Microsoft preventing people from using their software or services? People, this is a GOOD thing! It's like when career criminals give lectures in schools about the evils of crime, and stuff like that!
Can it be that Microsoft is finally turning from evil to good? No, I don't think so!
late last week, and I watched in on Saturday, and again on Sunday, and I'm gonna go home and watch it again tonite. It's a great movie.
I suspect a lot of the jokes might be somewhat
lost on non-Australians, but there's still a
LOT in there for everyone. The American national anthem is my personal favourite.
They keep doing really nice shots of the dish from the ground and the air. Beautiful colours, and a really nice setting.
Parkes is around 3-4 hours from where I am (Sydney, Australia). I've never seen the dish first hand, but after seeing the movie, I'm keen to go see the dish now. I might go take a look-see at our other radio telescope (the Australia Telescope) too now. That one is a doozy!
This leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. I've donated billions of CPU cycles from 50 or more machines to this project over the past 5 years.
Now, it looks a lot like they're doing what CDDB did - spent years freeloading until they have a nice strong base on the back of good-faith activity from the general public, then take advantage of that and go make some money out of it. CDDB turned into complete assholes about it too. I wonder, will they reduce a new client soon, and will it be named sellout.net?
Well, looks like today's the day I have to go find all those distributed.net clients and kill them off.
I gotta think long and hard about contributing to online projects nowadays. In the 'good old days', before the web and before script kiddies, the 'net was a place where it was more rewarding to give than receive, and people respected and appreciated the contributions of other, and the DIDN'T SELL OUT AND USE THE GIFT FOR PERSONAL FINANCIAL GAME! Make no mistake, the good old days are VERY over.
Way back when, I damaged my copy of a particular
album (Springsteen's "Born to Run") as I remember. I had exactly this thought: I already paid for the right to listen to the music, I just want to buy new media...
I tried this on at the local record store. The woman in the store gave me a look like I'd just asked her to fellate me right there and then in the store. She wasn't the brightest.
In any case, I figure even if someone got it in their heads to go bouncing through the courts and make it happen, we'd suddenly learn that the 'license to listen' component of the record/tape/cd amounts to a grand total of twenty-five cents.
Those record company execs would be up there swearing on their grandmother's grave: "Yes Your Honour, that's correct, it costs us twenty-four dollars and twenty-five cents to make those rec'ds y'r Honna. We keep twenty-five cents as our profit, take twenty-five cents in copyright licensing fees, and the retailers sells them for twenty-five dollars, keeping twenty-five cents for himself. That's not a lot of profit when you've got mouths to feed at home y'r Honna..."
User settings for slashdot allow me to ignore a whole range of topics, authors, subjects, etc. There isn't an option to allow me to ignore/not-see articles that require me to register/login to see the link?
I'd like the option to exclude stories that refer to articles on the NY Times in my slashdot config please.
In global terms, the two places aren't very far apart. In Sydney terms, they're like inner-north-east and inner-south-east of greater Sydney. Both are well disconnected from the city, and you have to cross the harbour (ie: The Bridge(tm)) of equivalent to travel between the two. You could drive a car between the two in about 45mins on a weekend, and an 75mins on a weekday.
Both locations are light-industrial with a small population of IT type stuff.
The interesting thing about it is that both Alexandria and Brookvale are about 10Km inland from the sea. I haven't figured that bit out yet...
You saw it here first... AUSTRALIANS DO NOT DRINK FOSTERS. We export the whole production to places where people (1) think we're cool, (2) think we drink Fosters, and (3) drink Fosters because they want to be cool like us.
They don't even bother advertising the stuff here in Australia anymore.
Actually, I was having a drink (Victoria Bitter) in a pub just yesterday, and I asked one of my colleagues: "Have you ever seen an Australian drink Fosters other than under duress?".
He answered in the negative. (Under duress includes no other beer available!)
No, they're not laid next to each other. They follow quite different (and well seperated) routes. Also, there's not actually two cables. There's a whole bunch of them, criss-crossing in different places. It looks like a good plan to me.
That's not actually accurate. That's a map of a private network operated by the incumbent telephone company in Australia. Yes, they do have a huge chunk of the Internet market here, but that isn't a map of Australia's connections to the Internet.
