I'd give their website a C- for usability. It seems way too technical for the average user to download the app in the first place. They have 4 links before the app download about patches, the description of which would be meaningless to most users and not obvious that they don't need them.
That may be the case , but over a million people a couple of years ago did their taxes with it. And they caught the ATO by surprise too - they had to do a lot of upgrades to the servers that handle the actual submissions. For a country that has about 8 million taxpayers, that's a *lot*. Even if the linux and mac taxpayers can't submit theirs:-)
How'd this story get onto the front page? This is not really news-for-nerds, or stuff-that-matters.
So, E-tax is windows-only. Big deal. The ATO is working with the lowest common denominator. Sadly for the zealots out there, that's not linux. And , as an Aussie citizen, this is *my* tax dollars at work. I'm not interested in them spending (say) $1 million to code up a working linux version and do support for it. I want my cash to go to more important things.
There are plenty of other ways to do your tax.
- Perhaps you could cough up $50 to use a tax agent (who'll likely find more deductions,anyway) and get that $50 back next year as a deduction.
- Or use wine , which has worked for me on the last three versions of e-tax. Hell, they did suggest it.
- Or, (gasp! the horror!) spend an hour or so with a calculator and use the standard paper-based form.
When linux is 25% of the installed Australian PC user base, they might consider it. But you'll probably see a Mac version first. Personally, I'm glad that they've made the first step and actually made online returns possible, because it's a hell of a lot better than the old paper-chase.
They're just having trouble with making a nice hot cup of tea. Perhaps the Brits could send over a few boffins? Things would probably move a lot quicker then.
(Five minutes after arrival) Boffin: Right. Who's up for a nice hot cup of tea?
You can go for a 'grid-interactive' system, which basically just has an inverter connected to both the solar panels and the grid. With grid interactive units, no batteries are needed, although there are disadvantages, chiefly that most grid-interactive systems shut off if there is no grid power.
Basically two operating modes:
Sunny day - the house gets its power from the solar panels, with any excess going 'into' the grid. You may get a cheque in the mail from your electricity provider for the power you send into the grid, you may not - it all depends. If you're at work 5 days a week and the house is basically empty, you should get some cash back, and with appropriately-sized panels, your power bill should zero out.
Rainy day and nighttime - the house gets its power from the grid, and your 20 grand's worth of panels sit useless on the roof, while your neighbours mock you:-)
Grid-interactive's probably the way to go if your existing grid supply is reliable, and your provider has some environmental smarts about it.
Perhaps you'd like to check out CRITICALITY ACCIDENTS from 1943-1970. Plenty of people saw large fission reactions first-hand and lived a day or two afterwards.
From about three quarters of the way down the page: At that time, the screwdriver apparently slipped and the upper shell fell into position around the fissionable material. Of the eight people in the room, two were directly engaged in the work leading to this incident.
The "blue glow" was observed, a heat wave felt, and immediately the top shell was slipped off and everyone left the room. The scientist who was demonstrating the experiment received sufficient dosage to result in injuries from which he died nine days later. The scientist assisting received sufficient radiation dosage to cause serious injuries and some permanent partial disability.
I have that page bookmarked as "Audiophiles are Idiots". I send it to people who ask me questions on audio quality, with the words,'Do not buy anything like this'. It really hurts to read sometimes. It's like the timecube, but for audiophiles.
There's "you and me and the rest of reality world" over here...... and then there's "those guys over there". Waaaaaaay over there. Pretty much over the horizon, actually.
What? No, of *course* I'll buy a crappy $500 laquered wooden knob to enhance the sound! *Everyone* knows how the micro-vibrations caused by ordinary knobs completely ruin the clarity of the sound!
(Ok, now everyone, just back away slowly, don't make eye contact)
I don't think so. Then you'd be wrong. I presume you're thinking about the power at 110V compared to power at 240V, like a 1000W bar heater. This is not relevant when you have a fixed resistance - when you double the voltage to a fixed resistance, you double the current as well.
High voltage gives you a nice jolt to make you pay attention again. High current kills you.
240V has a higher potential than 110V. It can push more electrons through a given size resistance. As your body is (pretty much) a constant resistance, you will recieve more current via 240V than with 110V. So you have all the joy of a nice high voltage jolt, as well as the high(er) current behind it to kill you.
