I was reading an article about Twitter being a poor indication of the success of a movie. This according to a recent study by three Princeton Uni students, who collected fifteen million tweets related to 34 movies that were either released in Jan 2012 or were in the running for an Academy Award. They also looked at Rotten Tomatoes (a favourite of mine) and IMDB (not so much). They found out that Tweets tended to be kinder than other social networks but none of them were very good at predicting how movies were going to go at the box office.
They concluded that it might be better to bump up the positive count rather than try and reduce the number of negative reviews. The theory is that the so called viral effect of the positives would take over any negatives in the world of Twitter at least.
For my own subjective perspective I find that looking at Rotten Tomatoes is better that listening to any of the usual review sites. In general if a reviewer hates a movie I and most people I know will generally love it. The opposite is not necessarily true but in some cases it is. Consider for example John Carter of Mars. It was caned by the critics and did not do very well at the box office in the US. As usual Disney marketing sucked because no one knew that it was by the man who wrote Tarzan. The movie had a good storyline, good effects and a good twist at the end. Compare this to The Hunger Games. Critics raved about it because people tried to link it to things like global warming. It did well at the box office and it was OK as a movie but IMESHO not as good as John Carter. In this case the poor reviews by the critics did seem to hurt so I am not sure what the study by the Princeton team really demonstrates.
Game manufacturers have to have some very slick production these days to make a sale. In many cases the combination of a well-known actor or two, a good story line, some nice cutaways and above all a good game playing experience is what is required to make sales and keep the players happy. Dragon Age 2 is not in this category. This game is the result of a frustrated movie director who had a story to tell but couldn’t do it unless they fitted it into a game format. In this case there are a few small pieces of linear action before jumping back to the next scene. Dragon Age 2 took some elements from the original game and simply dropped them. I’m not sure if it was because EA took over the franchise but the result is one of the most boring games I have played to date and there will be no playing of any DA3 if it comes out.
I have been working as a DBA the past few weeks, after being nominated into the role by a contracting agency even after I pointed out that the letters DBA do not appear together anywhere in my resume. A few weeks down the track I have settled into the role quite happily having just built a new disaster recovery database server with maintenance plans, recovery jobs, database backups and so on. Today I found out that the Robocopy utility used by my employer is actually a Microsoft product. This little gem returns the wrong success codes from Batch jobs that require some trickery to allow SQL Agent to report a successful operation. Thankyou Microsoft.
Industry News
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is annoyed that the new Apple iPad, touted as a 4G machine, cannot connect to the Australian 4G network. This is quite simply because the Australian Telcos are idiots. For some reason known only to such organisations Australia always needs to go it alone with their own version of any world standard. This has happened so many times in the past with so many technologies that I have quite simply lost count. To be fair it should be noted by readers that there is no real 4G standard as yet but when one is finally decided on it won’t be what Australia has o matter how important the country thinks it is on the world stage. Note to readers, if you are as yet unaware of this fact that I am an Australian, now you are.
Some notes on new games. Asura's Wrath, nice graphics but not a lot of playability for the money. Catherine a rather interesting puzzle game. Jane's Advanced Strike Fighters with 30 different planes is a nice one for those who like this kind of thing. Neverdead, not so good with about ten hours play time. Street Fighter X Tekken is a good adaption of the genre with good game play. The problem with most oif these game from my point of view is that only Jane’s has a version for the PC.
Hard drives are still up from last year’s prices but I was running out of space so I picked up a new 3TB drive for around A$200 or about 6200 Baht. Not too bad.
The CD is dead, not. Long live the compact disk. People are still buying CDs. It doesn’t matter is they are hidden in the back of the store behind the iTunes advertising cheaper tracks, well in the US perhaps, people keep on buying the silver disks. Digital music is gradually increasing in percentage sales but revenue figures are still well behind the more tangible formats. CD sales are dropping far slower than digital sales are rising. This is as it has been for the past three years. So why it is so (as Professor Julius Sumner Miller used to ask)?
