Sigh. It is not 'outright greed'. It is that doing business in Australia is so incredibly expensive. We have one of the highest average wages in the OECD. On top of that we have payroll tax and compulsory superannaution costs which must also be born by the employer. We have just gone retro with our industrial relations laws (back to the 80s) and union-led wage inflation is already appearing in some areas of our economy. We have one of the highest commercial average rental rates in the world. We have moderately high electricity tarrifs and rapidly climbing water tarrifs. The cost of our internet is also double that of in the States.
All of this feeds through to large operating costs for having an actual retail outlet vs importing direct from overseas. So no, it is not outright greed.
I partially agree with your premise: I run a company in Australia and doing business here is expensive but I don't think it justifies a 200%+ markup on items. In any case the biggest problem here is not the price it's the complete indifference of Australian retailers - they simply aren't interested in helping you, it's all simply a case of import the cheapest, nastiest crap from china and throw it at the customer as you shove them out the door.
I rarely buy anything locally anymore (except for food) even if it costs me more to buy from overseas. Why? Australian resellers (both traditional and online), distributors and importers are lazy abusive con artists.
Every time I try to order anything locally it's either marked up by an obscene amount (anywhere from 200% to 2000% over the retail price in the US/UK/EU/etc.) or more likely simply unavailable because the local shops and distributors couldn't be fucked carrying anything except the cheapest shitty thing they can import from China.
Email an online store here and ask about a product - 90% of the time you get no reply. Go into a bricks and mortar shop and ask for something and 90% of the time they'll answer by offering you a completely different product. When you tell them that you're after a specific make and model and aren't interested in alternatives more often than not the sales guy will abuse you.
Just today I had another experience of the local bullshit: I wanted to buy some new HDD's (I'd rather buy spinning chunks of rust locally for warranty purposes), I'd settled on the new Hitachi 7K3000 in the 2TB size (note that the 3TB size _is_ available here) so I emailed the three distributors mentioned on the Hitachi site. One bounced (this also happens a lot) one ignored me and the other one said that I'd have to wait at least two more months before they'd be bothered to import them. Best guess as to why: there are probably thousands of the older 7K2000 2TB model sitting in a warehouse in Japan and the local dickheads probably offered to take them at a reduced price from Hitachi all the while still charging the same price to the customer.
This debate has been making headlines here for a few weeks now and the thing I find most ironic is that no one has bothered to suggest that just maybe the GST should be simply abolished - everyone seems to accept the idea that the government sticking its hand in your pocket every time you make a purchase as some kind of natural law. This baffles me: the left should naturally be against it because it disproportionately taxes the poor and the right should be against it because it's a tax that is administered non-voluntarily buy businesses without recompense.
I've always found it strange that the NHS seems to love having "managers" who aren't doctors or nurses. Where else would you find someone in charge who's never done the job? Head teachers used to be teachers, football managers used to be players, heads of sales used to be salesmen, but a guy who runs a hospital isn't a doctor? How did this come about?
The only other example I can think of is MBAs thinking they can manage ANYTHING.
MBAs being able to manage anything is precisely what they are taught at MBA school. Medicine isn't the only area which suffers from this... just walk into any IT shop and you'll find the guy in charge probably used to sell tyres.
As someone who has visited A+E a few times, I have to (generally) agree.
The times I've been into A+E I (and those I've been in with) have generally been seen quickly and well (though once by a doctor who was obviously _very_ tired, but I could see that he still knew what he was doing). The one time I was kept waiting I wasn't going to go in, but I was very drunk, it was a wound on the back of my head I couldn't see, and a few people told me to go in (I'm occasionally vaguely rational when I'm drunk, and I thought I'd better take other people's advice because I knew the alcohol could be killing the pain and disrupting other symptoms). I sat there for 4 hours to be told it was a graze, but that wasn't really a problem with A+E.
Anyway, given the choice between the NHS and another system... I'd choose the NHS, despite some of its failings.
The NHS has for some time been dependent on the goodwill and vocational motivation of it's healthcare professionals, because they sure as hell ain't motivated by the working conditions, pay, and benefits.
The average pay for a GP in the UK is over £100,000 per year (linked like that because I'm not sure if/. will mangle pound signs in links). I'm not saying that GPs should not get that amount, but that is around 5 times the median for the UK. £100,000 is about the _total_ income tax of 30 taxpayers on that median pay.
I'm not sure exactly how it works in the UK but here in Australia most GP's earn around A$400,000/yr which seems like an insane amount of money until you factor in their costs - they have to pay for the very matronly group of gestapo officers at their front desks, utilities, journal subscriptions and most importantly they pay over $100,000/yr in insurance premiums and then their tax... so at the end of the year they probably walk away with 80-100k in their pockets which is a substantial amount to be sure but not the 400k windfall that everyone assumes.
