How I Learned to Live Google-free: An interesting experiment. As it turns out, it is possible to mostly go Google free. What part of Google is hard to refrain from using? The answer might surprise you:

"Incidentally, there was one Google service that I found I could just not live without, no matter how hard I tried: YouTube. I was quite surprised that I kept catching myself watching videos, despite all efforts to abstain... There are other video sites, of course, but the depth, breadth, and ubiquity of YouTube became conspicuous every time I watched another video. As a Web journalist, I use YouTube when researching, writing, and illustrating stories. I run into YouTube videos all over the Web (and all over the IEEE Spectrum site, too).

Pretty interesting.

Twitter's Unfortunate PR #Fail: Hopefully Twitter is doing the best that they can, but I agree it would be nice if they were a bit more transparent with their developers, who's hard work has made Twitter great.

AT&T not yet unlocking existing iPhone 4s: Apple's release of unlocked iPhone 4 models in the US ratchets up the pressure, but I think that AT&T is still profiting on keeping people locked to their network, so I don't envision them changing here (short of government intervention, anyway).

Apple's Royalty Payments to Nokia Estimated at $608 Million Up Front, ~$138 Million Per Quarter: It's a little surprising that Apple gave up so quickly on this lawsuit (and is paying so much), but in the context of turning the screws on Android, it starts to make sense.

Research@Intel: The cloud's future is many-core and GPU accelerated: Interesting research from Intel. This SCCC thing seems tailor made for Amazon's EC2 datacenter, but beyond that, I'm not sure how I'd leverage 48 individual Linux instances on a single box in my current environment.