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...try some random shots from my collection. There's a few sunsets and stuff in there too. Uses a Creative Commons Sharealike 2.0 licence.

I suggest you go to Keith Packard's talk at the upcoming linux.conf.au: The (re)architecture of the X Window System, etc.

The X.org people seem to be making good progress on updating X11 to suit modern hardware, while maintaining backward compatibility. If we threw out all our software every time the hardware changed we'd never get anywhere.

Who knows (or cares?) what OS google uses for their workstations?

They use some version of Red Hat for their worstations.
At least that is what Marc Merlin said at Linux.conf.au this year.

Who cares? Can't help you there...

I'd like to nominate Tridge, but not for his work on Samba specifically.

I was as Linux.conf.au and saw him sit down with a complete newbie who would have been maybe 17 years old. This guy was interested in writing some code for the AI competition that was running at the conference, but didn't seem to have much of a clue about how to start it off, let alone coding anything competetive.

Tridge, out of the blue began an informal AI 101 lesson in the courtyard. I sat in on it and can honestly say I learnt more about AI in 10 minutes with Tridge then I did in four years of a CS degree. His presentation of the material came so fluently, confidently and with a warm manner.

So, I nominate him for his *general* donation to the OS movement, and not for his Samba developments (though they are fantastic). It's because of people like him that others want to get involved and make a difference too, and that's the biggest influence we could ever want.

Linux Australia has a page with details of the Free Trade Agreement. including the text of a speech given by Rusty Russell to the senate select commitee.
So far most of the debate in parliment has centered around the price of pharmaceuticals and the local content on australian television.

Linux Australia has a page with details of the Free Trade Agreement. including the text of a speech given by Rusty Russell to the senate select commitee.
So far most of the debate in parliment has centered around the price of pharmaceuticals and the local content on australian television.

Linux Australia has a page with details of the Free Trade Agreement. including the text of a speech given by Rusty Russell to the senate select commitee.
So far most of the debate in parliment has centered around the price of pharmaceuticals and the local content on australian television.

...and you'd have got zero out of three for most of the airtime, even if it had been video. There were indeed cute females there, but scantily clad didn't happen anywhere near a mike. (-:

However, if you like nice feminine Indian voices, you can thrill to the sound of ubergeekette Suparna Bhattacharya (picture) talking about DProbes.

Just think of all those people who will be able to add Open Office and Linux familiarity to their resumes. Will they be able to negotiate raises based on their exceptional proficiency?

Just think of all those people who will be able to add Open Office and Linux familiarity to their resumes. Will they be able to negotiate raises based on their exceptional proficiency?

Also, send letters and sign the petition.

Please help.
Rusty.

Also, send letters and sign the petition.

Please help.
Rusty.

Well, it's this little thing called the Fair Trading Agreement that wes signed with the U.S. Basically, our government signed a bunch of laws to change our copyright act to become more like the DMCA. This is, of course, against even what the ACCC (the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) recommended to the government. The ACCC, for non-Aussies, is a Commonwealth statutory authority whose main function is to promotes competition and fair trade in the market place to benefit consumers, business and the community. Amazingly, for a govt. body, it does an exceptionally good job - it's stepped on a number of toes and pissed off some fairly powerful people which tends to show that they're fairly unbiased.

As usual, nobody's talking about it except fringe groups, and this is mainly because of the complicated nature of the problem, along with how quietly they're passing the legislation.

Incidently, I suspect you must come from the U.S. where you have "freedom of speech". Australia, contrary to popular opinion, does not have this formally ratified in our constitution. So I hope you weren't laughing when you read my comment, otherwise you would have looked a bit of a fool. Actually, even if we did have freedom of speech then you would have looked a fool laughing at your computer anyway, so loss there I suppose.

I thought this was supposed to be "stuff that matters" - since when does another little gadget that will be overtaken in two months at best qualify as "stuff that matters"

Here's something that matters: (albeit to me)

Linux Australia has written a draft position paper(or a PDF) on therecently negotiated Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia,and is looking for feedback.

The FTA has some Intellectual Property provisions that have a severe impact on Australia. The Australian Senate has a Committee looking into it and the dead-line for submissions is: April 30.

What can you do? Sign the petition, Comment on thedraft position paper and send feedback to the JointCommittee on Treaties.

