Links for 07-23-2010

• Dead Tree Alert: Mad Men Returns; Plus, What Is a Spoiler? - Tuned In - TIME.com - "The implicit request: thanks for all of your rave reviews of our show. We want you to write about the new season in advance. Preferably positively! But without any detail, quotation or concrete substantiation!
  Uh, no. Criticism doesn't work that way. Journalism doesn't work that way--you don't just make assertions without evidence." << Sounds a lot like some NDAs.
• Daring Fireball: Sorry, No, I'm Not Going to Write a Piece Arguing That Dan Lyons Is a Jackass - Have to laugh when journos start pissing on each other.
• Apple's iPad, iPhone and an enterprise halo effect | ZDNet - At least as interesting as formal evaluation and adoption is the many examples of "consumerization of IT" (i.e. people buying personally and using for work) examples that I see out there.
• NASA and Rackspace open source cloud fluffer • Channel Register - "But Kemp also said that the scalability of the product and other issues with Eucalyptus (including the inability by NASA to get some of its enhancements into the Eucalyptus code base) compelled Kemp to take the entire Nebula team and dedicate it – for the past six months – to creating a new fabric controller, called Nova, from scratch."
• The Web Means the End of Forgetting - NYTimes.com - "When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. " << My (mild) counterpoint to this meme is that the norm in history has been living where everyone knows your name (and your past).
• Why GPS voices are so condescending - CNN.com
• Grey beards seize power at Big Blue • The Register - "In the moves announced yesterday, a number of independent IBM groups were consolidated, giving certain IBM executives more power and others less. Most of the executives who have increased power at Big Blue are not much younger than Palmisano, who turns 59 in July and is approaching the traditional 60 retirement age for IBM chairmen, so the reorganization is not meant to anoint a successor to Palmisano. If anything, it makes it pretty clear that there really isn't a successor to Palmisano and that the whole team may just stay together and keep working past retirement age."
• E-Books: The Future Is Here - Business - The Atlantic - Interesting discussion of how the success of the Kindle could end up affecting book pricing (especially hardcover vs. paperback) more broadly.
• NASA drops Ubuntu's Koala food for (real) open source • The Register - "NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders."
• VMware Knows the Cloud Doesn’t Need Server Virtualization - This is really an argument about a level of abstraction different from that of the operating system (which VMware happens not to own).