"Jason and I spent a lot of time writing that code in the past, but because your policies are privacy invasive towards us, and thus completely thankless for the sales that we have given you in the past -- we will not spend any more time on your crummy products."
Sales?
Unless Theo can give a decent estimate of how much 'sales' OpenBSD has 'given' them, I doubt the upper brass at Hifn cares about Theo's whinging.
If you want drivers for "less mainstream OS'es", please attach your request to a large multi-mega-million part order from <insert vendor here>. If you don't believe me, we'll, the only reason NVIDIA's Linux support is miles ahead of ATI is due to the demand from Hollywood setups to use high-end-5000%-margin professional cards on Linux, not geeks on Slashdot playing Tuxracer.
Re:I've done tests with HoneyBOT
on
Spam from Taiwan
·
· Score: 1
That's a cool project for a Windows honeypot. Thanks for the link. Outside of honeypots, I've been blanket filtering addresses from APNIC
ALL of APNIC?
You do realize that includes us poor Aussies and New Zealanders too? (I assume since you mentioned Pacific Rim, yes)
Horray! We're part of the western world and considered careless already!
Has someone started a DNSBL to block those who use blocklists yet? Sure its useless, but it would be fun.
I used to use Linux (RedHat 7->Mandrake something->backandforth->RedHat 7.3->Debian->Linux From Scratch until end of last year), but I've switched to OS X on two of my boxen (server+powerbook), and stayed with Windoze on the other two. Occasionally I'll fire up a BSD or Ubuntu in VMware Server if I need that.
I have trouble justifying why I should bother ever going back for desktop use.... No, I don't have spyware. No, my virus infection count over the past few years has been so low its not even worth running a virus scanner (backup backup backup and reinstall if things blow up). No, I don't have any Windows boxen on the public interwebs. So, security isn't a justication... Can I fire up a live cd and do something without reaching to bash for some manual ifconfig when dhclient fails? Oops..... Why am I bothering to change something which works so well? Hmm, because I'm pissed off with William H Gates the 3rd? Lame reason.
Infact, it could be said the only selling points for Desktop Linux are: * Cost * Security * Err................... its not Microsoft? * Some features buried deep down in programs which you probably don't need?
You'll have to try better marketing than that guys.
I don't think Open Source is really going to take over the world. You might be able to borg all the home PC's, but Open Source itself isn't going to get you across the line in big corporate buy decisions - a better product will. Something the zealots have to realize...
IMO Baby Boomers suck at computing because: * Massive paranoia, not willing to risk it exploring their OS on their own * Too much brand association.
To use a bad analogy: You all seem to approach power drills as if every time you get a new drill you need to train yourself with how to use said drill again, even if its 99% similiar to the old one. While the majority of RMSdot will disagree, thats how I've seen people older than me handle computing.
On the other hand, young'uns are good, not because they grew up with it, but they are willing to explore whatever and not think about what will happen if it goes wrong.
The difference between the 12" iBook and 12" PowerBook is mainly down to fine print: audio line in (analogue but still useful), 5200rpm vs 4200rpm (yes there is a difference), 12" iBook slightly bigger in all dimensions, DVD burner not default, no monitor spanning without hacks, graphics even more god awful than the PowerBook[1], etc.
[1] NVIDIA should take the GeForce4 Ti 4200 and shrink it right down and use that as a mobile chip. Screw pixel shaded desktops, no use if your graphics chip isn't going to render anything beyond the desktop at 15fps.
Just because its open source and free does not mean the product is better than the closed source competition from the users point of view.
I'm sure there are many people around who would use something from Redmond over OSS simply because the developers only see other developers as their userbase. The task of reversing the result of developer mentality ends up at the distro companies who need people to buy the stuff and not need to read pages of badly formatted docs to use it. Users want to get stuff done (and will vote with dollars if need be), not listen to fanbois make baseless bullshit arguments for them to use their favorite product
I think its extreme pricewhore time for AMD, apart from a new Socket with DDR2 - which solves a problem which has never really existed at AMD* (I still enjoy my Opterons NUMA as much as the next person though:) ), although DDR2 still brings some benefits none the less.
* Apart from the Athlon MP, whose usefullness apart from a low low cost SMP server platform disappeared when stuff started to demand more bandwidth. A Uniprocessor Duron on an nForce2 owns it on anything where AGP and memory bandwidth comes into play!