Come on Ed's - who's the 'tard who can't tell the difference between the Irish Republic and the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?
The 2009 H1N1 must have mutated at a whole other level to be that resistant.
Must have? I find it surprising that so many people believe this was a random event when the first reported case of the 2009 N1H1 was about 80 miles from a research complex for Gilead Sciences (the company that developed Tamiflu) and one of the researchers looking at 2009 N1H1 stated it was almost identical to a flu virus they'd been working on at the lab.
Production of 400 million capsules at around $12 each is a very big incentive to release a virus.
Citation required!
(and please not from some whack job conspiracy site)
At least those with increasing prices by one cent. Those where the bids are going down don't fit this explanation.
And that is what this junk is, completely bogus bids with no intent other than to cost your competitors clock cycles.
I worked for a couple of years at one of the big trading exchanges in Chicago. Our offices were on a lower floor, and whenever our traders got off the elevator, coming back from lunch, they would hit all the floor buttons to delay the traders returning to the higher floors, and anyone else unlucky enough to be on the same elevator. But that was one of the minor reasons that I quit that business sector. The piles of spilled cocaine on the bathroom floors, and my boss asking me "Do you love money? I love money. In order to be in this business you have to love money!" were two others.
As is commonly cited here, everything NASA does screws up because stupid Americans don't use the metric system... if only the Japanese would use it they wouldn't have these prob...
[hushed whispering] Uh.. it has come to my attention that some people believe Japan uses the metric system. This cannot be possible for 2 reasons: 1. With the metric system there can't be any stupid screwups like what the Americans do. 2. Japanese always have the most badass robots and this is just a space robot, and therefore must work. I stand by my original statement.
Heh... you think you're only joking but actually it's at least partially true:
Like many people from outside the USA I used to get extremely frustrated whenever I went to print anything as most software and hardware is defaulted to use US Letter rather than A4.
Some time later I got a job at a large Japanese company that makes printers and one of the things that really blew me away was that the Japanese have a paper size called A4 which is very slightly different from the A4 paper used by Europe... after that I decided that as much as US Letter pissed me off at least the Americans have the common decency to give their paper a different name.
Even worse, on a tangential note, I also discovered that the dozen-odd different types of connectors used back in the 90s for SCSI connectors literally doubled overnight at said company because the Japanese have the same dozen or so connectors except that they reverse the gender of all the connections.
In the end I guess it all comes down to that old saying: "The great thing about standards is that there is so many to choose from"
Those users should shop around, any switch that supports DSL or DSL 2+ can be used by any of the ISP. TPG has some of the best plans in AU, however they have really crap customer service, but you really don't need it once your up and running.
TPG.... you've got to be joking! Their customer service makes Telstra's look good, the idea that you don't need it once setup is nonsense... you don't need it until it breaks then you're in deep shit.
As for users shopping around - many people simply do not have a choice: my parents live outside of the city and whilst there are a couple of other ISP's aside from Telstra they simply just re-sell the Telstra service and hence the price is still inflated.
I live in near the Ryde district of Sydney which is where all the major Tech companies are placed as well as the 2nd largest Telco Optus and I can't get ADSL2+ either (at least not without putting up with ADSL1 speeds as I'm about 5km from the phone exchange).
We're talking about the HP that sold hundreds of thousands of laptops to consumers knowing that they had defective chipsets on the motherboard. They didn't discover this after shipping the laptops, they were aware of the problem before the first one was shipped and they had a choice: rework or repair the defective units before shipping, or ship them in defective condition and screw the customer.
Being the HP that we know - the one that didn't see a problem with "pretexting" - no, let's call it spying / eavesdropping on journalists reporting on their products - they decided to just go ahead and ship the defective products and let customer service deal with them. They stonewalled for as long as they could and insisted that there was nothing wrong with those products - even though they KNEW that they were defective. Finally, they "resolved" the problem by issuing a BIOS patch that caused the system fan to run at full speed constantly - this conveniently postponed the inevitable failure until after the warranty ran out.
They also extended the warranty for those units who had already failed - or so they said, but when owners of those products tried to get them fixed under warranty they were either given a repair consisting of replacing their defective motherboard with another defective motherboard - or more commonly, they refused to honor the warranty on these products. I have personal knowledge here; I had one of their defective products that was completely dead and they refused to repair it under warranty.
So while I would like to see a tablet running WebOS, I would never consider buying it if it was running on HP hardware. They've already proven to me that they'll build substandard products and refuse to repair them under warranty - they fooled me once but never again. If you want to buy one of these, keep this warning in mind.
