I've run databases with no root password as well. It's not as insecure as people are laughing about, and the security problems here stem from sources other than the database. By default, MySQL only allows root access from the local ip of the box. The issue here is that the local security was compromised, hence that protection failed.
So what if they had have set the root password for MySQL? Pointless - with local security destroyed it's a trivial operation to reset the password, and it's described directly on the MySQL site here.
The article doesn't state they used a root db password either, it shows an SQL injection exploit using the "password for its database application". Doesn't mention that the db password was the root db password.
It's still a bad breach obviously, but the nature of the breach is not as the summary describes it.
I'm buying more games than I've bought in ages at the moment, but 'the industry' may not like the reasons I'm doing so. My two primary platforms are iPhone and Wii, in that order. iPhones games are anywhere from 59p to an eye-watering £2.99, the Wii has Gamecube games available which I can get for £1.99 second-hand.
That's about what these are worth to me. Looking at games appearing for £29.99, even £49.99 etc....I'm just not interested. The only games I've bought within the last year or so at full price have been Guitar Hero III (thinking about it, must be more than a year now) and err...err...hmm. Actually that's it. Oh yes, World of Goo which was already a download and relatively cheap. One glaring exception would be Wii Fit, depending on whether you want to count that as a pure game or not.
It's really a question of pricing for me. I don't care about licensed IP, I only marginally care about having the latest greatest graphics....it's just that games started costing a huge chunk of cash and I'm simply uninterested at that level. It's not that I can't afford it either, it's that I simply don't think it's worth it and would rather put the money towards a day out, or more bits for the bike, or something other than gaming.
Bring down the cost, get more buyers. If it's not profitable for you to bring the cost of your current model down, then change the model.
If you liked Robotron and have a C16/C64 and can get a copy of "Droid One" you'll like it.
I do indeed still have a C64 - both emulation and a real one with a flash card reader attached (MMC64). I'll see if the archives have a copy of Droid One and give it a shot thanks.
As for the hard comment - I think it is hard, but in a good and enjoyable way. It's still got staying power and my kids play it too - kids don't care if games are old or have flashy graphics, they care if the game is good and Llamatron is certainly that.
Always liked Jeff Minter's clone of it - Llamatron. Still downloadable for free, and I still play it in DOS Box now and again. To those who haven't tried it - have a quick search and give it a go.
What depresses me is that it's hard. Very hard. Not only myself who thought that, but my friends who were playing it at the time agreed too. Having a hard game isn't depressing in itself though, so why is this one different?
Because about a year I watched Jeff Minter, in a Google Talk about indie game development, said he wrote it to be easy. Well, thanks Jeff. That's just great. There's ten years of my gaming self-esteem down the drain...
No, we did. We being British tax payers, of which I am one, who are currently funding his pension. We're also funding the British police too, mentioned in the article as one of his sources. It follows then that we funded his career in the Met as well.
And now the git wants us to pay for stolen information, obtained from publicly funded sources utilising his publicly funded connections to acquire. Whatever his previous achievements in the Met may or may not have been, now he is simply a slimy scammer trading in stolen goods. The man is a disgrace.
Why not cover "real news" like How the smartphone rivals are building their communities, [techradar.com] referring to Android and iPhone platforms?
You know, I like my iPhone. It's nice. But compared to reporting on mankind's efforts in space I really don't think we're talking about the same level of importance...
"so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites"
Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again.
Oh yes, I completely agree. It took a while for Google to become so spam-infested though, so hopefully we get a reasonable break in the meantime.
I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping to be about as good as Google's, nothing special. Could definitely do without the noisy background, though. I crave simplicity!
Indeed. Is actually the one thing putting me off making it my homepage, but I'm going to do it just to give things a try. Have been less satisfied with Google of late - not necessarily their fault as such, but there's so much targeting of them that's it's getting harder to sort wheat from chaff.
I encourage slashdot users to try bing out, and tell me it doesn't look foreign to you! Tell me you don't feel weird clicking it's results! The internet trains you quickly that you are to embrace familiarity, because you will be quickly punished for not doing so.
I understand what you're saying, but I have a different perspective. Yes, the results page looks different to me but in fact that has meant I've paid more attention to it. I've been trying this out every so often and it's looking promising. Wish they'd get rid of the picture from the front page, but other than that I think I'm going to stick with this for a while. Its "Pages from the UK only" thing (insert your country here...) seems much more accurate than google.co.uk's, for instance. I might be imagining it, but it seems that way to me so far.
