Adding the netbook launcher by default might make it a good, out-of-the-box netbook distro. It seems odd to me to have a minimalist approach with a maximum desktop.
But then again, I don't put a lot on the desktop...
So you alter a small part of each frame and the signature changes. Or alter every single pixel like when you convert/compress to another format such as divx. So how will they track it?
Use different human actors for each copy and then you have yourself a trackable system.
"SOUTH Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson late last night backed down on online media censorship laws.
After stoking a fight with the media less than two months from a state election, Mr Atkinson said the laws stripping anonymity from media blogs would be repealed after the March 20 poll.
"From the feedback we've received through AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law supported by all MPs and all political parties is unduly restrictive. I have listened," Mr Atkinson said in statement released to the website AdelaideNow.
"I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively."
Mr Atkinson said the law would not be enforced for comments posted during the upcoming election campaign, even though it was technically applicable."
I am the development coordinator for one of the world's leading wagering software development companies.
Having a background in industrial automation and other real time software systems, I can tell you that writing software for gaming (especially when it involves racing) is easily of the same order of writing sharemarket trading software. As its essentially what it is - a great big real time bank. Most of the things you would like to do as batch can't be done, as it can be with a bank, as balances and histories need to be available straight away.
Most of the guys that work for me have masters degrees (I have the full set) and all need a broad experience in a variety of areas to be even able to work here. Every thing you do touches on performance, scalability and reliability.
If you worry about the morality of it you're probably wound too tight to be working anywhere. And how many of these hiring companies, especially in america, see military service as a moral plus? If the job interests you do it. If it doesn't don't. And if you're any good and want to work in Australia - send me your resume:-)
Cheers,
Brad
PS. The one thing I have found doing this, having a PhD, is I understand how the guys working on things like the Manhattan project must have felt. Not commenting on the morality or anything of it, but just how little you think of what it is you are actually doing. For example, rarely do you think of it as being horse racing - all you're concentrating on is getting the right prices in the right columns etc. You just don't think too much about the bigger picture. Just something I found interesting.
I would agree with you if my partner didn't make her money selling art online (obligatory self serving link: emmakirsopp.com - may be NSFW as it contains life drawings).
We have tried a lot of competing sites. Some local ones (we're australian) such as oztion. Art specific ones like Dwanda, Etsy. Online shops like bigcartel (which is very good - but...). Very little traffic.
eBay has such a large following its the only place that auctions work by having enough people that might actually be interested in buying what you're selling.
I can tell you that this eBay kurfuffle has had a big impact on the number of sales and amount of which they have gone for. Interest rate rises here have also been a factor. But what interesting with the eBay/paypal thing is that its the first time in years that we have seen a lot of watchers on an item, but still no sale. This has been unique over the last couple of months as this thing has caused uncertainty.
It would be interesting to know if the data at eBay supports this in the australian market.
Re:The difference between IT and other professions
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
I should practise my usage of practice/practise in my practice more often before posting under my username.
Need another year at uni...
Re:The difference between IT and other professions
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
I've always found that knowing the correct grammar when discussing data, as the parent does, is one of the hallmarks of our profession.
So is pedantry - so include them in your practise whenever possible!
(Practise is the verb in commonwealth countries - 8 years at university very well spent)
Can people suggest some recording devices that they have had good results with? I've seen a lot of pen recorders on eBay, but haven't had any experience with them.
I've heard of a lot of various recording devices being used at trade shows etc where they have been on lanyards etc.
Any suggestions out there as I wouldn't mind getting one to play with.
I find this surprising considering only very recently that Rudd wanted several government bodies to clear media releases, including research, with the PM's office.
I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies such as these.
This is something that I have had an interest in for the last few years. As such, a large part of my thesis has been developing "CompTorrent". It is a computing platform that has borrowed some ideas from BitTorrent and combined them with distributed computing.
The focus has been on making distributed computing projects as easy to start as a BitTorrent swarm. After spending some quality time with both BOINC and Condor I can assure you that getting a project going from scratch, can be a non-trivial exercise.
I see the difficulty of starting a distributed computing project as being a serious problem.
One solution I am proposing is borrowing some of the techniques from BitTorrent and using them in distributed computing. So far, the results have been very encouraging.