There's a whole bunch of others owned by different Telcos and stuff. It's a messy picture, and no one provider (or even two providers) has been able to offer a good (read fast + reliable) service out of the country.
This is great news from the point of view of 'the Internet guy' in a company in Australia. Despite having three separate 2Mbit/s frame links to the net (that's huge in Australian terms) already, I have to deal with constant outages, delays and problems.
That's largely because my provider is crap, but also because the only usefull way out of the country is by a fat link on the other side of the country. Theres lots of landline to carry traffic, and it seems to get broken a lot.
The second route ex-Sydney is oversubscribed, and is useless as a contingency when the main one dies.
I'll be the first to admit scepticism that this thing would ever be completed, but now that it is, the whole world changes for US. A whole bunch of new world-class providers will move down here now, instead of the second rate crap we've had to date.
Richard Branson never claimed to be the Messiah - in fact if pressed, I suspect he'd be the first to suggest that he's a very naughty boy:-)
IMHO, it's a hell of a shame to see Virgin Connect die. Virgin have quite a reputation for being good, fun and revolutionary
On past history though, when things go pear shaped for a Virgin business (and that doesn't happen often) then Virgin will be nice and play fair about it... read on...
Virgin is a branding company. They have lots of different businesses: The well known Virgn Megastores (no longer owned by the Virgin group), Virgin Atlantic, the luxury airline showing the others how to fly, Virgin Express in the UK, the cheap and cheerful airline in the UK. Virgin Trains, Virgin Mobile phones, the list goes on.
In the past few months, Mr Branson has come down under to set up Virgin Blue, the low-cost airline that is seriously putting the cat amongst the pigeons for the long standing duopoly that masqueraded as a scheduled air transport industry in Australia.
One of the first Virgin businesses was Virgin Records. After some initial success, the board of directors decided to float the company on the stock market. A bad decision as it happened, things went ugly, and ultimately the company decided to buy-back the shares and de-list.
At the time, the share price had dropped to some 30% of the original issue price. In legal terms, they could have paid the current price, and got out. Richard Branson took a different stance though. At the original float, he went to the street, and met with individual investors queueing to buy shares in the company. When they decided to de-list, he said "Those people put their faith in me, I won't let them down." He bought their shares back at the price they originally paid. A huge cost to the then ailing record company, but a huge boost to his personal reputation, and the Virgin brand.
So, a significant point about the withdrawal of Virgin Connect - I don't expect it to be an ugly grab-the-money-and-run action that one expects from failed start-ups these days.
> They are mentioned explicitly in a company's site license, as an inspector to ensure software legitimacy
Not in my backyard (Australia). Our legal system derives from the English, so this one probably applies to most cricket playing nations...
Thornton vs. Shoe Lane Parking(Ltd). In his judgement, Lord Denning said "No person in a thousand ever read the terms and conditions".
Result: Long winded and finely printed conditions that guarantee the software publisher right to everything from your first born boy child to open access to your house day or night aren't worth a hill 'o' beans.
(Applies differently to businesses mind you - The escape clause applies to individuals, but not corporates).
(The original case was one of a guy slipping and injuring himself in a car park having driven his car inside, and accepted a ticket from the machine beside the sign that read "accepting a ticket means that you agree with all the mindless drivel in this terms and conditions document" followed by about 80K of text in 6 point courier with all kinds of escape clauses. The guy sued, the company pointed at the sign and blew him a rasberry. He went all the way to the House of Lords (The highest Court in the UK), and Lord Justice Denning said "No, YOU get stuffed...".)
An interesting article in the newspaper a few
days ago talked about the 'fact' that Australia is due to start with HDTV in a few months time...
Only one problem with that plan, the standards haven't been agreed, the broadcast licences haven't been doled out (read: sold by a greedy govt for buttloads of cash), and there isn't any hardware on the shelves in stores.
> The new edition is less harsh on Solaris, and saves most of its snide remarks for RedHat.
Snide remarks towards DeadRat? More than appropriate IMNSHO. Dead Rat is a great learning tool, but you wouldn't want to risk your business on it. Too wierd, too many bits missing.
That said, I seem to attract lots of newbies who want to be a unix admin when they grow up. I send them off to d/l the RedHat ISOs and run it up. I tell them that they should use it to learn, since loading new stuff is easy enough with the RPM thing, and it's well documented on the net.