My current homepage is google.co.uk. I'm going to set bing.com as my homepage for a week to see how I get on with it - so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites, so looking promising at first glance. I'll see how it truly is after a longer term test.
"They were top of the notch graphics workstations and as a fan I am quite excited that the brand is kept."
Me too. But would you buy from them again, that's the thing? I'm also a (mildish) Commodore retro fan, but would I necessarily buy another Commodore? After all, they're still going too.
My own feeling is that recommending an SGI to someone who's not kept up with recent events would invoke either the same nostalgia you're talking about, or a "huh - SGI? Aren't they a bit old-fashioned?". Personally I think keeping the Rackable name might have served better - it's a new name which stands on its own, and whilst it doesn't have the golden halo of the past it doesn't have the baggage either.
I refer the Honourable Gentleman to the reply I gave some moments ago.*
Specifically, this one. A quick quote from the relevant bit:
"... some time later I had a reply from the Cabinet Minister under whose remit this fell....And that reply was awful. Essentially it was Phorm's press release. Not even regurgitated - the documents were straight from Phorm."
Was clear that the ministerial office and Phorm were either working rather more closely than they let on, or that the Minister in question had no clue and simply took everything on trust from Phorm.
Cheers,
Ian
*A UK Parliamentary phrase, for those that don't recognise it.
From the article: "Then there's the secretive Tarahumara tribe, the best long-distance runners in the world. These are a people who live in basic conditions in Mexico, often in caves without running water, and run with only strips of old tyre or leather thongs strapped to the bottom of their feet. They are virtually barefoot."
Virtually barefoot. Which is to say not barefoot at all. These 'best runners in the world' have decided that they need footwear.
I own a MacBook Pro - its hardware, OS and apps work more nicely for me. It has a higher cost than many roughly comparable PC laptops. I find greater value in it.
I run a Linux server. It has the same hardware cost as if Windows were on but no issues with client access licenses, activation or any artificial limitation brought on by segmentation like Home, Pro, Ultimate etc.. It has comparable but slightly lower cost. I find greater value in it.
Do they want to continue? The value argument is a very poor one from MS. Ubiquity is the best card they've got to play.
Quite some time ago, i wrote to my local MP regarding this. Specifically, I asked him to back an early day motion opposing Phorm (The Register were running the details at the time).
He wrote back saying that many people didn't realise exactly how the system worked and that supporting this motion would do no real good, but that instead he would question the Cabinet directly. As a result, some time later I had a reply from the Cabinet Minister under whose remit this fell.
And that reply was awful.
Essentially it was Phorm's press release. Not even regurgitated - the documents were straight from Phorm. There was clearly no understanding from the Minister involved what was actually being proposed, and the whole attitude smacked of "there there little one, look - the nice company here has promised they're not doing anything wrong". They'd clearly never even really considered it properly. The Information Commission too was at that time pushing the notion nothing was wrong, a stance they've clearly had to back-pedal on in the face of the E.U. pressure.
Next time I think I'll cut out the middle man and go to the Commission directly. Says nothing good about the state of our democracy, does it? An unelected quango in the Commission does the investigative work, whereas the actual democratic representatives completely ignore voter's enquiries and fob them off with press releases.
Mind you, well done to my local MP for taking the correct action in getting me a response from literally the highest level available on the subject in the UK.
From the comments on there it seems that the advertising is coming from affiliates, not from the companies themselves. This still makes it a problem for those who use Twitter, but it's a case of "MS Software cheap" or "Get a free MacBook Air"-style spam rather than the major companies themselves making use of this. Well, for the moment at least anyway.
It's not the first time I've come across it - a recent Mac promo (MacHeist? Think so) offered a free copy of DevonTHINK to anyone would would put certain text in their feeds. I'm not a Twitter user myself and didn't want to sign up to do that, but it does represent the first time I saw a "please spam twitter" call going out.
""A 'loose coalition of Internet denizens,' Anonymous consists largely of users from multiple internet sites such as 4chan, 711chan, 420chan, Something Awful, Fark, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Slashdot, IRC channels, and YouTube. "
For the hard drive, disassemble one in front of them and get their interest and curiosity.
