I thought we already had JPEG2000 for our lossy and loss-less needs.
Several chips for JPEG2000 in digital cameras have been designed, some even produced and sold. But I don't see the massive in-flux of cameras! The trouble is nobody wants a camera supporting a format that's harder for them to use on a PC, and they don't understand how old and decrepit JPEG is in comparison. After all, JPEG was standardised in the days when the fastest desktop machine took painful seconds to decode a small image, and it took years to get people to actually use it. New ideas since then have been put in writing but it will unfortunately be around the time of obsolescence that people start using them:)
You would be hard-pressed to sell a car with steam power yet people are using the equivalent in their cameras. Harder to use comes from less software support. The same problem I presume that this new format is going to suffer.
JPEG2000 is an ISO/IEC standard and an ITU-T recommendation. Whatever this "new" format is, it presumably doesn't have that kind of clout. People need to get with it and start supporting JPEG2000. I don't mean via plug-ins, I mean it should be there by default. A decent free-software (LGPL) library would allow Web browsers to support it, and I think this is all we need for an avalanche of support to follow. After all I wouldn't be generating PNG/JPEG pairs for my image gallery if I knew that people could access the JPIP protocol to retrieve a thumbnail and higher res. images without wasted data and in a resolution matching their monitor (on-the-fly of course!).
Yes I happen to like JPEG2000. I had to implement part of it once upon a time.
Nevertheless this laser is eye safe at 10.6 microns or similar.
You would have to physically burn the eye to do damage, and at any great distance the diffraction of a 10.6 micron beam minimises its effectiveness. Even if you had a kilowatt it would be tough to damage an airliner let alone the eyes of someone onboard. Don't forget it's a moving target. You'd need a pretty decent sized curved mirror or other focusing device and a high quality tracking system to do any damage at a distance with a CO2 laser. Up close and personal however you can lop off somebody's arm with one =)
What is more of a problem is a few watts Nd:YAG laser (1.06 micron) since it's easy to get high energy pulses out of them and they are both infrared and not eye safe. Also easy to get for laser machining just like the CO2. The required reflector is around 10x smaller to get a similar effect on the target due to the shorter wavelength.
If you could get a single 1 mJ pulse into somebody's eye they'd never know what happened to them but they would have blood all through their eyes in an instant! Now if your laser delivers 1 J pulses at a couple per second, you would have to get 0.1% of the light into their eye for any pulse and they're in major trouble.
That's why accidents occur with these things! It's infrared after all. Plenty of people get severely injured by pulsed Nd:YAG lasers all the time. Imagine if it were deliberate! Imagine the amount of havoc you could cause in one day without anybody knowing what you were up to!
Note: I do not advocate tougher measures on lasers. I work with them all the time and I'm not an idiot about it. Guns are still easier for a dumbass to point and shoot and consequently they get used for that purpose a hell of a lot more. But I do agree that people with no real business to have a high powered laser shouldn't be able to buy one over the counter. You have to go through a certain amount of trouble to get guns, explosives, even drive a car, so I think it's fair enough to show you know how dangerous your shiny new laser thing is before receiving it. Nothing will stop a determined person, terrorist or hobbyist, from making a dangerous laser and keeping it a secret, but forcing people to know something before selling them a dangerous piece of equipment which can instantly cause harm at a distance isn't unfair. You have to actually run someone over with a car.
1 mW laser pointers are still virtually harmless and it annoys me to hear people go on about them, especially in relation to obtaining compensation for some injury nobody can disprove. 5mW is more serious and I'm prepared to charge anyone with assault who deliberately points one in my eyes. I go to enough trouble at work to avoid that and I don't need some dipshit injuring me outside.
As a side note, the article mentions that laser light shows sometimes illuminate a cockpit but doesn't mention what happened as a result. For the same reasons as above I'm doubtful that a lightshow could be more than a nuisance at >500 m from the show. After all the beam is waving about in the sky and is normally just a few mm wide at the laser so it's going to diverge pretty quickly and sweep past the viewer delivering a low peak intensity, low energy pulse. Annoying yes but not dangerous unless by some freaky coincidence the beam tracked the cockpit for a large fraction of a second.
I recommend using a Class 4 laser, maybe a 25 W CO2. Just enough so that when the intruder enters the beam they get the hell out. And need a new shirt.
Plus you can tell your friends and local regulators that 10.6 microns is "eye safe" =)
Not only would it not kill you, but on the 100th cup you drink, you enter Matrix mode. Time slows down, you can see everything unfolding clearly before you, and you can rearrange everything to save the day.
Or I should stop watching Futurama after the 10th cup. Something like that;)
I thought Red Hat dropped the embedded systems market a while ago when they said as much. They dropped RCOS and RHEL a couple of years ago, according to my memory. I was using RHEL at the time, on an Altera Excalibur PLD / ARM micrprocessor chip. I was reading about the dropping of RCOS and the dropping of RHEL, but I don't remember any references. Some of what I read was on their website (developer part).
