Due to a growing number of concerns over the past few months on how Facebook treats my personal data, and triggered by what I’ve seen of their actual business model, new privacy policy and how they react to digruntled users and people who criticise them, I have decided to quit Facebook. I’ve been using it for a while, but I just cannot conclude other than that the cons heavily outweigh the pros. So I’m gone, even though the account deletion process is notoriously difficult to discourage people exercising their right to quit a service.
If you really want to know more (and you should!), try these links and decide for yourself:
Here’s a great description of the deletion process (and how tricky it is) @ groovyPost.
In case you’re wondering: yes, I’m still on LinkedIn (my only active social network now), them I do still trust.
UPDATE: The EFF has an interesting post up on how to opt out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization (which you probably want to do if you do decide to stay on Facebook).
UPDATE 4: Facebook is having an internal powwow on the storm of criticism their privacy policy has caused. Will this change anything? Nah, I really don’t think so. But do expect a slew of new marketing, and a whole cadre of management types declaring that what they do is actually a good thing and what you want. Yeah, right.
After a slew of very depressing news about all manner of patent trolls slamming down on innovation wherever they can, all in the pursuit of greed, greed and greed, finally one has been pushed back a bit.
Red Hat has won a legal fight with a small Texas company that claimed the Raleigh-based software maker infringed on its patents.IP Innovation (a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies LLC, a well-know patent troll) sued Red Hat and another software company, Novell, over technology that involves sharing icons across computer workstations. But on Friday, a jury in federal court in Marshall, Texas, agreed with Red Hat and Novell that the patents were invalid.
Here’s hoping this is the first of many more of these verdicts to come. Maybe one day even the law makers will wake up to the malodorous practices by these bastards.
Absolutely thrilling and beautiful: 185 voices from 12 countries, captured on their individual webcams, together performing Lux Aurumque. What a great piece of work, and great use of the net as a medium to connect.
I’ve built this VMware PowerCLI (formerly VI Toolkit) script for a customer that required multiple simultaneous clonings that he could easily configure to back up his production VMs. I’ve included a mechanism to limit the maximum number of concurrent clonings to maximise performance, so when using this script it will take some experimentation to find the ‘magic number’ to minimise the time used to do a full clone run.
ScriptClone.cfg – The config file, one VM per line, will be run in order from top to bottom
ScriptClone.ps1 – The actual script, includes three extra settings for you to configure
ScriptClone.bat – A batch file to run the script, change the paths to suit your system
The script will power down the target VM if it already exists, then delete it from disk and then clone the source to the target. The power down steps are included three timeswith a 20 second gap because experience has shown that powerdowns don’t always go smoothly. Also after the deletion of the ‘old’ target VM there is a wait of 2 minutes to give vCenter a chance to clean it all up and update the inventory.
As with all programming this code is based on larger of smaller elements of the work of many others before me, too many to mention all here, but I am of course grateful for everyone’s hard work.
Wow. Just wow. An amazing piece of animation and real-world integration: ‘Pixels’ by obvious genius Patrick Jean. Both the animation, the hommage to old-school games and excellent music make for a true must-see:
Quite hot on the heels of the excellent CS4 suite, Adobe is about to release the CS5 suite. Some of the ‘leaked’ features look very promising, such as the content-aware-fill demonstrated here:
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