- Use of the word "uni"
- University that charges students above-market rates for every tiny little thing which would be free in civilised countries
- 1/100 of currency unit abbreviated 'c'
You know he's in Australia or New Zealand. Add in the 1GB/month cap and he's solidly in Kiwi country.
For a period of several months, I was getting a number of angry calls from strangers, as well as some who wanted to "order more pills". Turns out my number was showing up on people's credit card bills for transactions from some mail-order pill mill.
At the time, I had my number forwarded to a cell phone in Thailand, where I was working, so in addition to being annoying, these calls came in when I was trying to sleep, and cumulatively cost me a not inconsiderable amount of money.
I never did manage to figure out who the company was. I asked some of the callers, but this made most of them very suspicious (maybe they were anti-paranoia pills). Nobody seemed to have the original ad that led them to order in the first place, so the only contact information they ever came up with was my own number, read from the Visa bill.
Sounds a lot like the stuff developers have been doing with the Eyetoy since PS2...
Way before that... A guy did this at the University of Michigan back in 1991 or so. There was a little Mac science fair thing at the campus computer store in the Union, and this one guy blew all the other contestants away with his touchless interactive project. Wish I remembered his name.
if there is one thing the Beijing Olympics have demonstrated, it is that the Chinese people are right behind their government in most cases. I suspect this is the case in Malaysia too
Actually, Malaysians are quite cynical about their government and it's hard to find anyone who has anything nice to say about it.
Malaysia is not like China in this regard - you can complain and grumble quite a lot without running into trouble. It's only when you start getting too close to the specific issue of the corruption of the perennially ruling party (or its red herring proxy issues of race and religion) that you have to watch your back.
The streisand effect comes to mind. Even if you're okay with censorship, doing it on the internet is stupid. You can arrest someone on the street corner and silence them. If you arrest someone for a post on a blog, you're only going to get more people to read that post.
It is probably important to know that a couple weeks before RPK was kidnapped by UMNO, his blog was blocked within Malaysia by order of the government and in violation of Malaysian law. When this happened, mirrors sprang up instantly, and every blogger in the country linked to them, probably getting his site far more traffic than it ever had before. The government then cancelled the block order, and went after the source of the material instead.
You may not have to wait that long, since Najib "bathe my dagger in Chinese blood" Tun Razak is sitting in the lobby being fitted for his PM's songkok.
A man who stood at a podium, waved a weapon, and made a death threat aimed at 24% of the population is currently the most likely person to be the next Prime Minister (unless Anwar pulls something pretty amazing out of his hat in the next few days). Historically, this sort of development does not augur well for the future.
It has been like this since the British dramatically changed the demographic from almost all Malay to something like 65% Malay, 26% Chinese, Indian 8% in less than 100 years.
It's amazing how many Malays have no sense of the actual demographics of the country.
Malays make up 51% of the population. And it only got that high through years of concerted efforts by UMNO, such as denying citizenship to any immigrants except for Javanese Muslims who were immediately redefined as Malay upon collecting their papers.
Even if you take all bumi categories together - another popular sleight-of-hand tactic used by peninsular politicians, you don't get to 65%.
Malays by history and by law, are Muslims and it is firmly tied to our identity.
More parroting of UMNO race politics propaganda. The constitutional claim that all Malays are Muslim is as absurd as a claim declaring that the sun is made of potatoes; it is disproven by the simple fact that I know many Malays who are not Muslims. In any case, it's only a few decades old, it's not as if this "history" goes back to the days of the Prophet or something. Before large numbers of Malays were converted by the Arabs they had other beliefs, and those are just as much a part of history.
Unfortunately, many people, like the blogger mentioned (who is a Malay) are impatient and want change NOW, without realising the inherent instability of the country. My view is that change, towards a more liberal political and social environment is inevitable as the country matures but we must do it slowly and with deliberation.
That is what people who never want change tell you to say.
In actual fact, Malaysia's undercurrent of instability is a direct result of the clannist, racist nature of the country's politics. BN has taken divide-and-conquer to heights the British could only dream of.
Also had it in Malaysia for a little while. About US$30/month for 1.2 megabit, $65 for 2.4 megabit. From what I've seen, it delivers as promised, but the uptake hasn't been high enough yet to really see how it performs under heavy use. When they do their demos they sometimes use an uncapped account and seem to get about 5mbps.
But are we any better than saudi govt. by labeling an educational activity as terrorism?
You pose a deep and profound question that may well shake the cultural gap between east and west to its very foundations.
But upon reflection, yes, I think there might be a small difference between systematically denying human rights to millions of people for generations... and sticking a flip one-word tag on a Slashdot story.
Mainly because men have to leave work four times a day to drive their wives around on errands - women can't drive, there's almost no public transport, it's too miserable to walk, and a taxi would be scandalous.
Building the world's largest building has several important benefits:
1. It's a statement of superiority (why did you build that building? Because we CAN, and you CAN'T.)
2. It facilitates development in a number of related fields (construction, materials science etc)
3. It encourages national pride and a spirit of can-do in most areas of society.
IMO, the day we stopped building the tallest buildings is the day we started to fall behind.