So here is a tidbit of my PhD research (an abstract from a paper hopefully being published soon):
"This paper describes the operational characteristics of "CompTorrent", a general purpose distributed computing platform that provides a low entry cost to creating new distributed computing projects. An algorithm is embedded into a metadata file along with data set details which are then published on the Internet. Potential nodes discover and download metadata files for projects they wish to participate in, extract the algorithm and data set descriptors, and join other participants in maintaining a swarm. This swarm then cooperatively shares the raw data set in pieces between nodes and applies the algorithm to produce a computed data set. This computed data set is also shared and distributed amongst participating nodes. CompTorrent allows a "simple home-brewed" solution for small or individual distributed computing projects. Testing and experimentation have shown CompTorrent to be an effective system that provides similar benefits for distributed computing to those BitTorrent provides for large file distribution."
As a PhD student and casual lecturer at the University of Tasmania's Computing deptartment Launceston campus (Launceston is where Guy Barnett has his office), I would like to clearly state for the record that nobody asked us for a comment on this before he started writing press releases!
Its rather funny actually, we have in the past been asked for help with expert advice in court cases etc, where technology has played a part in the crime. I don't think we've ever been asked anything on political party policy though... Why don't they make similar, unsupported claims about other scientific endeavors? Are the public only "politically gullible" about computer science? Might be a paper in that...:-)
Logan's Run has one of the first (if not the first) use of the laser special effects that went on to be used in Star Wars. Other bonuses include Michael York's terrible acting and Jenny Agutter with a minimum of clothing. Apparently a remake is in the works...
Yes. I stand corrected. As a lefty academic, maybe it was my internal predudice that was capitalising the left and lowercasing the right:). However, I agree that "L" vs "l" is important for the politically literate. The "Liberals" are now nowhere near the Menzies era "liberals".
Citizen's Electoral Council.
Thats an interesting one. I'm down in Tassie (Launceston) at present, at the CEC is quite prevalent here as far as front yard signage and the odd billboard goes.
They are pretty much the Left wing equivalent of the Family First (e.g. Family First if the Liberals aren't right enough for you. CEC if Labor, or even the Greens now, isn't quite left enough for you). I just *love* the billboard for them just down the road from me in Launceston from CEC "Nuclear power will save the environment Windmills Won't". And another favourite from their literature on the window at their campaign office "What would Jack Lang say about the Big Banks - Nationalise the bastards!".
I've had a few opportunities to discuss these issues with their Bass candidate, but unfortunately, I possess as few degrees in Science and would only end up arguing with her - especially on the implied nuclear power for Tassie platform.
"The Domain Name System (DNS) is an example of a system that blends peer-to-peer networking with a hierarchical model of information ownership. The remarkable thing about DNS is how well it has scaled, from the few thousand hosts it was originally designed to support in 1983 to the hundreds of millions of hosts currently on the Internet. The lessons from DNS are directly applicable to contemporary peer-to-peer data sharing applications.
DNS was established as a solution to a file-sharing problem. In the early days of the Internet, the way to map a human-friendly name like bbn to an IP address like 4.2.49.2 was through a single flat file, hosts.txt, which was copied around the Internet periodically. As the Net grew to thousands of hosts and managing that file became impossible, DNS was developed as a way to distribute the data sharing across the peer-to-peer Internet."
snip
"The namespace of DNS names is naturally hierarchical. For example, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. owns the namespace oreilly.com: they are the sole authority for all names in their domain, such as www.oreilly.com. This built-in hierarchy yields a simple, natural way to delegate responsibility for serving part of the DNS database. Each domain has an authority, the name server of record for hosts in that domain. When a host on the Internet wants to know the address of a given name, it queries its nearest name server to ask for the address. If that server does not know the name, it delegates the query to the authority for that namespace. That query, in turn, may be delegated to a higher authority, all the way up to the root name servers for the Internet as a whole. As the answer propagates back down to the requestor, the result is cached along the way to the name servers so the next fetch can be more efficient. Name servers operate both as clients and as servers."
Oram, A. Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies Available Online: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/peertopeer /chapter/ ch01.html
I am a post graduate student who is researching aspects of P2P software. Its a really fertile area for research that is now starting to get seriously damaged by the civil and criminal suits that are getting about these days. I know of one serious research group that has pulled their software, that wasn't even file sharing related, due to fears of being held accounatble for its use. I also have not released anything due to fears of retribution (and my stuff has bugger all to do with filesharing also).
I would like to extend my Masters research into a PhD but is it going to have a future for long enough? I hope that this will settle down and go the way of the fears of video tapes, PGP, cd burning, etc... But in the mean time research that will benefit ad hoc networking will suffer.
