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).

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.

Epic.

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."

Not all books are correct or useful. Not all accepted science is correct. The conventional wisdom might just be wrong. But ignoring all of it because the truth is now fashionably situational and in the eye of the beholder is a lame alternative.

I know this rant is nothing new. In fact, people have been complaining about widespread willful ignorance since Brutus or Caesar or whoever invented the salad... the difference now is this: more people than ever are creators. More people than ever go to work to use their minds, not just their hands. And more people than ever have a platform to share their point of view. I think that raises the bar for our understanding of how the world works.

Sent to me by a fellow follower...

I think it’s more to do with being threatened. I’ve argued for years that in a sense it’s the most important literary genre. It’s the only one that deals directly with the effects of change, and specifically technological change, on people and society. And that has been one of the most important aspects of our lives since the industrial revolution. There simply isn’t another genre that deals with that, and mainstream writing touches on it but doesn’t concentrate on it.

Advertisers, who employ plenty of psychologists, are well aware of this. Crompton quotes Guy Murphy, global planning director for JWT: marketers "should see themselves as trying to manipulate culture; being social engineers, not brand managers; manipulating cultural forces, not brand impressions". The more they foster extrinsic values, the easier it is to sell products. Rightwing politicians have also, instinctively, understood the importance of values in changing the political map. Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that "economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul".

Conservatives in the US generally avoid debating facts and figures. Instead they frame issues in ways that appeal to and reinforce extrinsic values. Every year, through mechanisms that are rarely visible and seldom discussed, the space in which progressive ideas can flourish shrinks a little more. The progressive response has been disastrous.

Much of America is in a nasty mood and the language of compassion has more or less been abandoned. Both political parties serve their rich campaign contributors, while proclaiming they defend the middle class. Neither party even mentions the poor – who now officially make up 15% of the population, but in fact are even more numerous when we count all those households struggling with healthcare, housing, jobs and other needs.