Even if that gives us the right to invade Iraq, the question is, was it in our best interest?
I actually think that is the wrong question. Ok, let's assume for a second that it is in "Your" best interest. You have to remove the double standard
America is responsible for some terrible state sponsored terrorism in South America during the 80's and 90's.
Let's assume for a minute that it is "Right" and in the "Best Interest's" of those nations to depose the American government and take control of all of your high tech facilities.
Are you prepared to deal with that scenario? America invaded for "her" wrongs?
Ok, lets assume that it isn't ever right for a country to invade America... What if it is ONLY in their "Best Interests", and they have no right ??? Sure, any country should be able to invade another because it is "In Their Best Interests".
Is America willing to let Cuba invade them because it would be in Cuba's best interest ?
This is the problem with the doctrine of preventive war. It assumes you are the only "Right" nation on the planet. And *THAT* is why the rest of the world is shaking their head at America.
Consequently it is also the reason why Asia is shaking it's head at Australia, for their policy of "Pre-Emptive terrorists strikes" in other nations.
Where do we get off placing ourselves as the Moral protectorates fo the world. This culture of arrogance is what brought the Brittish undone. Has America and Australia not learned ?
Sony Subsiduary Aiwa already has an ipod like digital mp3 player. It is disk based. I took one for a test drive here in a review for a major newspaper here in Australia.
I love steam now. It is stable, I can alt tab out of games and back in and have NO issues.
And updates download and install themselves...
I consider my self a fair tech head (I have 3 pc's in my room that I built, and a cupboard full of spare parts)... and most tech heads I know hate steam.. but I love it.
I have beeing playing with SUSE 9 for the last 3 months on some servers, and I have been impressed. My traditional background has been Slakware, Redhat & Mandrake.
Funny, here in Australia, I can't remember EVER seeing a Fuel efficiency rating!
I don't think I have ever seen a car over here that even *shows* the mpg on sticker (or here in aus kms per litre).
I drive a compact (Toyota Corolla Hatch) and I have no idea if it is good bad or indifferent, or if it is performing to spec...
All i know is I have a 40 litre tank, and get about 700km's Highway, and about 500km's City. So 10.5 Gallons, about 440 miles. So I get about 44 for Highway, and about 30 for City.....
Why does it "seem" to be really important to know this in the US, and completely irrelevant here in Aus ?
Quote from their page: The Committee encourages the lodgement of submissions in electronic form. E-mailed submissions must include the author's full name, phone number and postal address.
A good copper heatsink (eg Thermalrigh SLK800U) and a cool silent Panaflo L1A 80mm fan is almost completely silent.
I started with a good case, then the heatsink fan just like you, and then I had to replace my motherboard for one with less voltage toredude the heat a bot, to slow the fan down more... then the PSU... and then my Northbridge Fan with a big heatsink.... and then my video card
Over here in Australia some of the banks have started a transition to Smart cards. The Idea being that it is a lot harder to duplicate a microchip than to fake a magnetic strip.
I am in the lucky position of working at the coalface, and having the ear of 4 of the top 12 people at our company (1500 people).
I find the biggest problems we have in IT tend to be related to lack of business understanding of the underlying technology, as opposed to the day to day use of technology.
A good example would be lack of Redundancy for a key unix system. The board asks the question "Do you have a DR Plan" and the answer is yes.
What they should be doing is saying "Application X is really important to me, and we can't afford to be without it for Time frame Y". This step is often conducted in Business Continuity Planning, and is called Business Impact Analysis. "What does the loss of this application/service mean to our customers?" is another way of helping the business to understand the importance of a system.
Once this importance is establsihed you can communicate the current situation. This can be operational performance, DR capability, stability and reliability issues, capacity planning etc. When you are then explaining all of the issues, you then explain them in the context of the business impact analysis, and what it means to their customers.
Prioritise the problems around the maximum impact to customers, and they very quickly decide to take action.