Think distribution. You are in the supermarket queue and you spot the latest popular CD at a very reasonable price, from perhaps a not so major artist. You pop it into your cart because just about everyone still has a CD player at home. You are far less likely to pick up a subscription to iTunes in the same queue to get hold of the same album. You get home, pop into the player and are listening to it in under a minute. Not quite so simple for most people in the digital world. SO the current prediction is that the CD will be around as a format for a long time yet. As an interesting aside it is also still the easiest to copy and pirate at full quality.
Most people with an Android device play Angry Birds. It is free, addictive, challenging at the higher levels and keeps my nieces entertained for hours along with some of my older friends. Angry Birds Space was released a few days ago and has already attracted over 10 million downloads. Pause, add one to that. It really does have zero gravity physics. It will cost you some money for your iPhone but that is the price you pay for going Apple.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Blog Currents - 2012, 21-Mar
A little scrappy this week but here it is, enjoy.
How often do you find yourself “Google-ing” it these days? The Internet has well and truly turned into the answer source and more often than not people use Wikipedia as their primary source. As a general rule this is fine for non-contentious issues like a business formula or a maths proof but as soon as you move into areas of controversy don’t expect all you find there to be accurate or even close.
I use a quick search as a way to verify something or find a quick refutation. As one example I read recently, as reported by a journalist for The Australian newspaper, how recent changes in the C12 and C13 found in CO2 molecules were an anthropogenic signature of global warming. A minute later and another four to read through it twice I found an article showing how that was a load of bollocks. Unlike the average Warmist article this one pointed to the source data so that the reader could verify the results for themselves. In this case the trend curve matched exactly (to 6 decimal places) the plot of normal variability over the same period, i.e. no signature whatsoever.
There are two lessons here, journalists in general seem to be very lazy these days, and it is now quite simple to cross check most claims in a few minutes. It may take a while to process the results but the source materials are easy to find on most subjects. The source of the materials, the politics of the writer (if any), the supporting organisations (if any), the sponsors (if any) are all elements to be considered but these are also becoming far easier to track down as well.
Well I finished Dragon Age part 1 but mostly only the central theme parts. I immediately started Dragon Age 2 and it is a lot more linear than the earlier game in that a lot of the work is done automatically for you. It is a lot easier to work out what the different quests are and where they are, which is a huge improvement over the earlier game. Morrigan is missing which is a shame and so far the game is actually quite boring. I’ll let you know of it gets any better.
My time as a DBA is coming to an end but I have learned a lot about keeping databases up and running, scheduling jobs like backups of data and logs, tracking down why things don’t work and the different elements that make up a working database server. Ironically it is sufficient disk space that seems to be the biggest problem in a generally stable and working system. It is also quite obvious that SQLServer 2008 R2 is a very mature database platform and I have heard good things about 2012.
I installed Visual Studio 2010 recently as well and I’ll start looking at that. I must admit that I never really did very much with 2008 but I do have a couple of training videos on 2010 so hopefully I can get a golf scoring system I wrote a long time ago in Delphi moved to this new platform. I must admit I had been putting it off because Microsoft never really handled working with database with the same ease Delphi has for a couple of decades. I’m hoping to find that 2010 has solved most of the earlier issues. If not I may just use a more recent version of Delphi and use that instead.
Industry News
When I read this I could hardly stop laughing. China is claiming that external attacks on public and private organisations have increased dramatically in the past year. Why was I laughing, it is generally accepted that most of the attacks on organisations around the world to grab proprietary information has come from within China. Or more succinctly pot, kettle, black.