I have a feeling they don't know which market they support. Dropping the consumer desktop was a bit of a blow for their supporters, as nobody can claim Red Hat will be in it for the long haul any more. Finally a reason to go with a better distro.
We are not throwing resources, we are exercising imagination and initiative. These are not limited resources, they are amplified by being used... and they are the same things needed to solve problems on earth.
Labour, clever people and energy are some of the limited resources that are consumed by such an endeavour. Consider if these could be used in a better way, such as to invent a way to de-pollute the atmosphere, replenish the ozone layer, or figure out how to stop people from starving to death.
Crime fell drastically during the first Moon landings, because most everyone was glued to the story unfolding on live television. We should try to do this again.
I think there are cheaper ways to reduce crime than send people to Mars. One such way is to teach them properly in school so that they are motivated to better themselves.
Shouldn't we consider it a general religious imperative to learn what we can about where we came from and what else there is, starting with the history of other planets (including the life on them, if any)?
We seem to be doing a pretty good job with unmanned probes. If we can visit all the planets in the solar system multiple times for the cost of one manned mission to Mars, I think we would learn more with the probes. As far as religious imperatives go, I seem to remember helping the poor and dying as being a priority. It ranks above curiosity in my mind. A good 80% of all humans live in poverty, with no hope of ever working their way out of it, and they probably don't care about what's on Mars.
You can save an awful lot of starving people with the kind of money it would take to send people to Mars. It would create employment at home and in the communities needing help. It would create wealth by creating new customers who can afford to watch a Mars landing rather than trudging half a day to find pulluted drinking water. It would reduce the number of people supporting or becoming terrorists, since less people would be angry at the smug westerners who wouldn't help them out.
If you're only going to spend a certain amount on non-essential projects, I think it should go to raising the worldwide standard of living until nobody has to die of starvation (what a horrible and helpless way to go, really). Of course some space missions could be considered essential, for the technology they generate. After all it might make it that much easier to help others with better technology at home.
Re:I don't find the fast reactions unbelievable...
on
More MyDoom Gloom
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· Score: 1
So you're telling me that somebody executed an attachment on a critical machine running windoze?
I think your cluebat should come out of retirement ASAP. Preferably all the sysadmins dealing with the downtime should get five minutes alone with the luser(s) responsible.
Yeah I actually tried that hack out - my friend from tech-junkie.com brought over his brand-new GF4 Ti4600 reference board that NVIDIA gave him for review, and I added a jumper to flip it between GF4 and Quadro. Yes that was me doing the soldering, and it took ages since the through-hole resistor leg was bigger than the surface-mount resistor pad;) I'm sorry that the article is down but the site doesn't exist any more. Enough encouraging replies could get the article up on his private site though...
Anyway the result was that the Windows drivers said we had a Quadro, but since my friend also had a Quadro reference board of whatever model is comparable to the GF4, we found that the real Quadro had extra OpenGL features that the fake one didn't. We tried BIOS swaps etc. and we never did get a Quadro... except for the one that NVIDIA already gave us;)
As an aside, the hacked GF4 is in the machine I use regularly at home and it's in front of me now. Still working perfectly, although I've never set it to Quadro since that would be a bit silly now wouldn't it... =)
We simply start our own company, claiming to have all this IP that SCO is infringing upon. We also publicly claim that SCO has admitted wrongdoing, and that they will settle with us out-of-court by giving us $2bn to drop some battle we are about to win for $5bn.
We then all invest in this new company. The stock price rises because we're all buying it. Because the stock price is rising, every other investor out there jumps on the bandwagon, selling SCO stock because they assume we're going to kick SCO's arse.
SCO stock plummets, burning all those who invested in SCO when its price was high. Our stock rises up through the clouds. About 5 minutes before we are ordered to prove that SCO has violated our IP, we all sell our stock and our company folds, burning the other half of the investors who were dumb enough to invest in our company based on nothing but talk.
Net result: SCO gone. Us rich. Stupid investors poor. Some investors have learned their lesson, and another SCO is that much harder to inflate.
And then I wake up; it was all a dream. Geeks aren't organised enough to pull it off. Or are they...
And I know of at least one successful QC implementation in solid-state that uses pulsed lasers for the gates, whereas the guys trying solid-state with controlled electric fields haven't gotten very far.
Not only that but they probably aren't the first to demonstrate in a solid either.
I worked in a lab that already did that late last year, in the Laser Physics Centre, ANU, as evidenced by a recent PhD thesis by Jevon Longdell, and many conference presentations. Although technically it was a controlled-phase gate, but they are functionally equivalent anyway.
Unfortunately writing papers takes a back seat to doing the work, so in the wider field few people know about it. It sucks to watch it happen.
I once submitted a simulation of Conway's Game of Life to a science fair. Didn't win of course, some stupid tidal calculator (read: lookup table) won.