If found the great part about going through this process with people from within the business was: as they started to see what was critical to delivering service to customers, they were seeing the IT department go... we can provide that, but it will cost X, or if we don't provide it and the potential impact is Y.
If you use a template like this (get the business people to fill it in) and replace process with "Service Delivered to Client" and replace time to impact with "How Long Can I live Without It?", and then compare it to your list of problems, I think you will help both the Business an IT see what is important and needs fixing.
After spending quite some time on the Golf Course with a Novell SME evangelist, I will add this comment: You want a GNU/Linux specialist. Youy want people who understand more than just the kernel. Given that assumption, I will go further.
If you want to measure competencies, then you need to break this down into categories.
Design Competency
This should cover the elements of gathering the requirements from a customer, and designing appropriate hardware and software solutions for the client. It should include an assessment of their knowledge of
Server Design: Do they know how to spec a server, do they understand the consequences of Multi-proc, Raid and hardware choice.
Network design: Do they understand all of the services they need to provide to support the activities on the network
Security & Authentication: Do they know how to enforce password changes. Do they know what the key security holes are for key distributions and applications "out of the box"
Client design: What should they look at in choosing a distribution, or would they build their own. What Customer requirements should they capture to drive choices for wm and application choices.
Implementation & Support
This should capture if they understand the nuances of rolling out linux in an organisation
System Imaging: Do they have a handle of the options available for building multiple linux servers and clients for mass rollout
Do they know how to keep systems up to date and patched.
Do they know how rebuild a linux system with minimal loss and reconfiguration.
Application Competency: Do they understand the purpose and limitations of key applications that Novell will base their offering around.
Are they able to explain to your secretary how to use all of their key applications
Interoperability: Do they understand how get linux clients talking to Novell, Microsoft and other Unix Servers. Do they understand how to get windows workstations using linux for file sharing, and other services.
Now the harder part is "how to you test this".
As a perpetual student I would suggest that you need to do this in a multi-phase test. This will be expensive, but it will ensure that you get some level of objectivity:
1: You write a scenario based around a real world example to assess their ability to come up with an appropriate hardware and software solution for the design components.
2: Give them a multi-processor + Raid + Redundant PSU server and get them to install, configre and lockdown the system. Then get them to install a heap of services that you think are important.
3: Give them 10 PC's. Get them to build an image on 1 and then roll the image across all 10 workstations. Make some of the workstations different, give them different size drives, and different network adapters. See how they adjust to the variations
4: Bring a secretary in and get them to run a "how to use" session for the secretary. See how good they are
Also: Note this does not necessarily need to be the one person for all skills. So be flexible and allow them to have up to 3 different people to deliver the outcome. The only limit is that only 1 person can spend time with the end-user.
If you want any more ideas or thoughts, feel free to mail me: starsky AT bluecouch DOT COM DOT AU
This bill needs to be taken alongside the context of the privacy act.
The privacy act means that companies can only use information colelcted for the purpose that it was collected, unless the person who's information is collected agrees for it to be used for other specified and explained purposes.
The SPAM laws are basically enforcing the opt-out option, and making it easier to prosecute people who abuse the privacy laws (eg companies acquiring harvested lists from overseas organisations who are not subject to our privacy act) and then using the information to spam).
On its own this bill is toothless, but when combined with the Privacy Act it is a significant weapon.
In this case I think this bill will actually help.
My ISP here in Australia (IINET) iinet.com.au By defualt it blocks a number of ports (including 21, 80 and some others... You can then opt to turn them off if you wish to (through a web based toolbox).
They also offer SPAM tagging too (This is off by default, and can be turned on through the web based toolbox!
Now *THAT* is a progressive ISP.
They protect the n00bs, but allow people like me to still unblock ports that I want to.
When they say takeup is 2%, does that assume 2% of the population, becasue that is not accurate.