I did this with a floppy drive one time - it had died, nothing I could do was going to bring this thing back so...why not? Why not just open the thing up and show what's inside, pointing out the magents and the drive heads etc.. I'm not going to say it instilled a lifelong wish to become computer scientists or electrical engineers in them, but it held some interest for a few minutes, gave a bit more understanding and broke down one more piece of black-box mystique.
Thanks. To put it into context I'm 5' 10" - so 225lbs was way too much for me. And at that height, getting away with it isn't really an option - it was painfully obvious.
Sorry about this but I'm going to be blunt: you're likely fooling yourself.
Genetics may well be a factor and probably is, but as far as I can tell it's not the overriding one. I'm speaking from personal experience here - last summer I reached 16st 1 (225lbs) and decided Something Must Be Done(tm). I also put on weight pretty easily, so my I decided my metabolism wasn't going to help me out here and resigned myself to be fat for all time. Still, I didn't need to be quite that fat so decided to try losing a few lbs.
I started small - a half-hour on Wii Fit jogging every night, plus a change of diet. After a while a friend asked if I wanted to try for a 10km run, so I started training to do that with him. One night's real running, one night's Wii-Fit running - on and off. I also started using the stairs at work - all 17 floors of them, two flights between each floor, average of around 11 steps per flight. Pretty soon weight was coming off quite fast, and the thing is - the more came off, the better my metabolism become at shedding more of it. I was really proud the day I ran 10km for the first time: in a time I'd now consider disastrously slow. My time then was 1hr 15min - by co-incidence I've just come in from my morning 10km run and did 42mins, still not lightening but not terrible either. That's a short run today too since I'm busy, I normally I'd do a half-marathon every Sunday morning and I'm booked in for my first marathon at the end of May.
I realise that sounds boastful but this is Slashdot - I fully expect that in the thousands out there reading, somebody somewhere can utterly trounce every achievement I've just mentioned and looks at that level of activity as being weak. No, the reason I'm saying my activity levels these days is to contrast with what was happening when I just came home and sat at the computer, or the console, and barely moved all the while eating take-outs or relatively poor quality food. By Christmas I'd got down to 11t 9 (155 lbs). I've kept at that weight since - never lower, but never much higher either. The key here is that as I got more fit, what I'd put down to genetics about me losing weight turned out actually to be just a side effect of the fact I was already overweight. The fitter I became, the better my ability to stay that way.
It's something I'd seriously recommend to people - it's not just the weight loss though that's very welcome of course, it has an effect on everything. I'm happier, my mind is sharper, I don't feel so tired all the time, I now find I prefer healthier food to the junk so choosing the healthy option isn't a chore...just a better life all round. I'm no monk either - I cut down on drinking, but I still go out and have a few pints or Black Russians (or both, on a particularly good night...) and yes, the odd pizza is still known to be consumed. The difference is that I know how much work, in a literal physical measurement sense of burning energy, I'm going to have to do to get rid of it so I never allow nights like that to just pile up an up which is what I used to do.
To bring this all back into context with the parent post and the article: the parent's comment on genetics is likely to be misleading because your ability to metabolise improves the fitter you become. The article is going off on a rant about for once a perfectly reasonable statement from the UK government (and I'm British): a sedantery lifestyle for kids or indeed anyone else is going to be less healthy than an active one, and gaming is associated with a sedantery lifestyle. Yes, even Wii Sports and Wii Fit - I startd out with these and they helped a lot, but they're not a substitute for the real thing. I have three kids and I make absolutely sure they do a lot of running around and playing outside, bu I also encourage them to use the Wii and their DS's too. If I deprived them of some modern entertainment like gaming then I'd be being unreasonable, but if I allowed them to settle into doing nothing but then I'd also be being a bad parent - it's that circumstance that the government is pointing out.
"Calling google "creepy" (pejorative nontechnical evaluation) doesn't give it the credit for doing all three parts correctly. Not liking that google's choice of identifier is more unique than "LAST, FIRST" or "FIRST LAST" is a personal foible, not a problem with the technology."
No, that's shortsighted. There are criteria used to evaluate success that aren't technical - that a superb technical job has been done to get an unwanted result is neither here no there, the result is still unwanted.
That 'personal foible' - Google are perfectly capable of understanding unique ids, therefore they have chosen email for a reason. It's not too hard to extrapolate a scenario where they have location information and email addresses, and are therefore able to sell location-based marketing information about people who have been entered into their system without them even knowing. All it takes is one friend who doesn't realise the implications, or one business using services for free, and you're on whether you wanted to be or not.
