Utterly untrue. Australia DOES have mandatory voting.
The Electoral Act makes it very clear: ”It shall be the duty of every elector to vote at each election”
Now it's impossible to ENFORCE that, because there's no way for the Electoral Commission to KNOW that you've just rocked up, got your name checked off, and left, so in practice attendance is all they'd care about. However, voting is, strictly speaking, legally compulsory.
Google favors their news service, maps, YouTube, shopping and every other service over others.
[citation needed]
Bing returns results objectively.
[citation needed]
If I search for 'map of sydney' on Bing, I get a map result for Bing Maps embedded in the page. If I search for 'daniel morcombe' (a topic in the news in Australia, sadly) I get a sampling of news articles with the 'more' link taking me to Bing News. I don't see any links to Google Maps or Google News.
We've had a few British-born PMs (well, arguably, even the ones born in what is now Australia were 'British-born' if they were born before Federation, right?); as far as I know, there's only one born outside Australia / Great Britain -- Chris Watson, PM #3, was born in Chile (to a New Zealander mother, no less)
We have never had dumb/superstitious people in charge of our military.
If you want examples of stupidity and superstition in the US Military, I wouldn't look at MAD. Read The Men Who Stare At Goats, detailing the Army experiments to try and kill goats with thought power, 'remote viewing' to spy on enemies, and the idea of creating psychic peace soldiers. Scary scary stuff.
My biggest annoyance with the HTC phone is that it uses a single mini-USB connector for everything... charger, headphones/hands free, etc. It doesn't actually have any other input/output ports besides the single mini-USB.
Unless the HTC Hero US version (the 'chinless' sprint one) varies from the European model in this regard, it has a 3.5mm jack. The 'ExtUSB' (HTC proprietary but at least compatible audio-carrying extension of Mini-USB) jack is on the bottom, and the 3.5mm headphone jack is on the top left.
Trust me, it works, was listening to music on my (UK) Hero without an adapter not one hour ago. Unless I've been hallucinating. Which is, you know, actually quite plausible.
Huh? Android phones have a capacitive touch screen, gps, and an accelerometer. A "compass" is an application that uses an accelerometer.
Uh... no. Android phones (at least, I think all the ones on the market currently -- I don't know if some will be released later without, can't see why though) have an inbuilt magnetometer -- an actual compass. The 3GS added the same thing to the iPhone range.
Totally agree. "This means that more programmers are using Python and Ruby on the weekend for their personal projects, showing that these languages are more fun to use". Uh-huh, sure it does. What an inescapable conclusion.
We could instead argue:
"This means that these these languages are newer and less well-established, showing that people doing projects on the weekend are more likely to use something they're not experienced with as a learning experience."
or more likely
"This means that people developing in Python and Ruby are more popular in the kinds of startups that sucker people into working every weekend to get the 'next big thing' out the door with the promise of stock options, even though stock options in e-plasticthingsontheendsofshoelaces-online.net aren't actually ever going to be worth jack."
The instructions say, pretty clearly, "copy and paste the article text you want to use", not "copy and paste some random guff you want to prove a point with". If you don't follow the instructions then, no, the results you get won't be valid. Surprise.
The rights they're granting you are clearly 'the rights not to be sued by AP for quoting their text', not anything else -- not rights against being sued by any third party or anything else. It's rights licensing, not insurance. Likewise, if YOU screw up the building permit form, yes, the city are within their rights to let you swing in the breeze as far as I'm concerned. But if you didn't then, sure, they'd better honour their commitment, as (hopefully) AP will.
It's a braindead web app, yes, and AP do a bunch of other stuff that's dumb and/or evil. But claiming that it's some elaborate IP fraud scheme to allow a stupid web app to accept incorrect input and print out some boilerplate text around it is a cheap shot, and dumb.
Sigh, what a total non-story this is. It's an estimation tool, people. If you're dumb enough to use it in the wrong way, then... you know, hooray for you.
It's like a tool on a carpenter's website to get a fence built. Fill in what material you want, how high the fence will be, the perimeter of your block, and whether you want it finished or painted. The site gives you a quote for the fence. Then ring the carpenter, say "I've got the money now, can I pay you BEFORE you do the job?". Give the carpenter the money, and OH HA HA MR CARPENTER I SURE TRICKED YOU I JUST PAID YOU TO BUILD A FENCE FOR A PROPERTY THAT'S NOT EVEN MINE THAT IS THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR I AM SO CLEVAR.