It will be a sad day if everything P2P is banned - I wonder if those companies with miss chat, dns, nntp, etc
I have been a home office coder since 1998. I agree with a few of the earlier posts - having a laptop and working in the various places around helps. But the best tonic of all is about once a year, taking an onsite contract for a month or two. This is usually enough to remind me why I decided to work from home in the first place. This allows my hump to fill and then it provides the necessary reminders for the rest of the year. Until it wears down and I have to go and remind myself again that office work sucks arse.
You just have to experiment with various modes of work and find what works best for you.
As mentioned in the article, it was only a few days ago that he was reported here as being a "pin-up" boy for anti-spam. Perhaps this was a final good deed to make up for his many earlier sins? Or was it so that the new luddite-in-chief wasn't instantly lynched?
Whilst I'm far from being an economist, isn't this sort of thing completely and utterly unsustainable? I think its fair to say that lots of tech company's workers are pretty much their customers too. So if the majority of tech companies continue to outsource their development contracts in Asia aren't they going to eventually ruin their customer base? I mean they pay pittance to Indian workers who could not afford to be a customer of theirs. Don't believe the bullshit - get a quote from a offshoring firm for the chargeout rate on a developer - a client of ours recently did and it was around $10US per hour for a senior developer. So you can image what the poor sod cutting the code is actually getting paid. Never mind - some bright spark in 10 years time will decide that the next big thing to fix a country's economy will be to repatriate workers and the cycle will continue... Its already happened here in Australia with outsourcing vs permanent employees.
Slashdot Mirror
According to Ohm, current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the potential difference across the two points.
Adding the netbook launcher by default might make it a good, out-of-the-box netbook distro. It seems odd to me to have a minimalist approach with a maximum desktop. But then again, I don't put a lot on the desktop...
So you alter a small part of each frame and the signature changes. Or alter every single pixel like when you convert/compress to another format such as divx. So how will they track it? Use different human actors for each copy and then you have yourself a trackable system.
"SOUTH Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson late last night backed down on online media censorship laws.
After stoking a fight with the media less than two months from a state election, Mr Atkinson said the laws stripping anonymity from media blogs would be repealed after the March 20 poll.
"From the feedback we've received through AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law supported by all MPs and all political parties is unduly restrictive. I have listened," Mr Atkinson said in statement released to the website AdelaideNow.
"I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively."
Mr Atkinson said the law would not be enforced for comments posted during the upcoming election campaign, even though it was technically applicable."
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/sa-attorney-general-backs-down-on-political-blogging/story-e6frg6nf-1225826154732
I am the development coordinator for one of the world's leading wagering software development companies. :-)
Having a background in industrial automation and other real time software systems, I can tell you that writing software for gaming (especially when it involves racing) is easily of the same order of writing sharemarket trading software. As its essentially what it is - a great big real time bank. Most of the things you would like to do as batch can't be done, as it can be with a bank, as balances and histories need to be available straight away.
Most of the guys that work for me have masters degrees (I have the full set) and all need a broad experience in a variety of areas to be even able to work here. Every thing you do touches on performance, scalability and reliability.
If you worry about the morality of it you're probably wound too tight to be working anywhere. And how many of these hiring companies, especially in america, see military service as a moral plus? If the job interests you do it. If it doesn't don't. And if you're any good and want to work in Australia - send me your resume
Cheers, Brad
PS. The one thing I have found doing this, having a PhD, is I understand how the guys working on things like the Manhattan project must have felt. Not commenting on the morality or anything of it, but just how little you think of what it is you are actually doing. For example, rarely do you think of it as being horse racing - all you're concentrating on is getting the right prices in the right columns etc. You just don't think too much about the bigger picture. Just something I found interesting.
I would agree with you if my partner didn't make her money selling art online (obligatory self serving link: emmakirsopp.com - may be NSFW as it contains life drawings).
We have tried a lot of competing sites. Some local ones (we're australian) such as oztion. Art specific ones like Dwanda, Etsy. Online shops like bigcartel (which is very good - but...). Very little traffic.
eBay has such a large following its the only place that auctions work by having enough people that might actually be interested in buying what you're selling.
I can tell you that this eBay kurfuffle has had a big impact on the number of sales and amount of which they have gone for. Interest rate rises here have also been a factor. But what interesting with the eBay/paypal thing is that its the first time in years that we have seen a lot of watchers on an item, but still no sale. This has been unique over the last couple of months as this thing has caused uncertainty.