Apple's laptops are assembled somewhere over there (don't recall if it's Taiwan or the main land)
ASUS in Taiwan with Power/MacBook shells coming from Japan, I believe.
My PowerBook 12" says "Assembled in China" if that means anything, but it can mean either one afaik. I've heard definite confirmation that the iBooks are made by ASUS (they recently got a contract for the iBook replacement, too), presumably Power/MacBooks come from the same place.
No. Your're just used to your country being frucked up more. In particular, your communications sector.
The internet industry here has been showing the finger to the politicians a lot as of late.
Separation of church(|dumbasses*) from state? Oops, never happenens in the US, lousy religious arses run your country. Oh noes, now their trying to run ours! Nooo...
* I don't want to offend anyone religious, but too many politicians are too religious.
But isn't Conroe based on the new Intel Core (Not the current Solo or Duo) design, which is similar but not the same to the P-M?
See the dirt on Wikipedia
Now I don't want to be rude but what we really do need here in Victoria, Australia is good software engineers and I can think right now of a spot for him a couple of cubes across from me where his knowledge of linux kernel internals could be put to good use.
Definitely. The only religious kids around in this part of the world (I live in Geelong, Vic, Aus) these days are those whose parents make them, other that, its either slightly-"I believe in a superior being but will never read the bible" religious or atheist. (Australia isn't a mega-extremist-religious place like, erm, 50-70% of the rest of the world, and if it was, I would've offended a lot of people by now)
Hope he enjoys his time enlightening those who do believe something, knowing the broken zero-innovation (excluding tridge and a few others) frucked up Australian IT industry could use a non-management type like him.
there are heaps of people with access to the source code (ok, maybe not full), such as academic institutions, and infamous examples such as MainSoft, who could prove 'em wrong.
But then we'd have to take the word of some un1337 student haxer at some institution, who just locked down access to their precious copied jewels because some un1337 student haxer at some instituion proved some M$ guy wrong.
Anyway, aren't there multiple reports of backdoors in PGP from various stages of its life? Of course, since its not Stallman-Endorsed(TM) software everyone on Slashdot, fearing executing bash will get them locked up just points and laughs anyway, right?
Comparing my PB G4 to my previous Windoze laptop, in the case of normal touchpad usage I think the one button touchpad is a lot easier to use.
Pair it with SideTrack where I can use ctrl-click in the place of a normal right click button and I love it.
If I'm typing and I want to click on something, I just have one of my hands drop down to the touchpad. For right click my left hand can hit Ctrl without moving.
Better than the previous arrangement of having to move just a bit more to choose between left and right (the right button on my Acer TravelMate is notorious for requiring more force,too), its much more productive.
Speaking of which, how many normal consumers actually DO upgrade their processors? Maybe we should move back to the soldered on processors of the past. No socket to be stuck to, no expensive ZIP socket to put on the board (you can't tell me that 940 pin ZIF sockets are cheap), not much downside (if your CPU dies, most people would just buy a new and faster computer today for the price to get the thing repaired).
When you think of it, apart from dual core there hasn't been much movement in the processor industry since the introduction of AMD64 and the appearance of the Pentium M - in 2003.
All we've really seen is small tweaks in processor design and manufacture to get a higher IPC count, and small increments in clock speed to go with it, and an emphasis on lower power usage.
I also found Citadel, but it seems like while it's a cute solution, it's quite cobbled-together and filled with hacks. This is especially true with its major Telnet interface, which seems dangerous to me.
Dangerous? No it ain't, unless you think all classic BBS'es are dangerous.. Webcit (the web interface) is very young compared to Citadel itself.
(Citadel also isn't bloatware compared to Kolab and others, and I personally like not having to install 65535 seperate components and libraries just to get something working)
I've been using Citadel for some time and I've even done some hacking on it. Someday, i'll make sure my NNTP support addon actually comes into existance:-)
However, the issue of a decent client for Citadel is one annoyance. Kontact and others support Citadel via GroupDAV (which is firewall friendly) but once you go beyond OSS land there isn't much choice, particularly if you want to sync with mobile devices.
Its much better now than what you said it was. Heck, I can max out my connection 24/7 by downloading from my ISPs mirrors and not count a megabyte against my monthly 20GB quota. Many other non-'Group of the Four' ISP's are same.