If you like figures the Chinese are claiming that attackers behind 11,851 IP addresses took over 10,593 Chinese websites during 2011. This included grabbing personal information. About 500 government sites were defaced and as one Chinese official put it “This shows that Chinese websites still face a serious problem from being maliciously attacked by foreign hackers or IP addresses." The biggest culprit is Japan at around 23 per cent followed by the US with about 20 per cent. According to the US defence contractor Northrop Grumman the Chinese military is preparing advanced information warfare capabilities, assisted by academics and commercial ITC firms.
Hot off the presses, the iPad3 runs about 5 degrees hotter than the iPad2 with most of the heat focused on one side of the device. Some bored Dutchmen over at Tweakers.net took a thermal reading of the two units side by side. I must admit that I have yet to visit the “how well does an iPad3 blend” site as yet.
This week’s US Patent Office crazy story is brought to you by The letters S, A and V. Samsung has started a patent lawsuit against Apple over using emoticons, or at least a selectable list of them using the very familiar (in all systems everywhere) insert your Smiley. The US Patent Office decided to grant a patent for displaying a list of emoticons on the smartphone screen as a user convenience. That patent was granted to Samsung. But wait, in steps Varia who claim that they have the patent and Samsung is infringing it. The really crazy part of this story is there is a patent for this functionality in the first place.
With the release of the source code for its Ice Cream Sandwich Android version, 4, it won’t be long before Samsung Galaxy SII users have it on their phones. At the moment it is only English and Korean versions but others are sure to follow soon.
At the recent British Academy of Film and Television Videogames Awards EA took out Game of the Year went to Valve's highly-rated puzzler Portal 2 (EA distributes it) and Battlefield 3 that won in a few categories. This finally gives them a win over Call of Duty that has led for a while now.
In absolutely no surprise at all a recent Pew Research Center study found that Twitter and Facebook do not have that great an impact on what people watch or read. There are a few major media outlets that may find this surprising, because they have been pushing the platforms, but it simply isn’t so. News websites, including popular blog sites, are still the places that the majority of people visit to get their daily news fix. Also not a surprise is that in the US one on four people get their news from some kind of mobile device.
Finally for this week I am looking into publishing the first book of a fantasy series I started writing a while back, on Amazon. I tried the usual sending it to a myriad of publishers and agents but like so many before me, no such luck. Someone I work with has already done this and even sold a few copies.
How often do you find yourself “Google-ing” it these days? The Internet has well and truly turned into the answer source and more often than not people use Wikipedia as their primary source. As a general rule this is fine for non-contentious issues like a business formula or a maths proof but as soon as you move into areas of controversy don’t expect all you find there to be accurate or even close.
I use a quick search as a way to verify something or find a quick refutation. As one example I read recently, as reported by a journalist for The Australian newspaper, how recent changes in the C12 and C13 found in CO2 molecules were an anthropogenic signature of global warming. A minute later and another four to read through it twice I found an article showing how that was a load of bollocks. Unlike the average Warmist article this one pointed to the source data so that the reader could verify the results for themselves. In this case the trend curve matched exactly (to 6 decimal places) the plot of normal variability over the same period, i.e. no signature whatsoever.
There are two lessons here, journalists in general seem to be very lazy these days, and it is now quite simple to cross check most claims in a few minutes. It may take a while to process the results but the source materials are easy to find on most subjects. The source of the materials, the politics of the writer (if any), the supporting organisations (if any), the sponsors (if any) are all elements to be considered but these are also becoming far easier to track down as well.
Well I finished Dragon Age part 1 but mostly only the central theme parts. I immediately started Dragon Age 2 and it is a lot more linear than the earlier game in that a lot of the work is done automatically for you. It is a lot easier to work out what the different quests are and where they are, which is a huge improvement over the earlier game. Morrigan is missing which is a shame and so far the game is actually quite boring. I’ll let you know of it gets any better.
My time as a DBA is coming to an end but I have learned a lot about keeping databases up and running, scheduling jobs like backups of data and logs, tracking down why things don’t work and the different elements that make up a working database server. Ironically it is sufficient disk space that seems to be the biggest problem in a generally stable and working system. It is also quite obvious that SQLServer 2008 R2 is a very mature database platform and I have heard good things about 2012.