Telstra is one of 2 main suppliers, and they have 300,000 consumer broadband connections (both wholesale and retail). At the Australian average of 2.7 people per household (Australian Census 1996)that is 810,000 people who have access to broadband at home.
Australia's population is 18.2Million (Australian Census 1996).
So Telstra is reaching approx 4.5% of the population with broadband (via wholesale or retail).
Now this is just Telstra, and doesn't include any Optus cable customers (at least 100k more?)... So It has to be at least 6%....
I hate bad statisticians who assume broadband accounts = number of people with access to broadband at home.
There is DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) from sitting in economy class too long, but you can also get this from sitting at your PC for too long without a break. For a laugh (in a vain attempt to take the serious edge off this) I will call the clotting of blood from sitting at your PC too long "Computer Geek Thrombosis" (CGT).
To avoid this you should make sure that every hour or so people get up and around. We acheive this at our lan's through:
1 - BBQ, Softdrinks, water etc, and place them at least 20 meters away from the action. It forces people to get up and walk, and at the same time they also tend to wander.
2 - Make sure there is lots of cheap water (not just coke) available, as water prevents dehydration, and it stealthily encourages people to go to the loo... heheh nasty when in the middle of a tough cs WAR.... but it might save youre life.
3 - Ensure that there is pizza delivery, again, people need to stop gaming, get up, walk around etc.
This may sound silly, but CGT is a VERY serious problem, one that people have died from. We have all read the anecdotes on/. and laughed, but seriously don't let it happen to you (or people under your care at your LAN).
I had this discussion over a large quantity of red wine with my Parents and a group of their friends.
I have a degree in IT and work in the industry, and they see me as a guru because I know how to connect to the internet an fix their email and that kind of thing.
The ethical issues they came up with were:
1. When the only way to access a service is via technology (eg internet), are we creating a class of people who are denied access to services because they don't have or understand the technology involved? Particularly of relevance to government services. Disclaimer: i don't want to buy into the pc's in libraries debate, this is about the ability to use the tecnology, not just have access to it.
2. Why do computers use so much electricity? In terms of pollution are computers to the 21st century what cars were to the 20th century, amazingly transforming society but at what cost? This is not just the electricity, but the lack of recycling, the use of polluting products in manufacture etc.
3. Will a child be denied equal access to education because they don't have a PC at home?
Amen to that. I wean overclockers.com.au's april fools joke *NOTE SINGULAR* 24 hours ago was funny, but reading slashdot on April 2 and seeing them all is just LAME.
Time for a petition to get 1 april fools joke on/.;)
So true. This was such a great film. I bought this on DVD when it first came out. When I watched the Matrix I saw so much of Dark city in the whole story.
Starring: John Turturro, John Goodman, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, Judy Davis, Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi, Tony Shaloub, Richard Portnow, Christopher Murney, David Warrilow.
Read a great reviw of it here: http://www.cinepad.com/reviews/barton.htm
I was thinking exactly the same thing. All you have to do is keep a list of your downloads, and then if you ever get busted, rock up to court with a shipload of CD's in hand (or even better tapes if you can get em cheap.
Then you can claim you were entitled to obtain a backup copy, as you already own the original;)
Some pixel response times are measured in half-cycles and others are measured in full cycles.
My 25ms lcd's are FULL cycle. 25ms to clear and replace a pixel with a new colour.
Some manufacturers are advertising pixel response times based upon just the time from already cleared to fill, and as such report their times twice as good as they actually are. So be careful and definitely TRY BEFORE YOU BUY with LCD's. Also remember ot check for dead pixels.
This all depends on what the pixel response time is. I get no ghosting on my LCD's at all, but I have seen some crappy (eg Viewmaster) ones that did ghost.
My pixel response time on my TWO LG 563LE's is 25ms. This is the equivalent of 40fps... BUT this is only for the pixels that change colours.
All of the other pixels don't change color at all, and as such are inifite FPS !!! This is why you don't get such sore eyes on these babies.