The reasons why Australian interwebs access is crap: 1) Telstra controls some part of the connection delivered to >98% of all broadband users, including ones wholesaled from them. 2) Until Ziggy and Alston were kicked out, Telstra was a bloated company. 3) Sol and his Amigos came in with a decent plan to clean the company up and deliver superior services. Unfortunately, they decided to keep those services to their own monopoly. Those plans, excluding a nationwide (proprietary because it involves crap you'd usually only find in america, i.e everything Sprint and Verizon sell in the US) WCDMA 850 network are now on hold because Telstra can't be bothered wholesaling. 4) Keep in mind Telstra's share price is at it's lowest ever and many shareholders are rightfully pissed. 5) The only thing that got broadband going in Australia was the stupid $29.95 200mb 256/64 plans. Due to Telstras wholesale pricing (which they have been smacked for over these exact plans before), ISPs make almost nothing on them. 6).... as a result, every time Telstra changes its prices, ISPs have been forced to kill any chance of unlimited plans. In the days of when cable was the only choice (and besides that, only a few suburbs in the major cities have cable since they stopped rolling it out due to fights with city councils) for broadband access, Telstra introduced capped plans to replace unlimited ones. The whole industry soon dropped unlimited plans because 'Telstra basically made us'. 7) The 'Group of Four', Telstra, Optus/Singtel, MCI and AAPT/Telecom NZ carry most traffic domestically but refuse to let anybody else enter into the arrangement to protect their ailing business. Don't give me this bullshit about MCI etc. having peering policies because even though others do carry more traffic than at least one of the group (apparently Primus does more traffic than AAPT) have been refused entry. Ironically, it was a competition regulator decision which created the 'Group of Four' in the first place and the four have been lobbying to keep it that way ever since. 8)... in the mean time PIPE Networks and other peering exchanges are routing away loads of traffic per minute from the group of four. With arguably better QoS depending on who you are with, too.
And yes, Australia is an exclusive M$ shop. Broadband penetration has nothing to do with Linux/OSS usage. And I am quite happy with my 512/512 DSL for $69.95 per month with Internode thank you very much. While I can only pull 20GB worth down from non-ISP mirrors, I frankly don't give a shit that I'm not leeching pr0n at 100mbps like they do in Sweeden or whatever.
* IMHO CDMA would be decent (consumer choice) it if wasn't used as a consumer lock in tool, a.k.a ESN based authentication. For example, Hutchison (using a license of the Orange brand) runs a CDMA network in a few cities. Outside those cities their phones roam onto Telstra CDMA. Since neither of them will sign up ESN's from each other, loads of Orange CDMA phones are sitting unused, and most likely loads are already in landfill. Similarly, Palm Treo users who reguarly visit the bush can't import a Sprint or Verizon CDMA Treo. End rant. Don't flame me about how CDMA voice quality is superior blah blah blah, because Qualcomm invented it as a lock in tool to appease the mobile industry. Pure and simple.
I've started to program in J2EE myself, and I must say, the concepts presented in it definitely make me NOT want to program in PHP again. The Perl apps I've seen are marginally better - but maybe because of the module extensions which aren't used a lot in PHP land.
I haven't touched large scale PHP code in some time but J2EE does try very hard to divorce each layer of the application to the point where programmers need not worry about what others are writing too much.
Last time I checked PHP programmers had located their database abstraction code (if any) within their apps, and most PHP apps were explictly tied to MySQL.
On the other hand in J2EE land we have container managed persistance (or maybe Hibernate). Its a wonderful thing compared to if($db == 'mysql) { mysql_connect(); } else if ($db == 'loldb') { loldb_connect(); }
I do agree about slowness though. You need loads of memory just to run JBoss effectively.
Perhaps they should stop blaming others and increase the standard of what is being taught at Universities and the last few years of secondary/high school. The Australian IT industry is a shame compared to other countries.
He also said the Australian Computer Society, which accredits the IT qualifications of applicants for permanent residency, should introduce tougher English tests and insist that overseas students spend three years studying IT in Australia, rather than two.
The Australian Computer Society? Oh, these are the same guys who think IT 'pros' should be certified just like doctors and nurses. When its illegal to be an uncertified IT guy in Australia, please tell me because I will happily show the door to anything trying to enforce it.
Small hosting providers that lease servers from The Planet and EV1 etc. aren't bad (I've had two for CPanel based reseller accounts and had a good business relationship with the owners in both cases), but most of them don't get DDOS protection until its too late...
Programmers might have no problem trying to use the stuff they code but when Joe Blow comes along they all go "WTF?"