Of course, that's already the case the moment you've been entered into someone's online service-based address book. But combined with your image and location information...I find that disturbing. I don't know exactly why I do, but it's something that I feel disquiet about.
From the summary:'We do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data.'
What's the point of being consistent with a flawed methodology? I would have thought the thing to do would be to collect the new data, base newer model off that and then perform a statistically weighted correction to the older dater. Both data sets can be maintained if required.
Am not sure I see a point in consistency for consistency's sake, when you in the light of newer information you now know the original measurements are flawed.
"The crux of your argument here is that although Adobe has not lost a sale, the market as a whole has lost my participation in the cheaper and free alternatives."
Yes. An awful lot of italics and capital letters could have been saved by just writing that one sentence...
"I deny that assertion, as any program that costs money would still not be purchased, and open source projects are not hurt by the loss that specific user." Ah, now here we part company then. I directly assert that use of a product or project is likely to contribute to its success. For instance, I've never contributed code to Firefox but my use of it has increased pressure on web designers to support it, thus increasing the success of the product. It's years since I've contributed code to Linux, but my use of it has helped put pressure on certain hardware manfuacturers to increase compatibility and so contribute to the success of the project. Plus having a large number of users may well have attracted many people to develop or contribute code themselves, something they may not have been interested in doing for a one-man-and-his-dog project.
"Not damaged by the loss of that specific user" is interesting too - at what point are they damaged? By the loss of ten specific users, a hundred, a thousand? If all people take the piracy route, then yes - they are most certainly damaged. This happens too - think of all the pirate copies Office, if some marvel occurred and all people suddenly had to pay the real rate for this software, the use of OpenOffice and its ilk would rocket and the market would look very different - more skewed towards interopability thus allowing further choice down the line. Again, I have no justification for Office's price so I installed OpenOffice and bought iWork - they fulfil different niches for me and I use both.
"Any program that costs money would still not be purchased" is also an interesting statement. Again, I refute that. I was looking for photo manipulation software, I chose to buy Pixelmator based on the fact it was functional and priced sensibly for me. In other words I prioritised my budget for software and spent accordingly. I could have ignored that budget and pirated Photoshop instead even though I had the means to buy an alternative - that action would have directly damaged the market in functional alternatives to Photoshop.
Summary: if you're artificially propping up a particular piece of software (or music band, or whatever) by pretending its price is zero and copying it, you damage two sets of people: the people producing the original, and the people producing alternatives to the original. The second is important too - without alternatives, you'll get less incentive to produce improvements, less incentive to produce real innovation (as opposed to the corporate-speak use of the word) - things just stagnate.
If the average person has 10 pieces of gold total to spend 1 piece of gold each on copyrighted works and instead pirates 1,000 different copyrighted works, you cannot say that the market lost 1,000 pieces of gold. That's just common sense.
It's also total strawman.
Consider the piracy of software, for instance. Let's take...ooh, I don't know, err...Photoshop for instance. Massively pirated, and pretty expensive. You might correctly say that should I pirate a copy of Photoshop, Adobe has not lost a sale of Photoshop since I was never going to buy it anyway.
This is too simplistic though. I wasn't going to buy Photoshop, so what could I have done? I could have used any of a number of other programs - Adobe's cut-down versions, on my platform (Mac) I could have used Pixelmator. I could have used Paintshop Pro on Windows, I could have started using GIMP or derivatives (I like Seashore myself - GIMP with a more familiar interface). All those applications are quite definitely within my reach, and whilst it's true they don't have the full capabilities of Photoshop if I needed that level of control it's not unreasonable to expect me to pay for it.
So I've not deprived Adobe specifically of a Photoshop sale, but I've damaged the market (including GIMP's free) for alternatives. It's still a damaging act by me to do this.
I don't support some of the ludicrous draconian penalties being chucked around, but I also don't support the 'pretend it's all ok and the companies are just stupid' attitude that I hear far too often on here.
Slashdot Mirror
OK Slashdot, calm down...
I've run databases with no root password as well. It's not as insecure as people are laughing about, and the security problems here stem from sources other than the database. By default, MySQL only allows root access from the local ip of the box. The issue here is that the local security was compromised, hence that protection failed.
So what if they had have set the root password for MySQL? Pointless - with local security destroyed it's a trivial operation to reset the password, and it's described directly on the MySQL site here.