I qualify that recommendation with the instruction that once they have it grokked, they need to fdisk/newfs and install Mandrake (or, if they're sufficiently clued newbies) FreeBSD. Mandrake's a good home PC or an economy class server. FreeBSD's business class.
When the newsbies come back clued, and start asking what books they should buy, I tell them The Red Book. I've never seen a better book on Unix Admin for the pre-clued. Never leave home without it.
My copy of the red book has travelled with me to Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand (from Australia). It's more important to me than that pesky American Express card that every retailer on the planet hates!!!
Slightly different approach: When they ask about security, I send them out to buy:
1) The Red Book - good grounding in *nix for the pre-clued
2) The Crab Book (TCP/IP Net Admin - Hunt) - good for TCP/IP clues
3) The Cricket Book (DNS and Bind - Liu) - 'If something is wrong with your net connection, first check DNS, DNS, and then DNS'
4) 'Firewalls and Internet Security' - Cheswick and Bellovin. Needs no introduction. The network security bible. Brilliant teaching book.
5) 'Intranet Security' - Mccarthy - Usefull for putting fear of god (and thus extracting money) from management. Also an excellent grass roots 'this is what we're on about' for newbie security types...
OCR in Chinese - not that hard actually. Believe it or not, easier than English.
Chinese characters have very strict structure, and there are a large number of them. While you have a lot more choices, they're much better defined.
Even easier than OCR in Chinese is handwriting recognition. There are some really good Chinese handwriting recognition programs in routine business use already. For eg, I was in HK last week with my GF. She went to a government social security type office to sort out some stuff for her family. The interviewer there took all her notes and filled out the forms on a page-sized touch pad with a stylus, and the PC recognised and input all the writing on the fly.
I watched over some shoulders in electronics stores while people were trialling palm-like devices. Handwriting recognition there was very good as well.
The key is that Kanji (Chinese characters) not only have a strict structure, the stroke order _AND_ even the stroke direction is well defined. (Look closely at those chinese calligraphy style fonts and you'll see that one end of a line is always thicker than the other - the 'brush' starts out thick and thins as the ink is used and the writer lifts it off the page).
All that structure, stroke order and stroke direction stuff is well defined in Chinese culture - the kids have it drummed into them at school. The end result system is a handwriting method that is very easy for a computer to recognise with very high and repeatable levels of accuracy.
I was in HK last week. found a couple of really cool shops. Small, but a good selection of stuff.
I got a Neon Genesis Evangelion in a 3 DVD set comprising all episodes from Genesis1 to End for HK$220.00 (about fourty-eight cents in US money!). The death and rebirth ones were available on another DVD for HK$80.00.
The prices will bring tears to the eyes of those of you complaining about US prices!
Catch the MTR (Mass Transit Rail) to Kwun Tong station (green line). On one side of the station there is an elevated walkway approx 100m long from approx the _middle_ of the station (don't take the one off the end of the station) over to a small shopping centre. In that centre, there are two DVD/VCD shops devoted to anime, and a whole stack of others with DVD/VCD movies and even a bit of dodgy porn. No sign of any copied stuff though - all legit. A spot well worth a visit if you're in HK.
Machines in machines rock...
on
User Mode Linux
·
· Score: 2
Pretty awesome stuff. VMWare is a really good commercial one - though VMWare goes the whole hog, with a full virtual machine with access to hardware and everything. Still, being able to boot multiple instances of the one OS on any one machine is a real plus.
At my work, we have a choice of NT, NT, or NT - and it's not native hackable NT either, it's a bizarre mod on NT done by some systems group. I run Red Hat on my PC, then the obligatory corporate NT builde in a VMWare virtual machine. Handed it to the NT drones one day and said "what's wrong with this?" with the NT machine full-screen. They couldn't tell, said it was just fine.
Stuff like this really comes into it's own when you can run multiple 'machines' on one, get a whole multi-OS test lab happening on one box. User-land linux rocks - a great step in the right direction!
I have one of these at home. I've got the 'version 1' model that doesn't have a serial port.
I use it for a home server, with the SMB, NFS, etc. Mine is actually running as a Cobalt RaQ - the 1U high model that does multiple virtual site hosting, etc.