I also play counter-strike and DOD on my LCD's and I experience no problems at all playing. I have had other gamers surprised at how good they are given they are LCD's
This has been before the supreme court before, and it was knocked back becasue the court said that it is in affect adding a TAX on media for a party other than the government.
As such this will NEVER get passed into law now, as it would take a serious cahnge in what is now precedent.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually think that is the wrong question. Ok, let's assume for a second that it is in "Your" best interest. You have to remove the double standard
America is responsible for some terrible state sponsored terrorism in South America during the 80's and 90's.
Let's assume for a minute that it is "Right" and in the "Best Interest's" of those nations to depose the American government and take control of all of your high tech facilities.
Are you prepared to deal with that scenario? America invaded for "her" wrongs?
Ok, lets assume that it isn't ever right for a country to invade America... What if it is ONLY in their "Best Interests", and they have no right ??? Sure, any country should be able to invade another because it is "In Their Best Interests".
Is America willing to let Cuba invade them because it would be in Cuba's best interest ?
This is the problem with the doctrine of preventive war. It assumes you are the only "Right" nation on the planet. And *THAT* is why the rest of the world is shaking their head at America.
Consequently it is also the reason why Asia is shaking it's head at Australia, for their policy of "Pre-Emptive terrorists strikes" in other nations.
Where do we get off placing ourselves as the Moral protectorates fo the world. This culture of arrogance is what brought the Brittish undone. Has America and Australia not learned ?
The Aiwa HZ-WS2000
Anyway 1.5gb and smaller and lighter than an Ipod Mini.
I love steam now. It is stable, I can alt tab out of games and back in and have NO issues.
And updates download and install themselves...
I consider my self a fair tech head (I have 3 pc's in my room that I built, and a cupboard full of spare parts)... and most tech heads I know hate steam.. but I love it.
HP Press Release
I have beeing playing with SUSE 9 for the last 3 months on some servers, and I have been impressed. My traditional background has been Slakware, Redhat & Mandrake.
Good to see it on HP.
Funny, here in Australia, I can't remember EVER seeing a Fuel efficiency rating!
I don't think I have ever seen a car over here that even *shows* the mpg on sticker (or here in aus kms per litre).
I drive a compact (Toyota Corolla Hatch) and I have no idea if it is good bad or indifferent, or if it is performing to spec...
All i know is I have a 40 litre tank, and get about 700km's Highway, and about 500km's City. So 10.5 Gallons, about 440 miles. So I get about 44 for Highway, and about 30 for City.....
Why does it "seem" to be really important to know this in the US, and completely irrelevant here in Aus ?
Quote from their page: The Committee encourages the lodgement of submissions in electronic form. E-mailed submissions must include the author's full name, phone number and postal address.
You make them to FTA@APH.gov.au
A good copper heatsink (eg Thermalrigh SLK800U) and a cool silent Panaflo L1A 80mm fan is almost completely silent.
I started with a good case, then the heatsink fan just like you, and then I had to replace my motherboard for one with less voltage toredude the heat a bot, to slow the fan down more... then the PSU
Antec Sonata
SLK800U & Panaflo : My Experience
Silenx 400w PSU : My Experience
Abit NF7-S v2.0 + Northbridge Heatsink : My Experience
Iceq Radeon 9800 Pro (No experience documented yet)
ANZ Bank
it also uses the Microchip as part of the auth for web banking. So what if they get your pin, how the hell are they going to duplicate the smartcard.
I find the biggest problems we have in IT tend to be related to lack of business understanding of the underlying technology, as opposed to the day to day use of technology.
A good example would be lack of Redundancy for a key unix system. The board asks the question "Do you have a DR Plan" and the answer is yes.
What they should be doing is saying "Application X is really important to me, and we can't afford to be without it for Time frame Y". This step is often conducted in Business Continuity Planning, and is called Business Impact Analysis. "What does the loss of this application/service mean to our customers?" is another way of helping the business to understand the importance of a system.
