Don't stress folks. I live in SA and I can tell you now that there are no storm troopers out the window.
SA was amongst the first places in the world to give women a vote, gave rights to aborigines before most other states etc. Marijuana is decriminalized and all that. Good food and wine, lots of motor sports, great climate - could be worse.
The government here is mostly powerless and these sorts of laws are unenforcable. Anarchy is just around the corner anyway.
So chill out. People should be more concerned about concentration of media ownership and draconian defamation laws in Australia. Internet censorship has technical solutions.
For low end small business or backyard ISP use MTBF can be surpisingly good with commodity hardware. Infact my experience so far is that my ISPs routers are less reliable than anything I have built out of scrap. Ofcourse they are carrying a much greater load.
An easy way to cover the redundancy requirement is to have a complete standby unit preconfigured and ready to slot in. All that is needed is two obsolete PCs with identical WAN adapter and NIC. Either go the floppy approach as with LinuxRouter or get Sandisks. Since a sandisk just looks like another harddrive, an old IDE hardrive will do in the spare router to save on sandisk costs (I don't think they ever fail anyway)
It's not hot swappable, so you may lose a couple of customers in the minute it takes to swap cables and boot from sandisk, but if you are running amazon.com obviously you have a budget to buy better. To put the reliability issue in perspective, where I live my ISP lost 75% of it's bandwidth on Monday and its routers all went nuts. We had traffic interuptions for hours while they reconfigured their network and what looked like numerous router reboots.
So for those on a limited budget Linux routers can be both reliable and very flexible but like MySQL they have limitations that means they are not a solution for all situations.
A lot of countries have first past the post preferential voting systems. If the Presidential voting system was reformed to allow preferences then as long as you have a sensible second preference it still counts.
So with preferences you could vote Nader or Buchanan as a protest vote against the major parties and because they wouldn't get enough votes to count the second preference could go Gore or Bush.
So on the surface this seems pretty cool. You could vote for an independent based on policy but not end up with a major party you hate in power.
The problem with preferential voting is that while a lot more people would vote Nader or other minor parties, the major parties don't care so much. They are pretty sure where the preferences are going to be cast anyway so they don't have to work to keep those votes as hard as before.
Perhaps adolescents don't have any rights but adults sure as hell do.
These guys should be scared as hell of class actions from people dobbed in. If people can show that there schooling and therefore their future was severely changed by this shit and sues them for loss of earnings, emotional damage etc they are screwed.
I think Telstra should have been split before privatisation began. The local loop could have been sold of in regional parcels to produce something like the Baby Bells and the long distance business sold seperately.
At the moment Telstra legitimately uses some parts of its business to protect its interests elsewhere. This might have been largely overcome if the whole privitisation thing had been done better. Now half of the business has been sold we have lost the opportunity to partition it.
It is going to be in Telstra's interests to delay access to the local loop as long as possible to protect their long distance and data services. I wouldn't be surprised if they are delayed over all sorts of "technical difficulties"
I don't think all the woes of Australian coms are Telstra's fault. The government has to take most of the blame.
That is because the Newspapers have been aiming their product at an elderly demographic and low brows.
They have targeted young people much like the Nazi's targeted Jews for villification. The only time they portray young people in a good light is if they have aced the score in public examination or won a young business award (which is sponsered by their advertisers or the editor is a member of the service organisation that runs it). The recipients always look like unusually straight mormons.
The rest of the time it is all about illegal drugs, homelessness and unemployment. They never write about old people sucking down huge ammounts of legal drugs at tax payers expense, living forever in nursing homes at taxpayers expense, or not getting a job instead of bleading young working peoples wallets dry - all of which are the same issue from a similarly warped perspective.
Any attempt at writing for a younger audience is so damaged by previous biases that it is usually seen for the blatant pandering that it is.
Newspapers suffer from the one thing that younger people are most aware of - lack of credibility.
Newspapers have to appeal to too many people. I live in a the original News Corporation one paper town so perhaps others have it better.
Newspapers are trying to appeal to everyone and noone and lose me in the stupidity and irrelevance of the shit they write. Often they bow to commercial interest (undeclared infomercials), or worse are plain lazy and don't check their facts.
The week of Diana (may she rot in peace) front pages showed just how much they valued news coverage vs selling to collectors. Weeks later Mother Theresa got a small column buried somehwere after page three. I hate to think how many weak minds they are shaping.