With a bit of a kernel mod, and access to the distros, you can make your Qube be any Qube. Mine thinks it's a RaQ
I've compiled up MySQL, and I run a database on it as well. ProgresSQL is also available.
It's a very capable box. Not as advanced out-of- the-box as the Whistle Interjet, but a million times more configurable. The Interjet locks you out. This one lets you telnet in and do anything you damn well please.
There are two vendors (last time I checked) for these in Australia. I reccomend you avoid like the plague the one called Unixpac.
I installed a bunch of them in various small companies to be used as web servers, etc. They work very well that that job. Even did one with a VPN between two Qubes joining two remote offices together via the 'net.
This ain't 'news for nerds', this is an unmitigated plug for a book. OK, he's a good guy, we like him, he's earned a boatload of respect and all, but how did this make it slashdot.
I read over the site. It ain't Gene Krantz's web site, and it ain't a personal web site or anything. It's a plug for a book. Simple as that.
Rant off: That said, I'm gonna go order the book now:-)
Slashdot Mirror
That's BBS in Sydney, Australia for ya!
G
Can it be that Microsoft is finally turning from evil to good? No, I don't think so!
I suspect a lot of the jokes might be somewhat lost on non-Australians, but there's still a LOT in there for everyone. The American national anthem is my personal favourite.
They keep doing really nice shots of the dish from the ground and the air. Beautiful colours, and a really nice setting.
Parkes is around 3-4 hours from where I am (Sydney, Australia). I've never seen the dish first hand, but after seeing the movie, I'm keen to go see the dish now. I might go take a look-see at our other radio telescope (the Australia Telescope) too now. That one is a doozy!
URL for the Parkes Observatory is at http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/, and the Australia Telescope Compact Array http://www.narrabri.atnf.csiro.au/ (This one is an array of five small dishes that move along a 3Km long rail track).
One good thing about being so far from anywhere is that conditions are great for observatories down here!
Now, it looks a lot like they're doing what CDDB did - spent years freeloading until they have a nice strong base on the back of good-faith activity from the general public, then take advantage of that and go make some money out of it. CDDB turned into complete assholes about it too. I wonder, will they reduce a new client soon, and will it be named sellout.net?
Well, looks like today's the day I have to go find all those distributed.net clients and kill them off.
I gotta think long and hard about contributing to online projects nowadays. In the 'good old days', before the web and before script kiddies, the 'net was a place where it was more rewarding to give than receive, and people respected and appreciated the contributions of other, and the DIDN'T SELL OUT AND USE THE GIFT FOR PERSONAL FINANCIAL GAME! Make no mistake, the good old days are VERY over.
I tried this on at the local record store. The woman in the store gave me a look like I'd just asked her to fellate me right there and then in the store. She wasn't the brightest.
In any case, I figure even if someone got it in their heads to go bouncing through the courts and make it happen, we'd suddenly learn that the 'license to listen' component of the record/tape/cd amounts to a grand total of twenty-five cents.
Those record company execs would be up there swearing on their grandmother's grave: "Yes Your Honour, that's correct, it costs us twenty-four dollars and twenty-five cents to make those rec'ds y'r Honna. We keep twenty-five cents as our profit, take twenty-five cents in copyright licensing fees, and the retailers sells them for twenty-five dollars, keeping twenty-five cents for himself. That's not a lot of profit when you've got mouths to feed at home y'r Honna..."
I'd like the option to exclude stories that refer to articles on the NY Times in my slashdot config please.
Both locations are light-industrial with a small population of IT type stuff.
The interesting thing about it is that both Alexandria and Brookvale are about 10Km inland from the sea. I haven't figured that bit out yet...
They don't even bother advertising the stuff here in Australia anymore.
Actually, I was having a drink (Victoria Bitter) in a pub just yesterday, and I asked one of my colleagues: "Have you ever seen an Australian drink Fosters other than under duress?".
He answered in the negative. (Under duress includes no other beer available!)
See Map of network for details.
There's a whole bunch of others owned by different Telcos and stuff. It's a messy picture, and no one provider (or even two providers) has been able to offer a good (read fast + reliable) service out of the country.