For the rest of the class, we'll go for the water analogy, shall we?
This is like a pipe with higher pressure compared to one with lower pressure. Put the same size hole in both pipes, the higher pressure one will leak more water.
Actually it's the rest of the world that has it right, not you. I live in Australia, with a nominal 240V supply. 240V hurts like hell.
I'm touchy about all these casual references about power, as I had to resuscitate an electrician once - and I never, ever want to be in that position again. Giving CPR to someone with 2nd degree burns on the side of his face and who's shirt is melted to their skin is not very good at all. Having to do it on and off for an hour until the ambulance arrived was one of the most stressful experiences I've ever encountered.
It's very nearly impossible to place your body in such a way that going through you is a shorter path to ground. You clearly don't know enough about light sockets.
Well, I'll put my vote in for you at the next darwin awards. See you there!
Electricity is not black magic. But it does have the potential to kill. If someone said to me "Hey! put a penny in the socket! There's only a 5% chance of death!", I'd tell them to fuck off.
So, fuck off.
If you happen to touch the active pole with the penny/metal object/finger *first*, you make your body the only path to earth. This just might seem a bit of a belt at 110V (and it's still plenty lethal), but spare a thought for the rest of the world that has all their outlets at 240V - at that voltage there's a large burn hazard from just the flash, let alone the increased voltage.
And then there's sticky circuit breakers or nails as fuses - oops! my house just caught fire!
And then there's the floating neutral, due to bad netural-to-earth connections, that make the neutral part of the circuit rise up to lethal voltages when large currents flow, say like when you jam a penny in a light socket.
And then there's always the dumbass who wired the light socket the other way around with the active on the outide - zapped before you even touch the pin.
Hell, don't forget the other dumbass who wired it so that the neutral instead of the active was switched - zapped while the damn thing's turned off.
*And then* there's the poor bastard with a slightly weak heart that would have still lived to 90 had he not stuck a penny in the socket on the goading of his dumbass friends, who are now staring at him dying on the floor, while they try to remember how to do external cardiac massage.
So, just play it safe and don't stick objects in power outlets. You'll probably get enough unintentional electric shocks in your life, you don't need intentional ones.
If the police could link "evil terrorist's" identity to a slashdot account, you can be damn sure that slashdot's server(s) would be inspected for traceable IP's in the logs. That's their job - find evidence to find the person that did the crime.
Just because it's on 'teh intarweb' makes it no different to the physical world.
All recordable optical media uses a dye of some sort that gets 'burnt' by the laser. This dye can degrade or bleed on your disk over time. Then there's the reflective layer - this can basically rot and go flaky, leaving your drive with no way of reading the burn marks on the dye.
Then there's the inevitable march of technology. Hope there's a DVD reader around in 50 years time.
So, keep one in the box as well?
Then you have to hope that someone's still got a ATA-66 interface on their old-skool 64-core Athlon that they bought for 15 bucks off ebay in 2036.
So, plan to keep a spare PC in the box as well?
Electronics don't last for that long, especially considering the component count of your average PC. Electrolytic capacitors dry out, boards shink due to loss of volatile compounds, internal IC connections let go. See how much "fun" people have restoring vintage radios for an indication, but scale it 100x.
So, you're pretty much screwed for long-term storage. Visit your safe deposit boxe(s) every 12 months, rotate media with new ones. When the newest archival technology makes your DVD's look like 5 1/4" floppies in comparison, move to it. Repeat until nobody cares about your data any more. It's normally earlier than you wish it would be.("What? $125 bucks a year for a safe deposit box for Grandpa's old work documents? Well, I guess the old boy won't be needing them now he's gone.")
Volcanism just ain't gonna cut it. It goes like this:
Planet + good-sized asteriod impacting at speed = lots of ejecta with enough velocity to escape mars gravity and land on small moons and other planets.
Of course, most of the good-sized asteroids already smacked into planets eons ago, so the odds of it happening in your lifetime are pretty slim.
I worked at a coal mine where the main comms bundle ran about a kilometer from the telstra fibre optic terminaton shack to the control room.