Once this importance is establsihed you can communicate the current situation. This can be operational performance, DR capability, stability and reliability issues, capacity planning etc. When you are then explaining all of the issues, you then explain them in the context of the business impact analysis, and what it means to their customers. Prioritise the problems around the maximum impact to customers, and they very quickly decide to take action. If found the great part about going through this process with people from within the business was: as they started to see what was critical to delivering service to customers, they were seeing the IT department go... we can provide that, but it will cost X, or if we don't provide it and the potential impact is Y.
If you use a template like this (get the business people to fill it in) and replace process with "Service Delivered to Client" and replace time to impact with "How Long Can I live Without It?", and then compare it to your list of problems, I think you will help both the Business an IT see what is important and needs fixing.
If you want to measure competencies, then you need to break this down into categories.
Design Competency
This should cover the elements of gathering the requirements from a customer, and designing appropriate hardware and software solutions for the client. It should include an assessment of their knowledge of
Implementation & Support
This should capture if they understand the nuances of rolling out linux in an organisation
Now the harder part is "how to you test this". As a perpetual student I would suggest that you need to do this in a multi-phase test. This will be expensive, but it will ensure that you get some level of objectivity:
1: You write a scenario based around a real world example to assess their ability to come up with an appropriate hardware and software solution for the design components.
2: Give them a multi-processor + Raid + Redundant PSU server and get them to install, configre and lockdown the system. Then get them to install a heap of services that you think are important.
3: Give them 10 PC's. Get them to build an image on 1 and then roll the image across all 10 workstations. Make some of the workstations different, give them different size drives, and different network adapters. See how they adjust to the variations
4: Bring a secretary in and get them to run a "how to use" session for the secretary. See how good they are
Also: Note this does not necessarily need to be the one person for all skills. So be flexible and allow them to have up to 3 different people to deliver the outcome. The only limit is that only 1 person can spend time with the end-user. If you want any more ideas or thoughts, feel free to mail me: starsky AT bluecouch DOT COM DOT AU
This bill needs to be taken alongside the context of the privacy act.
The privacy act means that companies can only use information colelcted for the purpose that it was collected, unless the person who's information is collected agrees for it to be used for other specified and explained purposes.
The SPAM laws are basically enforcing the opt-out option, and making it easier to prosecute people who abuse the privacy laws (eg companies acquiring harvested lists from overseas organisations who are not subject to our privacy act) and then using the information to spam).
On its own this bill is toothless, but when combined with the Privacy Act it is a significant weapon.
In this case I think this bill will actually help.
My ISP here in Australia (IINET) iinet.com.au
By defualt it blocks a number of ports (including 21, 80 and some others... You can then opt to turn them off if you wish to (through a web based toolbox).
They also offer SPAM tagging too (This is off by default, and can be turned on through the web based toolbox!
Now *THAT* is a progressive ISP.
They protect the n00bs, but allow people like me to still unblock ports that I want to.
"and use all 3 fingers"
What! You only have three fingers! That must have been one hell of an accident to involve both hands!
When they say takeup is 2%, does that assume 2% of the population, becasue that is not accurate.
.. So It has to be at least 6%....
Telstra is one of 2 main suppliers, and they have 300,000 consumer broadband connections (both wholesale and retail). At the Australian average of 2.7 people per household (Australian Census 1996)that is 810,000 people who have access to broadband at home.
Australia's population is 18.2Million (Australian Census 1996).
So Telstra is reaching approx 4.5% of the population with broadband (via wholesale or retail).
Now this is just Telstra, and doesn't include any Optus cable customers (at least 100k more?).
I hate bad statisticians who assume broadband accounts = number of people with access to broadband at home.
There is DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) from sitting in economy class too long, but you can also get this from sitting at your PC for too long without a break. For a laugh (in a vain attempt to take the serious edge off this) I will call the clotting of blood from sitting at your PC too long "Computer Geek Thrombosis" (CGT).