I installed Visual Studio 2010 recently as well and I’ll start looking at that. I must admit that I never really did very much with 2008 but I do have a couple of training videos on 2010 so hopefully I can get a golf scoring system I wrote a long time ago in Delphi moved to this new platform. I must admit I had been putting it off because Microsoft never really handled working with database with the same ease Delphi has for a couple of decades. I’m hoping to find that 2010 has solved most of the earlier issues. If not I may just use a more recent version of Delphi and use that instead.
Industry News
When I read this I could hardly stop laughing. China is claiming that external attacks on public and private organisations have increased dramatically in the past year. Why was I laughing, it is generally accepted that most of the attacks on organisations around the world to grab proprietary information has come from within China. Or more succinctly pot, kettle, black.
If you like figures the Chinese are claiming that attackers behind 11,851 IP addresses took over 10,593 Chinese websites during 2011. This included grabbing personal information. About 500 government sites were defaced and as one Chinese official put it “This shows that Chinese websites still face a serious problem from being maliciously attacked by foreign hackers or IP addresses." The biggest culprit is Japan at around 23 per cent followed by the US with about 20 per cent. According to the US defence contractor Northrop Grumman the Chinese military is preparing advanced information warfare capabilities, assisted by academics and commercial ITC firms.
Hot off the presses, the iPad3 runs about 5 degrees hotter than the iPad2 with most of the heat focused on one side of the device. Some bored Dutchmen over at Tweakers.net took a thermal reading of the two units side by side. I must admit that I have yet to visit the “how well does an iPad3 blend” site as yet.
This week’s US Patent Office crazy story is brought to you by The letters S, A and V. Samsung has started a patent lawsuit against Apple over using emoticons, or at least a selectable list of them using the very familiar (in all systems everywhere) insert your Smiley. The US Patent Office decided to grant a patent for displaying a list of emoticons on the smartphone screen as a user convenience. That patent was granted to Samsung. But wait, in steps Varia who claim that they have the patent and Samsung is infringing it. The really crazy part of this story is there is a patent for this functionality in the first place.
With the release of the source code for its Ice Cream Sandwich Android version, 4, it won’t be long before Samsung Galaxy SII users have it on their phones. At the moment it is only English and Korean versions but others are sure to follow soon.
At the recent British Academy of Film and Television Videogames Awards EA took out Game of the Year went to Valve's highly-rated puzzler Portal 2 (EA distributes it) and Battlefield 3 that won in a few categories. This finally gives them a win over Call of Duty that has led for a while now.
In absolutely no surprise at all a recent Pew Research Center study found that Twitter and Facebook do not have that great an impact on what people watch or read. There are a few major media outlets that may find this surprising, because they have been pushing the platforms, but it simply isn’t so. News websites, including popular blog sites, are still the places that the majority of people visit to get their daily news fix. Also not a surprise is that in the US one on four people get their news from some kind of mobile device.
Finally for this week I am looking into publishing the first book of a fantasy series I started writing a while back, on Amazon. I tried the usual sending it to a myriad of publishers and agents but like so many before me, no such luck. Someone I work with has already done this and even sold a few copies.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Blog Currents – 2012, Mar 14
So I finally gave up on The Elder Scrolls game, I’d finished all the quests I could find and it had devolved into doing Thief Guild tasks that all seemed to be the same. Instead I started Dragon Age 1 – Origins. It is a step back in terms of game play and the quests are hard to figure out but one of the characters is played by Claudia Black. Yes I know she is married but she plays a quite delightful character. As I mentioned the game play is not all that fantastic but I read that Dragon Age 2 is quite good so I may try that after I finish this one, which should be soon.