The article doesn't state they used a root db password either, it shows an SQL injection exploit using the "password for its database application". Doesn't mention that the db password was the root db password.
It's still a bad breach obviously, but the nature of the breach is not as the summary describes it.
Cheers,
Ian
I'm buying more games than I've bought in ages at the moment, but 'the industry' may not like the reasons I'm doing so. My two primary platforms are iPhone and Wii, in that order. iPhones games are anywhere from 59p to an eye-watering £2.99, the Wii has Gamecube games available which I can get for £1.99 second-hand.
That's about what these are worth to me. Looking at games appearing for £29.99, even £49.99 etc....I'm just not interested. The only games I've bought within the last year or so at full price have been Guitar Hero III (thinking about it, must be more than a year now) and err...err...hmm. Actually that's it. Oh yes, World of Goo which was already a download and relatively cheap. One glaring exception would be Wii Fit, depending on whether you want to count that as a pure game or not.
It's really a question of pricing for me. I don't care about licensed IP, I only marginally care about having the latest greatest graphics....it's just that games started costing a huge chunk of cash and I'm simply uninterested at that level. It's not that I can't afford it either, it's that I simply don't think it's worth it and would rather put the money towards a day out, or more bits for the bike, or something other than gaming.
Bring down the cost, get more buyers. If it's not profitable for you to bring the cost of your current model down, then change the model.
Cheers,
Ian
If you liked Robotron and have a C16/C64 and can get a copy of "Droid One" you'll like it.
I do indeed still have a C64 - both emulation and a real one with a flash card reader attached (MMC64). I'll see if the archives have a copy of Droid One and give it a shot thanks.
As for the hard comment - I think it is hard, but in a good and enjoyable way. It's still got staying power and my kids play it too - kids don't care if games are old or have flashy graphics, they care if the game is good and Llamatron is certainly that.
Cheers,
Ian
Always liked Jeff Minter's clone of it - Llamatron. Still downloadable for free, and I still play it in DOS Box now and again. To those who haven't tried it - have a quick search and give it a go.
What depresses me is that it's hard. Very hard. Not only myself who thought that, but my friends who were playing it at the time agreed too. Having a hard game isn't depressing in itself though, so why is this one different?
Because about a year I watched Jeff Minter, in a Google Talk about indie game development, said he wrote it to be easy. Well, thanks Jeff. That's just great. There's ten years of my gaming self-esteem down the drain...
Cheers,
Ian
A skiing robot eh? And there's massively renewed interest in missions to the moon all of a sudden too. Hmmm...
If it's coin-operated, looks like and oven and is rusty, then run like hell.
Cheers,
Ian
No, we did. We being British tax payers, of which I am one, who are currently funding his pension. We're also funding the British police too, mentioned in the article as one of his sources. It follows then that we funded his career in the Met as well.
And now the git wants us to pay for stolen information, obtained from publicly funded sources utilising his publicly funded connections to acquire. Whatever his previous achievements in the Met may or may not have been, now he is simply a slimy scammer trading in stolen goods. The man is a disgrace.
Cheers,
Ian
Why not cover "real news" like How the smartphone rivals are building their communities, [techradar.com] referring to Android and iPhone platforms?
You know, I like my iPhone. It's nice. But compared to reporting on mankind's efforts in space I really don't think we're talking about the same level of importance...
Cheers,
Ian
"so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites"
Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again.
Oh yes, I completely agree. It took a while for Google to become so spam-infested though, so hopefully we get a reasonable break in the meantime.
I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping to be about as good as Google's, nothing special. Could definitely do without the noisy background, though. I crave simplicity!
Indeed. Is actually the one thing putting me off making it my homepage, but I'm going to do it just to give things a try. Have been less satisfied with Google of late - not necessarily their fault as such, but there's so much targeting of them that's it's getting harder to sort wheat from chaff.
Cheers,
Ian
I encourage slashdot users to try bing out, and tell me it doesn't look foreign to you! Tell me you don't feel weird clicking it's results! The internet trains you quickly that you are to embrace familiarity, because you will be quickly punished for not doing so.
I understand what you're saying, but I have a different perspective. Yes, the results page looks different to me but in fact that has meant I've paid more attention to it. I've been trying this out every so often and it's looking promising. Wish they'd get rid of the picture from the front page, but other than that I think I'm going to stick with this for a while. Its "Pages from the UK only" thing (insert your country here...) seems much more accurate than google.co.uk's, for instance. I might be imagining it, but it seems that way to me so far.