/. and laughed, but seriously don't let it happen to you (or people under your care at your LAN).
To avoid this you should make sure that every hour or so people get up and around. We acheive this at our lan's through:
1 - BBQ, Softdrinks, water etc, and place them at least 20 meters away from the action. It forces people to get up and walk, and at the same time they also tend to wander.
2 - Make sure there is lots of cheap water (not just coke) available, as water prevents dehydration, and it stealthily encourages people to go to the loo... heheh nasty when in the middle of a tough cs WAR.... but it might save youre life.
3 - Ensure that there is pizza delivery, again, people need to stop gaming, get up, walk around etc.
This may sound silly, but CGT is a VERY serious problem, one that people have died from. We have all read the anecdotes on
As does my antec Sonata. Just tip it backwards and pull it out the front.
Since installing the Sonata I now have NO dust in my case.
I had this discussion over a large quantity of red wine with my Parents and a group of their friends. I have a degree in IT and work in the industry, and they see me as a guru because I know how to connect to the internet an fix their email and that kind of thing. The ethical issues they came up with were: 1. When the only way to access a service is via technology (eg internet), are we creating a class of people who are denied access to services because they don't have or understand the technology involved? Particularly of relevance to government services. Disclaimer: i don't want to buy into the pc's in libraries debate, this is about the ability to use the tecnology, not just have access to it. 2. Why do computers use so much electricity? In terms of pollution are computers to the 21st century what cars were to the 20th century, amazingly transforming society but at what cost? This is not just the electricity, but the lack of recycling, the use of polluting products in manufacture etc. 3. Will a child be denied equal access to education because they don't have a PC at home?
Amen to that. I wean overclockers.com.au's april fools joke *NOTE SINGULAR* 24 hours ago was funny, but reading slashdot on April 2 and seeing them all is just LAME.
/. ;)
Time for a petition to get 1 april fools joke on
So true. This was such a great film. I bought this on DVD when it first came out. When I watched the Matrix I saw so much of Dark city in the whole story.
Starring: John Turturro, John Goodman, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, Judy Davis, Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi, Tony Shaloub,
Richard Portnow, Christopher Murney, David Warrilow.
Read a great reviw of it here:
http://www.cinepad.com/reviews/barton.htm
In Australia you have the OPTION to have your mobile number listed. I know a number of people who choose to do this, but the majority do not.
This is a sensible approach, as those people who want their number to remain private can keep it that way.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. All you have to do is keep a list of your downloads, and then if you ever get busted, rock up to court with a shipload of CD's in hand (or even better tapes if you can get em cheap.
;)
Then you can claim you were entitled to obtain a backup copy, as you already own the original
Some pixel response times are measured in half-cycles and others are measured in full cycles.
My 25ms lcd's are FULL cycle. 25ms to clear and replace a pixel with a new colour.
Some manufacturers are advertising pixel response times based upon just the time from already cleared to fill, and as such report their times twice as good as they actually are. So be careful and definitely TRY BEFORE YOU BUY with LCD's. Also remember ot check for dead pixels.
This all depends on what the pixel response time is. I get no ghosting on my LCD's at all, but I have seen some crappy (eg Viewmaster) ones that did ghost.
My pixel response time on my TWO LG 563LE's is 25ms. This is the equivalent of 40fps... BUT this is only for the pixels that change colours.
All of the other pixels don't change color at all, and as such are inifite FPS !!! This is why you don't get such sore eyes on these babies.
I also play counter-strike and DOD on my LCD's and I experience no problems at all playing. I have had other gamers surprised at how good they are given they are LCD's
This has been before the supreme court before, and it was knocked back becasue the court said that it is in affect adding a TAX on media for a party other than the government.
As such this will NEVER get passed into law now, as it would take a serious cahnge in what is now precedent.