P.S no one ever said Windows doesn't work. Infact, i'd go as far to say that open source desktops aren't too usable until end-user distros take a look at them and do the stuff that upstream devs won't.
Disclaimer: I'm just a teenager myself (age: 15.5) but I have perfectly valid reasons for spending 90% of my non-educational time tinkering with computers. I should not (and never have been) considered similar to other people my age, rather as an adult.
Do you have any real reason why you want to limit time?
Kids don't have cars. If they had a chaffeur to drive them around at their request they stil wouldn't use it. IM is the wonder product for people of their age and I'd suggest you be careful in trying to limit it. Despite what you think, school (and specifically recess time) is not a perfect place to socialise, so don't use bulls*it excuses like "You can talk to x tomorrow". Let your kids try to manage their own time and let them bite the consequences if they manage it incorrectly - TIGHTARSE PARENTING DOES NOT WORK. I HAVE SEEN IT FAIL MANY TIMES.
Excercise? Seriously, its time someone tries to create a new wonder drug to burn fat doing less work. Sport is overvalued in the world, thanks to you Americans and your broken education system. Thanks a lot for making my life difficult by having class mates that have no ambitions whatsoever than to be free advertising space for their favorite surf brands. Ok, end rant. If they want to excercise, they will. Encorage but do not force.
Do police any bad engrish that you see - computers aren't mobile phones. Believe it or not though, using proper english on "teen-centric" IM networks such as MSN gets you called a nerd by some idiots, so be careful not to destroy social lives.
One therory I have about the over use of discipline is that once you start using it excessively on a person, such person will quickly lose any motivation and be more willing to do something wrong*. Don't be an arse, you are only creating more problems.
* I suppose that holds up with the long standing fact that teenagers will deliberately break rules. By punishing them, you are giving them rules to break. Encorage use of common sense not strict enforcement.
Slashdot Mirror
"Jason and I spent a lot of time writing that code in the
past, but because your policies are privacy invasive towards us, and
thus completely thankless for the sales that we have given you in the
past -- we will not spend any more time on your crummy products."
Sales?
Unless Theo can give a decent estimate of how much 'sales' OpenBSD has 'given' them, I doubt the upper brass at Hifn cares about Theo's whinging.
If you want drivers for "less mainstream OS'es", please attach your request to a large multi-mega-million part order from <insert vendor here>. If you don't believe me, we'll, the only reason NVIDIA's Linux support is miles ahead of ATI is due to the demand from Hollywood setups to use high-end-5000%-margin professional cards on Linux, not geeks on Slashdot playing Tuxracer.
That's a cool project for a Windows honeypot. Thanks for the link. Outside of honeypots, I've been blanket filtering addresses from APNIC
ALL of APNIC?
You do realize that includes us poor Aussies and New Zealanders too? (I assume since you mentioned Pacific Rim, yes)
Horray! We're part of the western world and considered careless already!
Has someone started a DNSBL to block those who use blocklists yet? Sure its useless, but it would be fun.
I used to use Linux (RedHat 7->Mandrake something->backandforth->RedHat 7.3->Debian->Linux From Scratch until end of last year), but I've switched to OS X on two of my boxen (server+powerbook), and stayed with Windoze on the other two. Occasionally I'll fire up a BSD or Ubuntu in VMware Server if I need that.
I have trouble justifying why I should bother ever going back for desktop use.... No, I don't have spyware. No, my virus infection count over the past few years has been so low its not even worth running a virus scanner (backup backup backup and reinstall if things blow up). No, I don't have any Windows boxen on the public interwebs. So, security isn't a justication... Can I fire up a live cd and do something without reaching to bash for some manual ifconfig when dhclient fails? Oops..... Why am I bothering to change something which works so well? Hmm, because I'm pissed off with William H Gates the 3rd? Lame reason.
Infact, it could be said the only selling points for Desktop Linux are:
* Cost
* Security
* Err................... its not Microsoft?
* Some features buried deep down in programs which you probably don't need?
You'll have to try better marketing than that guys.
I don't think Open Source is really going to take over the world. You might be able to borg all the home PC's, but Open Source itself isn't going to get you across the line in big corporate buy decisions - a better product will. Something the zealots have to realize...
IMO Baby Boomers suck at computing because:
* Massive paranoia, not willing to risk it exploring their OS on their own
* Too much brand association.