The only paper I read reliably is the Tuesday Australian as it is 2/3 computer industry news and it balances some of the vested interests with columns from The Australian Unix users group and the Australian Telecommunications Users Group. Most of it I have read on the Net first but it is good reinforcement.
I am very aware that I am lacking informed general news coverage but I generally just watch late night TV news. If it pisses me off I can always flick to the playstation and I don't have to pay for a piece of environmental vandalism as an added bonus.
And I used to like Newspapers and was a subsciber.
As you will see from the almost universal dislike of CA in the surrounding discussions this company is not well regarded.
As a linux admin I am get to choosing the best solution. I don't have this choice when I have to look after Netware or NT because the solution was all worked out on someones spreadsheet on the basis of comparing pricelists and reading glossy brochures not on an informed understanding of technical issues.
The standard test applies here. What's in it for us? CA get access to the Linux buzzword that makes shares soar. What do we get? Why should we drop our pants and bend over for every company that ports to Linux? Lets leave the worst of the old software companies in the last millenium where they belong and choose carefully which ones we partner with.
Wow! I am so glad we don't run Redhat or somebody might decide it is a good idea to buy this stuff.
My impression of CAI is that they are the slumlord of software. They seem to buy old programs, market the hell out of them, add an IT to the name and provide crap support.
Not sure that is a real term but as I understand it x86 processors don't have the stuff to be fully virtualisable so people have to do really clever hacks like vmware so we can run multiple OS.
Now that the instruction set is in software I wonder if Transmeta can make this a bit simpler to do?
The trouble is that governments don't want the Internet to be judged by the same rules as telephone and mail.
They view it as a threat to internal security because it promotes true democracy. So they will introduce legislation so that Judges don't have to think about common law rights and precedent.
If you don't believe me, come to Australia. People elsewhere think our government is backward because of some recent policies - wrong - they are way ahead of the game.
The Aus government has already figured out that the way to curb unbridled democracy is to have ISPs running scared over draconian content laws and then to have a politically controlled internal security organisation (read secret police) legally authorized to hack into said ISPs (or any one else) and to change data on their computers.
Note that ASIO (the security org) is not answerable to a judge to get a warrant but to a political master. So if an someone hosts unsavoury political commentry that the government sees as a threat to national security (ie it threatens the government of the day or some political or economice interest) they can legally compromise the providers computers.
I do like reading Katz's articles. They are a nice alternative to the usual crap media.
Not being there, I wonder if the political protests were totally spontaneous or if they may have been manipulated. Sorry to get conspiritorial but some US corporations and political institutions really don't benefit from the WTO at all. Are some of the large industry lobby groups and political organisations financing and organising the protests?
I can't help feeling that the WTO are something of a convenient scapegoat now that we don't have the commies to blame things on.
Since we don't have guaranteed freedom of speech in Australia, I can get sued for defamation if I say what I really think. So I'll be nice.
We are a tiny marketplace. Most businesses are controlled by powerful monopolies or price-fixing arrangements between would be monopolies. So we don't get to vote with our dollar.
We have an aging population who are largely conservative, racist and anglophile. We let English citizens resident here vote even though they have no loyalty to our country. So we didn't get a republic.
We elected a conservative goverment as a balance to a couple of decades of less conservative government on a platform to revitalize the economy and reform taxation and got a lot of patronising bastards as a by product. The result is that the economy is sweet and government tax on computers will fall from 22% to 10%.
Unfortunately, we lost any chance at a republic, freedom of speach, privacy, a voice for young people, any rights workers have managed to get over the past two hundred years and a few other things like automatic weapons.
So basically Australia is a great place except that young educated people don't feel as if they are adequately represented by our democracy - which is probaly true of most modern democratic states.
Watching the riots in Seattle, I realised that in Australia it isn't the WTO that is screwing us, it is the guy next door. Half my friends work for Telstra and they are all nice people. Telstra is mainly owned by the government and aussie mom and pop shareholders. But they still screw the consumer somehow.