Here in Malaysia we had the world's tallest buildings for a while. I think it only had benefit #1 - and only until someone else built a taller one, which didn't take that long. The towers here were built by Korean engineering firms, which gained benefits #2 and #3. In the same way that not many countries have the wherewithal to build the world's tallest buildings on their own, I don't think many would have the ability to develop record-breaking supercomputers from scratch. So again it really comes down to the nyah-nyah factor, and proof of having at least briefly had a lot of money to spend (or good credit).
Kind of an odd way to run a research institution - research is all about legacy.
Not odd if you've ever been to a Saudi university. They'll spend millions on this so they can say they have it, then it'll just sit there using electricity and being used to play Tetris.
FTP has evolved: most clients use "passive mode" (no callback) by default now, and (almost?) all clients and servers support it.
Passive FTP just moves the NAT problem to the other end of the wire. Try running a passive-mode FTP server behind NAT and see how much fun you have.
It's not quite as big a deal, because there are far more clients than servers, but it's still moving (if slowly) in the direction of a breaking point; it will not scale indefinitely.
Chinese sites are accessed by relatively few non-Chinese. Therefore, the penalty for running an IPv6-only site inside China would not be very great.
Strong disagree.
There are many countries with large Chinese-speaking populations for whom sites in China are important: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam, to name a few.
Here in Malaysia the national ISP is still struggling to implement IPv2 (scheduled by 2020) so I'm not optimistic about them getting v6 working anytime soon.
That's a consequence of the way things have evolved, not a characteristic of the essential nature of things.
The only reason we have these NAT boxes is because ISPs didn't give each customer a whole bunch of IPs. If they had, then we'd have the same boxes, but call them firewalls.
You are trying to justify something based on its existence. That's what we call a circular argument.
Why can't everyone have one? Because not everyone NEEDS one.
From such statements does infamy arise.
How do you possibly know whether or not it might be useful to have independent addressability for orders of magnitude more devices than have it now? Have you already invented all the things that this might bring about, and pronounced them useless? What a remarkably shortsighted view.
Orange Austria (until recently known as One Austria) has a far better rate to offer:
1 Euro per day
Anyone know of similar offers in France? I am going to be there (as well as Italy and Switzerland) shortly and need some way to get online for a reasonable price. In Switzerland I found Sunrise which has a CHF3/hour deal, not exactly bargain-basement but within my price range.
Also, you pay $30 USD for your data plan, but the exchange rate in China is almost 7 to 1, Korea is about 3:1, Hong Kong dollars and Thai Baht are about 8:1 etc... The most reasonable exchange rate I'm aware of is in Singapore dollar, which is worth about 0.7 USD. Unless you're living in Singapore, $30 USD sounds like a bad deal for anyone living in Asia. If you DO live in Singapore, then the price sounds just about right.
Hm? The baht is suddenly worth 4 times as much as it was earlier today? I guess that's no big deal; the won has apparently appreciated by a factor of almost 400. What exactly are you talking about? It's clear you don't know what the actual exchange rates happen to be; do you know how exchange rates and purchasing power parity even work?
$30/month is a good deal for unlimited mobile data almost anywhere in Asia.
Just because food is very cheap in some areas over here doesn't mean that things with significant highly arbitragable constituent costs (like phone service) are necessarily going to be.
Slashdot Mirror
If I find out that the office doesn't have showers, it means I will stink all day after cycling to work, so I look for a different job.
Based on the following:
- Use of the word "uni"
- University that charges students above-market rates for every tiny little thing which would be free in civilised countries
- 1/100 of currency unit abbreviated 'c'
You know he's in Australia or New Zealand. Add in the 1GB/month cap and he's solidly in Kiwi country.
I've been joe-jobbed in a slightly different way.
For a period of several months, I was getting a number of angry calls from strangers, as well as some who wanted to "order more pills". Turns out my number was showing up on people's credit card bills for transactions from some mail-order pill mill.
At the time, I had my number forwarded to a cell phone in Thailand, where I was working, so in addition to being annoying, these calls came in when I was trying to sleep, and cumulatively cost me a not inconsiderable amount of money.
I never did manage to figure out who the company was. I asked some of the callers, but this made most of them very suspicious (maybe they were anti-paranoia pills). Nobody seemed to have the original ad that led them to order in the first place, so the only contact information they ever came up with was my own number, read from the Visa bill.
This doesn't surprise me too much; people who drive seem to be so much more tense.
Way before that... A guy did this at the University of Michigan back in 1991 or so. There was a little Mac science fair thing at the campus computer store in the Union, and this one guy blew all the other contestants away with his touchless interactive project. Wish I remembered his name.
I know! And he's ridiculous on the other end of the scale too. 200KB? Gimme a break. I've worked with microdatabases as small as 5 bits.
Actually, Malaysians are quite cynical about their government and it's hard to find anyone who has anything nice to say about it.
Malaysia is not like China in this regard - you can complain and grumble quite a lot without running into trouble. It's only when you start getting too close to the specific issue of the corruption of the perennially ruling party (or its red herring proxy issues of race and religion) that you have to watch your back.