I'm not going to disagree with what you've said but HP aren't alone here.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who suffered through Apple's iBook G3 fiasco with a bad logic board design - Apple simply replaced the failed board with an exact replacement, no redesign even though they admitted there was a fault with the design.
All the manufacturers are guilty of this shit. The problem is that we let them get away with it.
Regardless of the government's hysterical raving about internet filtering it is worth noting that it has always been the case that any publication that has not been given a certification by the Australian Government's Office of Film and Literature Classifaction is technically illegal - porn or otherwise.
Please stop spreading myths, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. RC material is generally not illegal to possess. Listen to Steven Conroy sometime, whenever he is asked a question about this he goes off on a long spiel about how RC material is not available in shops, can't rent it at the video store, etc etc which is all a distraction so he can avoid having to admit that it isn't actually illegal.
Refused Classification ("RC") material is legal in most states and territories, except for material that falls under the definition of child porn. See here, for example, for more details, and stop spreading crap info!
Eh... it may not be illegal to posess but I suspect that it is illegal to import without a license
So they can search for porn. What can they do if they find it? Is porn illegal in Australia now?
Regardless of the government's hysterical raving about internet filtering it is worth noting that it has always been the case that any publication that has not been given a certification by the Australian Government's Office of Film and Literature Classifaction is technically illegal - porn or otherwise.
Note that I'm not trying to justify the governments' position just pointing out how it works down here, I believe it's a similar situation in most Common Law jurisdictions.
Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance
KVM is fantastic virtualization technology, yet Xen gets all the hype these days. Why? Paravirtualization is pretty cool stuff, but seriously, what CPU's are made without some type of hardware-assisted virtualization support?
You must be reading a very different set of websites to me.
Of all the major linux distro's only OpenSuSE still ships with Xen, redhat, centos, fedora, debian and ubuntu are all kvm only and have been for quite some time.
Also KVM is linux only by it's very nature, some of us do use the still dying *BSD and the in purgatory OpenSolaris some of which support Xen out of the box so I for one welcome a non-kvm only future for opensource hypervisors.:)
Frankly I would say that it's the exact opposite of what you say - KVM is getting all the hype, unless you are referring to the commercial XenSource/Citrix offering which is respectfully suggest is a very different kettle of fish.
One thing that does seem curiously absent is how the NX bit helps you with DMA transfers. Ok, granted, you'd need to trick hardware other than the cpu into overwriting it, but given how much buggy hardware *cough* wireless broadcom chips for example *cough* there is in this imperfect world that isn't going to take all that long.
So you'd need to forbid virtual machines from accessing any non-emulated hardware* (which I'd say is going to cost you in performance) and even then any mistake in the hypervisor's drivers for the real hardware will be fatal (the latest linux release needed about 6.3 megabytes to describe the driver changes done)
* if you allow direct access to any device capable of DMA transfers, that will enable the VM to overwrite any memory it chooses
Although I have some very grave reservations about the idea of "guaranteeing" the security of a hypervisor (or anything else on x86 for that matter) you're DMA example is incorrect assuming that you use the lastest processors that have an IOMMU.
The real issue as the grandfather post points out is that you can provide a formal proof of any program the problem is that there is no formal proof of the correctness of any AMD or Intel CPU AFAIK.
- if you use any electronics, or wear shoes for that matter, you're partially responsible for the sweatshops in China. (I notice you didn't ask if he bought specifically from BP, so I'm not gonna cut you any such slack here either.)
- if you ever used anything cocoa-based, you're partially responsible for child slave labour in Africa. (Turns out even buying "Fair Trade" doesn't mean it can't be from those.)
Citation definately needed here.
- if you or any relative ever used opiates (e.g., as painkillers for a cancer), then you're at least partially responsible for funding the taliban in Afghanistan. (There is no opium poppy grown in the USA to the best of my knowledge, you know.)
And of course the USA and Afghanistan are the only countries on earth. Did you even try and google for legal opium production? Poppys are in fact grown legally in India, Japan, Korea and Australia - in fact about 40% of the worlds legally produced poppy is grown in the Australian state of Tasmania so in all likelyhood the opiates used by the American health industry is actually from Australia.
- if you ever bought bread, whiskey, beer or anything made from grain, really, then you're at least partially responsible for the destruction of agriculture in third world countries and the extinction of several species because of pesticides.
Etc.
I could call you a monster for that, but in reality, it just shows how stupid that kind of argument is.