It would be interesting to know if the data at eBay supports this in the australian market.
I should practise my usage of practice/practise in my practice more often before posting under my username.
Need another year at uni...
I've always found that knowing the correct grammar when discussing data, as the parent does, is one of the hallmarks of our profession.
So is pedantry - so include them in your practise whenever possible!
(Practise is the verb in commonwealth countries - 8 years at university very well spent)
So perhaps they won't invade Poland a third time?
HTH
Whilst we're on the subject:
Can people suggest some recording devices that they have had good results with? I've seen a lot of pen recorders on eBay, but haven't had any experience with them.
I've heard of a lot of various recording devices being used at trade shows etc where they have been on lanyards etc.
Any suggestions out there as I wouldn't mind getting one to play with.
I find this surprising considering only very recently that Rudd wanted several government bodies to clear media releases, including research, with the PM's office.
I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies such as these.
Disclaimer: I am an Australian lefty.
This is something that I have had an interest in for the last few years. As such, a large part of my thesis has been developing "CompTorrent". It is a computing platform that has borrowed some ideas from BitTorrent and combined them with distributed computing.
The focus has been on making distributed computing projects as easy to start as a BitTorrent swarm. After spending some quality time with both BOINC and Condor I can assure you that getting a project going from scratch, can be a non-trivial exercise.
Here's a paper if anyone is interested: Enabling grassroots distributed computing with CompTorrent
I totally agree with you.
I see the difficulty of starting a distributed computing project as being a serious problem.
One solution I am proposing is borrowing some of the techniques from BitTorrent and using them in distributed computing. So far, the results have been very encouraging.
So here is a tidbit of my PhD research (an abstract from a paper hopefully being published soon):
"This paper describes the operational characteristics of "CompTorrent", a general purpose distributed computing platform that provides a low entry cost to creating new distributed computing projects. An algorithm is embedded into a metadata file along with data set details which are then published on the Internet. Potential nodes discover and download metadata files for projects they wish to participate in, extract the algorithm and data set descriptors, and join other participants in maintaining a swarm. This swarm then cooperatively shares the raw data set in pieces between nodes and applies the algorithm to produce a computed data set. This computed data set is also shared and distributed amongst participating nodes. CompTorrent allows a "simple home-brewed" solution for small or individual distributed computing projects. Testing and experimentation have shown CompTorrent to be an effective system that provides similar benefits for distributed computing to those BitTorrent provides for large file distribution."
If anyone else is interested in my shameless self promotion: http://www.comp.utas.edu.au/users/bcg/
"...to re-energize the pipeline via high-profile tentpoles while revitalizing the Par brand with top-tier talent..."
Are they serious?
As a PhD student and casual lecturer at the University of Tasmania's Computing deptartment Launceston campus (Launceston is where Guy Barnett has his office), I would like to clearly state for the record that nobody asked us for a comment on this before he started writing press releases!
:-)
Its rather funny actually, we have in the past been asked for help with expert advice in court cases etc, where technology has played a part in the crime. I don't think we've ever been asked anything on political party policy though... Why don't they make similar, unsupported claims about other scientific endeavors? Are the public only "politically gullible" about computer science? Might be a paper in that...
Logan's Run has one of the first (if not the first) use of the laser special effects that went on to be used in Star Wars. Other bonuses include Michael York's terrible acting and Jenny Agutter with a minimum of clothing. Apparently a remake is in the works...
Yes. I stand corrected. As a lefty academic, maybe it was my internal predudice that was capitalising the left and lowercasing the right :). However, I agree that "L" vs "l" is important for the politically literate. The "Liberals" are now nowhere near the Menzies era "liberals".
:)
.au now and I've been drinking
Citizen's Electoral Council.
Thats an interesting one. I'm down in Tassie (Launceston) at present, at the CEC is quite prevalent here as far as front yard signage and the odd billboard goes.
They are pretty much the Left wing equivalent of the Family First (e.g. Family First if the Liberals aren't right enough for you. CEC if Labor, or even the Greens now, isn't quite left enough for you). I just *love* the billboard for them just down the road from me in Launceston from CEC "Nuclear power will save the environment Windmills Won't". And another favourite from their literature on the window at their campaign office "What would Jack Lang say about the Big Banks - Nationalise the bastards!".