It is probably important to know that a couple weeks before RPK was kidnapped by UMNO, his blog was blocked within Malaysia by order of the government and in violation of Malaysian law. When this happened, mirrors sprang up instantly, and every blogger in the country linked to them, probably getting his site far more traffic than it ever had before. The government then cancelled the block order, and went after the source of the material instead.
Not much. Acting Indonesian means different accent, some different vocabulary, different recipes, subtly different clothing, and much better rhythm.
You may not have to wait that long, since Najib "bathe my dagger in Chinese blood" Tun Razak is sitting in the lobby being fitted for his PM's songkok.
A man who stood at a podium, waved a weapon, and made a death threat aimed at 24% of the population is currently the most likely person to be the next Prime Minister (unless Anwar pulls something pretty amazing out of his hat in the next few days). Historically, this sort of development does not augur well for the future.
It's amazing how many Malays have no sense of the actual demographics of the country.
Malays make up 51% of the population. And it only got that high through years of concerted efforts by UMNO, such as denying citizenship to any immigrants except for Javanese Muslims who were immediately redefined as Malay upon collecting their papers.
Even if you take all bumi categories together - another popular sleight-of-hand tactic used by peninsular politicians, you don't get to 65%.
More parroting of UMNO race politics propaganda. The constitutional claim that all Malays are Muslim is as absurd as a claim declaring that the sun is made of potatoes; it is disproven by the simple fact that I know many Malays who are not Muslims. In any case, it's only a few decades old, it's not as if this "history" goes back to the days of the Prophet or something. Before large numbers of Malays were converted by the Arabs they had other beliefs, and those are just as much a part of history.
That is what people who never want change tell you to say.
In actual fact, Malaysia's undercurrent of instability is a direct result of the clannist, racist nature of the country's politics. BN has taken divide-and-conquer to heights the British could only dream of.
Also had it in Malaysia for a little while. About US$30/month for 1.2 megabit, $65 for 2.4 megabit. From what I've seen, it delivers as promised, but the uptake hasn't been high enough yet to really see how it performs under heavy use. When they do their demos they sometimes use an uncapped account and seem to get about 5mbps.
You pose a deep and profound question that may well shake the cultural gap between east and west to its very foundations.
But upon reflection, yes, I think there might be a small difference between systematically denying human rights to millions of people for generations... and sticking a flip one-word tag on a Slashdot story.
Mainly because men have to leave work four times a day to drive their wives around on errands - women can't drive, there's almost no public transport, it's too miserable to walk, and a taxi would be scandalous.
Here in Malaysia we had the world's tallest buildings for a while. I think it only had benefit #1 - and only until someone else built a taller one, which didn't take that long. The towers here were built by Korean engineering firms, which gained benefits #2 and #3. In the same way that not many countries have the wherewithal to build the world's tallest buildings on their own, I don't think many would have the ability to develop record-breaking supercomputers from scratch. So again it really comes down to the nyah-nyah factor, and proof of having at least briefly had a lot of money to spend (or good credit).
That's putting it kindly.
There is, if you like windows.
Not odd if you've ever been to a Saudi university. They'll spend millions on this so they can say they have it, then it'll just sit there using electricity and being used to play Tetris.
Passive FTP just moves the NAT problem to the other end of the wire. Try running a passive-mode FTP server behind NAT and see how much fun you have.
It's not quite as big a deal, because there are far more clients than servers, but it's still moving (if slowly) in the direction of a breaking point; it will not scale indefinitely.
Strong disagree.
There are many countries with large Chinese-speaking populations for whom sites in China are important: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam, to name a few.
Here in Malaysia the national ISP is still struggling to implement IPv2 (scheduled by 2020) so I'm not optimistic about them getting v6 working anytime soon.
That's a consequence of the way things have evolved, not a characteristic of the essential nature of things.
The only reason we have these NAT boxes is because ISPs didn't give each customer a whole bunch of IPs. If they had, then we'd have the same boxes, but call them firewalls.
You are trying to justify something based on its existence. That's what we call a circular argument.
From such statements does infamy arise.
How do you possibly know whether or not it might be useful to have independent addressability for orders of magnitude more devices than have it now? Have you already invented all the things that this might bring about, and pronounced them useless? What a remarkably shortsighted view.
Anyone know of similar offers in France? I am going to be there (as well as Italy and Switzerland) shortly and need some way to get online for a reasonable price. In Switzerland I found Sunrise which has a CHF3/hour deal, not exactly bargain-basement but within my price range.
Hm? The baht is suddenly worth 4 times as much as it was earlier today? I guess that's no big deal; the won has apparently appreciated by a factor of almost 400. What exactly are you talking about? It's clear you don't know what the actual exchange rates happen to be; do you know how exchange rates and purchasing power parity even work?
$30/month is a good deal for unlimited mobile data almost anywhere in Asia.
Just because food is very cheap in some areas over here doesn't mean that things with significant highly arbitragable constituent costs (like phone service) are necessarily going to be.
It's all about the consulting gigs that follow.
Married all these years, and only today you discover that you both sneak off and read Slashdot.