My current homepage is google.co.uk. I'm going to set bing.com as my homepage for a week to see how I get on with it - so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites, so looking promising at first glance. I'll see how it truly is after a longer term test.
Cheers,
Ian
"They were top of the notch graphics workstations and as a fan I am quite excited that the brand is kept."
Me too. But would you buy from them again, that's the thing? I'm also a (mildish) Commodore retro fan, but would I necessarily buy another Commodore? After all, they're still going too.
My own feeling is that recommending an SGI to someone who's not kept up with recent events would invoke either the same nostalgia you're talking about, or a "huh - SGI? Aren't they a bit old-fashioned?". Personally I think keeping the Rackable name might have served better - it's a new name which stands on its own, and whilst it doesn't have the golden halo of the past it doesn't have the baggage either.
Cheers,
Ian
Wouldn't YOU be pissed if you knew you weren't drunk
Paging Rene Descarte - Monsieur, we need you urgently....
Cheers,
Ian
I refer the Honourable Gentleman to the reply I gave some moments ago.*
... some time later I had a reply from the Cabinet Minister under whose remit this fell....And that reply was awful. Essentially it was Phorm's press release. Not even regurgitated - the documents were straight from Phorm."
Specifically, this one. A quick quote from the relevant bit:
"
Was clear that the ministerial office and Phorm were either working rather more closely than they let on, or that the Minister in question had no clue and simply took everything on trust from Phorm.
Cheers,
Ian
*A UK Parliamentary phrase, for those that don't recognise it.
From the article:
"Then there's the secretive Tarahumara tribe, the best long-distance runners in the world. These are a people who live in basic conditions in Mexico, often in caves without running water, and run with only strips of old tyre or leather thongs strapped to the bottom of their feet. They are virtually barefoot."
Virtually barefoot. Which is to say not barefoot at all. These 'best runners in the world' have decided that they need footwear.
Cheers,
Ian
I own a MacBook Pro - its hardware, OS and apps work more nicely for me. It has a higher cost than many roughly comparable PC laptops. I find greater value in it.
I run a Linux server. It has the same hardware cost as if Windows were on but no issues with client access licenses, activation or any artificial limitation brought on by segmentation like Home, Pro, Ultimate etc.. It has comparable but slightly lower cost. I find greater value in it.
Do they want to continue? The value argument is a very poor one from MS. Ubiquity is the best card they've got to play.
Cheers,
Ian
Quite some time ago, i wrote to my local MP regarding this. Specifically, I asked him to back an early day motion opposing Phorm (The Register were running the details at the time).
He wrote back saying that many people didn't realise exactly how the system worked and that supporting this motion would do no real good, but that instead he would question the Cabinet directly. As a result, some time later I had a reply from the Cabinet Minister under whose remit this fell.
And that reply was awful.
Essentially it was Phorm's press release. Not even regurgitated - the documents were straight from Phorm. There was clearly no understanding from the Minister involved what was actually being proposed, and the whole attitude smacked of "there there little one, look - the nice company here has promised they're not doing anything wrong". They'd clearly never even really considered it properly. The Information Commission too was at that time pushing the notion nothing was wrong, a stance they've clearly had to back-pedal on in the face of the E.U. pressure.
Next time I think I'll cut out the middle man and go to the Commission directly. Says nothing good about the state of our democracy, does it? An unelected quango in the Commission does the investigative work, whereas the actual democratic representatives completely ignore voter's enquiries and fob them off with press releases.
Mind you, well done to my local MP for taking the correct action in getting me a response from literally the highest level available on the subject in the UK.
Cheers,
Ian
Following a path of links from the article gets to the original research behind this.
From the comments on there it seems that the advertising is coming from affiliates, not from the companies themselves. This still makes it a problem for those who use Twitter, but it's a case of "MS Software cheap" or "Get a free MacBook Air"-style spam rather than the major companies themselves making use of this. Well, for the moment at least anyway.
It's not the first time I've come across it - a recent Mac promo (MacHeist? Think so) offered a free copy of DevonTHINK to anyone would would put certain text in their feeds. I'm not a Twitter user myself and didn't want to sign up to do that, but it does represent the first time I saw a "please spam twitter" call going out.