I know it's hard for you right-wing, corporate- and oil-baron-apologist crowd to comprehend, but really it isn't everyone else who's a hypocrite. It's just your limited brain power, sorry. The rest of us can distinguish between personal guilt and just not having other choices but trying to change society for the better in those aspects. But, don't worry if you can't understand it right away. Some day your children might evolve into something that does. And maybe can walk without getting bruised knuckles. Won't that be nice?
Or in other words, that's gotta be the lamest attempt at a guilt trip attempt ever.
Or as a former Compaq employee who moved to greener pastures after being swallowed by HP I could argue that it was HP that wasted the engineering competence of both DEC and Compaq through lousy management, lack of vision and a love for work place backstabbing.
Again, I'd agree except that most of the lousy management were Compaq people that Carly promoted through the ranks. So much of the old HP brass was culled around the time of the merger because they didn't agree with what Carly was up to.
When I was a young buck working my first developer job in college Compaq had the best little handheld ever created...it was the iPhone of 1998...it was iPaq. It ran Windows CE, which is shit today because it's hardly changed since 1996. However, in 1998, it was amazing. We developed some software for them (and the customers went with $4000 ruggedized B&W models as opposed to the $500 or $600 iPaq, which was awesome. HP bought Compaq, started making the iPaq with cheaper and cheaper parts. it got shittier and shittier and slower and slower and Microsoft focused on bastardizing it into a phone and HP said meh. Then iPhone comes along (which I have and love btw), and everyone's like, oooh, it's never been done before, well arguably not as good, but still, iPaq as a bad-ass machine in its day and HP fucked it...guess what they'll do with Palm, who it could easily be argued beat out iPaq only to fuck themselves with incompetence.
While I'm at it, fuck Android...bring on the flamebait. The irony of the parallels between the phone computer was between Apple/iP* and Google/Android and Apple and Microsoft back in the day is clear. Microsoft copied from Apple and released an open, but shoddy platform. Google is copying from Apple and releasing an open, but shoddy platform.
I may be alone here, but I hope Apple wins this one. I'm sure I'm alone in being excited about actual innovation coming out of Redmond with Windows Phone 7...but it looks like their glossing over some clunkiness (typical).
Whilst I do agree with your comments about the iPaq as someone who has seen the whole HP/Compaq/DEC train-wreck from the inside* I feel bound to point out that the bad things happened when Carly arrived on the scene and got a whole lot worse when they aquired Compaq - a lot of bad performers on both sides were promoted to way above their own level of competence and unfortunately the few digital staff who had survived became very resentful of the situation.
In short from my perspective it was the two great engineering firms HP and DEC that have become sullied by a culture of mediocrity that Compaq brought to the party.
* my wife was a DEC engineer and I was a HP contractor pre-merger
In any case there is an avenue for appeal. Leave may be sought for the case to be heard by the High Court which has appellate jurisdiction over the federal court and all states supreme court. This is not overly likely however as the high court rarely accepts matters and the majority of its sittings are to determine constitutional matters.
Actually, the next step would probably be the Federal Court of Appeal.
Then a leave application to the High Court - where each party gets all of 20 minutes to make their case.
Then (iff the leave application is successful) you get a High Court hearing.
I also wouldn't say that the majority of HCA sittings regard constitutional matters. They get a mix of pretty much everything as a quick scan of last years' cases will show. All that immigration stuff is mostly straight admin law rather than anything constitutional.
And yes, IAAAL.
You are indeed correct about Federal Court of Appeal.
I was under the impression that most cases that the High Court deemed worthy were of a constitutional nature however seeing as IANAL and you say that you are I'm willing to accept this.
However I still believe that this is all a formality anyway - I'd be willing to wager that there will be new legislation before this time next year.
Its the supreme court after all. I think that says it all.
maybe ACTA will be nexT?
Sorry, no it wasn't the supreme court. If you are an non-Australian you will find a more complete explanation here. If on the other hand you are a fellow Aussie and you think that we have a single supreme court I respectfully suggest that you have watched way too many hours of imported American TV shows. Stop it!
The case was held in the federal court - each state within Australia has it's own court system the highest court within each state is the state's own supreme court. As this seems to have been a case with respect to federal law it was brought before the federal court.
In any case there is an avenue for appeal. Leave may be sought for the case to be heard by the High Court which has appellate jurisdiction over the federal court and all states supreme court. This is not overly likely however as the high court rarely accepts matters and the majority of its sittings are to determine constitutional matters.
The next step in this process for AFACT is more likely to lobby the idiots in Canberra for new laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. It is not 'outright greed'. It is that doing business in Australia is so incredibly expensive. We have one of the highest average wages in the OECD. On top of that we have payroll tax and compulsory superannaution costs which must also be born by the employer. We have just gone retro with our industrial relations laws (back to the 80s) and union-led wage inflation is already appearing in some areas of our economy. We have one of the highest commercial average rental rates in the world. We have moderately high electricity tarrifs and rapidly climbing water tarrifs. The cost of our internet is also double that of in the States.