Well, someone had to dig near the middle of it one day, so we look up the survey - it said "cable to be buried min 1m covered with 30cm sand,2 layers of warning tape at 30cm and 60cm. Signs erected every 25m denoting cable location and direction".
So we're out looking for the trench/and or signs. No sign of the signs, or trench. Someone says, "So, what's that over there? It's a cable, just lying on the ground." We all go, "Naaaaah, that can't be it."
So after about 10 minutes , we head back to the shack to try and pinpoint it from there. The cable came directly out of shack, and ran the kilometer to the control room under a fine protective layer of leaf litter cand cow dung.
It turns out that in the mad rush 3 years ago to get the control room on-line, they'd rolled out the cable, hooked up both ends and said, "We'll dig the trench for that later...". Apparently the contractor later just decided to skip all that tedium of actually digging the trench.
For a start, I'd suggest: Use the standard CUPS page with it's colour pinwheel, but also enough circles of 1 deg lines to do a pair of each primary colour. Make the line transition from one primary at the inner point to another primary at the circumference.
A set of colour circles like that would give you an indication of: - the colour resolution (from the radials expanding, just like normal B/W) - mixing (from the transition from one primary to another) - and any problem with colour overlay. (Eg, the ones involving magenta being misaligned would end up with some sort of moire pattern on the inner parts of the circle)
It does make it difficult to find a piece of software by name in package managers - 6000 KDE programs all start with K, fer chrissakes.
So, say I want a KDE photo app...... Kphoto? Klab? Kimp? It seriously limits the availability of an average user to find your program if you tenuously manage to link a witty 'K-name' from a name that describes your app correctly.
You'll be in trouble when you're dead and your preferred deity says something like:
"Right! So you've had another go at life, eh? Lets just check your/. account (clickety-click) hmmm... a lot of trolling here.... (click) poor karma...... (click) And see here? You called the karma system worthless? Hmmm. Not really a good idea, that. Let's just send you back as a single-celled organism for a couple hundred thousand generations, hey? Off you go!"
Of course, if they *do* manage to come out with something in three years, you can bet your little cotton socks that the NSA has had it for the last five years.
That's why I always leave *my* data unencrypted, with just a header stating, "Encrypted message follows:" Drives the NSA guys nuts when their quantum decryptor auto-converts my dirty bomb plans into innocuous emails to friends.
Probably because ICBM's were designed to be sub-orbital, to conveniently deliver their happy-fun-payload of DOOM to the other side of the planet.
Sure, with a lighter payload and a longer engine burn to reach an intermediate orbit, they'd 'probably' be ok. But don't bet the whole farm on something that's supposed to just launch to 100km and fall back down again via gravity.
For those of you who dont RTFA a small excerpt: It should be pointed out that this is the effect of a 15-kiloton air-burst nuke. Consider the effects of a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb such as what the russians tested.
As a result of the explosion of the bomb at 8:15, almost the entire city was destroyed by a single blow. Only small outlying districts in the southern and eastern parts of the town excaped complete destruction. The bomb exploded over the center of the city. As a result of the blast, all the small Japanese houses in a diameter of five kilometers, which encompassed 99% of the city, collapsed or were blown up. Those who were in the houses were buried in the ruins. Those who were in the open sustained burns resulting from contact with the substance or rays omitted by the bomb. Where the substance struck in quantity, fires sprung up. these spread rapidly. The heat which rose from the center created a whirlwind which was effective in spreading fire throughout the whole city
On second thought, maybe we shouldn't get kids to read this - it'd give them nightmares for the rest of their lives.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd give their website a C- for usability. It seems way too technical for the average user to download the app in the first place. They have 4 links before the app download about patches, the description of which would be meaningless to most users and not obvious that they don't need them.
:-)
That may be the case , but over a million people a couple of years ago did their taxes with it. And they caught the ATO by surprise too - they had to do a lot of upgrades to the servers that handle the actual submissions. For a country that has about 8 million taxpayers, that's a *lot*. Even if the linux and mac taxpayers can't submit theirs
How'd this story get onto the front page? This is not really news-for-nerds, or stuff-that-matters.