After years of observation I think Telstra's recipe is something like this. Find a cool technology. Base the pricing of it on what it would have cost to implement with 1960s technology and then market it to the only segment of the market that doesn't actually want the product. Then outsource the implementation to a company with no experience in that area (possibly swedish). If a product should be successful, move in on resellers and VARs markets so they desert the product completely and never want to work with Telstra again. To cover losses, don't pass on savings made by advances in technology in core services like long distance calls. Then run lots of expensive adds on TV with pictures of happy Aussie farmers (who in reality get screwed by expensive long distance phone calls) and use the "we are a great Australian company not a monopoly" mantra to the ACCC.
At least it doesn't snow at Christmas. That would suck big time.
It would seem that the inside of the planet is already pretty hot from radioactive decay - where the heat is close enough to the surface, such as in New Zealand it is used for power production.
Anyway, the bombs should be exploded under France, not Kansas.
I really shopped around for a distribution after Slackware lost ground technically. I tried really hard to like Red Hat because the press was determined it was the one true distibution - some closed source software releases such as IBM Viavoice and APC Powerchute seem only to work with Red Hat for some unfathomable reason (Has anyone noticed how Oracle seems to be distibution neutral - it runs on anything)
Ease of installation isn't 1% of what it takes to have a good distribution - even if it does make good copy for a clueless journo. I think Debian is the right choice for a Linux based server OS in a commercial environment. It is good to see a server vendor realise the truth of this. Red Hat may be the choice for the home user or Grandma, Debian is a professionals(and hackers) choice.
I am one of those Linux guys who complains that they can't keep their NT and Netware boxes up, but that is because I have very high expectations. I expect fatal reproducible TCP/IP bugs to be fixed before the 5th service pack. Admittedly both can work reasonably well in particular environments.
If IRC is proven on BSD why would you bother using Linux - they cost the same. If Oracle runs well on Linux why would you shift to NT? If NT or Netware are not suited to a particular task don't you owe it to yourself and your company to investigate the alternative.
So is Linux overhyped? In my experience, no. It has done everything I have asked of it and has proven very stable for a number of critial business applications. I would add that BSD is no lesser system and that most commercial Unix are very good as well.
The most overhyped systems come from Utah and Seattle - they work well in particular niches but their marketing people continue to push their use in areas they may not be capable of handling as well as Unix-like alternatives.
I don't rate most commercial software I have seen for Linux - most seems to have only been tested on the latest Red Hate. You are lucky to get it installed, let alone running on any other dist.
Oracle have done an intelligent port to Linux. It runs fine on Debian, which practically no other commercial software does. I would have no problems recommending Oracle on Debian to anyone for developing any sort of business applications. Oracle tech support has been really knowledgable and helpful the one time I needed them.
The only worry is that I think Oracle licenses have recently gone up in price. I am not so concerned about their technical excellence as about greed and the fact that we are now locked in to proprietry SQL. Still I must admit we are getting a good product for the dollars.
I hate it when people bash Delphi because it's not free or becuase its Pascal or whatever. Borland/Inprise are going to generate more Linux related jobs. Once some of the bashers enter the job market they will appreciate this.
There are two main camps of people developing software for businesses. The VB/Backoffice losers and the Delphi Client-Server crowd. One just got a huge competitive advantage over the other because they can deliver a better, faster, more stable product with no OS licensing fees and Macro virus bullshit. If the market truly is free one of these is going to get trashed RSN.
So with all these business apps running on Linux the demand for good Linux support people will go through the roof. And all these Linux support people are going to get paid to write little GPLed tools in gcc/perl etc that benefit the whole community. Delphi isn't a threat to Linux - it improves the job market and increases the size of the community.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI Australia launched their first satellite from Woomera in South Australia in November '67. So Australia isn't that knew to the space business.
It's just that they decided to specialise in areas more vital to national interests.
There is an interesting non-commercial, non-government Australian space program here:
http://www.asri.org.au/ASRI/index.xml
Humours last great frontier - the internet.
I hope they never sanitize and control the internet to conform to the standards of surprisingly humourless slashdot readers.
Self parody loony fringe sites like this are hilarious. My question for Alex is, has he considered doing a standup show based on his scientific ideas?
A second possible question is what is Alex's expert opinion on Scientologist technology and how it works?
Yes we know Alex's ideas are a crock of shit scientifically, but so is Star Trek and we still enjoy it don't we?
Aren't these all Federal politicians?
I don't know of an email list but State members can be found here
Don't stress folks. I live in SA and I can tell you now that there are no storm troopers out the window.
