I was in Canberra just yesterday doing an install of software that can (and does in this case) run on on opensource base.
According to the person I shared a cab with the ATO (Australian Tax Office) is a big M$ shop with an almost permanent staff of visiting Redmond Monkeys(tm).
Yeah it's hearsay, but, you know, my tax dollars at work...
Ok. I've got my caffeine cereal and my caffeine mints. I've got some nicotine water and Cocaine playing on the stereo. I'm wearing a hemp shirt and the corner shop will sell me an icecream called Ecstacy. When it all ends in a headache I'll score some Herron (Pharmaceuticals Panadol).
From the site:... team currently consists of a bunch of guys, a girl......small research and development team......computer-controlled hydrogen peroxide rocket X-Prize class vehicle development......lead us to space......Man in the air......Hypergolic fuels......Venturi injector...
Years ago I used to work for a large Australian Telecommunications monopoly (which shall remain nameless...) as a Novell network admin.
The Unix admin (hello John if you're out there) decided that he needed names for both his network and mine; he decided to use creatures from Dungeons & Dragons. The name of the machine would be matched with it's MIPs value and the hitpoints of the creature from the book.
So all the PCs (we actually had one real IBM PS/2 486!) would be worm or slime and the Sun 490(s) would be Hydra or Leviathan. (We even had Sparcstation 1s!)
Damn, those were the days! A new toy every week. *sob* I miss it so much...
On a lighter note: my home network uses people associated with the 70s pop group ABBA. This was my partner's idea because she was a member of their fan club as a kid. Unfortunately when you get to more than 4 machines you have to start looking at names of producers and session musos.
When I first upgraded her machine (years ago now) Bjorn (must be up to Bjorn#5 by now) with a second disk she wanted the disk labels to match. This meant using song titles - not just any song titles, no - A and B sides from singles. Somehow this has migrated to the other machines and other OSs.
Now we're 'updgrading' our house with C-bus and X10. I dread to imagine the labelling scheme for the switches.
What AI really needs is a proper model of the human brain - human cognition, information storage, the whole works. For example - how are memories actually stored and retreived? There appears to be some connection between the chemicals that give us emotions and memory storage and retreival. It's even been suggested that memories are coding directly into DNA. (Although that one's drawing a pretty long bow, admittedly).
The 50-or-more years of coding glorified 'if then' startments haven't got a machine any closer to consciousness or cognition.
Similarly, relying on Penfold's 'quantum brain', or souls, spirits or deities is just hiding the problem - it's not doing science.
By the time our ancenstors have conscious silicon, they'll probably be more alien to us than their machines.
Ah, you see when they have the amount of control they want, they get their tame politicians, tame attorneys, and tame reptiles of the press to convince the 'public ' that security holes are good for Freedom Loving Peoples(TM) everywhere.
As to authentication generally, I look forward to the day when I can Sit Down (R) at my Computer(TM) and Work (C) while have A Lot More Fun (Pat. Pending) at the same time.
And while we're on the subject: Is it just me or does Ballmer REALLY look like the monster from Young Frankenstein (pron. Fronk-en-steen)
People who've never worked in a 'real world' situation might tellyou to 'hack their boxen' and show the client what a mistake they made not hiring you.
Forget about that.
I have always liked the 'Company Newsletter' idea.
Depending on who much time and $ you can put into it etc., consider a written bulletin that lauds your company under the guise of keeping clents informed about the horrible choices they made.
Pitch it at your best contact point (IT manager?) and keep it simple and direct. Reference news web sites, bugzilla, or security pages.
Make sure the bulletin sticks it to M$ products while using words and phrases like 'TCO'and 'compromised security'.
In one of Arthur C. Clarkes '2001' series (the end of 2010, I think), the decay of historical monuments has been halted by covering them in a film of diamond atoms.
This idea has stayed with me for years.
*Sigh* imagine Paris, in the springtime, the Tower and Arch sparkling like diamond in the morning sun...
At the risk of sounding intensly paranoid (I've just re-read the 'Halloween Memoranda'), is it possible that M$ is trying to judge the level of 'trust' their userbase has in them and their products?
Consigning your credit information to an online bank is problematic at best, but to use M$ with their demonstrable inability to understand system security sems like, well, the act of a total sucker.
So if I was a crazed marketeer (M$ as we all know is not a software company but a marketing arganisation), I'd love to test my client base's trust in my 'brand' like this.
While I'm not happy with you and others lumping us all together, when there are obviuosly as many viewpoints in the country as there are Australians, your comment is pertinent: this nonsense has made us all look like rubes.
Being forced to run 'doze 98, indeed.
Give me linux or give me dea^H^H^H a really tough time of it.
...oblige Australian internet users to accept censorship based not on the criteria decided by government...
What many people fail to understand (including the knee-jerk reaction lot on/.) is that the guvmint has done this for reasons of pure political payola.
Originally the idea was to get a godbotherer (Brian Harradine, Tasmanian Independant) to allow the passage of a goods & services tax bill, and the provision of selling off the remainder of Telstra.
It now has a life of its own, thanks to apparent political cowardice by the conservatives and the communications minister in particular.
Australians value their freedoms highly, and there is no doubt that many of those involved have not thought this thing through.
I can see (for example) the Indonesian government pressuring the Australian government to 'ban' access to anti-Indonesian sites.
I hope that that sort of action will result in a wakeup call that sees the whole pathetic, cowardly saga binned for good
They're easy to get work done on - most users can switch them on & go to work. They're great for writers & graphic artists who don't want to know what the OS is doing.
I know at of people who still have the old Mac SE, running MacWrite & a bubblejet printer. All still going strong.
They definitely have their place in the great panoply of 'puters.
Still, once you get a taste of recompiling a linux kernel - well there's not going back!
The guvmint should hold onto the infrastructure & sell it off like any old (radio-spectrum) bandwidth.
Forget 'Telsta's network" let them buy parts of it like anybody else, and try to run it with their existing 'service levels'. I wonder how long they'd last?
Stuart Fist, one of the better telecummunications columnists has said that the guvmint could raise revenue by selling domestic users the cable from the street into their home. This is a great idea; I could get some quality cable instead of the shite Telstra put in.
Slashdot Mirror
Working man's guide to pseudo-science?
He is, after all, just a tiler.
I was in Canberra just yesterday doing an install of software that can (and does in this case) run on on opensource base.
According to the person I shared a cab with the ATO (Australian Tax Office) is a big M$ shop with an almost permanent staff of visiting Redmond Monkeys(tm).
Yeah it's hearsay, but, you know, my tax dollars at work...
Ok. I've got my caffeine cereal and my caffeine mints. I've got some nicotine water and Cocaine playing on the stereo. I'm wearing a hemp shirt and the corner shop will sell me an icecream called Ecstacy. When it all ends in a headache I'll score some Herron (Pharmaceuticals Panadol).
I think we need a war on brandnames.
From the site: ... team currently consists of a bunch of guys, a girl... ...small research and development team... ...computer-controlled hydrogen peroxide rocket X-Prize class vehicle development... ...lead us to space... ...Man in the air... ...Hypergolic fuels... ...Venturi injector...
So what's the girl look like?
Years ago I used to work for a large Australian Telecommunications monopoly (which shall remain nameless...) as a Novell network admin.
The Unix admin (hello John if you're out there) decided that he needed names for both his network and mine; he decided to use creatures from Dungeons & Dragons. The name of the machine would be matched with it's MIPs value and the hitpoints of the creature from the book.
So all the PCs (we actually had one real IBM PS/2 486!) would be worm or slime and the Sun 490(s) would be Hydra or Leviathan. (We even had Sparcstation 1s!)
Damn, those were the days! A new toy every week. *sob* I miss it so much...
On a lighter note: my home network uses people associated with the 70s pop group ABBA. This was my partner's idea because she was a member of their fan club as a kid. Unfortunately when you get to more than 4 machines you have to start looking at names of producers and session musos.
When I first upgraded her machine (years ago now) Bjorn (must be up to Bjorn#5 by now) with a second disk she wanted the disk labels to match. This meant using song titles - not just any song titles, no - A and B sides from singles. Somehow this has migrated to the other machines and other OSs.
Now we're 'updgrading' our house with C-bus and X10. I dread to imagine the labelling scheme for the switches.
Yep. It's got out of hand.
What AI really needs is a proper model of the human brain - human cognition, information storage, the whole works. For example - how are memories actually stored and retreived? There appears to be some connection between the chemicals that give us emotions and memory storage and retreival. It's even been suggested that memories are coding directly into DNA. (Although that one's drawing a pretty long bow, admittedly).
The 50-or-more years of coding glorified 'if then' startments haven't got a machine any closer to consciousness or cognition.
Similarly, relying on Penfold's 'quantum brain', or souls, spirits or deities is just hiding the problem - it's not doing science.
By the time our ancenstors have conscious silicon, they'll probably be more alien to us than their machines.
