Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Google To Acquire Motorola Mobility

In some very interesting news (after all, as an Amiga fan, I am a fan of the Motorola 68000 series of CPUs, as well as some of their other offerings), Google has announced its intention to acquire Motorola Mobility for US$12.5 billion.

In Feb, 2010, Motorola announced its intention to split the company into Motorola Mobility - mobile devices and home businesses, and Motorola Solutions - business and mission critical communications products.  On Jan 4th, 2011 this split was finalised.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Saturday, August 13, 2011

This Week In Social Media

It has been a bad week for Social Media and Privacy.  First, LinkedIn decided that they'd emulate Facebook's utter disregard for their members' privacy by enabling anyone you're associated with to use your images and details in their advertising.

To disable this reduction in your privacy and copyright, in LinkedIn, click on your name and go to Settings, then click on the Account option on the left and then Manage Social Advertising.  Uncheck the "LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising" box that LinkeIn has checked for you by default when they introduced this feature.

Now, as if Facebook could allow some other social media site to invade your privacy without having an invasion of their own!  So, Facebook decided to one-up LinkedIn and make available to others the phone numbers of all of your friends, whether they are on Facebook or not.  I don't recall them asking me if this was what I wanted...

To disable this invasion of your friends and colleagues privacy, you need to click on Account, Edit Friends, then Contacts over on the left.  Now, click on the "this page" link over on the right and click the "Remove" button.  Also, on your iPhone, in Facebook's main menu, click the Friends icon, then click the Sync icon (arrow in a box) and then "Sync Contacts".  From here you can set syncing to on or off and can also remove any synced data.

Now, I have no issue with people HAVING the choice as to whether they use these features or not, however I DO have an issue with these privacy invading features being introduced and enabled by default, especially when their introduction isn't made well known to all their members.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Monday, August 08, 2011

Cloud Down Due To Lightning

Ironic as it may seem, a good portion of Microsoft and Amazon's cloud offerings available from Dublin, Ireland were taken offline recently due to a lightning strike.

Have a read of this article for more info.

Now, if you had data on these servers, your business would be offline until they got it restored.  Was this your office, we could restore a backup onto a temporary server in around an hour or two and have you up and running from an alternate location.

So, it's your call - cloud services that you have no control over or locally hosted servers that we can restore from backups relatively easily?

**Update** According to a TechEye article, lightning didn't take out the transformer in question, however there is currently no explanation as to why the transformer caused the issues.  Amazon was out for less than a second whilst Microsoft was out for a number of hours.  (Thanks to Robert Crane for bringing this additional article to my attention.)

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Friday, August 05, 2011

It Seems The Jews Hate Paedophile Laws, Too

Along with the Catholic Church and Ratzinger's protection of the paedopholes instead of the children, it seems that the Jewish faith has also just taken a stance on the wrong side of morality over this issue.

Rabbi Yosef Feldman seems to have told the Australian Jewish News that he seens no reason that when something as serious as child molestation is reported, it is necessary for their church to take this to the "secular authorities" (otherwise known as the Law - the same Law for everyone in this country, that is).  Have a read of The Age for more on this vile story.

Now, before anyone gets all hot and bothered that I'm being anti-semitic, realise that this is your children these guys don't want to protect.  The same as Ratzinger's doing.  And I'd be equally as outraged if I found out any secular organization was promoting the rights of the paedophole over the rights of the child.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Monday, August 01, 2011

Charlie 1 - Fred 0

If you've not read this, then you simply should.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie