Parent is spot on. I used to live in Westmead (near Parramatta in Sydney), and got attacked while walking home from Australia Day celebrations by a carload of Lebanese guys my age. I was sober, minding my own business, and 200m from my door so I was able to run away without getting too hurt.
Suburbs like Auburn, Lakemba and Liverpool are much, much worse. Things are also bad when visiting soccer teams from Middle Eastern countries lose - the local supporters go crazy. Its always males aged 10-40 as well, never women.
And people wonder why some segments of the Australian population want to limit immigration from some countries.
For the most part it is. Shootings don't happen very often outside of the realm of organized crime. The average citizen goes their whole life without seeing a gun.
It is very, very hard to keep things out of Australia - just like keeping drugs out of America, there is just too much unmonitored coastline to watch. A friend of my former Sydney employer is retired and sails around the world for fun - in January this year he sailed from Fiji directly into Circular Quay (past the Opera House) without being stopped by any form of authority. He could have brought in guns, bombs, drugs, you name it.
In parts of Sydney and Melbourne it is trivially easy to find black market guns... you just have to ask certain people. A Steyr of the sort used in Counterstrike and by the Australian army will set you back about AU$10,000 (US$7500).
1) The number of typos in the book. Didn't anyone proofread it before it went to print? 2) How many features MySQL lacks. Don't get me wrong, I like it as its fast and easy to work with for web stuff, but I was surprised at how often I read "MySQL doesn't do x yet, but will in version y".
The chapter on replication was worth the cost of the book for me, but I suggest people considering buying the book should wait until the 2nd edition.
That "current affairs" show is utter crap. They sensationalise all sorts of mundane things just to get viewers to watch. Anything for ratings. There are better alternatives on SBS (another channel), but hey, no one watches anything other than channels 7,9, and 10.
Disclaimer: I'm an Aussie and disgusted with the crappy tv we have to put up with.
Oh, the twits have always been around, but the harshness of life used to kill them off. If someone wasn't watching where they were going, they'd fall off a cliff.
What happened was society getting better, and we now have laws and regulations that make it easier for twits to stay alive. Now the cliff has a guardrail and warning signs for people to walk into instead of going over the edge.
Not knowing anything about SUSE (other than its German focus), why would Novell choose them as a Linux distro? Does it have some capability that other distros do not?
Parent poster is right - it's not like guns were easily available at Kmart before Port Arthur. Lots of types of guns were already illegal.
More and more guns are becoming illegal too - a family friend in Sydney has just had to hand in another of his rifles, because it is about to become illegal to own it. He doesn't like having to do it, but nothing can be done about it.
It should be noted that in some parts of Australia, you do not have the right to defend yourself with force in your home. I had a friend at uni who is about a finish a 4 year jail sentence for hitting an intruder once with a snooker cue (this happened in Bentley in Perth at 2am). This could have been avoided if the WA government would let people put bars on their windows.
# There is no one clearly identified "killer application" for Ka-band satellites but provision of high speed Internet and associated services is likely to be a major short to medium term lead market. Ka-band satellites can provide the cheapest and most quickly available of all options (high speed cable modems, ADSL and ISDN) in providing such high speed access.
Maybe this will encourage telcos to hurry up and expand their terrestrial broadband coverage, lest they lose potential customers.
... your CEOs are GIVING them away. Don't get pissed off at an Indian or Chinese IT worker, they got offered your job and they took it. What, were they going to say "no thanks, an American should have this job"? Its your countrymen that are doing this to you, not some phantom job thieves overseas.
In 2001, my girlfriend was forced to do her honours thesis in Word. It was around 120 pages, split into two files. She had to split it at page 99, because if she opened the thesis with more than 99 pages in Word, it fell over, thankfully without corrupting the file but still losing the work done since her last backup (made at 98 pages fortunately) as she was unable to open the "99 page + new work" file:( This was 100% repeatable on four different Windows machines that I tried it on. Even crashed a Mac she tried it on.
It was at this point she switched to Mandrake + Openoffice and hasn't looked back since.
I use Miranda. I like the interface, it uses plugins for protocols so everything is supported, it doesn't chew down loads of memory, and its released under the GPL. I stick with version 0.3.2 though, because I don't like the icons in newer versions.
Yes, its Windows-only, but most of you are using Windows right now anyway.
I will always sit through a movie just to get my moneys worth, no matter how bad it is. Magnolia was the exception to this - I stayed until 3/4 the way through the movie, by which time nearly everyone in the cinema had left already. And it was only half full to begin with.
