a huge win for everybody. If you've got Hotmail, go check it out.

Price Gap: Storage vs Bandwidth →

We decided to take a look at how well Internet bandwidth to the home has kept up with another key ingredient of the cloud: hard drive prices. Below is the comparison and, unfortunately, it seems that while hard drive manufacturers have done a phenomenal job of capacity increases and price reduction - bandwidth to the home has not kept up.

Google Introduces Facebook Competitor Google+ →

Today Google launched a beta of their latest foray into social networking, social search, and social in general, called Google+. Wired has a great writeup about the design and engineering efforts and the purpose behind Google+, but I think this quote from the New York Times' coverage says it all:

Mr. Gundotra and Mr. Horowitz said that knowing more about individual Google users would improve all Google products, including ads, search, YouTube and maps, because Google will learn what people like and eventually personalize those products.

That's what the game's really all about.

How to Get a Real Education at College →

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic, discusses what you really need to learn in college, how to be an entrepreneur, and lessons he learned about entrepreneurship on his way through college.