'Stereo Mix' functionality is provided by some sound card drivers, not others.
The same as in Vista.
And XP.
And probably further back.
Either the submitter is running different hardware, or was using OEM drivers before and Windows 7-supplied drivers now, or the Win 7 OEM driver has regressed, which would be the OEM's fault and not Microsoft's... almost certainly not a real story (that part, at least).
You can do something similar to the divided-inserts in a SQL Server cluster, assuming your table is partitioned appropriately, but I agree that it doesn't sound like the same thing... and is a lot more fiddly.
Oh, and if you want to enforce query timeouts, that is supported in the user profile via CPU_PER_CALL (non-conforming queries are terminated and resources released)
In SQL Server, you can use "sp_configure 'query governor cost limit', xxxx" to do something very similar. It's elapsed time, not CPU time, but has the same basic effect.
I must admit I don't know that much about RAC -- but it doesn't really seem to me THAT different from clustering a SQL Server. I don't see a heap of difference between and Oracle Clusterware infrastructure and an active-active Windows Cluster Service (or whatever the hell they're calling it now, the damn thing changes names every 38 seconds) setup running SQL Server Enterprise (ditto).
Fair enough on the other points -- they're not really things I'd consider as stopping it being an 'enterprise database' but that may be just because I've never hit those problems myself -- never done geospatial work, and running it on Windows-only has never REALLY been a problem wherever I've worked, but obviously YMMV. I don't know about the filesize and RAM thing though -- pick your tools for the job, I guess. Don't run SQL Server on 32-bit Windows Server on a FAT filesystem, any more than you would try and run a huge Oracle install on 32-bit Linux with (some crappy Linux filesystem).
And as for the user/schema thing, yeah that's weird. But it's gone away in 2005.:)
That, and not using medium and low duty databases lile MSSQL and MySQL can go a very long way to keeping users happy.
Honestly, to describe MSSQL as "medium and low duty" is pretty rich. You'd best believe I'm happy to bash MS as much as the next guy but SQL Server is a high-performing, highly maintainable, high-availability database and doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as MySQL.
Hell, MSSQL might actually be the only truly good product MS make -- in fact, it probably is. It's not a toy and people who assume it is, just because it comes from MS (I'm not saying this is what you're doing, but people DO do this) just show that they don't know what they're talking about.
it was some of the other companies on the list that I found interesting such as SGI.
Some of this might be the XFS filesystem -- this came from Irix and was landed in Linux a year or two ago (not sure on the details; I don't really follow these things, we just have one of the ex-SGI XFS guys at work).
There are some great looking Japanese "novelty watches" at Tokyoflash (Disclaimer: never used them, just admired them from afar).
I've long wanted an Eleeno G -- it's one of those "coded" watches but it's easier than most to read -- just count the squares. It's not rocket science. And, you know, I think they look really nice. Can't ask for much more than that.
So while a lot of nonprofits have.org, most.orgs are not nonprofit.
Right. In fact, contrary to popular belief, there's nothing at all that says that.org domains are even supposed to be for non-profits - or ever were..org is, and always has been, a catch-all.
.org was originally intended as a "miscellaneous" TLD for organizations that weren't commercial entities, educational institutions, network providers, or governmental agencies
No, in australia it counts as a vote for whomever is in power.
Erm... no. Did you just make that up?
In Australia (at least, at a Commonwealth level, but certainly also at every state level I'm familiar with) informal (invalid) votes are tallied separately, and do not count as a vote at all. The 50% + 1 requirement to achieve a victory (after distribution of preferences, if required) is a 50% of the formal (valid) votes. The same applies to the Senate, where the quota (e.g. for a typical 6-seat half-senate ballot, 1/7th + 1) is based on formal votes only.
Obviously, a donkey vote (as mentioned upthread) - numbering the candidates 1..n in the order they appear on the paper - isn't informal, and doesn't count towards the party in power, unless they happen to be high enough on the ballot paper that they end up with the vote/preference anyway. As the position on the ballot paper is determined randomly, that's hardly automatic.