I've had a few opportunities to discuss these issues with their Bass candidate, but unfortunately, I possess as few degrees in Science and would only end up arguing with her - especially on the implied nuclear power for Tassie platform.
I'm new to Tassie - I love it
NB: Its late in
It is generally considered that Labor is "left" in Australia whilst the coalition (liberal and national parties) are the "right".
The family first party is clearly a right wing party and is identified locally as such.
This party has been clearly shown to be essentially a front for the "Assemblies of God" church. See one of Australia's most popular political sites for an article on them
They're right-wingers guys!
Probably best summed up by Andy Oram:
r /chapter/ ch01.html
"The Domain Name System (DNS) is an example of a system that blends peer-to-peer networking with a hierarchical model of information ownership. The remarkable thing about DNS is how well it has scaled, from the few thousand hosts it was originally designed to support in 1983 to the hundreds of millions of hosts currently on the Internet. The lessons from DNS are directly applicable to contemporary peer-to-peer data sharing applications.
DNS was established as a solution to a file-sharing problem. In the early days of the Internet, the way to map a human-friendly name like bbn to an IP address like 4.2.49.2 was through a single flat file, hosts.txt, which was copied around the Internet periodically. As the Net grew to thousands of hosts and managing that file became impossible, DNS was developed as a way to distribute the data sharing across the peer-to-peer Internet."
snip
"The namespace of DNS names is naturally hierarchical. For example, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. owns the namespace oreilly.com: they are the sole authority for all names in their domain, such as www.oreilly.com. This built-in hierarchy yields a simple, natural way to delegate responsibility for serving part of the DNS database. Each domain has an authority, the name server of record for hosts in that domain. When a host on the Internet wants to know the address of a given name, it queries its nearest name server to ask for the address. If that server does not know the name, it delegates the query to the authority for that namespace. That query, in turn, may be delegated to a higher authority, all the way up to the root name servers for the Internet as a whole. As the answer propagates back down to the requestor, the result is cached along the way to the name servers so the next fetch can be more efficient. Name servers operate both as clients and as servers."
Oram, A. Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies Available Online:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/peertopee
I am a post graduate student who is researching aspects of P2P software. Its a really fertile area for research that is now starting to get seriously damaged by the civil and criminal suits that are getting about these days. I know of one serious research group that has pulled their software, that wasn't even file sharing related, due to fears of being held accounatble for its use. I also have not released anything due to fears of retribution (and my stuff has bugger all to do with filesharing also).
I would like to extend my Masters research into a PhD but is it going to have a future for long enough? I hope that this will settle down and go the way of the fears of video tapes, PGP, cd burning, etc... But in the mean time research that will benefit ad hoc networking will suffer.
It will be a sad day if everything P2P is banned - I wonder if those companies with miss chat, dns, nntp, etc
Wouldn't a 4Gb hard disk just like whats in the mini ipod go down a treat in one of these things?
:)
Combine that with wifi (as mentioned by another poster) and at least laptop battery life expectancy and i would instantly order one.
I don't ask much
I have been a home office coder since 1998.
I agree with a few of the earlier posts - having a laptop and working in the various places around helps. But the best tonic of all is about once a year, taking an onsite contract for a month or two. This is usually enough to remind me why I decided to work from home in the first place. This allows my hump to fill and then it provides the necessary reminders for the rest of the year. Until it wears down and I have to go and remind myself again that office work sucks arse.
You just have to experiment with various modes of work and find what works best for you.
I would have gladly laid down the Australian IT industry as a sacrifice rather than see her back in immigration.
As mentioned in the article, it was only a few days ago that he was reported here as being a "pin-up" boy for anti-spam. Perhaps this was a final good deed to make up for his many earlier sins? Or was it so that the new luddite-in-chief wasn't instantly lynched?
Whilst I'm far from being an economist, isn't this sort of thing completely and utterly unsustainable? I think its fair to say that lots of tech company's workers are pretty much their customers too. So if the majority of tech companies continue to outsource their development contracts in Asia aren't they going to eventually ruin their customer base? I mean they pay pittance to Indian workers who could not afford to be a customer of theirs. Don't believe the bullshit - get a quote from a offshoring firm for the chargeout rate on a developer - a client of ours recently did and it was around $10US per hour for a senior developer. So you can image what the poor sod cutting the code is actually getting paid. Never mind - some bright spark in 10 years time will decide that the next big thing to fix a country's economy will be to repatriate workers and the cycle will continue... Its already happened here in Australia with outsourcing vs permanent employees.