To use a bad analogy: You all seem to approach power drills as if every time you get a new drill you need to train yourself with how to use said drill again, even if its 99% similiar to the old one. While the majority of RMSdot will disagree, thats how I've seen people older than me handle computing.
On the other hand, young'uns are good, not because they grew up with it, but they are willing to explore whatever and not think about what will happen if it goes wrong.
Doesn't Internet2 already have an agreement with Level3?
The difference between the 12" iBook and 12" PowerBook is mainly down to fine print: audio line in (analogue but still useful), 5200rpm vs 4200rpm (yes there is a difference), 12" iBook slightly bigger in all dimensions, DVD burner not default, no monitor spanning without hacks, graphics even more god awful than the PowerBook[1], etc.
[1] NVIDIA should take the GeForce4 Ti 4200 and shrink it right down and use that as a mobile chip. Screw pixel shaded desktops, no use if your graphics chip isn't going to render anything beyond the desktop at 15fps.
Just because its open source and free does not mean the product is better than the closed source competition from the users point of view.
I'm sure there are many people around who would use something from Redmond over OSS simply because the developers only see other developers as their userbase. The task of reversing the result of developer mentality ends up at the distro companies who need people to buy the stuff and not need to read pages of badly formatted docs to use it. Users want to get stuff done (and will vote with dollars if need be), not listen to fanbois make baseless bullshit arguments for them to use their favorite product
I think its extreme pricewhore time for AMD, apart from a new Socket with DDR2 - which solves a problem which has never really existed at AMD* (I still enjoy my Opterons NUMA as much as the next person though :) ), although DDR2 still brings some benefits none the less.
* Apart from the Athlon MP, whose usefullness apart from a low low cost SMP server platform disappeared when stuff started to demand more bandwidth. A Uniprocessor Duron on an nForce2 owns it on anything where AGP and memory bandwidth comes into play!
Apple's laptops are assembled somewhere over there (don't recall if it's Taiwan or the main land)
ASUS in Taiwan with Power/MacBook shells coming from Japan, I believe.
My PowerBook 12" says "Assembled in China" if that means anything, but it can mean either one afaik. I've heard definite confirmation that the iBooks are made by ASUS (they recently got a contract for the iBook replacement, too), presumably Power/MacBooks come from the same place.
Just about everyone in Australia with a mobile phone (CDMA never took off here) has heard this sound.
Some phones seem to be worse than others. My Treo 600 is notorious for causing problems with CRT's, while lower end phones aren't.
No. Your're just used to your country being frucked up more. In particular, your communications sector.
The internet industry here has been showing the finger to the politicians a lot as of late.
Separation of church(|dumbasses*) from state? Oops, never happenens in the US, lousy religious arses run your country. Oh noes, now their trying to run ours! Nooo...
* I don't want to offend anyone religious, but too many politicians are too religious.
How long until they stop doing these checks because the management and HR people themselves made an arse of themselves on teh intarwebs?
Welcome to the age where people are willing to insult each other in public to the end instead of filing defamation lawsuits.
But isn't Conroe based on the new Intel Core (Not the current Solo or Duo) design, which is similar but not the same to the P-M? See the dirt on Wikipedia
Now I don't want to be rude but what we really do need here in Victoria, Australia is good software engineers and I can think right now of a spot for him a couple of cubes across from me where his knowledge of linux kernel internals could be put to good use.
Definitely. The only religious kids around in this part of the world (I live in Geelong, Vic, Aus) these days are those whose parents make them, other that, its either slightly-"I believe in a superior being but will never read the bible" religious or atheist. (Australia isn't a mega-extremist-religious place like, erm, 50-70% of the rest of the world, and if it was, I would've offended a lot of people by now)
Hope he enjoys his time enlightening those who do believe something, knowing the broken zero-innovation (excluding tridge and a few others) frucked up Australian IT industry could use a non-management type like him.
there are heaps of people with access to the source code (ok, maybe not full), such as academic institutions, and infamous examples such as MainSoft, who could prove 'em wrong.
But then we'd have to take the word of some un1337 student haxer at some institution, who just locked down access to their precious copied jewels because some un1337 student haxer at some instituion proved some M$ guy wrong.
Anyway, aren't there multiple reports of backdoors in PGP from various stages of its life? Of course, since its not Stallman-Endorsed(TM) software everyone on Slashdot, fearing executing bash will get them locked up just points and laughs anyway, right?
Comparing my PB G4 to my previous Windoze laptop, in the case of normal touchpad usage I think the one button touchpad is a lot easier to use.