Southern Cross Cables, or, if you prefer to bypass the Macromedia slash crap: Southern Cross Cables Front Page
That's largely because my provider is crap, but also because the only usefull way out of the country is by a fat link on the other side of the country. Theres lots of landline to carry traffic, and it seems to get broken a lot. The second route ex-Sydney is oversubscribed, and is useless as a contingency when the main one dies.
I'll be the first to admit scepticism that this thing would ever be completed, but now that it is, the whole world changes for US. A whole bunch of new world-class providers will move down here now, instead of the second rate crap we've had to date.
IMHO, it's a hell of a shame to see Virgin Connect die. Virgin have quite a reputation for being good, fun and revolutionary
On past history though, when things go pear shaped for a Virgin business (and that doesn't happen often) then Virgin will be nice and play fair about it... read on...
Virgin is a branding company. They have lots of different businesses: The well known Virgn Megastores (no longer owned by the Virgin group), Virgin Atlantic, the luxury airline showing the others how to fly, Virgin Express in the UK, the cheap and cheerful airline in the UK. Virgin Trains, Virgin Mobile phones, the list goes on.
In the past few months, Mr Branson has come down under to set up Virgin Blue, the low-cost airline that is seriously putting the cat amongst the pigeons for the long standing duopoly that masqueraded as a scheduled air transport industry in Australia.
One of the first Virgin businesses was Virgin Records. After some initial success, the board of directors decided to float the company on the stock market. A bad decision as it happened, things went ugly, and ultimately the company decided to buy-back the shares and de-list.
At the time, the share price had dropped to some 30% of the original issue price. In legal terms, they could have paid the current price, and got out. Richard Branson took a different stance though. At the original float, he went to the street, and met with individual investors queueing to buy shares in the company. When they decided to de-list, he said "Those people put their faith in me, I won't let them down." He bought their shares back at the price they originally paid. A huge cost to the then ailing record company, but a huge boost to his personal reputation, and the Virgin brand.
So, a significant point about the withdrawal of Virgin Connect - I don't expect it to be an ugly grab-the-money-and-run action that one expects from failed start-ups these days.
Not in my backyard (Australia). Our legal system derives from the English, so this one probably applies to most cricket playing nations...
Thornton vs. Shoe Lane Parking(Ltd). In his judgement, Lord Denning said "No person in a thousand ever read the terms and conditions".
Result: Long winded and finely printed conditions that guarantee the software publisher right to everything from your first born boy child to open access to your house day or night aren't worth a hill 'o' beans.
(Applies differently to businesses mind you - The escape clause applies to individuals, but not corporates).
(The original case was one of a guy slipping and injuring himself in a car park having driven his car inside, and accepted a ticket from the machine beside the sign that read "accepting a ticket means that you agree with all the mindless drivel in this terms and conditions document" followed by about 80K of text in 6 point courier with all kinds of escape clauses. The guy sued, the company pointed at the sign and blew him a rasberry. He went all the way to the House of Lords (The highest Court in the UK), and Lord Justice Denning said "No, YOU get stuffed...".)
I love it when the little guys win! :-)
Only one problem with that plan, the standards haven't been agreed, the broadcast licences haven't been doled out (read: sold by a greedy govt for buttloads of cash), and there isn't any hardware on the shelves in stores.
He's dreaming son...
Snide remarks towards DeadRat? More than appropriate IMNSHO. Dead Rat is a great learning tool, but you wouldn't want to risk your business on it. Too wierd, too many bits missing.
That said, I seem to attract lots of newbies who want to be a unix admin when they grow up. I send them off to d/l the RedHat ISOs and run it up. I tell them that they should use it to learn, since loading new stuff is easy enough with the RPM thing, and it's well documented on the net.
I qualify that recommendation with the instruction that once they have it grokked, they need to fdisk/newfs and install Mandrake (or, if they're sufficiently clued newbies) FreeBSD. Mandrake's a good home PC or an economy class server. FreeBSD's business class.
When the newsbies come back clued, and start asking what books they should buy, I tell them The Red Book. I've never seen a better book on Unix Admin for the pre-clued. Never leave home without it.
My copy of the red book has travelled with me to Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand (from Australia). It's more important to me than that pesky American Express card that every retailer on the planet hates!!!
