You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."
—Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut

IT skills don’t just cycle economically the way other broad categories do–one year, public-school teaching is competitive, the next, it’s nursing and transportation, and eventually it comes back to teaching. Several of the skills or specialties Korzeniowski rightly characterizes as “not hot” aren’t just out of favor temporarily. They’ll never return.

On the busiest day, the BBC delivered 2.8 petabytes, with the peak traffic moment occurring when Bradley Wiggins won Gold and we shifted 700 Gb/s.

Here's the audio from the chat Charlie Stross and I did with Mitch Wagner from Internet Evolution about our forthcoming book, Rapture of the Nerds.

The only sensible thing to do would be to set up an independent, technical board that ran the Internet for the benefit not of companies looking to exploit its possibilities, or of countries looking to use it as an instrument of control, but of the Internet itself. That is, its decisions would be based on technical criteria designed to make the whole thing run and evolve as smoothly as possible, for the benefit of all constituencies, undistracted by other agendas that damage the underlying infrastructure, as ICANN's current moves threaten to do.

That might seem hopelessly idealistic, and may be it is. But it's worth pushing as a third way in the current situation, which is fast coming down to an impossible choice between seeing the Net destroyed by ICANN's ham-fisted commercialisation or by ITU's all-too efficient politicisation.

I find myself wanting to redesign secondary education so that history and literature get merged into a single class, and you read novels in conjunction with learning about the time of their writing or setting.

Choire Sicha offers the essential viewing guide to watch from beginning to end without the crap bits. Yes, most of season 3 is gone.

Our city of 2032 is emitting as much information in a second as Google processes in an hour today: remarkable, but not outrageous in context.

The truth is that a large number of the animals featured on O’Reilly books are threatened or critically endangered. We’ve always used colophons in the books as a way to tell readers about the animals. Now we want to use social media and the web to tell those same readers how they can contribute to helping the animals in real life.

When we launched AOL 4.0 in 1998, AOL used ALL of the world-wide CD production for several weeks.  Think of that.  Not a single music CD or Microsoft CD was produced during those weeks.

Der Internethändler Amazon verkauft mittlerweile auch in Großbritannien mehr E-Books als gedruckte Bücher, ein Meilenstein, der in den USA bereits 2011 erreicht wurde.

Amazon nennt in der Mitteilung keine absoluten Verkaufszahlen, listet aber ein paar Vergleiche auf. So habe das Unternehmen in Großbritannien im laufenden Jahr für je 100 verkaufte Bücher 114 E-Books absetzen können. Nach dem Kauf eines Kindle würde ein Kunde darüber hinaus viermal so viele Bücher kaufen wie zuvor. Auf gedruckte Bücher würde dabei auch nicht verzichtet, fügt Amazon hinzu.

I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL

The people formerly known as the audience have a voice and boy are they using it to complain about NBC’s tape delays of races and the opening ceremonies, about its tasteless decision to block the UK tribute to its 7/7 victims, and about its commentators’ idiocies (led by Meredith Vieira’s ignorance of the inventor of the web; they could have used their extra three hours to enlighten her).

• Twitter is a gigantic spoiler machine. It would be nearly impossible to isolate oneself from news of results because even if you don’t read Twitter or Facebook or go to the net, someone you know, someone you run into will. Information can’t be controlled. Amen.

The lead author and editor of the OAuth 2.0 network authorization standard has stepped down from his role, withdrawn his name from the specification, and quit the working group, describing the current version of the spec as "the biggest professional disappointment of my career."

I.B.M. is doing its own thing in the enterprise market, much as Apple is in consumer technology. Both are separated from the industry pack. In I.B.M.’s case, to be sure, that separation has been a more subtle and evolutionary process than it has been at Apple, the blockbuster product machine.

Satellite operator Avanti has launched a new Pay-As-You-Go service across Europe which it says will offering a high-speed internet connection with no monthly subscription.

Launched by feisty Olympic legend Daley Thompson, of button-bashing 8-bit fame, the show will start at 9 p.m. every night the games are on. Positive tweets will color the wheel gold, the Metro reports; negative will make it purple. Eye sponsor EDF Energy reckons it's the first disaster-waiting-to-happen social media-driven light show.

Once a remote prospect, an important barrier in disk storage has become a reality: the venerable master boot record (MBR) partitioning scheme can't fully handle disks larger than 2.2TB (2TiB). With disks as large as 3TB readily available and with much larger RAID arrays common, alternatives to the MBR partitioning scheme have become important to understand. The heir apparent is the GUID Partition Table (GPT). Learn how to make sure your Linux system is fully prepared for the future of disk storage.

Microsoft has always understood that to win a platform war, you must engage the developer community. More than engage: Energize. Empower. Aggressive support for developers, through great tools, outstanding technical guidance and marketing assistance, propelled Windows past OS/2 so many years ago. It’s how Microsoft has remained the desktop leader for so many years.

But the world has changed, and in important new spaces (smartphones, tablets and the cloud), Microsoft clearly is lagging. Not only are consumers voting for non-Microsoft products, but developers are as well.

Take phones. Apple and Google, with iOS and Android, have raced out of the starting gate and left Microsoft plodding, well up the track and way off the pace of smartphones and tablets.

Mobile computing is probably the hottest topic for development and operations teams right now. Employees in companies large and small have various mobile devices, many of them personal, that they are using for work. Companies all over the world want to exploit the mobile market by providing customers and users with apps that make mobile computing easier. So, it is important for companies to think through not just the development of a mobile capability but also how they will deploy it and how they can ensure the continuity of the capabilities as these change over time. This article covers how DevOps (development & operations) can help address the issues of deploying different versions of apps to different devices.