All of this feeds through to large operating costs for having an actual retail outlet vs importing direct from overseas. So no, it is not outright greed.
I partially agree with your premise: I run a company in Australia and doing business here is expensive but I don't think it justifies a 200%+ markup on items. In any case the biggest problem here is not the price it's the complete indifference of Australian retailers - they simply aren't interested in helping you, it's all simply a case of import the cheapest, nastiest crap from china and throw it at the customer as you shove them out the door.
I rarely buy anything locally anymore (except for food) even if it costs me more to buy from overseas. Why? Australian resellers (both traditional and online), distributors and importers are lazy abusive con artists.
Every time I try to order anything locally it's either marked up by an obscene amount (anywhere from 200% to 2000% over the retail price in the US/UK/EU/etc.) or more likely simply unavailable because the local shops and distributors couldn't be fucked carrying anything except the cheapest shitty thing they can import from China.
Email an online store here and ask about a product - 90% of the time you get no reply. Go into a bricks and mortar shop and ask for something and 90% of the time they'll answer by offering you a completely different product. When you tell them that you're after a specific make and model and aren't interested in alternatives more often than not the sales guy will abuse you.
Just today I had another experience of the local bullshit: I wanted to buy some new HDD's (I'd rather buy spinning chunks of rust locally for warranty purposes), I'd settled on the new Hitachi 7K3000 in the 2TB size (note that the 3TB size _is_ available here) so I emailed the three distributors mentioned on the Hitachi site. One bounced (this also happens a lot) one ignored me and the other one said that I'd have to wait at least two more months before they'd be bothered to import them. Best guess as to why: there are probably thousands of the older 7K2000 2TB model sitting in a warehouse in Japan and the local dickheads probably offered to take them at a reduced price from Hitachi all the while still charging the same price to the customer.
This debate has been making headlines here for a few weeks now and the thing I find most ironic is that no one has bothered to suggest that just maybe the GST should be simply abolished - everyone seems to accept the idea that the government sticking its hand in your pocket every time you make a purchase as some kind of natural law. This baffles me: the left should naturally be against it because it disproportionately taxes the poor and the right should be against it because it's a tax that is administered non-voluntarily buy businesses without recompense.
I've always found it strange that the NHS seems to love having "managers" who aren't doctors or nurses. Where else would you find someone in charge who's never done the job? Head teachers used to be teachers, football managers used to be players, heads of sales used to be salesmen, but a guy who runs a hospital isn't a doctor? How did this come about?
The only other example I can think of is MBAs thinking they can manage ANYTHING.
MBAs being able to manage anything is precisely what they are taught at MBA school. Medicine isn't the only area which suffers from this... just walk into any IT shop and you'll find the guy in charge probably used to sell tyres.
As someone who has visited A+E a few times, I have to (generally) agree.
The times I've been into A+E I (and those I've been in with) have generally been seen quickly and well (though once by a doctor who was obviously _very_ tired, but I could see that he still knew what he was doing). The one time I was kept waiting I wasn't going to go in, but I was very drunk, it was a wound on the back of my head I couldn't see, and a few people told me to go in (I'm occasionally vaguely rational when I'm drunk, and I thought I'd better take other people's advice because I knew the alcohol could be killing the pain and disrupting other symptoms). I sat there for 4 hours to be told it was a graze, but that wasn't really a problem with A+E.
Anyway, given the choice between the NHS and another system... I'd choose the NHS, despite some of its failings.
The NHS has for some time been dependent on the goodwill and vocational motivation of it's healthcare professionals, because they sure as hell ain't motivated by the working conditions, pay, and benefits.
The average pay for a GP in the UK is over £100,000 per year (linked like that because I'm not sure if /. will mangle pound signs in links). I'm not saying that GPs should not get that amount, but that is around 5 times the median for the UK. £100,000 is about the _total_ income tax of 30 taxpayers on that median pay.
I'm not sure exactly how it works in the UK but here in Australia most GP's earn around A$400,000/yr which seems like an insane amount of money until you factor in their costs - they have to pay for the very matronly group of gestapo officers at their front desks, utilities, journal subscriptions and most importantly they pay over $100,000/yr in insurance premiums and then their tax... so at the end of the year they probably walk away with 80-100k in their pockets which is a substantial amount to be sure but not the 400k windfall that everyone assumes.
Why is it that the editors seem to assume that we all know who Attachmate are?
I have a limited idea since taking a look at the wikipedia entry but come on Ed's a bit of backgound info in the summary wouldn't kill you.
