Melbourne Australia has a large number of cameras in some parts of the downtown and they are not effective. Someone who worked for the city claims that people were not reporting crimes because they thought the cameras would catch the people. It turns out that after spending millions of dollars, they haven't been effective at catching criminals. This was recently in the news here so I'm sure more info is at google news. The result of a recent investigation is that the cameras aren't worth wath they cost and do nothing to help prevent crime and nothing in catching criminals but they are going to stay a while longer.
Funny, I don't know a single wheat farmer in Kasnas thats getting any goverment money for growing wheat. The US wheat farmers get paid not to plant some areas. Right now only about 1/100 of the good areas in Kasnas are planted with wheat.
Australia had about 12 million ha of wheat farms. Kansas has 4 million ha. Total production in Australia ranges from about 9 million tons with a record of 20 million tons. The worst Kasnas produces is 13 million tons.
I also don't see how production costs can be higher but I don't have any figure on that. I do know that many govt departments are trying to get Aussie farmers to use technology like GPS systems to help get their costs inline with US farmers so I'm not sure where you get your production costs.
Canada is a territory (like Puerto Rico), its got too many liberals to make it a state. However UK is looking at being number 51 and since there is no decent way to put 51 stars on a flag, it looks like Oz is going to have to be added at the same time to keep the stars in the flag balanced. Lucky for the Kiwis 53 stars don't work.
The Aussie Sugar farmers sell the most expensive raw sugar in the world. Who would even want it? The only reason the US market makes sense is its ultra high taxes on processing sugar. By the time Aussie sugar ends up in American products, its cheaper to buy Hawaiian processed sugar. If the US ever fixed its sugar price manipulation, the Aussies wouldn't sell any sugar to anyone since the stuff is real cheap in places like the Caribbean.
As far as US wheat, the Aussies can't come close to the efficiencies of the Kasnas fields so I don't see wheat trade helping the Aussies at all.
I don't see what the big deal about the farming products are concerned. Both countries are major food producers and both make far more food than they can use to the point that massive amoutns of it get destroyed every day. There is no good reason a Texan would be eating an Aussie cow anymore than an Aussie would be eating a Texan cow since the local grown beast doesn't need to be shipped 1/2 over the world.
The only way whitegoods are going to get cheaper in Australia is if they start putting in 120V 60Hz power.
Clothing (except for Levis) is about the same.
The only way cars are going to be cheaper is to switch to driving on the right side of the road.
Things that don't have special Aussie standards like computers are already about the same price as in the US. Beige box computers are cheaper as is memory. Macs and Toshiba comptuers cost a bit more.
Most of the high cost is a result of a massivly inefficient distribution systems with high margins at every step. Add in artificial increases in real estate prices to drive the rents up and you have Aussie retail prices.
Many HR deprtments sole job is to keep themselves empolyed until the next wave of hirings happen. Then they switch to filter mode where their job is to filter resumes and do pre-interviews so they don't waste the time of the group thats needs a body to do work. The problem with this is when the HR dept's likes aren't compatable with say the engineering team.
unless MSFT1 had to compete with MSFT2, there is no reason to do things like an office for linix. That is only going to happen when one group has to fight another group with a similar product and that isn't going to happen in the MS world except at the OS level and maybe some of the games which they aren't making any money on anyway. Getting Word and Excel in different compaines with the require that they only share interfaces over the public internet would allow others to attempt to integrate which would never happen if Office is contorlled by one company.
The scary thing about linux market share in the windows world is that it happens to be about the same numbers as very old things that are going away such as OS2, big iron main frames and lots of silly old things like Pyramid minis and TRS-80s.
no, lots of vlans and things like workstation 22 being on 192.168.22.22 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0 and an eth0:22 ip address of 192.168.22.233 on the samba box.
Except I no longer use 192.168.*.* since that seems to be built in to every virus on the planet.