Slightly different approach: When they ask about security, I send them out to buy:
1) The Red Book - good grounding in *nix for the pre-clued
2) The Crab Book (TCP/IP Net Admin - Hunt) - good for TCP/IP clues
3) The Cricket Book (DNS and Bind - Liu) - 'If something is wrong with your net connection, first check DNS, DNS, and then DNS'
4) 'Firewalls and Internet Security' - Cheswick and Bellovin. Needs no introduction. The network security bible. Brilliant teaching book.
5) 'Intranet Security' - Mccarthy - Usefull for putting fear of god (and thus extracting money) from management. Also an excellent grass roots 'this is what we're on about' for newbie security types...
My twenty-five cents...
Geoff
Chinese characters have very strict structure, and there are a large number of them. While you have a lot more choices, they're much better defined.
Even easier than OCR in Chinese is handwriting recognition. There are some really good Chinese handwriting recognition programs in routine business use already. For eg, I was in HK last week with my GF. She went to a government social security type office to sort out some stuff for her family. The interviewer there took all her notes and filled out the forms on a page-sized touch pad with a stylus, and the PC recognised and input all the writing on the fly.
I watched over some shoulders in electronics stores while people were trialling palm-like devices. Handwriting recognition there was very good as well.
The key is that Kanji (Chinese characters) not only have a strict structure, the stroke order _AND_ even the stroke direction is well defined. (Look closely at those chinese calligraphy style fonts and you'll see that one end of a line is always thicker than the other - the 'brush' starts out thick and thins as the ink is used and the writer lifts it off the page).
All that structure, stroke order and stroke direction stuff is well defined in Chinese culture - the kids have it drummed into them at school. The end result system is a handwriting method that is very easy for a computer to recognise with very high and repeatable levels of accuracy.
I got a Neon Genesis Evangelion in a 3 DVD set comprising all episodes from Genesis1 to End for HK$220.00 (about fourty-eight cents in US money!). The death and rebirth ones were available on another DVD for HK$80.00.
The prices will bring tears to the eyes of those of you complaining about US prices!
Catch the MTR (Mass Transit Rail) to Kwun Tong station (green line). On one side of the station there is an elevated walkway approx 100m long from approx the _middle_ of the station (don't take the one off the end of the station) over to a small shopping centre. In that centre, there are two DVD/VCD shops devoted to anime, and a whole stack of others with DVD/VCD movies and even a bit of dodgy porn. No sign of any copied stuff though - all legit. A spot well worth a visit if you're in HK.
At my work, we have a choice of NT, NT, or NT - and it's not native hackable NT either, it's a bizarre mod on NT done by some systems group. I run Red Hat on my PC, then the obligatory corporate NT builde in a VMWare virtual machine. Handed it to the NT drones one day and said "what's wrong with this?" with the NT machine full-screen. They couldn't tell, said it was just fine.
Stuff like this really comes into it's own when you can run multiple 'machines' on one, get a whole multi-OS test lab happening on one box. User-land linux rocks - a great step in the right direction!
You can afford a wife? I'm so poor I can't afford a wife of my own - I need to do a time-share thing with the guy up the street...
I use it for a home server, with the SMB, NFS, etc. Mine is actually running as a Cobalt RaQ - the 1U high model that does multiple virtual site hosting, etc.
With a bit of a kernel mod, and access to the distros, you can make your Qube be any Qube. Mine thinks it's a RaQ
I've compiled up MySQL, and I run a database on it as well. ProgresSQL is also available.
It's a very capable box. Not as advanced out-of- the-box as the Whistle Interjet, but a million times more configurable. The Interjet locks you out. This one lets you telnet in and do anything you damn well please.
There are two vendors (last time I checked) for these in Australia. I reccomend you avoid like the plague the one called Unixpac.
I installed a bunch of them in various small companies to be used as web servers, etc. They work very well that that job. Even did one with a VPN between two Qubes joining two remote offices together via the 'net.
This ain't 'news for nerds', this is an unmitigated plug for a book. OK, he's a good guy, we like him, he's earned a boatload of respect and all, but how did this make it slashdot.
:-)
I read over the site. It ain't Gene Krantz's web site, and it ain't a personal web site or anything. It's a plug for a book. Simple as that.
Rant off: That said, I'm gonna go order the book now