I managed to get a look at Windows 8 recently and as long as you have a touch screen it should be fun to play with. As expected it had no Start button and some of the actions require a swipe to trigger. I suspect that if Microsoft decides to go with a PC version, then there will have to be some changes made. The primary focus however is the tablet or touch screen based devices.
It looks like a tablet app with boxes representing different applications and things to do. It starts up and shuts down quickly using an extension to the hibernate functionality of older machines and operating systems. It seemed to be fast and responsive on the inexpensive machine I was watching someone use. Not sure if it will be something that I will jump to and it remains to be seen if it will be another Windows Me or Vista.
Like most people these days I read blogs, mostly sensible ones usually dedicated to subjects I am interested in. In the February 2012 issue of International Journal of Managing Information Technology, a paper by Xuequn Wang and Yanjun Yu describes the types of people that sit in front of computers and interact, or not, with the blogs and other things they are looking at, seven types of them. They did this because others had not and for most people there are the contributors, the lurkers and the trolls.
So for your reading pleasure and because most of you are too lazy to look this up for yourselves I present the Wang and Yu classification system.
For this to work we also need to know the kinds of posts that people make, again from one to seven.
Type 1: Posts which provide new information
Type 2: Posts which ask questions
Type 3: Response posts which answer questions
Type 4: Response posts which provide feedback
Type 5: Response posts which thank for help
Type 6: Response posts which say something bad
Type N: Non-posts by those who read but don't post.
From this there are seven types of posters:
1. Attraction
2. Build-up
3. Maintenance
4. Deterioration.
Like any study of this kind there are exceptions to the rule.
Industry News
Ha, ha those that invested fully in Microsoft technologies are facing two cost rises in the near future. A 20 percent rise in the cost of SQL Server 2012 up front and a possible move from server instance to the Oracle per CPU core costing model. Either way it will be more expensive to be an SQL Server based organisation in the near future, if you upgrade.
Mozilla has started working on a Windows 8 Firefox port to run under the Windows 8 classic desktop, yes of course Microsoft will have a version for the PC, and also the tablet-friendly Metro user version. This will be a single app that will work on either platform, i.e. they are not building two versions for Windows 8. Availability will be sometime in the second half of this year. This means it will be able to compete directly with IE 10.
Since Apple refuses to bring out a 3G compatible iPhone for the China market Samsung is kicking their butt there. Apple is in fifth place in China at the moment. This in the face of 15 million unofficial iPhone customer using 2G technologies. 4G in China is a long way away in technology years in this case 2-3 by which time providers like Samsung should all but have the market sewn up. Samsung recently filed against Apple in a South Korean court claiming the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 violates three of their patents. Good luck wining in Korea Apple.
I just finished watching a video where a ‘printer’ build a tiny 385 micrometre long formula-1 racing car in about a minute. Scientists at the Vienna Institute of Technology, who had way too much time on their hands, have developed this technology for when our new tiny overlords arrive to take over the Earth. They were having way too much fun so they have been asked to now find more practical applications for the new technology.
I managed to get a look at Windows 8 recently and as long as you have a touch screen it should be fun to play with. As expected it had no Start button and some of the actions require a swipe to trigger. I suspect that if Microsoft decides to go with a PC version, then there will have to be some changes made. The primary focus however is the tablet or touch screen based devices.
It looks like a tablet app with boxes representing different applications and things to do. It starts up and shuts down quickly using an extension to the hibernate functionality of older machines and operating systems. It seemed to be fast and responsive on the inexpensive machine I was watching someone use. Not sure if it will be something that I will jump to and it remains to be seen if it will be another Windows Me or Vista.
Like most people these days I read blogs, mostly sensible ones usually dedicated to subjects I am interested in. In the February 2012 issue of International Journal of Managing Information Technology, a paper by Xuequn Wang and Yanjun Yu describes the types of people that sit in front of computers and interact, or not, with the blogs and other things they are looking at, seven types of them. They did this because others had not and for most people there are the contributors, the lurkers and the trolls.