I had a NT4 box get owned from inside our test network. It appears that a users home box got owned and when he VPNed internal machine, a virus rode along for the ride and then started scanning iternal machines and found the NT sitting duck on the test network. The NT box then procedded to try to open some odd connections so I let it. It then downloaded something that would open up a smart proxy and then it tried to send out something in the order of a billion messages which my free bsd firewall/cluestick box accepted and most of them were addressed to AOL.
So what we have here is someone writing a virus that can get into a recent windows box that then looks for remote control connections and knows how to exploit them. Then it installs a different program that can scan and install a spam proxy on machines that can access the net and only machines that have net access.
That was about a year ago. MS came out with the pach many months after the box had been owned. After that, I've got a new rule, no pc can talk to anything else except the samba server by defautl. No PC has any access to the net except through squid. I don't set up default gateways now either. Default PC installs can't even ping anything but the samba/squid box. Too bad SAP Business one is forcing me to break some of this for some clients. Maybe they will port it to solaris like they said they would.
So you propose having three compaines all with their own monopolies? You must be a MSFT stock holder.
They should have been broken up like Standard Oil -- into compaines that have to fight each other for market share. That means one company would end up with a server OS and excel while a different one would end up with the home OS and word. That would result in decreased costs for consumers and increased competition in the marketplace.
Melbourne wireless is a group of people building their own network. Its not connected to the net mostly because the local telco charges per megabyte and all the other tier two providers (who claim their tier 1) bill the same way so the net is too expensive to give away connections....
Except.... the local telcos have annoyed me a great deal. I'm tired of seeing bills in the thousands of dollars a month for work's pathetic connection which does a less than a hundred gig a month. So I called up every local provder through their offices in the US and got price quotes there for service here. I've now got a spare bandwidth on an unlimited pricing plan. So lets see here, I'm mad the local telco, I've got roof space on the 129th tallest building in the world as well as a few other choice spots, I've got a few nice 120 degree max-rad antennas, I've got spare bandwidth that won't cost me anything if I give it away and a service contract that lets me resell or share it. I wonder what I should do.
MS has seen the light and they know the only way to stop their market share loss is to use patents to stop others. Open source can play the new game or ignore it but if they ignore it, it will end badly. What would have happened with the.gif patent if it included all compressed graphincs formats? Some of the new MS patents are generic enough to kill any implementations. Remember that you can patent a method and you can patent something if the reason for it being needed isn't obvious. The second type is going to be a real pain to get kicked out because prior art won't kill thouse patents in some cases.
Many of the CC TLD domains servers are run out of UC Berkeley. In some ways this make sense when you consider that many of the countries don't have even a 2mb link into the country. If someone decides to DDOS a CC TLD name server, UCB is a much better position to take the hit than some server tied off a slow 100 km link to a sat up link somewhere in the 3rd world. There are places where running the top level domain is best left to someone who understands the real world and can cope with the real issues. It doesn't matter if the real offical manages stuff over a uucp link, the name servers and whois servers need to be a reasonable net link.
Vodaphone in Egypt does SMS for LE.50 which is about US$.08 or EU$.066 on their worst plan.
The cost to send the messages is on the order of a thousand of a cent. The rest is all nice profit or intercarrier fees.
If you send a lot of messages, you can buy a microcell for about US$6000 new ($1000 used) and relay them yourself. Of course someone might get a bit annoyed if you used a frequency you don't have the rights too but that migth not too expensive to buy for a small area.
NZ has crazy interconnect fees. The result is that a typical pre-pay plan its the same or cheaper to call London than a phone in New Zealand. The plan my kiwi sim is on works fine in Australia with no extra roaming fees but its just as cheap to call a land line in the UK or US than a another mobile in NZ with the same company. With Orange in Oz, it costs half as much to call Canada as it does to call a landline in the same town your in.
