Links for 03-20-2012

• Open plan offices must die! - Rogish Reading Writing
• Getting Real About Distributed System Reliability - Jay Kreps - "You hear this assumption of reliability everywhere. Now that scalable data infrastructure has a marketing presence, it has really gotten bad. Hadoop or Cassandra or what-have-you can tolerate machine failures then they must be unbreakable right? Wrong."
• Google Grows Up: A Necessary Evil? - Joshua Gans - Harvard Business Review - "Facebook's threat was and continues to be to Google's core product, search. Facebook gathers information that Google's own success destroyed: the linking behavior of website developers and owners that allowed for citation-based search to organize the web. Once Google could organize the web for us, why link? Why set up a portal? Why set up a useful page directing people to various bits of information? There was no reason. But Facebook has given people a reason to link again — to share information with friends."
• Rational Survivability » Security As A Service: “The Cloud” & Why It’s a Net Security Win
• Connections: Podcast: Red Hat's Chris Wells on cloud management and service catalogs - Podcast w #redhat's Chris Wells talks IaaS management and service catalogs
• Tertiary data: Big data's hidden layer - O'Reilly Radar - "Back in the days of floppy disks, the lines of ownership were pretty clear. If you had the disk, the data was yours. If someone else had it, it was theirs. Things these days are much blurrier. That tertiary data — data that's generated about us but not by us — doesn't just build up on your mobile devices of course. Other people are building datasets about our patterns of movement, buying decisions, credit worthiness and other things. The ability to compile these sorts of datasets left the realm of major governments with the invention of the computer."
• Empowered - "First, there is such a thing as truth. Second, even in normal situations, truth shifts depending on who is telling the story, because of the choices they make. Third, always consider the source -- this may the only remaining differentiating factor for conventional news media. And fourth, with all the resources available to you online, it is your responsiblity to seek out more viewpoints. The truth will out. But only if you, the reader, do a little more work."
• Dan Heller's Photography Business Blog: Pinterest Copyright Infringement: Yeah, so what? - Whether or not you wholly agree, very thorough analysis of Pinterest and copyright
• Software, Services and The Office of The CMO – James Governor's Monkchips - "Systems of Record were bought by, and for, the bean counters. Systems of Record are owned and managed by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). But Systems of Engagement- getting closer to employees, customers and partners, encouraging greater participation in company ecosystems- well that’s a marketing function isn’t it? The key buyer for Systems of Engagement will likely be the Office of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)"
• Cutting the cord: Vodafone UK's revolutionary approach to mobility, flexibility & productivity | opensource.com - "While employees and all levels of management – even the board – have home zones throughout the six buildings on campus, where colleagues carrying out similar functions may reside, no-one has a dedicated desk and everyone is so mobile that they can pitch up wherever they are needed. The working environment is designed to facilitate the creation of cross-functional teams who gather in order to launch a product or deal with an issue."