Come on Ed's - who's the 'tard who can't tell the difference between the Irish Republic and the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?
The article doesn't make it very clean but I think the redundancy referred to is the act of using the POTS network as a fall-back power supply.
What's the bet that...
10..9..8..7..6..
site gets slashdotted
5..4..3..2..1
site gets a DMCA takedown notice
I'm pretty sure it's a coded broadcast of the The timecube. It's just that you snotbrains can't see it through your evil "Oneism"
All I can say is whiskey-tango-foxtrot
The 2009 H1N1 must have mutated at a whole other level to be that resistant.
Must have? I find it surprising that so many people believe this was a random event when the first reported case of the
2009 N1H1 was about 80 miles from a research complex for Gilead Sciences (the company that developed Tamiflu) and one of
the researchers looking at 2009 N1H1 stated it was almost identical to a flu virus they'd been working on at the lab.
Production of 400 million capsules at around $12 each is a very big incentive to release a virus.
Citation required!
(and please not from some whack job conspiracy site)
At least those with increasing prices by one cent. Those where the bids are going down don't fit this explanation.
And that is what this junk is, completely bogus bids with no intent other than to cost your competitors clock cycles.
I worked for a couple of years at one of the big trading exchanges in Chicago. Our offices were on a lower floor, and whenever our traders got off the elevator, coming back from lunch, they would hit all the floor buttons to delay the traders returning to the higher floors, and anyone else unlucky enough to be on the same elevator. But that was one of the minor reasons that I quit that business sector. The piles of spilled cocaine on the bathroom floors, and my boss asking me "Do you love money? I love money. In order to be in this business you have to love money!" were two others.
Your boss wasn't called Gordon was he?
As is commonly cited here, everything NASA does screws up because stupid Americans don't use the metric system... if only the Japanese would use it they wouldn't have these prob...
[hushed whispering] Uh.. it has come to my attention that some people believe Japan uses the metric system. This cannot be possible for 2 reasons: 1. With the metric system there can't be any stupid screwups like what the Americans do. 2. Japanese always have the most badass robots and this is just a space robot, and therefore must work. I stand by my original statement.
Heh... you think you're only joking but actually it's at least partially true:
Like many people from outside the USA I used to get extremely frustrated whenever I went to print anything as most software and hardware is defaulted to use US Letter rather than A4.
Some time later I got a job at a large Japanese company that makes printers and one of the things that really blew me away was that the Japanese have a paper size called A4 which is very slightly different from the A4 paper used by Europe... after that I decided that as much as US Letter pissed me off at least the Americans have the common decency to give their paper a different name.
Even worse, on a tangential note, I also discovered that the dozen-odd different types of connectors used back in the 90s for SCSI connectors literally doubled overnight at said company because the Japanese have the same dozen or so connectors except that they reverse the gender of all the connections.
In the end I guess it all comes down to that old saying: "The great thing about standards is that there is so many to choose from"
Those users should shop around, any switch that supports DSL or DSL 2+ can be used by any of the ISP. TPG has some of the best plans in AU, however they have really crap customer service, but you really don't need it once your up and running.
TPG.... you've got to be joking! Their customer service makes Telstra's look good, the idea that you don't need it once setup is nonsense... you don't need it until it breaks then you're in deep shit.
As for users shopping around - many people simply do not have a choice: my parents live outside of the city and whilst there are a couple of other ISP's aside from Telstra they simply just re-sell the Telstra service and hence the price is still inflated.
I live in near the Ryde district of Sydney which is where all the major Tech companies are placed as well as the 2nd largest Telco Optus and I can't get ADSL2+ either (at least not without putting up with ADSL1 speeds as I'm about 5km from the phone exchange).
So please go and troll somewhere else!
We're talking about the HP that sold hundreds of thousands of laptops to consumers knowing that they had defective chipsets on the motherboard. They didn't discover this after shipping the laptops, they were aware of the problem before the first one was shipped and they had a choice: rework or repair the defective units before shipping, or ship them in defective condition and screw the customer.
Being the HP that we know - the one that didn't see a problem with "pretexting" - no, let's call it spying / eavesdropping on journalists reporting on their products - they decided to just go ahead and ship the defective products and let customer service deal with them. They stonewalled for as long as they could and insisted that there was nothing wrong with those products - even though they KNEW that they were defective. Finally, they "resolved" the problem by issuing a BIOS patch that caused the system fan to run at full speed constantly - this conveniently postponed the inevitable failure until after the warranty ran out.