Pair it with SideTrack where I can use ctrl-click in the place of a normal right click button and I love it.
If I'm typing and I want to click on something, I just have one of my hands drop down to the touchpad. For right click my left hand can hit Ctrl without moving.
Better than the previous arrangement of having to move just a bit more to choose between left and right (the right button on my Acer TravelMate is notorious for requiring more force,too), its much more productive.
Speaking of which, how many normal consumers actually DO upgrade their processors? Maybe we should move back to the soldered on processors of the past. No socket to be stuck to, no expensive ZIP socket to put on the board (you can't tell me that 940 pin ZIF sockets are cheap), not much downside (if your CPU dies, most people would just buy a new and faster computer today for the price to get the thing repaired).
When you think of it, apart from dual core there hasn't been much movement in the processor industry since the introduction of AMD64 and the appearance of the Pentium M - in 2003.
All we've really seen is small tweaks in processor design and manufacture to get a higher IPC count, and small increments in clock speed to go with it, and an emphasis on lower power usage.
I also found Citadel, but it seems like while it's a cute solution, it's quite cobbled-together and filled with hacks. This is especially true with its major Telnet interface, which seems dangerous to me.
:-)
Dangerous? No it ain't, unless you think all classic BBS'es are dangerous.. Webcit (the web interface) is very young compared to Citadel itself.
(Citadel also isn't bloatware compared to Kolab and others, and I personally like not having to install 65535 seperate components and libraries just to get something working)
I've been using Citadel for some time and I've even done some hacking on it. Someday, i'll make sure my NNTP support addon actually comes into existance
However, the issue of a decent client for Citadel is one annoyance. Kontact and others support Citadel via GroupDAV (which is firewall friendly) but once you go beyond OSS land there isn't much choice, particularly if you want to sync with mobile devices.
Why use plain old MPEG-4 when you can go one up to H264?
The difference IS noticeable the lower down the bitrate you go.
So what, you'll need more resources to encode the video but its worth it.
Maybe its due to the fact that 'Mac' on its own has instant brand recognition in 99.99% of people while 'xBook' doesn't ?
Its much better now than what you said it was. Heck, I can max out my connection 24/7 by downloading from my ISPs mirrors and not count a megabyte against my monthly 20GB quota. Many other non-'Group of the Four' ISP's are same.
.... as a result, every time Telstra changes its prices, ISPs have been forced to kill any chance of unlimited plans. In the days of when cable was the only choice (and besides that, only a few suburbs in the major cities have cable since they stopped rolling it out due to fights with city councils) for broadband access, Telstra introduced capped plans to replace unlimited ones. The whole industry soon dropped unlimited plans because 'Telstra basically made us'. ... in the mean time PIPE Networks and other peering exchanges are routing away loads of traffic per minute from the group of four. With arguably better QoS depending on who you are with, too.
The reasons why Australian interwebs access is crap:
1) Telstra controls some part of the connection delivered to >98% of all broadband users, including ones wholesaled from them.
2) Until Ziggy and Alston were kicked out, Telstra was a bloated company.
3) Sol and his Amigos came in with a decent plan to clean the company up and deliver superior services. Unfortunately, they decided to keep those services to their own monopoly. Those plans, excluding a nationwide (proprietary because it involves crap you'd usually only find in america, i.e everything Sprint and Verizon sell in the US) WCDMA 850 network are now on hold because Telstra can't be bothered wholesaling.
4) Keep in mind Telstra's share price is at it's lowest ever and many shareholders are rightfully pissed.
5) The only thing that got broadband going in Australia was the stupid $29.95 200mb 256/64 plans. Due to Telstras wholesale pricing (which they have been smacked for over these exact plans before), ISPs make almost nothing on them.
6)
7) The 'Group of Four', Telstra, Optus/Singtel, MCI and AAPT/Telecom NZ carry most traffic domestically but refuse to let anybody else enter into the arrangement to protect their ailing business. Don't give me this bullshit about MCI etc. having peering policies because even though others do carry more traffic than at least one of the group (apparently Primus does more traffic than AAPT) have been refused entry. Ironically, it was a competition regulator decision which created the 'Group of Four' in the first place and the four have been lobbying to keep it that way ever since.
8)
And yes, Australia is an exclusive M$ shop. Broadband penetration has nothing to do with Linux/OSS usage.