A decade ago when I got to play with a real 24 bit 1024x768 display on a sun 4/110, I wrote a program to display most of the colors 1/16 of them at a time. It turns out that out of the 16,777,216 colors you could tell the thing to display but to the human eye 8 million or so of them were brown and most of of the rest were grey.
I wonder how much of the Junk DNA is just part of a data segment? Most of it will never even get looked at but some tiny bit of that junk might describe how to make the inside bit of a big toe.
Many of the people I know that were involved with the early stages of the human gome project also where involved in the theoritcal computer science.
The solution is for a company that gets nailed by a someone enforceing a stupid patent to sue the director of the patent office. That would change things very quickly.
An RJ-11 is technically a phone service delivered over the middle pins of a 6P modular connector. An R11/RJ25 is two phone lines delivered of the 4 inner pins of a 6P modular connector.
Why where the tests done in the 1st place? They needed more power and didn't have the ability to build a new plant (like one that was desinged in the last 40 years or so).
Re:Bingo.
on
The 3Com Saga
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Their "Open" phone system that uses the H3 protocol which is published just where??? (rumor is at MIT -- anyone want to hunt for it?)
It also seems that all the version of the NBX software up to 4.1.21 have GPL code in them and you can prove it by just asking it. To upgrade to a version where 3com isn't illegally using GPLed code, you have to buy another license. Keep in mind that 3com was one of the few IT compaines that supported the DMCA. Maybe its because the DMCA helps hide the fact they are using open source software without following the terms of its licenses. Details are here.
One other nice thing about their new license scam is once your dealer goes under, your out of luck and when 3com can't find the prior license, you get to rebuy all them all over again. Too bad the best source for info on it NBX Group has given up on the product and is bailing out.
A pet cat the knew well enough to stay away from anything veggie based, loved the cooked carrots found in TV dinners. That makes me wonder just what they made them out of and how they were made.
Slashdot Mirror
The cameras may increase crime.
Melbourne Australia has a large number of cameras in some parts of the downtown and they are not effective. Someone who worked for the city claims that people were not reporting crimes because they thought the cameras would catch the people. It turns out that after spending millions of dollars, they haven't been effective at catching criminals. This was recently in the news here so I'm sure more info is at google news. The result of a recent investigation is that the cameras aren't worth wath they cost and do nothing to help prevent crime and nothing in catching criminals but they are going to stay a while longer.
Funny, I don't know a single wheat farmer in Kasnas thats getting any goverment money for growing wheat. The US wheat farmers get paid not to plant some areas. Right now only about 1/100 of the good areas in Kasnas are planted with wheat.
Australia had about 12 million ha of wheat farms. Kansas has 4 million ha. Total production in Australia ranges from about 9 million tons with a record of 20 million tons. The worst Kasnas produces is 13 million tons.
I also don't see how production costs can be higher but I don't have any figure on that. I do know that many govt departments are trying to get Aussie farmers to use technology like GPS systems to help get their costs inline with US farmers so I'm not sure where you get your production costs.
Canada is a territory (like Puerto Rico), its got too many liberals to make it a state.
However UK is looking at being number 51 and since there is no decent way to put 51 stars on a flag, it looks like Oz is going to have to be added at the same time to keep the stars in the flag balanced. Lucky for the Kiwis 53 stars don't work.
The Aussie Sugar farmers sell the most expensive raw sugar in the world. Who would even want it? The only reason the US market makes sense is its ultra high taxes on processing sugar. By the time Aussie sugar ends up in American products, its cheaper to buy Hawaiian processed sugar. If the US ever fixed its sugar price manipulation, the Aussies wouldn't sell any sugar to anyone since the stuff is real cheap in places like the Caribbean.
As far as US wheat, the Aussies can't come close to the efficiencies of the Kasnas fields so I don't see wheat trade helping the Aussies at all.