Cheers,
Ian
""A 'loose coalition of Internet denizens,' Anonymous consists largely of users from multiple internet sites such as 4chan, 711chan, 420chan, Something Awful, Fark, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Slashdot, IRC channels, and YouTube. "
In your face, Digg! Yeah!
For the hard drive, disassemble one in front of them and get their interest and curiosity.
I did this with a floppy drive one time - it had died, nothing I could do was going to bring this thing back so...why not? Why not just open the thing up and show what's inside, pointing out the magents and the drive heads etc.. I'm not going to say it instilled a lifelong wish to become computer scientists or electrical engineers in them, but it held some interest for a few minutes, gave a bit more understanding and broke down one more piece of black-box mystique.
Cheers,
Ian
Replying late to this but I hope you see it - my absolute pleasure and good luck.
Cheers,
Ian
Thanks. To put it into context I'm 5' 10" - so 225lbs was way too much for me. And at that height, getting away with it isn't really an option - it was painfully obvious.
Cheers, Ian
Sorry about this but I'm going to be blunt: you're likely fooling yourself.
Genetics may well be a factor and probably is, but as far as I can tell it's not the overriding one. I'm speaking from personal experience here - last summer I reached 16st 1 (225lbs) and decided Something Must Be Done(tm). I also put on weight pretty easily, so my I decided my metabolism wasn't going to help me out here and resigned myself to be fat for all time. Still, I didn't need to be quite that fat so decided to try losing a few lbs.
I started small - a half-hour on Wii Fit jogging every night, plus a change of diet. After a while a friend asked if I wanted to try for a 10km run, so I started training to do that with him. One night's real running, one night's Wii-Fit running - on and off. I also started using the stairs at work - all 17 floors of them, two flights between each floor, average of around 11 steps per flight. Pretty soon weight was coming off quite fast, and the thing is - the more came off, the better my metabolism become at shedding more of it. I was really proud the day I ran 10km for the first time: in a time I'd now consider disastrously slow. My time then was 1hr 15min - by co-incidence I've just come in from my morning 10km run and did 42mins, still not lightening but not terrible either. That's a short run today too since I'm busy, I normally I'd do a half-marathon every Sunday morning and I'm booked in for my first marathon at the end of May.
I realise that sounds boastful but this is Slashdot - I fully expect that in the thousands out there reading, somebody somewhere can utterly trounce every achievement I've just mentioned and looks at that level of activity as being weak. No, the reason I'm saying my activity levels these days is to contrast with what was happening when I just came home and sat at the computer, or the console, and barely moved all the while eating take-outs or relatively poor quality food. By Christmas I'd got down to 11t 9 (155 lbs). I've kept at that weight since - never lower, but never much higher either. The key here is that as I got more fit, what I'd put down to genetics about me losing weight turned out actually to be just a side effect of the fact I was already overweight. The fitter I became, the better my ability to stay that way.
It's something I'd seriously recommend to people - it's not just the weight loss though that's very welcome of course, it has an effect on everything. I'm happier, my mind is sharper, I don't feel so tired all the time, I now find I prefer healthier food to the junk so choosing the healthy option isn't a chore...just a better life all round. I'm no monk either - I cut down on drinking, but I still go out and have a few pints or Black Russians (or both, on a particularly good night...) and yes, the odd pizza is still known to be consumed. The difference is that I know how much work, in a literal physical measurement sense of burning energy, I'm going to have to do to get rid of it so I never allow nights like that to just pile up an up which is what I used to do.
To bring this all back into context with the parent post and the article: the parent's comment on genetics is likely to be misleading because your ability to metabolise improves the fitter you become. The article is going off on a rant about for once a perfectly reasonable statement from the UK government (and I'm British): a sedantery lifestyle for kids or indeed anyone else is going to be less healthy than an active one, and gaming is associated with a sedantery lifestyle. Yes, even Wii Sports and Wii Fit - I startd out with these and they helped a lot, but they're not a substitute for the real thing. I have three kids and I make absolutely sure they do a lot of running around and playing outside, bu I also encourage them to use the Wii and their DS's too. If I deprived them of some modern entertainment like gaming then I'd be being unreasonable, but if I allowed them to settle into doing nothing but then I'd also be being a bad parent - it's that circumstance that the government is pointing out.
Cheers,
Ian
"Calling google "creepy" (pejorative nontechnical evaluation) doesn't give it the credit for doing all three parts correctly. Not liking that google's choice of identifier is more unique than "LAST, FIRST" or "FIRST LAST" is a personal foible, not a problem with the technology."