SA was amongst the first places in the world to give women a vote, gave rights to aborigines before most other states etc. Marijuana is decriminalized and all that. Good food and wine, lots of motor sports, great climate - could be worse.
The government here is mostly powerless and these sorts of laws are unenforcable. Anarchy is just around the corner anyway.
So chill out. People should be more concerned about concentration of media ownership and draconian defamation laws in Australia. Internet censorship has technical solutions.
For low end small business or backyard ISP use MTBF can be surpisingly good with commodity hardware. Infact my experience so far is that my ISPs routers are less reliable than anything I have built out of scrap. Ofcourse they are carrying a much greater load.
An easy way to cover the redundancy requirement is to have a complete standby unit preconfigured and ready to slot in. All that is needed is two obsolete PCs with identical WAN adapter and NIC. Either go the floppy approach as with LinuxRouter or get Sandisks. Since a sandisk just looks like another harddrive, an old IDE hardrive will do in the spare router to save on sandisk costs (I don't think they ever fail anyway)
It's not hot swappable, so you may lose a couple of customers in the minute it takes to swap cables and boot from sandisk, but if you are running amazon.com obviously you have a budget to buy better. To put the reliability issue in perspective, where I live my ISP lost 75% of it's bandwidth on Monday and its routers all went nuts. We had traffic interuptions for hours while they reconfigured their network and what looked like numerous router reboots.
So for those on a limited budget Linux routers can be both reliable and very flexible but like MySQL they have limitations that means they are not a solution for all situations.
A lot of countries have first past the post preferential voting systems. If the Presidential voting system was reformed to allow preferences then as long as you have a sensible second preference it still counts.
So with preferences you could vote Nader or Buchanan as a protest vote against the major parties and because they wouldn't get enough votes to count the second preference could go Gore or Bush.
So on the surface this seems pretty cool. You could vote for an independent based on policy but not end up with a major party you hate in power.
The problem with preferential voting is that while a lot more people would vote Nader or other minor parties, the major parties don't care so much. They are pretty sure where the preferences are going to be cast anyway so they don't have to work to keep those votes as hard as before.
I still think it is a bit fairer.
Are the patents office totally out of touch or what? Wake up guys, software patents are wrong.
Doctors have this wonderful creed "Do no harm"
From the directors comments I suspect the lawyers equivalent is "Cover our asses"
Patents are for lightbulbs and can openers not for giving street directions.
> Also, I have no idea how to even get to a login prompt on an ATM in the first place
Press ctrl-alt-del !-)
Perhaps adolescents don't have any rights but adults sure as hell do.
These guys should be scared as hell of class actions from people dobbed in. If people can show that there schooling and therefore their future was severely changed by this shit and sues them for loss of earnings, emotional damage etc they are screwed.
I hope they have lots of liability insurance.
I think Telstra should have been split before privatisation began. The local loop could have been sold of in regional parcels to produce something like the Baby Bells and the long distance business sold seperately.
At the moment Telstra legitimately uses some parts of its business to protect its interests elsewhere. This might have been largely overcome if the whole privitisation thing had been done better. Now half of the business has been sold we have lost the opportunity to partition it.
It is going to be in Telstra's interests to delay access to the local loop as long as possible to protect their long distance and data services. I wouldn't be surprised if they are delayed over all sorts of "technical difficulties"
I don't think all the woes of Australian coms are Telstra's fault. The government has to take most of the blame.
That is because the Newspapers have been aiming their product at an elderly demographic and low brows.
They have targeted young people much like the Nazi's targeted Jews for villification. The only time they portray young people in a good light is if they have aced the score in public examination or won a young business award (which is sponsered by their advertisers or the editor is a member of the service organisation that runs it). The recipients always look like unusually straight mormons.
The rest of the time it is all about illegal drugs, homelessness and unemployment. They never write about old people sucking down huge ammounts of legal drugs at tax payers expense, living forever in nursing homes at taxpayers expense, or not getting a job instead of bleading young working peoples wallets dry - all of which are the same issue from a similarly warped perspective.
Any attempt at writing for a younger audience is so damaged by previous biases that it is usually seen for the blatant pandering that it is.
Newspapers suffer from the one thing that younger people are most aware of - lack of credibility.