I thought this was supposed to be "stuff that matters" - since when does another little gadget that will be overtaken in two months at best qualify as "stuff that matters"

Here's something that matters: (albeit to me)

Linux Australia has written a draft position paper(or a PDF) on therecently negotiated Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia,and is looking for feedback.

The FTA has some Intellectual Property provisions that have a severe impact on Australia. The Australian Senate has a Committee looking into it and the dead-line for submissions is: April 30.

What can you do? Sign the petition, Comment on thedraft position paper and send feedback to the JointCommittee on Treaties.

I thought this was supposed to be "stuff that matters" - since when does another little gadget that will be overtaken in two months at best qualify as "stuff that matters"

Here's something that matters: (albeit to me)

Linux Australia has written a draft position paper(or a PDF) on therecently negotiated Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia,and is looking for feedback.

The FTA has some Intellectual Property provisions that have a severe impact on Australia. The Australian Senate has a Committee looking into it and the dead-line for submissions is: April 30.

What can you do? Sign the petition, Comment on thedraft position paper and send feedback to the JointCommittee on Treaties.

I thought this was supposed to be "stuff that matters" - since when does another little gadget that will be overtaken in two months at best qualify as "stuff that matters"

Here's something that matters: (albeit to me)

Linux Australia has written a draft position paper(or a PDF) on therecently negotiated Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia,and is looking for feedback.

The FTA has some Intellectual Property provisions that have a severe impact on Australia. The Australian Senate has a Committee looking into it and the dead-line for submissions is: April 30.

What can you do? Sign the petition, Comment on thedraft position paper and send feedback to the JointCommittee on Treaties.

I thought this was supposed to be "stuff that matters" - since when does another little gadget that will be overtaken in two months at best qualify as "stuff that matters"

Here's something that matters: (albeit to me)

Linux Australia has written a draft position paper(or a PDF) on therecently negotiated Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia,and is looking for feedback.

The FTA has some Intellectual Property provisions that have a severe impact on Australia. The Australian Senate has a Committee looking into it and the dead-line for submissions is: April 30.

What can you do? Sign the petition, Comment on thedraft position paper and send feedback to the JointCommittee on Treaties.

I thought this was supposed to be "stuff that matters" - since when does another little gadget that will be overtaken in two months at best qualify as "stuff that matters"

Here's something that matters: (albeit to me)

Linux Australia has written a draft position paper(or a PDF) on therecently negotiated Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia,and is looking for feedback.

The FTA has some Intellectual Property provisions that have a severe impact on Australia. The Australian Senate has a Committee looking into it and the dead-line for submissions is: April 30.

What can you do? Sign the petition, Comment on thedraft position paper and send feedback to the JointCommittee on Treaties.

I thought this was supposed to be "stuff that matters" - since when does another little gadget that will be overtaken in two months at best qualify as "stuff that matters"

Here's something that matters: (albeit to me)

Linux Australia has written a draft position paper(or a PDF) on therecently negotiated Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia,and is looking for feedback.

The FTA has some Intellectual Property provisions that have a severe impact on Australia. The Australian Senate has a Committee looking into it and the dead-line for submissions is: April 30.

What can you do? Sign the petition, Comment on thedraft position paper and send feedback to the JointCommittee on Treaties.

One of the first banks to use Linux was Banrisul, that is running thousands of ATM with Linux since 2001. I found a picture of the guys behind the project. There is a small embossed picture of Tux in the welcome screen.

Linux Australia, the national Linux body, have been doing a lot more interesting work in the Government space.

...perhaps we should ask Bernard Blackham or Trent Lloyd about it.

They seem to do a pretty effective job of chopping out spam, and they don't require you to submit to Trey's patented (soon if not now) technology and centralised-at-Microsoft you-must-join-Passport "stamps" idea.

When I loaded the story the banner was Microsoft bragging on a "completely rewritten" MS-FrontPage and one of the feature points was XML. No doubt that this is or will soon be XML with quirks in it patented by Microsoft, meaning that in effect they own your websites, every page of them. RTFEULA.

The other thing about stamps is that we don't control their price - and what inevitably happens if stamps are only available through a single provider, let alone one that happens to make 95% of the email clients which potentially use said stamps? The rimshot to that particular joke is that said provider is already a huge convicted monopolist and actively (and generally successfully) working to both extend their monopolies and frustrate any attempt to remedy the situation.

The only thing which seems to slow them down is decentralised distributed-intelligence passive-resistance social phonomena like Open Source.