In my first year of high school (in a small town in Western Australia) home economics was a compulsory course for everyone. You could not avoid it, unless you were ill or had broken limbs, in which case you had to sit and watch.
There is no such accountability for software development.
If there was, it would take a lot longer to churn out. Companies/management want their software now, now, now.
Look at Microsoft Windows, that our banks and governments rely upon!
Banks and governments rely upon mainframes that were made and certified by engineers. They expect Windows to fail as often as we expect it to.
I think such a product would be much higher quality if the coders working on it were professionals and had to adhere to Codes; violating their professional duties would mean severe personal consequences. And the firm itself (Microsoft) would be legally liable if it produced a shoddy, dangerous product!
General Motors isn't liable when our cars break, why should Microsoft be liable when its software crashes?
A product as complex as Windows XP would take a century to write properly. Time to market is a stronger influence in software development than in most engineering projects.
The software development industry as a whole is still in its infancy. And infants are generally not held legally liable for their actions.
I have a mailserver which have about 20GB mail with Reiser. With Ext3 it would be over 30GB.
With disk space being so cheap, does 10GB really matter? It may make a speed difference, but your users won't notice their mail check running 10ms faster.
If the current state of Windows security is anything to go by, and if Joe Average has an 802.11g card in his machine in the future, we'll all have free internet via our neighbours poorly secured wireless link. Go Microsoft!:)
Bandwidth in Australia is very expensive compared to the US regardless of how you get it. Its still billed by the meg in a lot of places.
I have dedicated servers colocated in New Jersey and in Sydney. In the US I pay $2.00US/gb for bandwidth, in Australia I pay $0.09cAU/mb ($0.06US/mb) which is $60US/gb.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent is spot on. I used to live in Westmead (near Parramatta in Sydney), and got attacked while walking home from Australia Day celebrations by a carload of Lebanese guys my age. I was sober, minding my own business, and 200m from my door so I was able to run away without getting too hurt.
Suburbs like Auburn, Lakemba and Liverpool are much, much worse. Things are also bad when visiting soccer teams from Middle Eastern countries lose - the local supporters go crazy. Its always males aged 10-40 as well, never women.
And people wonder why some segments of the Australian population want to limit immigration from some countries.
For the most part it is. Shootings don't happen very often outside of the realm of organized crime. The average citizen goes their whole life without seeing a gun.
It is very, very hard to keep things out of Australia - just like keeping drugs out of America, there is just too much unmonitored coastline to watch. A friend of my former Sydney employer is retired and sails around the world for fun - in January this year he sailed from Fiji directly into Circular Quay (past the Opera House) without being stopped by any form of authority. He could have brought in guns, bombs, drugs, you name it.
In parts of Sydney and Melbourne it is trivially easy to find black market guns... you just have to ask certain people. A Steyr of the sort used in Counterstrike and by the Australian army will set you back about AU$10,000 (US$7500).
What happens when these chips fail? Do you get locked up for tampering with a Federal document, or some crap like that?
...and was surprised at a two things:
1) The number of typos in the book. Didn't anyone proofread it before it went to print?
2) How many features MySQL lacks. Don't get me wrong, I like it as its fast and easy to work with for web stuff, but I was surprised at how often I read "MySQL doesn't do x yet, but will in version y".
The chapter on replication was worth the cost of the book for me, but I suggest people considering buying the book should wait until the 2nd edition.
That "current affairs" show is utter crap. They sensationalise all sorts of mundane things just to get viewers to watch. Anything for ratings. There are better alternatives on SBS (another channel), but hey, no one watches anything other than channels 7,9, and 10.
Disclaimer: I'm an Aussie and disgusted with the crappy tv we have to put up with.
Oh, the twits have always been around, but the harshness of life used to kill them off. If someone wasn't watching where they were going, they'd fall off a cliff.
What happened was society getting better, and we now have laws and regulations that make it easier for twits to stay alive. Now the cliff has a guardrail and warning signs for people to walk into instead of going over the edge.
I wonder what the local nurses union has to say about this.
Not knowing anything about SUSE (other than its German focus), why would Novell choose them as a Linux distro? Does it have some capability that other distros do not?
...the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Parent poster is right - it's not like guns were easily available at Kmart before Port Arthur. Lots of types of guns were already illegal.
More and more guns are becoming illegal too - a family friend in Sydney has just had to hand in another of his rifles, because it is about to become illegal to own it. He doesn't like having to do it, but nothing can be done about it.