So for your reading pleasure and because most of you are too lazy to look this up for yourselves I present the Wang and Yu classification system.
For this to work we also need to know the kinds of posts that people make, again from one to seven.
Type 1: Posts which provide new information
Type 2: Posts which ask questions
Type 3: Response posts which answer questions
Type 4: Response posts which provide feedback
Type 5: Response posts which thank for help
Type 6: Response posts which say something bad
Type N: Non-posts by those who read but don't post.
From this there are seven types of posters:
- The Contributor that provide lots of Type 1 and 3 posts and are regular visitors.
- The Partial-contributing participant that post using Types 1 to 5, but aren't regulars.
- Non-contributing Participants that will ask questions and thank fellow members for their responses but who don't contribute new information.
- Lurkers that read the content and comments but don't add anything new to the discussion.
- The Trouble makers that sometimes make Type 6 posts usually in the middle of Type 1 and 3 contributions.
- The Non-interested knowers that know about the community but don't visit.
- The Outsiders that don't know about the community and may or may not care.
- A variant of the partial contributor who uses Type 1, 4, and 6 who only add in things that have direct relevance to themselves.
- Also the Stirrer who deliberately makes a post to stir up comment or trouble, some make call this the Troll. Could be a nasty Troublemaker type or more benign.
1. Attraction
2. Build-up
3. Maintenance
4. Deterioration.
Like any study of this kind there are exceptions to the rule.
Industry News
Ha, ha those that invested fully in Microsoft technologies are facing two cost rises in the near future. A 20 percent rise in the cost of SQL Server 2012 up front and a possible move from server instance to the Oracle per CPU core costing model. Either way it will be more expensive to be an SQL Server based organisation in the near future, if you upgrade.
Mozilla has started working on a Windows 8 Firefox port to run under the Windows 8 classic desktop, yes of course Microsoft will have a version for the PC, and also the tablet-friendly Metro user version. This will be a single app that will work on either platform, i.e. they are not building two versions for Windows 8. Availability will be sometime in the second half of this year. This means it will be able to compete directly with IE 10.
Since Apple refuses to bring out a 3G compatible iPhone for the China market Samsung is kicking their butt there. Apple is in fifth place in China at the moment. This in the face of 15 million unofficial iPhone customer using 2G technologies. 4G in China is a long way away in technology years in this case 2-3 by which time providers like Samsung should all but have the market sewn up. Samsung recently filed against Apple in a South Korean court claiming the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 violates three of their patents. Good luck wining in Korea Apple.
I just finished watching a video where a ‘printer’ build a tiny 385 micrometre long formula-1 racing car in about a minute. Scientists at the Vienna Institute of Technology, who had way too much time on their hands, have developed this technology for when our new tiny overlords arrive to take over the Earth. They were having way too much fun so they have been asked to now find more practical applications for the new technology.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Blog currents – 2012 March 7
I feel some sympathy for non-computer people using computers. To narrow that down a little I am referring to the error messages some applications provide when something goes wrong. For that matter I feel even more sympathy for IT professionals faced with an error message that tells them nothing or the wrong thing.
For the average person the solution is to call someone, usually a niece, nephew, younger child etc. to help them out. This person will come over, look at the screen and ion varying shades of derision point out that the reason is clearly printed on the screen and if they had read it they would have known what the problem was and how to fix it. There is a logic issue with the last part of that logic but I have heard it enough to know it is at least common.
For the IT professional the situation is different. They read the error message and based on what they are being shown go through a series of steps to chase it down. The quickest one is to Google the message, verbatim. The logic is that someone somewhere will have some across the same error and worked out a solution. This works sometimes depending on how explicit the conditions are that generate the message. For the average say SQL Server error message there can be half a dozen reasons why. If not successful the next step is to try and see if the vendor has some suggestions. The problem with this approach is that vendors don’t want to admit there are problems with their software and will minimise the amount of error information available. Microsoft is a little better than some in this regard because so many people now use their products so they need to have some info available either through official MSDN documents or their forums.