Ah, you see when they have the amount of control they want, they get their tame politicians, tame attorneys, and tame reptiles of the press to convince the 'public ' that security holes are good for Freedom Loving Peoples(TM) everywhere.
As to authentication generally, I look forward to the day when I can Sit Down (R) at my Computer(TM) and Work (C) while have A Lot More Fun (Pat. Pending) at the same time.
And while we're on the subject: Is it just me or does Ballmer REALLY look like the monster from Young Frankenstein (pron. Fronk-en-steen)
Always maintain your professionalism.
People who've never worked in a 'real world' situation might tellyou to 'hack their boxen' and show the client what a mistake they made not hiring you.
Forget about that.
I have always liked the 'Company Newsletter' idea.
Depending on who much time and $ you can put into it etc., consider a written bulletin that lauds your company under the guise of keeping clents informed about the horrible choices they made.
Pitch it at your best contact point (IT manager?) and keep it simple and direct. Reference news web sites, bugzilla, or security pages.
Make sure the bulletin sticks it to M$ products while using words and phrases like 'TCO'and 'compromised security'.
Then gouge them until they squeal...
In one of Arthur C. Clarkes '2001' series (the end of 2010, I think), the decay of historical monuments has been halted by covering them in a film of diamond atoms.
This idea has stayed with me for years.
*Sigh* imagine Paris, in the springtime, the Tower and Arch sparkling like diamond in the morning sun...
Those things were great...
Faster than any of those Ti calculators (mainly because my classmates couldn't use them very well).
Then along came RPN, and I just had to have that HP29C.
Those were the days...
The 'proprietary protocols' bit is the clincher. I wonder, is it possible than RH can develop an Open Sourced protocol to replace this?
/.ers know anything about banking protocols?
Is there anything out there now? What sort of thing are we looking at, do any
At the risk of sounding intensly paranoid (I've just re-read the 'Halloween Memoranda'), is it possible that M$ is trying to judge the level of 'trust' their userbase has in them and their products?
Consigning your credit information to an online bank is problematic at best, but to use M$ with their demonstrable inability to understand system security sems like, well, the act of a total sucker.
So if I was a crazed marketeer (M$ as we all know is not a software company but a marketing arganisation), I'd love to test my client base's trust in my 'brand' like this.
No, surely not...
While I'm not happy with you and others lumping us all together, when there are obviuosly as many viewpoints in the country as there are Australians, your comment is pertinent: this nonsense has made us all look like rubes.
Being forced to run 'doze 98, indeed.
Give me linux or give me dea^H^H^H a really tough time of it.
...oblige Australian internet users to accept censorship based not on the criteria decided by government...
/.) is that the guvmint has done this for reasons of pure political payola.
What many people fail to understand (including the knee-jerk reaction lot on
Originally the idea was to get a godbotherer (Brian Harradine, Tasmanian Independant) to allow the passage of a goods & services tax bill, and the provision of selling off the remainder of Telstra.
It now has a life of its own, thanks to apparent political cowardice by the conservatives and the communications minister in particular.
Australians value their freedoms highly, and there is no doubt that many of those involved have not thought this thing through.
I can see (for example) the Indonesian government pressuring the Australian government to 'ban' access to anti-Indonesian sites.
I hope that that sort of action will result in a wakeup call that sees the whole pathetic, cowardly saga binned for good
Jeez, I can spend more than 4 hours online reading the Perl documentation.
What sort of nitwit made this 'statistic' up?
Macs have pretty much a zero admin overhead.
They're easy to get work done on - most users can switch them on & go to work. They're great for writers & graphic artists who don't want to know what the OS is doing.
I know at of people who still have the old Mac SE, running MacWrite & a bubblejet printer. All still going strong.
They definitely have their place in the great panoply of 'puters.
Still, once you get a taste of recompiling a linux kernel - well there's not going back!
Ahem...
well spotted - should have been clients sites.
This is excellent news.
Now there's a real groupware solution for Linux, with proper server scaling (unlike that exchange thingee), and some real cross-platform grunt.
I can start trying to get Linux into some of my clients...
The guvmint should hold onto the infrastructure & sell it off like any old (radio-spectrum) bandwidth.
Forget 'Telsta's network" let them buy parts of it like anybody else, and try to run it with their existing 'service levels'. I wonder how long they'd last?
Stuart Fist, one of the better telecummunications columnists has said that the guvmint could raise revenue by selling domestic users the cable from the street into their home.
This is a great idea; I could get some quality cable instead of the shite Telstra put in.
Stroppy