We don’t have Dominos Pizza over here in Germany (at least not where I live) but I can’t help but admire their new concept to attract more custom. Dominos is today rolling out an online feature where you can track the status of your pie – from the moment you order it to the moment it leaves the store.
When you feel the need for a double pepperoni with extra cheese, you can go to dominos.com , click on the “Pizza Tracker” link and follow the progress of your pizza masterpiece. You can find out when the pizza is in the oven, when it has been placed in the box and when it finally heads out the door. Unfortunately from then on, you will have to remain in a state of constant paralyzing fear, not knowing its precise status while it makes its way towards your front door.
The new system is aimed at people who spend lots of time online. Rival Pizza Hut is said to be “unimpressed” with Dominos latest gimmick. One critic said dismissively “I guess they’ll sell a ton of pizzas to people with no social life who are sitting in front of computers.”
For the past few days, my WordPress blog, which is hosted by Yahoo Webhosting, has been “playing silly buggers” (as we Brits like to say). I would get up each morning to check my blog RSS count and upon getting to the page, discover that WordPress has reverted back to the default template.
This was more than a little irritating because plugins that I had installed on my preferred theme would malfunction on the default theme. How many RSS subscribers have I lost because the template was going all Kamikaze on me? I dread to think. Plus if you’re trying to exude an air of professionalism, having your site template jump back and forth isn’t going to help.
I have never really got into the whole gaming thing. Despite giving it my best shot more than once, I have often found PC / console games to have a very limited attention span for me. Once I’ve shot one person, the thrill kind of wears off and I suddenly want to surf the internet. I had a Gamecube for 3 weeks and then never used it again.
But I know enough gamers (my girlfriend’s brother for one) to know one sure fact – never seriously criticise the games or the people who play them. The people who love playing these games love them as if they are related to them by blood. Criticise the game and by extension, you’re criticising the gamer. This is not good if your aim in life is to live peacefully and not bring any attention upon yourself. Gamers tend to take criticism of their pastime rather personally.
This is a fact that Cooper Lawrence is learning the hard way. The author of “The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace With Your Inner Overachiever” has seen her Amazon page wrecked by irate gamers. The gamers went on the virtual rampage after Lawrence went on Fox News and criticised a X-Box game called “Mass Effect“. The game is apparently one of the most popular games of 2007 but Lawrence made the rather foolish decision to trash the game on-screen – despite admitting she had never played it or seen anyone play it.
The game apparently has a romantic sub-plot and supporters have asserted that what you see is no more risque than evening television. But that didn’t stop Lawrence who sneered the game and its “full-frontal nudity and explicit sexual activity”. But she didn’t stop there. She decided to dig an even deeper grave for herself by continuing with :
“Here’s how they’re seeing women: they’re seeing them as these objects of desire, as these, you know, hot bodies. They don’t show women as being valued for anything other than their sexuality. And it’s a man in this game deciding how many women he wants to be with.”
This was too much for the dedicated gamers. They decided to get their revenge by going to Lawrence’s Amazon page and giving her a one star rating for her book along with some fake nasty reviews. At one point, there were over 400 one star reviews. Then Amazon wised up to the situation and began removing the fake reviews, leaving about 80 to go. The book was even tagged with keywords such as “hypocrite” and “trash”. Ouch.
One reviewer said :
“I, for one, am appalled that such slanderous filth would end up on bookshelves where any child could walk into the store, drop a couple dollars, and leave this store with this trite, poorly written, racist bible for the Neo-Nazi consortium of modern America.”
Whatever happened to writing a letter of complaint, sticking a stamp on the envelope and mailing it in?
Lawrence has now decided to eat humble pie by declaring she was wrong about the game. She now claims to have seen someone “play it for about two and a half hours”. Her take now on the “full-frontal nudity and explicit sexual activity”? “It’s not like pornography” she now asserts, “I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.”
In the past few weeks, I’ve tested a few disaster recovery procedures for [GAS], and I thought that sharing those with the blogosphere could be of value to a lot of bloggers out there. If you’re among those who’ve been religiously backing up their WordPress blog since day one, let me ask you a question: Have you ever tried restoring a backup of your data on a non-production box? After a data-loss disaster, this procedure could make a huge difference between losing everything you’ve worked on since your blog went online, or being up and running in under an hour.
“The torch” is a $300 Flashlight that is so powerful, it can actually melt plastic and light up paper within seconds. Needless to say, I wouldn’t use that thing in your house or point it in your eyes. You’ve been warned!
After reading the last installment of Geek Lair, you’ve probably been waiting to find out how to complete the perfect den of Geekdom. As we all know, the epicenter of a cool cave is the computer desk; that place where you keep your most valued possessions. The setup is home to your monitors, computers, gadgets, expired Bagel Bites, and most of your free time. Obviously it should be decked out for maximum comfort and productivity.
Click on for awesome ways to pimp your lair, but tread softly, and keep your credit card in the freezer.
In the past, I have been a vocal critic of the Church of Scientology. Like many of you, I saw the video of Tom Cruise, wide-eyed and cackling, talking about how only Scientologists know what to do when they pass a car wreck. It made me pray to God that, should I actually be involved in a real car wreck, to please prevent any Scientologist whackos from slapping an e-meter on me. God should instead dispatch a firetruck with the jaws of life.
Last week, the Church of Scientology began to legally threaten those that posted the Tom Cruise and other initiation videos. The leagues of “Anonymous” who inhabit the /b/ channel of 4chan.org issued a battle cry and decided to DDoS Scientology websites as a response. You can see their declaration video against CoS here.
So how successful was their campaign of cyber-terror against the CoS? It was disruptive, causing lengthy periods of unavailability for many of the Scientology sites. The CoS responded to the attacks by “repositioning their Internet posture” by hiring a content-distribution company that will load-balance their servers, preventing the effects of the DDoS.
Maximum PPS rates seen: nearly 20000 pps (packets per second), with an average attack size of 15,000 pps
Maximum bandwidth seen per attack: 220 Mbps, with an average attack size of 168 Mbps. This is on the high side of an attack, but significantly smaller than the largest ones we commonly see nowadays
Maximum duration of a single attack: 1.8 hours, which is on the long end of common, but the average attack lasted just under half an hour
Number of reporting ISPs: 1, indicating that this is not a huge, broadly sourced attack (ie it may not have registered on other ISPs systems)
I have read many of the forums and threads that discussed the attack as it was ongoing from members of “Anonymous.” Most of the attacks seemed to be scripted by individual users. Some were merely sending ping floods with multiple command prompts. It is unlikely anyone was using a botnet.
This means that “citizen volunteers” can still knock over internet sites as part of hactivism or to make a point. And in this case, I think Anonymous made their point. They certainly scored well in the press coverage.
We don’t have Dominos Pizza over here in Germany (at least not where I live) but I can’t help but admire their new concept to attract more custom. Dominos is today rolling out an online feature where you can track the status of your pie – from the moment you order it to the moment it leaves the store.
After reading Kiltak’s recent post on 
