http://techandsoc.com Just another CommonGroundPublishing weblog Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:30:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en From David Friend at Vanity Fair “One petabyte is equivalent to million gigabytes. A zettabyte is a million petabytes. A yottabyte is a thousand zettabytes.” —The New York Times, March 2, 2010 Linguists who study changes in Internet-related terminology have discovered an increasing use of ever-more-bizarre and sometimes Yiddish-sounding phrases when it comes ... http://techandsoc.com/2010/03/07/yentabytes-and-shiksabytes/ From Joseph Tartakoff at paidContent.org: Microsoft ... is still most closely associated with its desktop software (Windows, Office etc.), but on Thursday CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft was “betting our company” on the cloud. About 70 percent of Microsoft employees are working on cloud-related projects right now; that figure will reach ... http://techandsoc.com/2010/03/06/ballmer-microsoft-%e2%80%98betting-our-company%e2%80%99-on-the-cloud/ From The Economist print edition for 25 February 2010: Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headaches WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks ... http://techandsoc.com/2010/03/02/data-data-everywhere-an-economist-special-report-on-managing-information/ http://techandsoc.com/2010/03/01/the-state-of-the-internet/ From David Goldman at CNNMoney.com: Despite claims from mobile phone carriers, the next generation of mobile technology, or 4G, will only be slightly faster than current 3G speeds, at least initially. Massive costs, soaring consumer demand for data and the logistical nightmare of setting up tens of thousands of new cell sites ... http://techandsoc.com/2010/02/23/att-verizon-and-sprint-4g-not-so-fast/ From Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie at www.pewinternet.org: A survey of nearly 900 Internet stakeholders reveals fascinating new perspectives on the way the Internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered. The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology ... http://techandsoc.com/2010/02/20/the-future-of-the-internet-iv/ From  Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post: More than 75,000 computer systems at nearly 2,500 companies in the United States and around the world have been hacked in what appears to be one of the largest and most sophisticated attacks by cyber criminals discovered to date, according to a northern Virginia security ... http://techandsoc.com/2010/02/18/more-than-75000-computer-systems-hacked-in-one-of-largest-cyber-attacks-security-firm-says/ From Ryan Singel in the Wired blog Epicenter: Google is quickly making changes to its new social networking service Buzz — built on the back of its popular Gmail service — as a complaint to federal regulators follows a populist privacy backlash over the past week. Google admitted to rare gaff in ... http://techandsoc.com/2010/02/17/google-tweaks-buzz-after-overblown-privacy-backlash/ From Charles Petersen in the New York Review of Books: Facebook, the most popular social networking Web site in the world, was founded in a Harvard dorm room in the winter of 2004. Like Microsoft, that other famous technology company started by a Harvard dropout, Facebook was not particularly original. A ... http://techandsoc.com/2010/02/07/in-the-world-of-facebook/ From Andrew Lawler, Orion Magazine For Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly, technology is neither the practical nor the neutral result of scientific discoveries, but a powerful universal force for creating opportunities. He speaks in unapologetically theological terms. The internet is “a miracle and a gift” that allows humans to organize ... http://techandsoc.com/2010/01/26/tending-the-garden-of-technology/