No, that's shortsighted. There are criteria used to evaluate success that aren't technical - that a superb technical job has been done to get an unwanted result is neither here no there, the result is still unwanted.
That 'personal foible' - Google are perfectly capable of understanding unique ids, therefore they have chosen email for a reason. It's not too hard to extrapolate a scenario where they have location information and email addresses, and are therefore able to sell location-based marketing information about people who have been entered into their system without them even knowing. All it takes is one friend who doesn't realise the implications, or one business using services for free, and you're on whether you wanted to be or not.
Of course, that's already the case the moment you've been entered into someone's online service-based address book. But combined with your image and location information...I find that disturbing. I don't know exactly why I do, but it's something that I feel disquiet about.
Cheers,
Ian
From the summary:'We do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data.'
What's the point of being consistent with a flawed methodology? I would have thought the thing to do would be to collect the new data, base newer model off that and then perform a statistically weighted correction to the older dater. Both data sets can be maintained if required.
Am not sure I see a point in consistency for consistency's sake, when you in the light of newer information you now know the original measurements are flawed.
Cheers,
Ian
"The crux of your argument here is that although Adobe has not lost a sale, the market as a whole has lost my participation in the cheaper and free alternatives."
Yes. An awful lot of italics and capital letters could have been saved by just writing that one sentence...
"I deny that assertion, as any program that costs money would still not be purchased, and open source projects are not hurt by the loss that specific user."
Ah, now here we part company then. I directly assert that use of a product or project is likely to contribute to its success. For instance, I've never contributed code to Firefox but my use of it has increased pressure on web designers to support it, thus increasing the success of the product. It's years since I've contributed code to Linux, but my use of it has helped put pressure on certain hardware manfuacturers to increase compatibility and so contribute to the success of the project. Plus having a large number of users may well have attracted many people to develop or contribute code themselves, something they may not have been interested in doing for a one-man-and-his-dog project.
"Not damaged by the loss of that specific user" is interesting too - at what point are they damaged? By the loss of ten specific users, a hundred, a thousand? If all people take the piracy route, then yes - they are most certainly damaged. This happens too - think of all the pirate copies Office, if some marvel occurred and all people suddenly had to pay the real rate for this software, the use of OpenOffice and its ilk would rocket and the market would look very different - more skewed towards interopability thus allowing further choice down the line. Again, I have no justification for Office's price so I installed OpenOffice and bought iWork - they fulfil different niches for me and I use both.
"Any program that costs money would still not be purchased" is also an interesting statement. Again, I refute that. I was looking for photo manipulation software, I chose to buy Pixelmator based on the fact it was functional and priced sensibly for me. In other words I prioritised my budget for software and spent accordingly. I could have ignored that budget and pirated Photoshop instead even though I had the means to buy an alternative - that action would have directly damaged the market in functional alternatives to Photoshop.
Summary: if you're artificially propping up a particular piece of software (or music band, or whatever) by pretending its price is zero and copying it, you damage two sets of people: the people producing the original, and the people producing alternatives to the original. The second is important too - without alternatives, you'll get less incentive to produce improvements, less incentive to produce real innovation (as opposed to the corporate-speak use of the word) - things just stagnate.
Cheers,
Ian
It's also total strawman.
Consider the piracy of software, for instance. Let's take...ooh, I don't know, err...Photoshop for instance. Massively pirated, and pretty expensive. You might correctly say that should I pirate a copy of Photoshop, Adobe has not lost a sale of Photoshop since I was never going to buy it anyway.
This is too simplistic though. I wasn't going to buy Photoshop, so what could I have done? I could have used any of a number of other programs - Adobe's cut-down versions, on my platform (Mac) I could have used Pixelmator. I could have used Paintshop Pro on Windows, I could have started using GIMP or derivatives (I like Seashore myself - GIMP with a more familiar interface). All those applications are quite definitely within my reach, and whilst it's true they don't have the full capabilities of Photoshop if I needed that level of control it's not unreasonable to expect me to pay for it.
So I've not deprived Adobe specifically of a Photoshop sale, but I've damaged the market (including GIMP's free) for alternatives. It's still a damaging act by me to do this.
I don't support some of the ludicrous draconian penalties being chucked around, but I also don't support the 'pretend it's all ok and the companies are just stupid' attitude that I hear far too often on here.
Cheers,
Ian