Yeah, that's a very interesting one. Sensis is quite fascinating in and of itself. There's been a lot of talk that parent company Telstra (Australia's half-government-owned telecommunications near-monopoly behemoth -- think the Aussie equivalent of AT+T before the break-up) wants to sell off Sensis as it's worth a mint and is a quick way to inject some cash. Maybe Google would want part/all of it?
Sensis has a few businesses that seem to 'fit' google to varying degrees:
A search engine (Sensis)
Classifieds (Trading Post)
Directory listings (White Pages/Yellow Pages)
Mapping/directions (WhereIs)
Reviews/Listings/"What's On" (Citysearch)
The biggest reasons Google wouldn't buy Sensis? One, it's way too regional. It's basically Australia-only (Australia + New Zealand in some cases) which doesn't seem to fit that well with Google's history -- that particularly affects the CitySearch and White/Yellow Pages businesses, I'd say (the others could probably be rolled out elsewhere -- the concepts are sound). Secondly, Telstra has a new incoming chief exec, American Solomon Trujillo (ex-Orange and US West) whose early musings would seem to imply he likes the whole 'near-monopoly behemoth' thing, not the 'selling off parts for a cash injection' thing.
My employer: large Australian e-Commerce site (one of the biggest); general retail, not specialist. Quite heavily female-skewed demographic.
IE derivatives: 89.1%
NS derivatives (largely '7.x', which is how our stats shows Firefox): 8.1%
Last month, it was 90.3%/7.3%.
This is MASSIVELY higher than it was even 6 months ago, and it surprises me a very great deal (I haven't looked at the stats for a while). I'm a very happy camper. If anything, our stats have tracked very pro-MS for some time (e.g. our stats have always been skewed more towards windows/IE than to other OSes or browsers, relative to stats seen elsewhere) so if we're at 8%, I wouldn't be at all surprised if 10% was quite close to the 'real world' figure at a lot of sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Utterly untrue. Australia DOES have mandatory voting.
The Electoral Act makes it very clear: ”It shall be the duty of every elector to vote at each election”
Now it's impossible to ENFORCE that, because there's no way for the Electoral Commission to KNOW that you've just rocked up, got your name checked off, and left, so in practice attendance is all they'd care about. However, voting is, strictly speaking, legally compulsory.
2. It needs more information, or at least a simlpe click-through to details, location radius / distance from me, pictures of the people involved, etc.
FYI, URLs aren't permitted:
A CMAS Alert Message processed by a Participating CMS Provider must not include an embedded Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
"His family asks that you respect their privacy at this difficult time"?
Bing doesn't favor its own services over others.
[citation needed]
Google favors their news service, maps, YouTube, shopping and every other service over others.
[citation needed]
Bing returns results objectively.
[citation needed]
If I search for 'map of sydney' on Bing, I get a map result for Bing Maps embedded in the page. If I search for 'daniel morcombe' (a topic in the news in Australia, sadly) I get a sampling of news articles with the 'more' link taking me to Bing News. I don't see any links to Google Maps or Google News.
This is different... how?
Yes, though born in London.
We've had a few British-born PMs (well, arguably, even the ones born in what is now Australia were 'British-born' if they were born before Federation, right?); as far as I know, there's only one born outside Australia / Great Britain -- Chris Watson, PM #3, was born in Chile (to a New Zealander mother, no less)
except for Soth Australia which was settled
... by an unholy army of Death Knights?
We have never had dumb/superstitious people in charge of our military.
If you want examples of stupidity and superstition in the US Military, I wouldn't look at MAD. Read The Men Who Stare At Goats, detailing the Army experiments to try and kill goats with thought power, 'remote viewing' to spy on enemies, and the idea of creating psychic peace soldiers. Scary scary stuff.
Unless the HTC Hero US version (the 'chinless' sprint one) varies from the European model in this regard, it has a 3.5mm jack. The 'ExtUSB' (HTC proprietary but at least compatible audio-carrying extension of Mini-USB) jack is on the bottom, and the 3.5mm headphone jack is on the top left.
Trust me, it works, was listening to music on my (UK) Hero without an adapter not one hour ago. Unless I've been hallucinating. Which is, you know, actually quite plausible.