I don't have an XboX but our local Linux User Group's web pages are served from one, running Linux of course.

I don't have a copy of MS-Windows to my name, and we use no Microsoft software in this house (but can run (e.g.) PhotoShop if we want to, hurrah for the WINE team). This kind of invalidates your main point, which is that "we all depend on Microsoft". You also need to face and eventualy accept that the only reason "we all depend on" Microsoft is because their product tying, bribery, back-room kick-back/extortion deals and other unfair (sometimes criminal) practices have succeeded.

It's important to realise that these practices are not a thing of the past, Microsoft continues to do them. Witness them patenting an MS-Office file format which they sold to everyone as open and portable (and it wasn't portable anyway, since they put binary data within a text file), all of this while they've been directed by a court to open their Ofice formats up as a consequence of being convicted as a corporate criminal.

You don't have to "find" a hundred reasons to whine about Microsoft, that's already been done by Microsoft themselves. What you do have to do to avoid being sad about Microsoft is stick your head in the sand.

B'dale Garbee is here too, and Rusty, and Tridge, and Conrad Parker, Russell Coker, Chris Yeoh, Jon Oxer, Maddog, Job Corbet, Nick Bannon, James Henstridge, Malcolm Tredinnick, Sylvia Pfeiffer, Con Zymaris, Glen Turner, Ananth Mavinakayanahalli, Hugh Blemings, Janis Johnson, Jeremy Allison, Groggy Lehey, Jeff "jdub" Waugh, Rasmus Lerdorf, Trent "Lathiat" Lloyd, Jeremy Malcolm, Mark Tearle, Bernard Blackham, it's turning into a regular who's who.

And here's a postcard of Tux climbing the "Heroin Needle/Crashed Spaceship" communications tower Godzilla-style, telling us that Canberra have the 2005 conf. And they certainly have the balls for it: big concrete ones along the edges of some of their roads.

Well, if the one in Perth was anything to go by, I count.. well. four?

Linux 2.6.1 kernel? Great, compiling it now.

Linus coming to Linux.conf.au Australia's annual Linux conference? It's soon to start next week in Adelaide! Now that would be something considering Linus isn't listed as one of the speakers. Rest assured we'll buy you a drink.

What, like this or maybe this?

Please email me in private to arrange for the transfer of the serious money, thanks.

What, like this or maybe this?

Please email me in private to arrange for the transfer of the serious money, thanks.

There is one good reason to have a lossless audio format available: when the lossy encoding that you have your listenable audio in isn't supported. Then, you either suffer the pain of transcoding or go with a lossless format.

For example, suppose I want to listen to all the presentations given at linux.conf.au 2003. Now, on the CD they're all in Speex format.

This format, I'll note, isn't terribly well supported by hardware players. Also, although some of those presentations are a bit long, I doubt that the entire conference is going to come close to filling up one of these huge players, even when converted into FLAC.

However, if you actually do have a lossless source (CD rip, recorded FLAC file, etc.) I'll grant you that FLAC support at that point is a bit silly.

...or Linux (-:

... includes audio recordings in Ogg/Speex format. See here.

CQiNet - Open Source implementation of Voice over IP (VoIP) software specifically for Ham Radio. Currently there are three popular VoIP packages used by Ham Radio operators, IRLP, ILink and EchoLink. Since none of these packages are open source it is difficult to contribute to the their development and learn from them by studying their source code. Let's face it for many of us Ham Radio is more about playing with technology than it is about yacking on the radio or Internet. (Hmmm... maybe some folks on Slashdot could learn something....)

Hamsoft - A great HAM/Linux database. (not to be confused with GNU/Linux)

TAPR! - These geeks will whoop yer ass in a second! A lot of them are commited to open source. They actually help fund HARDWARE projects (we could learn something). Check out their LINUX sig.

Flex-Radio - An open source software defined radio!

GnuRadio - Signal Processing in oepn source software

...had a hand in restarting PLUG before he left (that website served from an XboX). D'you know if he's a member of SLUG or anything over there?

Anyone know how to do our lobbying?

Is there anyway we could get a good speaker that is sort of local to go talk to some of the more undecided politicians? Maybe Rusty or Tridge? These two bring money into Australia and some of that can be directly tracked to South Australia.

LinuxSA has a bit more on the propsed law.

This law will get passed if the local goverment understands that supporting open souce does being in people all over the world through things like linux.conf.au.

Welcome to an XboX in Western Australia!