I don't see what the big deal about the farming products are concerned. Both countries are major food producers and both make far more food than they can use to the point that massive amoutns of it get destroyed every day. There is no good reason a Texan would be eating an Aussie cow anymore than an Aussie would be eating a Texan cow since the local grown beast doesn't need to be shipped 1/2 over the world.
The only way whitegoods are going to get cheaper in Australia is if they start putting in 120V 60Hz power.
Clothing (except for Levis) is about the same.
The only way cars are going to be cheaper is to switch to driving on the right side of the road.
Things that don't have special Aussie standards like computers are already about the same price as in the US. Beige box computers are cheaper as is memory. Macs and Toshiba comptuers cost a bit more.
Most of the high cost is a result of a massivly inefficient distribution systems with high margins at every step. Add in artificial increases in real estate prices to drive the rents up and you have Aussie retail prices.
Many HR deprtments sole job is to keep themselves empolyed until the next wave of hirings happen. Then they switch to filter mode where their job is to filter resumes and do pre-interviews so they don't waste the time of the group thats needs a body to do work. The problem with this is when the HR dept's likes aren't compatable with say the engineering team.
unless MSFT1 had to compete with MSFT2, there is no reason to do things like an office for linix. That is only going to happen when one group has to fight another group with a similar product and that isn't going to happen in the MS world except at the OS level and maybe some of the games which they aren't making any money on anyway. Getting Word and Excel in different compaines with the require that they only share interfaces over the public internet would allow others to attempt to integrate which would never happen if Office is contorlled by one company.
The scary thing about linux market share in the windows world is that it happens to be about the same numbers as very old things that are going away such as OS2, big iron main frames and lots of silly old things like Pyramid minis and TRS-80s.
no, lots of vlans and things like workstation 22 being on 192.168.22.22 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0 and an eth0:22 ip address of 192.168.22.233 on the samba box.
Except I no longer use 192.168.*.* since that seems to be built in to every virus on the planet.
I had a NT4 box get owned from inside our test network. It appears that a users home box got owned and when he VPNed internal machine, a virus rode along for the ride and then started scanning iternal machines and found the NT sitting duck on the test network. The NT box then procedded to try to open some odd connections so I let it. It then downloaded something that would open up a smart proxy and then it tried to send out something in the order of a billion messages which my free bsd firewall/cluestick box accepted and most of them were addressed to AOL.
So what we have here is someone writing a virus that can get into a recent windows box that then looks for remote control connections and knows how to exploit them. Then it installs a different program that can scan and install a spam proxy on machines that can access the net and only machines that have net access.
That was about a year ago. MS came out with the pach many months after the box had been owned. After that, I've got a new rule, no pc can talk to anything else except the samba server by defautl. No PC has any access to the net except through squid. I don't set up default gateways now either. Default PC installs can't even ping anything but the samba/squid box. Too bad SAP Business one is forcing me to break some of this for some clients. Maybe they will port it to solaris like they said they would.
Oh, our new dev machines are made by apple.
So you propose having three compaines all with their own monopolies? You must be a MSFT stock holder.
They should have been broken up like Standard Oil -- into compaines that have to fight each other for market share. That means one company would end up with a server OS and excel while a different one would end up with the home OS and word. That would result in decreased costs for consumers and increased competition in the marketplace.
Melbourne wireless is a group of people building their own network. Its not connected to the net mostly because the local telco charges per megabyte and all the other tier two providers (who claim their tier 1) bill the same way so the net is too expensive to give away connections....
Except.... the local telcos have annoyed me a great deal. I'm tired of seeing bills in the thousands of dollars a month for work's pathetic connection which does a less than a hundred gig a month. So I called up every local provder through their offices in the US and got price quotes there for service here. I've now got a spare bandwidth on an unlimited pricing plan. So lets see here, I'm mad the local telco, I've got roof space on the 129th tallest building in the world as well as a few other choice spots, I've got a few nice 120 degree max-rad antennas, I've got spare bandwidth that won't cost me anything if I give it away and a service contract that lets me resell or share it. I wonder what I should do.
