The evidence also suggests the attackers have had access to Gawker’s internal systems for a period of time that is at least a month, and that they gained root level access to servers the Gawker Media web properties are hosted on.
Pwned
These people are missing the point. Chrome OS has its problems, and the Cr-48 has its quirks, but it is clear what Google is trying to accomplish here. The Cr-48 is a machine for the conveyance of thoughts and ideas. Chrome OS is a pane of glass, and has no goal besides transparency; the netbook itself is simply a handsome but unadorned window frame. If not for just a few niggling technical issues — the trackpad sticks, video runs sluggishly, it’s a little too heavy — the Cr-48 would be the perfect gadget. Why? Because it’s one of the few gadgets that can forget itself in favor of its purpose.
The same dinosaurs who didn't get the iPad (and still don't), don't get Chrome OS either. As with the iPad, I suspect people trying to get work done will adopt it in droves while the troglodytes will continue to scratch their heads as to why no one is paying them any attention anymore.
Porter's five forces, the 5 "C"s of marketing? Forget it. I'd suggest that today, nothing characterizes industrial age business like the Five P's. Business is Pedestrian (in its vanishing smallness of ambition), Predictable (in its furious obsession with the trivial), Predatory (in it's hyperaggressive selfishness), Pompous (in its unvarnished self-importance), and Pointless (in its lack of usefulness to people and society). What it really excels at is pumping out inauthentic, unsustainable, illusory value--instead of the real thing.
Hell yes. Enough of this. Time to do something epic.
For example, across the 13 countries in the global study, 52 percent of the IT professionals stated they use or plan to use cloud computing, while much higher cloud adoption rates are predicted in Brazil (70 percent), China (69 percent) and India (76 percent). Across the world, respondents rated the following as their top data center priorities for the next three years: improve agility and speed in deploying business applications (33 percent), better manage resource capacity to align demand and capacity (31 percent), increase data center resilience (19 percent), and reduce power and cooling costs (17 percent).
Revealed by The Guardian, the latest cable leak from WikiLeaks provides evidence to suggest the Chinese government is working with IT security companies, licensed to access Microsoft source code, to bolster offensive and defensive computer network operations capabilities.
Founded in November 1995, Topsec is China’s largest network security firm and provider of security products and services. Topsec is also one of the organizations authorized by the Chinese Goverment to evaluate the source code of Microsoft Windows. In 2003, CNITSEC – responsible for overseeing the People’s Replic of China’s Information Technology (IT) security certification program – signed a Government Security Program (GSP) with Microsfot that allowed TOPSEC access to Microsoft source code to help secure the future of Windows."
Via
I think we an officially blame Microsoft for everything now: http://j.mp/eruMhh
— rands (@rands) December 7, 2010
The trend toward supporting corporate applications on employee-owned notebooks and smartphones is already under way in many organizations and will become commonplace within four years. The main driver for adoption of mobile devices will be employees — i.e., individuals who prefer to use private consumer smartphones or notebooks for business, rather than using old-style limited enterprise devices. IT is set to enter the next phase of the consumerization trend, in which the attention of users and IT organizations shifts from devices, infrastructure and applications to information and interaction with peers. This change in view will herald the start of the postconsumerization era.
This is a really, really significant shift in what organizational IT is about. Smart IT Directors and CIOs will get this. The ones that don't will likely not be IT Directors and CIOs for long.
In short, the role of IT will change from being a primarily infrastructure engineering role to being one of facilitating access to information and enabling relationships. The mechanisms for doing this will be mobile, consumer devices (often owned by employees themselves), cloud-delivered applications (SaaS) and corporate use of social media for something other than marketing. Most of the old infrastructure engineering tasks are going to move out of the hands of on-site IT people and into the hands of service providers.
The most radical change is going to come for people in small to medium size IT operations, who in my experience are the ones least in touch with this, and the most entrenched in a more traditional model of IT. Unfortunately, IT staff in small to mid-sized organizations are also the less likely to have the skills to either become the facilitators I mention above, or to move on to high-skill infrastructure engineering positions with service providers.
What all this means, in practical terms, is that the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn't to fetishise the "spark of genius", to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to "be creative", or to blabber interminably about "blue-sky", "out-of-the-box" thinking. Rather, it's to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine. This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe's 17th-century coffee-houses, and by the internet. Good ideas happen in networks; in one rather brain-bending sense, you could even say that "good ideas are networks". Or as Johnson also puts it: "Chance favours the connected mind."