They also extended the warranty for those units who had already failed - or so they said, but when owners of those products tried to get them fixed under warranty they were either given a repair consisting of replacing their defective motherboard with another defective motherboard - or more commonly, they refused to honor the warranty on these products. I have personal knowledge here; I had one of their defective products that was completely dead and they refused to repair it under warranty.
So while I would like to see a tablet running WebOS, I would never consider buying it if it was running on HP hardware. They've already proven to me that they'll build substandard products and refuse to repair them under warranty - they fooled me once but never again. If you want to buy one of these, keep this warning in mind.
I'm not going to disagree with what you've said but HP aren't alone here.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who suffered through Apple's iBook G3 fiasco with a bad logic board design - Apple simply replaced the failed board with an exact replacement, no redesign even though they admitted there was a fault with the design.
All the manufacturers are guilty of this shit. The problem is that we let them get away with it.
Please stop spreading myths, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. RC material is generally not illegal to possess. Listen to Steven Conroy sometime, whenever he is asked a question about this he goes off on a long spiel about how RC material is not available in shops, can't rent it at the video store, etc etc which is all a distraction so he can avoid having to admit that it isn't actually illegal.
Refused Classification ("RC") material is legal in most states and territories, except for material that falls under the definition of child porn. See here, for example, for more details, and stop spreading crap info!
Eh... it may not be illegal to posess but I suspect that it is illegal to import without a license
So they can search for porn. What can they do if they find it? Is porn illegal in Australia now?
Regardless of the government's hysterical raving about internet filtering it is worth noting that it has always been the case that any publication that has not been given a certification by the Australian Government's Office of Film and Literature Classifaction is technically illegal - porn or otherwise.
Note that I'm not trying to justify the governments' position just pointing out how it works down here, I believe it's a similar situation in most Common Law jurisdictions.
Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance
KVM is fantastic virtualization technology, yet Xen gets all the hype these days. Why? Paravirtualization is pretty cool stuff, but seriously, what CPU's are made without some type of hardware-assisted virtualization support?
You must be reading a very different set of websites to me.
Of all the major linux distro's only OpenSuSE still ships with Xen, redhat, centos, fedora, debian and ubuntu are all kvm only and have been for quite some time.
Also KVM is linux only by it's very nature, some of us do use the still dying *BSD and the in purgatory OpenSolaris some of which support Xen out of the box so I for one welcome a non-kvm only future for opensource hypervisors. :)
Frankly I would say that it's the exact opposite of what you say - KVM is getting all the hype, unless you are referring to the commercial XenSource/Citrix offering which is respectfully suggest is a very different kettle of fish.
One thing that does seem curiously absent is how the NX bit helps you with DMA transfers. Ok, granted, you'd need to trick hardware other than the cpu into overwriting it, but given how much buggy hardware *cough* wireless broadcom chips for example *cough* there is in this imperfect world that isn't going to take all that long.
So you'd need to forbid virtual machines from accessing any non-emulated hardware* (which I'd say is going to cost you in performance) and even then any mistake in the hypervisor's drivers for the real hardware will be fatal (the latest linux release needed about 6.3 megabytes to describe the driver changes done)
* if you allow direct access to any device capable of DMA transfers, that will enable the VM to overwrite any memory it chooses
Although I have some very grave reservations about the idea of "guaranteeing" the security of a hypervisor (or anything else on x86 for that matter) you're DMA example is incorrect assuming that you use the lastest processors that have an IOMMU.
The real issue as the grandfather post points out is that you can provide a formal proof of any program the problem is that there is no formal proof of the correctness of any AMD or Intel CPU AFAIK.
Really? By that logic,
- if you use any electronics, or wear shoes for that matter, you're partially responsible for the sweatshops in China. (I notice you didn't ask if he bought specifically from BP, so I'm not gonna cut you any such slack here either.)
- if you ever used anything cocoa-based, you're partially responsible for child slave labour in Africa. (Turns out even buying "Fair Trade" doesn't mean it can't be from those.)
Citation definately needed here.
- if you or any relative ever used opiates (e.g., as painkillers for a cancer), then you're at least partially responsible for funding the taliban in Afghanistan. (There is no opium poppy grown in the USA to the best of my knowledge, you know.)
And of course the USA and Afghanistan are the only countries on earth. Did you even try and google for legal opium production? Poppys are in fact grown legally in India, Japan, Korea and Australia - in fact about 40% of the worlds legally produced poppy is grown in the Australian state of Tasmania so in all likelyhood the opiates used by the American health industry is actually from Australia.
- if you ever bought bread, whiskey, beer or anything made from grain, really, then you're at least partially responsible for the destruction of agriculture in third world countries and the extinction of several species because of pesticides.
Etc.
I could call you a monster for that, but in reality, it just shows how stupid that kind of argument is.