And I am quite happy with my 512/512 DSL for $69.95 per month with Internode thank you very much. While I can only pull 20GB worth down from non-ISP mirrors, I frankly don't give a shit that I'm not leeching pr0n at 100mbps like they do in Sweeden or whatever.
* IMHO CDMA would be decent (consumer choice) it if wasn't used as a consumer lock in tool, a.k.a ESN based authentication. For example, Hutchison (using a license of the Orange brand) runs a CDMA network in a few cities. Outside those cities their phones roam onto Telstra CDMA. Since neither of them will sign up ESN's from each other, loads of Orange CDMA phones are sitting unused, and most likely loads are already in landfill. Similarly, Palm Treo users who reguarly visit the bush can't import a Sprint or Verizon CDMA Treo. End rant. Don't flame me about how CDMA voice quality is superior blah blah blah, because Qualcomm invented it as a lock in tool to appease the mobile industry. Pure and simple.
You sir have NO F*CKING IDEA on what J2EE is.
I've started to program in J2EE myself, and I must say, the concepts presented in it definitely make me NOT want to program in PHP again. The Perl apps I've seen are marginally better - but maybe because of the module extensions which aren't used a lot in PHP land.
I haven't touched large scale PHP code in some time but J2EE does try very hard to divorce each layer of the application to the point where programmers need not worry about what others are writing too much.
Last time I checked PHP programmers had located their database abstraction code (if any) within their apps, and most PHP apps were explictly tied to MySQL.
On the other hand in J2EE land we have container managed persistance (or maybe Hibernate). Its a wonderful thing compared to if($db == 'mysql) { mysql_connect(); } else if ($db == 'loldb') { loldb_connect(); }
I do agree about slowness though. You need loads of memory just to run JBoss effectively.
Perhaps they should stop blaming others and increase the standard of what is being taught at Universities and the last few years of secondary/high school. The Australian IT industry is a shame compared to other countries.
He also said the Australian Computer Society, which accredits the IT qualifications of applicants for permanent residency, should introduce tougher English tests and insist that overseas students spend three years studying IT in Australia, rather than two.
The Australian Computer Society? Oh, these are the same guys who think IT 'pros' should be certified just like doctors and nurses. When its illegal to be an uncertified IT guy in Australia, please tell me because I will happily show the door to anything trying to enforce it.
Small hosting providers that lease servers from The Planet and EV1 etc. aren't bad (I've had two for CPanel based reseller accounts and had a good business relationship with the owners in both cases), but most of them don't get DDOS protection until its too late...
Definitely.
Programmers might have no problem trying to use the stuff they code but when Joe Blow comes along they all go "WTF?"
P.S no one ever said Windows doesn't work. Infact, i'd go as far to say that open source desktops aren't too usable until end-user distros take a look at them and do the stuff that upstream devs won't.
Disclaimer: I'm just a teenager myself (age: 15.5) but I have perfectly valid reasons for spending 90% of my non-educational time tinkering with computers. I should not (and never have been) considered similar to other people my age, rather as an adult.
Do you have any real reason why you want to limit time?
Kids don't have cars. If they had a chaffeur to drive them around at their request they stil wouldn't use it. IM is the wonder product for people of their age and I'd suggest you be careful in trying to limit it. Despite what you think, school (and specifically recess time) is not a perfect place to socialise, so don't use bulls*it excuses like "You can talk to x tomorrow". Let your kids try to manage their own time and let them bite the consequences if they manage it incorrectly - TIGHTARSE PARENTING DOES NOT WORK. I HAVE SEEN IT FAIL MANY TIMES.
Excercise? Seriously, its time someone tries to create a new wonder drug to burn fat doing less work. Sport is overvalued in the world, thanks to you Americans and your broken education system. Thanks a lot for making my life difficult by having class mates that have no ambitions whatsoever than to be free advertising space for their favorite surf brands. Ok, end rant. If they want to excercise, they will. Encorage but do not force.
Do police any bad engrish that you see - computers aren't mobile phones. Believe it or not though, using proper english on "teen-centric" IM networks such as MSN gets you called a nerd by some idiots, so be careful not to destroy social lives.
One therory I have about the over use of discipline is that once you start using it excessively on a person, such person will quickly lose any motivation and be more willing to do something wrong*. Don't be an arse, you are only creating more problems.
* I suppose that holds up with the long standing fact that teenagers will deliberately break rules. By punishing them, you are giving them rules to break. Encorage use of common sense not strict enforcement.