So, E-tax is windows-only. Big deal. The ATO is working with the lowest common denominator. Sadly for the zealots out there, that's not linux. And , as an Aussie citizen, this is *my* tax dollars at work. I'm not interested in them spending (say) $1 million to code up a working linux version and do support for it. I want my cash to go to more important things.
There are plenty of other ways to do your tax.
- Perhaps you could cough up $50 to use a tax agent (who'll likely find more deductions,anyway) and get that $50 back next year as a deduction.
- Or use wine , which has worked for me on the last three versions of e-tax. Hell, they did suggest it.
- Or, (gasp! the horror! ) spend an hour or so with a calculator and use the standard paper-based form.
When linux is 25% of the installed Australian PC user base, they might consider it. But you'll probably see a Mac version first. Personally, I'm glad that they've made the first step and actually made online returns possible, because it's a hell of a lot better than the old paper-chase.
They're just having trouble with making a nice hot cup of tea. Perhaps the Brits could send over a few boffins? Things would probably move a lot quicker then.
(Five minutes after arrival)
Boffin: Right. Who's up for a nice hot cup of tea?
(Dumfounded pause)
NASA: Eureka!
You can go for a 'grid-interactive' system, which basically just has an inverter connected to both the solar panels and the grid. With grid interactive units, no batteries are needed, although there are disadvantages, chiefly that most grid-interactive systems shut off if there is no grid power.
:-)
Basically two operating modes:
Sunny day - the house gets its power from the solar panels, with any excess going 'into' the grid. You may get a cheque in the mail from your electricity provider for the power you send into the grid, you may not - it all depends. If you're at work 5 days a week and the house is basically empty, you should get some cash back, and with appropriately-sized panels, your power bill should zero out.
Rainy day and nighttime - the house gets its power from the grid, and your 20 grand's worth of panels sit useless on the roof, while your neighbours mock you
Grid-interactive's probably the way to go if your existing grid supply is reliable, and your provider has some environmental smarts about it.
Perhaps you'd like to check out CRITICALITY ACCIDENTS from 1943-1970. Plenty of people saw large fission reactions first-hand and lived a day or two afterwards.
:
From about three quarters of the way down the page
At that time, the screwdriver apparently slipped and the upper shell fell into position around the fissionable material. Of the eight people in the room, two were directly engaged in the work leading to this incident.
The "blue glow" was observed, a heat wave felt, and immediately the top shell was slipped off and everyone left the room. The scientist who was demonstrating the experiment received sufficient dosage to result in injuries from which he died nine days later. The scientist assisting received sufficient radiation dosage to cause serious injuries and some permanent partial disability.
"er, Whoops."
I have that page bookmarked as "Audiophiles are Idiots". I send it to people who ask me questions on audio quality, with the words,'Do not buy anything like this'. It really hurts to read sometimes. It's like the timecube, but for audiophiles.
...... and then there's "those guys over there". Waaaaaaay over there. Pretty much over the horizon, actually.
There's "you and me and the rest of reality world" over here
What? No, of *course* I'll buy a crappy $500 laquered wooden knob to enhance the sound! *Everyone* knows how the micro-vibrations caused by ordinary knobs completely ruin the clarity of the sound!
(Ok, now everyone, just back away slowly, don't make eye contact)
How delightfully 1984-esque! Sign me up!
I don't think so.
Then you'd be wrong. I presume you're thinking about the power at 110V compared to power at 240V, like a 1000W bar heater. This is not relevant when you have a fixed resistance - when you double the voltage to a fixed resistance, you double the current as well.
High voltage gives you a nice jolt to make you pay attention again. High current kills you.
240V has a higher potential than 110V. It can push more electrons through a given size resistance. As your body is (pretty much) a constant resistance, you will recieve more current via 240V than with 110V. So you have all the joy of a nice high voltage jolt, as well as the high(er) current behind it to kill you.
For the rest of the class, we'll go for the water analogy, shall we?
This is like a pipe with higher pressure compared to one with lower pressure. Put the same size hole in both pipes, the higher pressure one will leak more water.
Actually it's the rest of the world that has it right, not you.
I live in Australia, with a nominal 240V supply. 240V hurts like hell.