It should be noted that in some parts of Australia, you do not have the right to defend yourself with force in your home. I had a friend at uni who is about a finish a 4 year jail sentence for hitting an intruder once with a snooker cue (this happened in Bentley in Perth at 2am). This could have been avoided if the WA government would let people put bars on their windows.
# There is no one clearly identified "killer application" for Ka-band satellites but provision of high speed Internet and associated services is likely to be a major short to medium term lead market. Ka-band satellites can provide the cheapest and most quickly available of all options (high speed cable modems, ADSL and ISDN) in providing such high speed access.
Maybe this will encourage telcos to hurry up and expand their terrestrial broadband coverage, lest they lose potential customers.
... your CEOs are GIVING them away. Don't get pissed off at an Indian or Chinese IT worker, they got offered your job and they took it. What, were they going to say "no thanks, an American should have this job"? Its your countrymen that are doing this to you, not some phantom job thieves overseas.
Having just arrived in London (from Australia), I am amazed at the number of cameras everywhere. The maintenance bill must be horrendous.
The Aussie government would love this level of camera surveillance, but its not feasible - they'd all get stolen in the first week.
In 2001, my girlfriend was forced to do her honours thesis in Word. It was around 120 pages, split into two files. She had to split it at page 99, because if she opened the thesis with more than 99 pages in Word, it fell over, thankfully without corrupting the file but still losing the work done since her last backup (made at 98 pages fortunately) as she was unable to open the "99 page + new work" file :( This was 100% repeatable on four different Windows machines that I tried it on. Even crashed a Mac she tried it on.
It was at this point she switched to Mandrake + Openoffice and hasn't looked back since.
I use Miranda. I like the interface, it uses plugins for protocols so everything is supported, it doesn't chew down loads of memory, and its released under the GPL. I stick with version 0.3.2 though, because I don't like the icons in newer versions.
Yes, its Windows-only, but most of you are using Windows right now anyway.
I will always sit through a movie just to get my moneys worth, no matter how bad it is. Magnolia was the exception to this - I stayed until 3/4 the way through the movie, by which time nearly everyone in the cinema had left already. And it was only half full to begin with.
In my first year of high school (in a small town in Western Australia) home economics was a compulsory course for everyone. You could not avoid it, unless you were ill or had broken limbs, in which case you had to sit and watch.
There is no such accountability for software development.
If there was, it would take a lot longer to churn out. Companies/management want their software now, now, now.
Look at Microsoft Windows, that our banks and governments rely upon!
Banks and governments rely upon mainframes that were made and certified by engineers. They expect Windows to fail as often as we expect it to.
I think such a product would be much higher quality if the coders working on it were professionals and had to adhere to Codes; violating their professional duties would mean severe personal consequences. And the firm itself (Microsoft) would be legally liable if it produced a shoddy, dangerous product!
General Motors isn't liable when our cars break, why should Microsoft be liable when its software crashes?
A product as complex as Windows XP would take a century to write properly. Time to market is a stronger influence in software development than in most engineering projects.
The software development industry as a whole is still in its infancy. And infants are generally not held legally liable for their actions.
I have a mailserver which have about 20GB mail with Reiser. With Ext3 it would be over 30GB.
With disk space being so cheap, does 10GB really matter? It may make a speed difference, but your users won't notice their mail check running 10ms faster.
If the current state of Windows security is anything to go by, and if Joe Average has an 802.11g card in his machine in the future, we'll all have free internet via our neighbours poorly secured wireless link. Go Microsoft! :)
These people don't look like Linux geeks to me. They are clean and well dressed! :)
They could have used the money to fix 1200 potholes in Sydney roads, you can swim in some of them when it rains!
What do commercial software authors get in return for implementing features users want? Money.
What do OSS authors get in return for implementing features users want? Nothing.
So where's the motivation for OSS authors to pander to users?
Bandwidth in Australia is very expensive compared to the US regardless of how you get it. Its still billed by the meg in a lot of places.
I have dedicated servers colocated in New Jersey and in Sydney. In the US I pay $2.00US/gb for bandwidth, in Australia I pay $0.09cAU/mb ($0.06US/mb) which is $60US/gb.
Beings friends with the most powerful nation (politically, economically and militarily) in the world is a wise course of action.
When you are an insignificant foreign country, doing business with the US govt is like having dinner with Mike Tyson: you can expect to be raped.