Magic, no, but Hero yes.
Uh... no. Android phones (at least, I think all the ones on the market currently -- I don't know if some will be released later without, can't see why though) have an inbuilt magnetometer -- an actual compass. The 3GS added the same thing to the iPhone range.
Totally agree. "This means that more programmers are using Python and Ruby on the weekend for their personal projects, showing that these languages are more fun to use". Uh-huh, sure it does. What an inescapable conclusion.
We could instead argue:
"This means that these these languages are newer and less well-established, showing that people doing projects on the weekend are more likely to use something they're not experienced with as a learning experience."
or more likely
"This means that people developing in Python and Ruby are more popular in the kinds of startups that sucker people into working every weekend to get the 'next big thing' out the door with the promise of stock options, even though stock options in e-plasticthingsontheendsofshoelaces-online.net aren't actually ever going to be worth jack."
The instructions say, pretty clearly, "copy and paste the article text you want to use", not "copy and paste some random guff you want to prove a point with". If you don't follow the instructions then, no, the results you get won't be valid. Surprise.
The rights they're granting you are clearly 'the rights not to be sued by AP for quoting their text', not anything else -- not rights against being sued by any third party or anything else. It's rights licensing, not insurance. Likewise, if YOU screw up the building permit form, yes, the city are within their rights to let you swing in the breeze as far as I'm concerned. But if you didn't then, sure, they'd better honour their commitment, as (hopefully) AP will.
It's a braindead web app, yes, and AP do a bunch of other stuff that's dumb and/or evil. But claiming that it's some elaborate IP fraud scheme to allow a stupid web app to accept incorrect input and print out some boilerplate text around it is a cheap shot, and dumb.
Sigh, what a total non-story this is. It's an estimation tool, people. If you're dumb enough to use it in the wrong way, then... you know, hooray for you.
It's like a tool on a carpenter's website to get a fence built. Fill in what material you want, how high the fence will be, the perimeter of your block, and whether you want it finished or painted. The site gives you a quote for the fence. Then ring the carpenter, say "I've got the money now, can I pay you BEFORE you do the job?". Give the carpenter the money, and OH HA HA MR CARPENTER I SURE TRICKED YOU I JUST PAID YOU TO BUILD A FENCE FOR A PROPERTY THAT'S NOT EVEN MINE THAT IS THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR I AM SO CLEVAR.
Err.. yeah, good for you, I guess. Want a cookie?
How is this noteworthy?
'Stereo Mix' functionality is provided by some sound card drivers, not others. The same as in Vista. And XP. And probably further back. Either the submitter is running different hardware, or was using OEM drivers before and Windows 7-supplied drivers now, or the Win 7 OEM driver has regressed, which would be the OEM's fault and not Microsoft's... almost certainly not a real story (that part, at least).
You can do something similar to the divided-inserts in a SQL Server cluster, assuming your table is partitioned appropriately, but I agree that it doesn't sound like the same thing... and is a lot more fiddly.
Oh, and if you want to enforce query timeouts, that is supported in the user profile via CPU_PER_CALL (non-conforming queries are terminated and resources released)
In SQL Server, you can use "sp_configure 'query governor cost limit', xxxx" to do something very similar. It's elapsed time, not CPU time, but has the same basic effect.
Thanks GoofyBoy, interesting.
I must admit I don't know that much about RAC -- but it doesn't really seem to me THAT different from clustering a SQL Server. I don't see a heap of difference between and Oracle Clusterware infrastructure and an active-active Windows Cluster Service (or whatever the hell they're calling it now, the damn thing changes names every 38 seconds) setup running SQL Server Enterprise (ditto).
Fair enough on the other points -- they're not really things I'd consider as stopping it being an 'enterprise database' but that may be just because I've never hit those problems myself -- never done geospatial work, and running it on Windows-only has never REALLY been a problem wherever I've worked, but obviously YMMV. I don't know about the filesize and RAM thing though -- pick your tools for the job, I guess. Don't run SQL Server on 32-bit Windows Server on a FAT filesystem, any more than you would try and run a huge Oracle install on 32-bit Linux with (some crappy Linux filesystem).