I'm touchy about all these casual references about power, as I had to resuscitate an electrician once - and I never, ever want to be in that position again. Giving CPR to someone with 2nd degree burns on the side of his face and who's shirt is melted to their skin is not very good at all. Having to do it on and off for an hour until the ambulance arrived was one of the most stressful experiences I've ever encountered.
It's very nearly impossible to place your body in such a way that going through you is a shorter path to ground. You clearly don't know enough about light sockets.
Well, I'll put my vote in for you at the next darwin awards. See you there!
Electricity is not black magic. But it does have the potential to kill. If someone said to me "Hey! put a penny in the socket! There's only a 5% chance of death!", I'd tell them to fuck off.
So, fuck off.
If you happen to touch the active pole with the penny/metal object/finger *first*, you make your body the only path to earth. This just might seem a bit of a belt at 110V (and it's still plenty lethal), but spare a thought for the rest of the world that has all their outlets at 240V - at that voltage there's a large burn hazard from just the flash, let alone the increased voltage.
And then there's sticky circuit breakers or nails as fuses - oops! my house just caught fire!
And then there's the floating neutral, due to bad netural-to-earth connections, that make the neutral part of the circuit rise up to lethal voltages when large currents flow, say like when you jam a penny in a light socket.
And then there's always the dumbass who wired the light socket the other way around with the active on the outide - zapped before you even touch the pin.
Hell, don't forget the other dumbass who wired it so that the neutral instead of the active was switched - zapped while the damn thing's turned off.
*And then* there's the poor bastard with a slightly weak heart that would have still lived to 90 had he not stuck a penny in the socket on the goading of his dumbass friends, who are now staring at him dying on the floor, while they try to remember how to do external cardiac massage.
So, just play it safe and don't stick objects in power outlets. You'll probably get enough unintentional electric shocks in your life, you don't need intentional ones.
If the police could link "evil terrorist's" identity to a slashdot account, you can be damn sure that slashdot's server(s) would be inspected for traceable IP's in the logs. That's their job - find evidence to find the person that did the crime.
:-)
Just because it's on 'teh intarweb' makes it no different to the physical world.
I know, IHBT.
Perhaps we should try and persuade google to link "WTF is" with "define:" on google. Would make it a lot more natural.
It's not "Immersively Kick-Ass Kung-Fu" until the ass that gets kicked is *yours*.
And then you might as well go down to your local martial-arts place and get your ass immersively-kung-fu-kicked for free.
chemical breakdown due to air interaction?
Yes.
All recordable optical media uses a dye of some sort that gets 'burnt' by the laser. This dye can degrade or bleed on your disk over time.
Then there's the reflective layer - this can basically rot and go flaky, leaving your drive with no way of reading the burn marks on the dye.
Then there's the inevitable march of technology.
Hope there's a DVD reader around in 50 years time.
So, keep one in the box as well?
Then you have to hope that someone's still got a ATA-66 interface on their old-skool 64-core Athlon that they bought for 15 bucks off ebay in 2036.
So, plan to keep a spare PC in the box as well?
Electronics don't last for that long, especially considering the component count of your average PC. Electrolytic capacitors dry out, boards shink due to loss of volatile compounds, internal IC connections let go. See how much "fun" people have restoring vintage radios for an indication, but scale it 100x.
So, you're pretty much screwed for long-term storage. Visit your safe deposit boxe(s) every 12 months, rotate media with new ones. When the newest archival technology makes your DVD's look like 5 1/4" floppies in comparison, move to it. Repeat until nobody cares about your data any more. It's normally earlier than you wish it would be.("What? $125 bucks a year for a safe deposit box for Grandpa's old work documents? Well, I guess the old boy won't be needing them now he's gone.")
Wait till it finally runs out of spare sectors to map.
Get a SMART reader and see what it says about your drive - if it's just saying "yeah, this drive is >40000 hours old" ignore.
If it says "Slow spin-up time", or "exessive ECC corrected errors", back your data up more regularly than you do now.
I have no putty for people who comit a crime
You heartless person! Criminals sometimes have to deal with broken windows,just like everyone else. Have some pity and lend them putty.
Volcanism just ain't gonna cut it.