I know it's hard for you right-wing, corporate- and oil-baron-apologist crowd to comprehend, but really it isn't everyone else who's a hypocrite. It's just your limited brain power, sorry. The rest of us can distinguish between personal guilt and just not having other choices but trying to change society for the better in those aspects. But, don't worry if you can't understand it right away. Some day your children might evolve into something that does. And maybe can walk without getting bruised knuckles. Won't that be nice?
Or in other words, that's gotta be the lamest attempt at a guilt trip attempt ever.
Or as a former Compaq employee who moved to greener pastures after being swallowed by HP I could argue that it was HP that wasted the engineering competence of both DEC and Compaq through lousy management, lack of vision and a love for work place backstabbing.
Again, I'd agree except that most of the lousy management were Compaq people that Carly promoted through the ranks. So much of the old HP brass was culled around the time of the merger because they didn't agree with what Carly was up to.
"Too bad they can't both lose"
-Henry Kissinger on the iran-iraq war
Too bad they haven't sent Kissinger to The Hague
When I was a young buck working my first developer job in college Compaq had the best little handheld ever created...it was the iPhone of 1998...it was iPaq. It ran Windows CE, which is shit today because it's hardly changed since 1996. However, in 1998, it was amazing. We developed some software for them (and the customers went with $4000 ruggedized B&W models as opposed to the $500 or $600 iPaq, which was awesome. HP bought Compaq, started making the iPaq with cheaper and cheaper parts. it got shittier and shittier and slower and slower and Microsoft focused on bastardizing it into a phone and HP said meh. Then iPhone comes along (which I have and love btw), and everyone's like, oooh, it's never been done before, well arguably not as good, but still, iPaq as a bad-ass machine in its day and HP fucked it...guess what they'll do with Palm, who it could easily be argued beat out iPaq only to fuck themselves with incompetence.
While I'm at it, fuck Android...bring on the flamebait. The irony of the parallels between the phone computer was between Apple/iP* and Google/Android and Apple and Microsoft back in the day is clear. Microsoft copied from Apple and released an open, but shoddy platform. Google is copying from Apple and releasing an open, but shoddy platform.
I may be alone here, but I hope Apple wins this one. I'm sure I'm alone in being excited about actual innovation coming out of Redmond with Windows Phone 7...but it looks like their glossing over some clunkiness (typical).
Whilst I do agree with your comments about the iPaq as someone who has seen the whole HP/Compaq/DEC train-wreck from the inside* I feel bound to point out that the bad things happened when Carly arrived on the scene and got a whole lot worse when they aquired Compaq - a lot of bad performers on both sides were promoted to way above their own level of competence and unfortunately the few digital staff who had survived became very resentful of the situation.
In short from my perspective it was the two great engineering firms HP and DEC that have become sullied by a culture of mediocrity that Compaq brought to the party.
* my wife was a DEC engineer and I was a HP contractor pre-merger
Actually, the next step would probably be the Federal Court of Appeal.
Then a leave application to the High Court - where each party gets all of 20 minutes to make their case.
Then (iff the leave application is successful) you get a High Court hearing.
I also wouldn't say that the majority of HCA sittings regard constitutional matters. They get a mix of pretty much everything as a quick scan of last years' cases will show. All that immigration stuff is mostly straight admin law rather than anything constitutional.
And yes, IAAAL.
You are indeed correct about Federal Court of Appeal.
I was under the impression that most cases that the High Court deemed worthy were of a constitutional nature however seeing as IANAL and you say that you are I'm willing to accept this.
However I still believe that this is all a formality anyway - I'd be willing to wager that there will be new legislation before this time next year.
Its the supreme court after all. I think that says it all.
maybe ACTA will be nexT?
Sorry, no it wasn't the supreme court. If you are an non-Australian you will find a more complete explanation here. If on the other hand you are a fellow Aussie and you think that we have a single supreme court I respectfully suggest that you have watched way too many hours of imported American TV shows. Stop it!
The case was held in the federal court - each state within Australia has it's own court system the highest court within each state is the state's own supreme court. As this seems to have been a case with respect to federal law it was brought before the federal court.
In any case there is an avenue for appeal. Leave may be sought for the case to be heard by the High Court which has appellate jurisdiction over the federal court and all states supreme court. This is not overly likely however as the high court rarely accepts matters and the majority of its sittings are to determine constitutional matters.
The next step in this process for AFACT is more likely to lobby the idiots in Canberra for new laws.
I'm reminded of the old example:
"I helped my uncle Jack off a horse."
No spellchecker is going to catch it if you forget to capitalize...
Stop it for god's sake... if you keep this up I'll asphyxiate.