And as for the user/schema thing, yeah that's weird. But it's gone away in 2005. :)
Just out of curiosity, what features/tools do Oracle and DB2 have that MS SQL doesn't have, which keep it out of that 'level' in your opinion?
I'm not disagreeing, just geniunely curious.
That, and not using medium and low duty databases lile MSSQL and MySQL can go a very long way to keeping users happy.
Honestly, to describe MSSQL as "medium and low duty" is pretty rich. You'd best believe I'm happy to bash MS as much as the next guy but SQL Server is a high-performing, highly maintainable, high-availability database and doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as MySQL.
Hell, MSSQL might actually be the only truly good product MS make -- in fact, it probably is. It's not a toy and people who assume it is, just because it comes from MS (I'm not saying this is what you're doing, but people DO do this) just show that they don't know what they're talking about.
Yes it is.
Not disagreeing with the sentiment, but Hashtable is a Map (and has been since 1.2, according to the Javadoc).
Some of this might be the XFS filesystem -- this came from Irix and was landed in Linux a year or two ago (not sure on the details; I don't really follow these things, we just have one of the ex-SGI XFS guys at work).
There are some great looking Japanese "novelty watches" at Tokyoflash (Disclaimer: never used them, just admired them from afar).
I've long wanted an Eleeno G -- it's one of those "coded" watches but it's easier than most to read -- just count the squares. It's not rocket science. And, you know, I think they look really nice. Can't ask for much more than that.
Right. In fact, contrary to popular belief, there's nothing at all that says that .org domains are even supposed to be for non-profits - or ever were. .org is, and always has been, a catch-all.
From Internic:
Erm... no. Did you just make that up?
In Australia (at least, at a Commonwealth level, but certainly also at every state level I'm familiar with) informal (invalid) votes are tallied separately, and do not count as a vote at all. The 50% + 1 requirement to achieve a victory (after distribution of preferences, if required) is a 50% of the formal (valid) votes. The same applies to the Senate, where the quota (e.g. for a typical 6-seat half-senate ballot, 1/7th + 1) is based on formal votes only.
Obviously, a donkey vote (as mentioned upthread) - numbering the candidates 1..n in the order they appear on the paper - isn't informal, and doesn't count towards the party in power, unless they happen to be high enough on the ballot paper that they end up with the vote/preference anyway. As the position on the ballot paper is determined randomly, that's hardly automatic.
Yeah, that's a very interesting one. Sensis is quite fascinating in and of itself. There's been a lot of talk that parent company Telstra (Australia's half-government-owned telecommunications near-monopoly behemoth -- think the Aussie equivalent of AT+T before the break-up) wants to sell off Sensis as it's worth a mint and is a quick way to inject some cash. Maybe Google would want part/all of it?
Sensis has a few businesses that seem to 'fit' google to varying degrees:
The biggest reasons Google wouldn't buy Sensis? One, it's way too regional. It's basically Australia-only (Australia + New Zealand in some cases) which doesn't seem to fit that well with Google's history -- that particularly affects the CitySearch and White/Yellow Pages businesses, I'd say (the others could probably be rolled out elsewhere -- the concepts are sound). Secondly, Telstra has a new incoming chief exec, American Solomon Trujillo (ex-Orange and US West) whose early musings would seem to imply he likes the whole 'near-monopoly behemoth' thing, not the 'selling off parts for a cash injection' thing.
Still, interesting thought.
Or degrees R. Aaah, Rankine, the poor forgotten brother of the temperature-measurement world....
My employer: large Australian e-Commerce site (one of the biggest); general retail, not specialist. Quite heavily female-skewed demographic.
IE derivatives: 89.1%
NS derivatives (largely '7.x', which is how our stats shows Firefox): 8.1%
Last month, it was 90.3%/7.3%.
This is MASSIVELY higher than it was even 6 months ago, and it surprises me a very great deal (I haven't looked at the stats for a while). I'm a very happy camper. If anything, our stats have tracked very pro-MS for some time (e.g. our stats have always been skewed more towards windows/IE than to other OSes or browsers, relative to stats seen elsewhere) so if we're at 8%, I wouldn't be at all surprised if 10% was quite close to the 'real world' figure at a lot of sites.