Newspapers have to appeal to too many people. I live in a the original News Corporation one paper town so perhaps others have it better.
Newspapers are trying to appeal to everyone and noone and lose me in the stupidity and irrelevance of the shit they write. Often they bow to commercial interest (undeclared infomercials), or worse are plain lazy and don't check their facts.
The week of Diana (may she rot in peace) front pages showed just how much they valued news coverage vs selling to collectors. Weeks later Mother Theresa got a small column buried somehwere after page three. I hate to think how many weak minds they are shaping.
The only paper I read reliably is the Tuesday Australian as it is 2/3 computer industry news and it balances some of the vested interests with columns from The Australian Unix users group and the Australian Telecommunications Users Group. Most of it I have read on the Net first but it is good reinforcement.
I am very aware that I am lacking informed general news coverage but I generally just watch late night TV news. If it pisses me off I can always flick to the playstation and I don't have to pay for a piece of environmental vandalism as an added bonus.
And I used to like Newspapers and was a subsciber.
How about CensorNet- the broken net where nothing works as it should and people live in fear.
Or some alternate names might be BookBurningNet, FundamentalistNet, AuthoritorianNet, FascistNet or Australia.
Wrong. This is bad for Linux.
As you will see from the almost universal dislike of CA in the surrounding discussions this company is not well regarded.
As a linux admin I am get to choosing the best solution. I don't have this choice when I have to look after Netware or NT because the solution was all worked out on someones spreadsheet on the basis of comparing pricelists and reading glossy brochures not on an informed understanding of technical issues.
The standard test applies here. What's in it for us? CA get access to the Linux buzzword that makes shares soar. What do we get? Why should we drop our pants and bend over for every company that ports to Linux? Lets leave the worst of the old software companies in the last millenium where they belong and choose carefully which ones we partner with.
Wow! I am so glad we don't run Redhat or somebody might decide it is a good idea to buy this stuff.
My impression of CAI is that they are the slumlord of software. They seem to buy old programs, market the hell out of them, add an IT to the name and provide crap support.
Not sure that is a real term but as I understand it x86 processors don't have the stuff to be fully virtualisable so people have to do really clever hacks like vmware so we can run multiple OS.
Now that the instruction set is in software I wonder if Transmeta can make this a bit simpler to do?
The trouble is that governments don't want the Internet to be judged by the same rules as telephone and mail.
They view it as a threat to internal security because it promotes true democracy. So they will introduce legislation so that Judges don't have to think about common law rights and precedent.
If you don't believe me, come to Australia. People elsewhere think our government is backward because of some recent policies - wrong - they are way ahead of the game.
The Aus government has already figured out that the way to curb unbridled democracy is to have ISPs running scared over draconian content laws and then to have a politically controlled internal security organisation (read secret police) legally authorized to hack into said ISPs (or any one else) and to change data on their computers.
Note that ASIO (the security org) is not answerable to a judge to get a warrant but to a political master. So if an someone hosts unsavoury political commentry that the government sees as a threat to national security (ie it threatens the government of the day or some political or economice interest) they can legally compromise the providers computers.
I do like reading Katz's articles. They are a nice alternative to the usual crap media.
Not being there, I wonder if the political protests were totally spontaneous or if they may have been manipulated. Sorry to get conspiritorial but some US corporations and political institutions really don't benefit from the WTO at all. Are some of the large industry lobby groups and political organisations financing and organising the protests?
I can't help feeling that the WTO are something of a convenient scapegoat now that we don't have the commies to blame things on.
Since we don't have guaranteed freedom of speech in Australia, I can get sued for defamation if I say what I really think. So I'll be nice.
We are a tiny marketplace. Most businesses are controlled by powerful monopolies or price-fixing arrangements between would be monopolies. So we don't get to vote with our dollar.
We have an aging population who are largely conservative, racist and anglophile. We let English citizens resident here vote even though they have no loyalty to our country. So we didn't get a republic.
We elected a conservative goverment as a balance to a couple of decades of less conservative government on a platform to revitalize the economy and reform taxation and got a lot of patronising bastards as a by product. The result is that the economy is sweet and government tax on computers will fall from 22% to 10%.
Unfortunately, we lost any chance at a republic, freedom of speach, privacy, a voice for young people, any rights workers have managed to get over the past two hundred years and a few other things like automatic weapons.