Can't speak for elsewhere, but it turns out under Australian law that even if I release something under the GPL, I might be able to "take it back." It has something to do with the fact that the law makes it extremely difficult to give something away - that's the reason that if, for instance, I want to give someone a house, I can't "give" it to them, I have to "sell" it to them for $1.

A lawyer called Jeremy Malcolm gave a rather good talk on this at Linux.conf.au 2003 (there should be links to his slides and audio of the talk itself on the site, if anyone's interested).

YO LEON Why is your website such a steaming load of n00b-ass bullshit????????

The article was similar to Tridge's talk on the same subject at linux.conf.au in January - "towards full NTFS semantics in Samba."

The talk (in Ogg Speex audio format) and accompanying paper are on the linux.conf.au CD. There's a list of mirrors on their web site, both to mounted copies of the CD so you can download individual talks, and ISO images of the whole thing.

The author certainly doesn't look like he's twelve.

Now I am just waiting for the HOW-TO on a Linux-run micro-satellite!

Amateur satellites are nothing new. Hams and AMSAT have been putting satellites up since the early 60's. Right now they have about 20 operational satellites in orbit. Linux based software is quite popular in the Ham community, and plays a big role in AMSAT operations. Satellite Software

The HOW-TO's :

Davidoff, Martin, The Satellite Experimenter's
Handbook Newington, CT: The American
Radio Relay League, 1984.

Jansson, Richard, Spacecraft Technology Trends
in the Amateur Satellite Service, Ogden, UT:
Proceedings of the 1st Annual USU Conference
on Small Satellites, 1987.

Visit http://plug.linux.org.au/~leonb/2000_seminar2a.htm l for some Wordless viewing pleasure. :-( Thank you, SlashDot, for that gratuitous space in the text. )-:

Some Enlightenment on the issue.

For a start there is: Australian Contributions to the Linux movement

There is a lot more strangeness tucked away in that document than ever men dreamed of. For example, it was produced from a Microsoft Word document named `sullivan' - who is Sullivan?

Now that it is for sale (!), if anyone wants to see the very last free revision (with some fixed figures etc) with a view to mirroring and linking from here, please email me and ask.

Within a few days (work commitments), an updated and more detailed version of this analysis will be up, including commentary on the diffs. A word-by-word diff is most enlightening. An incomplete summary of the diffs is up here for the curious-but-lazy.

It does look very much like AdTI simply ran the controversy up in order to raise hits, which they are now converting into sales.

There is a lot more strangeness tucked away in that document than ever men dreamed of. For example, it was produced from a Microsoft Word document named `sullivan' - who is Sullivan?

Now that it is for sale (!), if anyone wants to see the very last free revision (with some fixed figures etc) with a view to mirroring and linking from here, please email me and ask.

Within a few days (work commitments), an updated and more detailed version of this analysis will be up, including commentary on the diffs. A word-by-word diff is most enlightening. An incomplete summary of the diffs is up here for the curious-but-lazy.

It does look very much like AdTI simply ran the controversy up in order to raise hits, which they are now converting into sales.

Throw the rebuttal URLs at every journo and talkback you can find. And the MITRE study in particular, it has immense credibility.

And don't forget mine, either! (-:

...you should switch back now (please mirror this under the FDL) blow by blow.

What *else* is there to do here in Perth

Of course, home is even better.

I doubt too many people here [...] consider Australia sufficiently exotic that a Linuxconf would be interesting.

Visit us for a few weeks. We'll show you exotic. (-:

The only problem with Oz in terms of exotic, and WestOz in particular, is that it's so large that you need months to even visit the highlights, let alone take in and really explore much. We can show you the world's best beaches, red deserts that make Dakota look pale, lush tropical rainforests, soaring views across rugged ranges, the kind of unbelievable fishing normally associated with pacific islands, magnificent caves and sinkholes, rock made entirely out of sponges, the world's best grapes, more golf courses per capita than anywhere else in the world, and so on... about the only touristy things WA's missing are a set of Andes or Himalayas (with ski runs), and thousands of years of ambitious architecture (although we do have our share of mysterious stepped pyramids and the like, not a well known thing).

I live in Brisbane, and I must say this is bloody fantastic. I'm a student and travel is out of my scope for the time being; I've been hanging out for a decent sized Linux event for a long time. I will definitely be there.

Does anyone know who is going to be speaking or any other details? I checked the site and I couldn't find any specifics as yet.