So why am I waffling on about errors today? Yesterday I spent an hour tracking down a series of scheduled job failures on a SQLServer instance. Some jobs worked, some didn’t, mostly the reindexing and defrag ones. I looked at the job histories, looked for conflicts, looked at the system log and so on. Checked the MS documents and looked at some of their solutions until I finally noticed the words write error in one message. Then I looked at the disk space and saw it was very low, too low to allow the jobs to finish. Was there a single place that check for low disk space appeared in any document on the error message, of course not.
I also noted with interest this week that some of the hackers associated with Anonymous were snapped up in a series of coordinated raids by various world authorities. A friend of mine is a hacker tracker. Organisations use him to trace and track down hackers that have done something to their systems. I once had a conversation with him where he rated hackers from 1 – 7 in their abilities. He said that those in 1-4 were easy to find, level 5’s were harder and they needed to make a mistake. Level 6 was more of a case of blind luck and level 7’s were all but impossible to track down.
With the technologies available today the 6 and 7 types are careful, don’t brag about their achievements and rarely even cross communicate with their group. They use tools that mask their activities, misdirect any investigation to another person or place and in some cases are protected. This is why country sponsored hackers cannot be found. They have access to the middle of the system where they can inject their wares not from a node as such but right into the stream a bit like tapping into the phone network, once the cables are removed there is no way to tell where the signal came from.
Consider a very simple example. When you send an e-mail it goes from your machine to an SMTP pool and then onto the destination. The header and source information is added by your client application so it can be traced back to you device. If a program is written to drop correctly formatted e-mails directly into the SMTP pool then the source information can be set to anything you want from a security guard to the president. With no real source how can this be tracked back. Expanding this concept a good hacker will use similar techniques to mask where the action or event originated making it very difficult to track.
A good hacker will also not have a signature. Many hackers like to include something to uniquely identify them. This is typically a handle or signature of some kind but it can also be an image or a phrase. This allows investigators to identify patterns of behaviour and a possible central point to start looking. The best hackers are anonymous J.
Industry News
So how many times did hackers break into NASA systems last year? Twice, three times? No it was an embarrassing 13 times and that is the “full functional control” count. Some of the attacks got into some important systems. Some were foreign nations trying to get new technology information. NASA spends about four per cent of its IT budget on security. Even so they had over 5000 security incidents where malware was found on NASA systems. Direct cost to NASA is estimated at $7m. Loss of data has no real price tag.
The worst incident was when someone traced to an IP address in China got into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Others targeted personnel information. While this doesn’t sound so bad the info could have been used to get access to other systems. There is a lot more to this story but the main point is that if groups can get into NASA they can get into a lot of other places as well.
We you would think that but just because it is NASA we are talking about doesn’t mean they get everything right. They still for example let James Hansen run their GISS unit and produce bad data used to support his global warming campaign. With government encryption on mobile devices running at just over 50 percent on mobile and portable devices NASA runs at about 1 percent. The agency has managed to lose a large number of portable devices including the unencrypted notebook that contained command and control codes for the International Space Station for example. Others had social security numbers, data on the Constellation and Orion programmes and other gems. I guess rocket scientists are not that careful after all.
Those of us who are really old, in computer terms, remember the first pub or computer arcade game, Pong. It was a couple of flat paddles that bounced a square ball back and forth until one person managed to get it past the other enough times to win. It also had a couple of electronic beeps but that was about it. That was 40 years ago. The engineer, Allan "Al" Alcorn built it based on Atari’s (another old computer maker) Nolan Bushnell. In truth Pong wasn’t the first, predated by Computer Space and Odyssey, but it was the first one most people saw and it was very easy to play; hence popular in pubs and bars. The hardest part according to the engineer? Building the outer plastic case.
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