MS has seen the light and they know the only way to stop their market share loss is to use patents to stop others. Open source can play the new game or ignore it but if they ignore it, it will end badly. What would have happened with the .gif patent if it included all compressed graphincs formats? Some of the new MS patents are generic enough to kill any implementations. Remember that you can patent a method and you can patent something if the reason for it being needed isn't obvious. The second type is going to be a real pain to get kicked out because prior art won't kill thouse patents in some cases.
Many of the CC TLD domains servers are run out of UC Berkeley. In some ways this make sense when you consider that many of the countries don't have even a 2mb link into the country. If someone decides to DDOS a CC TLD name server, UCB is a much better position to take the hit than some server tied off a slow 100 km link to a sat up link somewhere in the 3rd world. There are places where running the top level domain is best left to someone who understands the real world and can cope with the real issues. It doesn't matter if the real offical manages stuff over a uucp link, the name servers and whois servers need to be a reasonable net link.
So how long have you been in psychotherapy for delusion? I hope you get better soon.
Vodaphone in Egypt does SMS for LE.50 which is about US$.08 or EU$.066 on their worst plan.
The cost to send the messages is on the order of a thousand of a cent. The rest is all nice profit or intercarrier fees.
If you send a lot of messages, you can buy a microcell for about US$6000 new ($1000 used) and relay them yourself. Of course someone might get a bit annoyed if you used a frequency you don't have the rights too but that migth not too expensive to buy for a small area.
NZ has crazy interconnect fees. The result is that a typical pre-pay plan its the same or cheaper to call London than a phone in New Zealand. The plan my kiwi sim is on works fine in Australia with no extra roaming fees but its just as cheap to call a land line in the UK or US than a another mobile in NZ with the same company. With Orange in Oz, it costs half as much to call Canada as it does to call a landline in the same town your in.
How can Telecom be the devil incarnate when Telsra is also a choice?
A decade ago when I got to play with a real 24 bit 1024x768 display on a sun 4/110, I wrote a program to display most of the colors 1/16 of them at a time. It turns out that out of the 16,777,216 colors you could tell the thing to display but to the human eye 8 million or so of them were brown and most of of the rest were grey.
I wonder how much of the Junk DNA is just part of a data segment? Most of it will never even get looked at but some tiny bit of that junk might describe how to make the inside bit of a big toe.
Many of the people I know that were involved with the early stages of the human gome project also where involved in the theoritcal computer science.
I'm alreadying getting spam with vaild SPF records from throw away domains. SPF has nothing to do with spam prevention.
The solution is for a company that gets nailed by a someone enforceing a stupid patent to sue the director of the patent office. That would change things very quickly.
An RJ-11 is technically a phone service delivered over the middle pins of a 6P modular connector. An R11/RJ25 is two phone lines delivered of the 4 inner pins of a 6P modular connector.
Why where the tests done in the 1st place? They needed more power and didn't have the ability to build a new plant (like one that was desinged in the last 40 years or so).
Their "Open" phone system that uses the H3 protocol which is published just where??? (rumor is at MIT -- anyone want to hunt for it?)
It also seems that all the version of the NBX software up to 4.1.21 have GPL code in them and you can prove it by just asking it. To upgrade to a version where 3com isn't illegally using GPLed code, you have to buy another license. Keep in mind that 3com was one of the few IT compaines that supported the DMCA. Maybe its because the DMCA helps hide the fact they are using open source software without following the terms of its licenses. Details are here.
One other nice thing about their new license scam is once your dealer goes under, your out of luck and when 3com can't find the prior license, you get to rebuy all them all over again. Too bad the best source for info on it NBX Group has given up on the product and is bailing out.
A pet cat the knew well enough to stay away from anything veggie based, loved the cooked carrots found in TV dinners. That makes me wonder just what they made them out of and how they were made.