So basically Australia is a great place except that young educated people don't feel as if they are adequately represented by our democracy - which is probaly true of most modern democratic states.
Watching the riots in Seattle, I realised that in Australia it isn't the WTO that is screwing us, it is the guy next door. Half my friends work for Telstra and they are all nice people. Telstra is mainly owned by the government and aussie mom and pop shareholders. But they still screw the consumer somehow.
After years of observation I think Telstra's recipe is something like this. Find a cool technology. Base the pricing of it on what it would have cost to implement with 1960s technology and then market it to the only segment of the market that doesn't actually want the product. Then outsource the implementation to a company with no experience in that area (possibly swedish). If a product should be successful, move in on resellers and VARs markets so they desert the product completely and never want to work with Telstra again. To cover losses, don't pass on savings made by advances in technology in core services like long distance calls. Then run lots of expensive adds on TV with pictures of happy Aussie farmers (who in reality get screwed by expensive long distance phone calls) and use the "we are a great Australian company not a monopoly" mantra to the ACCC.
At least it doesn't snow at Christmas. That would suck big time.
Office Apps are dead, Microsoft won this and the browser wars. Opensource needs a better tree and SQL server so why not buy them.
How much would Novell and Oracle cost? Redhat with NDS and Oracle would kick the shit out of BackOffice.
It would seem that the inside of the planet is already pretty hot from radioactive decay - where the heat is close enough to the surface, such as in New Zealand it is used for power production.
Anyway, the bombs should be exploded under France, not Kansas.
I really shopped around for a distribution after Slackware lost ground technically. I tried really hard to like Red Hat because the press was determined it was the one true distibution - some closed source software releases such as IBM Viavoice and APC Powerchute seem only to work with Red Hat for some unfathomable reason (Has anyone noticed how Oracle seems to be distibution neutral - it runs on anything)
Ease of installation isn't 1% of what it takes to have a good distribution - even if it does make good copy for a clueless journo. I think Debian is the right choice for a Linux based server OS in a commercial environment. It is good to see a server vendor realise the truth of this. Red Hat may be the choice for the home user or Grandma, Debian is a professionals(and hackers) choice.
I am one of those Linux guys who complains that they can't keep their NT and Netware boxes up, but that is because I have very high expectations. I expect fatal reproducible TCP/IP bugs to be fixed before the 5th service pack. Admittedly both can work reasonably well in particular environments.
If IRC is proven on BSD why would you bother using Linux - they cost the same. If Oracle runs well on Linux why would you shift to NT? If NT or Netware are not suited to a particular task don't you owe it to yourself and your company to investigate the alternative.
So is Linux overhyped? In my experience, no. It has done everything I have asked of it and has proven very stable for a number of critial business applications. I would add that BSD is no lesser system and that most commercial Unix are very good as well.
The most overhyped systems come from Utah and Seattle - they work well in particular niches but their marketing people continue to push their use in areas they may not be capable of handling as well as Unix-like alternatives.
I don't rate most commercial software I have seen for Linux - most seems to have only been tested on the latest Red Hate. You are lucky to get it installed, let alone running on any other dist.
Oracle have done an intelligent port to Linux. It runs fine on Debian, which practically no other commercial software does. I would have no problems recommending Oracle on Debian to anyone for developing any sort of business applications. Oracle tech support has been really knowledgable and helpful the one time I needed them.
The only worry is that I think Oracle licenses have recently gone up in price. I am not so concerned about their technical excellence as about greed and the fact that we are now locked in to proprietry SQL. Still I must admit we are getting a good product for the dollars.
I hate it when people bash Delphi because it's not free or becuase its Pascal or whatever. Borland/Inprise are going to generate more Linux related jobs. Once some of the bashers enter the job market they will appreciate this.
There are two main camps of people developing software for businesses. The VB/Backoffice losers and the Delphi Client-Server crowd. One just got a huge competitive advantage over the other because they can deliver a better, faster, more stable product with no OS licensing fees and Macro virus bullshit. If the market truly is free one of these is going to get trashed RSN.
So with all these business apps running on Linux the demand for good Linux support people will go through the roof. And all these Linux support people are going to get paid to write little GPLed tools in gcc/perl etc that benefit the whole community. Delphi isn't a threat to Linux - it improves the job market and increases the size of the community.