It goes like this:
Planet
+
good-sized asteriod impacting at speed
=
lots of ejecta with enough velocity to escape mars gravity and land on small moons and other planets.
Of course, most of the good-sized asteroids already smacked into planets eons ago, so the odds of it happening in your lifetime are pretty slim.
I worked at a coal mine where the main comms bundle ran about a kilometer from the telstra fibre optic terminaton shack to the control room.
...". Apparently the contractor later just decided to skip all that tedium of actually digging the trench.
Well, someone had to dig near the middle of it one day, so we look up the survey - it said "cable to be buried min 1m covered with 30cm sand,2 layers of warning tape at 30cm and 60cm. Signs erected every 25m denoting cable location and direction".
So we're out looking for the trench/and or signs. No sign of the signs, or trench.
Someone says, "So, what's that over there? It's a cable, just lying on the ground."
We all go, "Naaaaah, that can't be it."
So after about 10 minutes , we head back to the shack to try and pinpoint it from there.
The cable came directly out of shack, and ran the kilometer to the control room under a fine protective layer of leaf litter cand cow dung.
It turns out that in the mad rush 3 years ago to get the control room on-line, they'd rolled out the cable, hooked up both ends and said, "We'll dig the trench for that later
For a start, I'd suggest :
Use the standard CUPS page with it's colour pinwheel, but also enough circles of 1 deg lines to do a pair of each primary colour. Make the line transition from one primary at the inner point to another primary at the circumference.
A set of colour circles like that would give you an indication of:
- the colour resolution (from the radials expanding, just like normal B/W)
- mixing (from the transition from one primary to another)
- and any problem with colour overlay. (Eg, the ones involving magenta being misaligned would end up with some sort of moire pattern on the inner parts of the circle)
If it was some super-dense form of $100 which, which expanded out to a million bucks in normal monetary systems, then, yes you would be a millionaire.
Kind of like the exchange rate when you go to Indonesia - a hundred USD gets you a million rupiah.
It does make it difficult to find a piece of software by name in package managers - 6000 KDE programs all start with K, fer chrissakes.
So, say I want a KDE photo app...... Kphoto? Klab? Kimp? It seriously limits the availability of an average user to find your program if you tenuously manage to link a witty 'K-name' from a name that describes your app correctly.
You'll be in trouble when you're dead and your preferred deity says something like :
/. account (clickety-click) hmmm... a lot of trolling here.... (click) poor karma...... (click) And see here? You called the karma system worthless? Hmmm. Not really a good idea, that. Let's just send you back as a single-celled organism for a couple hundred thousand generations, hey? Off you go!"
"Right! So you've had another go at life, eh?
Lets just check your
Of course, if they *do* manage to come out with something in three years, you can bet your little cotton socks that the NSA has had it for the last five years.
That's why I always leave *my* data unencrypted, with just a header stating, "Encrypted message follows:"
Drives the NSA guys nuts when their quantum decryptor auto-converts my dirty bomb plans into innocuous emails to friends.
That we've got a cool sense of the ironic?
Probably because ICBM's were designed to be sub-orbital, to conveniently deliver their happy-fun-payload of DOOM to the other side of the planet.
Sure, with a lighter payload and a longer engine burn to reach an intermediate orbit, they'd 'probably' be ok. But don't bet the whole farm on something that's supposed to just launch to 100km and fall back down again via gravity.
For those of you who dont RTFA a small excerpt :
It should be pointed out that this is the effect of a 15-kiloton air-burst nuke. Consider the effects of a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb such as what the russians tested.
As a result of the explosion of the bomb at 8:15, almost the entire city was destroyed by a single blow. Only small outlying districts in the southern and eastern parts of the town excaped complete destruction. The bomb exploded over the center of the city. As a result of the blast, all the small Japanese houses in a diameter of five kilometers, which encompassed 99% of the city, collapsed or were blown up. Those who were in the houses were buried in the ruins. Those who were in the open sustained burns resulting from contact with the substance or rays omitted by the bomb. Where the substance struck in quantity, fires sprung up. these spread rapidly. The heat which rose from the center created a whirlwind which was effective in spreading fire throughout the whole city
On second thought, maybe we shouldn't get kids to read this - it'd give them nightmares for the rest of their lives.