Plus it looks OK as ASCII art on fixed-font displays (but maybe not on Mozilla viewing/. for some reason? I used the PRE tag, honest!): .*...*
***
Fits perfectly on a three-line sig. If only I had a sig;)
Also you could export one file from each machine to the central server, which then mounts them via loopback and RAIDs them as before.
This would be handy when you don't want NBD for some reason. Like some machines have a perfectly good NFS/SMB mount already visible from the server and for those machines you don't mind using loopback. Or whatever.
You could incrementally add 1GB at a time to the RAID whenever you find a good home for it on one of the machines. Just think about whether you have enough redundancy for that drive to fail and take out multiple "discs" from the RAID.
The real downside of these schemes is needing to have all machines on all the time. Unless you use RAID level 1 or similar to achieve a mirrored filesystem. But as you reboot machines they will most probably get flagged as defunct, requiring manual hot-adding them for a resync. Not all that fun if you intend to reboot any of the machines. Running Windows on any of them? Don't try updating drivers then;)
I like to rush into things. Like the time I patched Windows 2000 into Mandrake 8.1. I didn't even check if it was tested, I just did it. And thankfully it worked.
I don't need to patch very often any more, I guess this patch must have taken care of a helluva lot of problems everybody else still has to fix.
Seriously guys you should be flying by the seat of your pants on this one, just apply the patch. No spyware or DRM or hidden services ready to be exploited. And it's free!
Regardless of how old you think your hardware is, you haven't seen old hardware until you visit an active physics research lab.
The one I was working in recently is still using an Apple ][ to scan the dye laser that forms the frequency reference in the world's first and only solid-state quantum computer.
It just goes to show you that the really clever guys simply won't upgrade until either something breaks or the old system won't do what's needed. Otherwise, keep the Apple.
BTW the Apple is sitting near a superconducting magnet, and still works. Its first failure that I know of was a few weeks ago when the power supply died. It's now got an AT power supply hanging off it;)
more competition, lower prices and higher quality.
If Tel$tra has anything to do with it, we will see less competition, rediculously high prices, and the music will end up sounding like that disabled guy bashing the piano while you're on call waiting.
After all, the ACCC accuses Tel$tra repeatedly of doing a crappy job and maintaining its monopoly using unfair trading practices, such as selling wholesale ADSL access to third parties for more than it retails to its own private customers. Tel$tra is the M$ of the telecoms industry (if we have such an industry in AU).
Oh but Senator Alston would thoroughly disagree with me on all of these points. And when his govt sells off the remaining 51% they own (which will be less than a year from now), it won't even be his problem anymore, he's retiring. After doing such a brilliant job for telecoms and IT, says Howard.
The whole concept that competition will lead to better results for the consumer relies on the competition being unrestricted and the consumer being informed, none of which tends to happen in Australia.
I am about to buy an Adaptec 1200A because I have hunted around and found people near me who run Linux servers on them. The 2400 has support listed on the web. So I'm willing to assume the 1200A will work for me.
Microsoft has an internal communication problem, right about the same time the whole friggin' Internet has a communication problem which they are mostly responsible for.
Way to go Microsoft! Now if we could just get you to accidentally disband, the world would be a better place to use a computer.
Check out the Australian project to pipe IP over VHF. It's called BushLAN. The custom hardware is just being finished as far as I know. Linux-based hubs of course;)
Slashdot Mirror
I thought we already had JPEG2000 for our lossy and loss-less needs.
:)
Several chips for JPEG2000 in digital cameras have been designed, some even produced and sold. But I don't see the massive in-flux of cameras! The trouble is nobody wants a camera supporting a format that's harder for them to use on a PC, and they don't understand how old and decrepit JPEG is in comparison. After all, JPEG was standardised in the days when the fastest desktop machine took painful seconds to decode a small image, and it took years to get people to actually use it. New ideas since then have been put in writing but it will unfortunately be around the time of obsolescence that people start using them
You would be hard-pressed to sell a car with steam power yet people are using the equivalent in their cameras. Harder to use comes from less software support. The same problem I presume that this new format is going to suffer.
JPEG2000 is an ISO/IEC standard and an ITU-T recommendation. Whatever this "new" format is, it presumably doesn't have that kind of clout. People need to get with it and start supporting JPEG2000. I don't mean via plug-ins, I mean it should be there by default. A decent free-software (LGPL) library would allow Web browsers to support it, and I think this is all we need for an avalanche of support to follow. After all I wouldn't be generating PNG/JPEG pairs for my image gallery if I knew that people could access the JPIP protocol to retrieve a thumbnail and higher res. images without wasted data and in a resolution matching their monitor (on-the-fly of course!).
Yes I happen to like JPEG2000. I had to implement part of it once upon a time.
Nevertheless this laser is eye safe at 10.6 microns or similar.
You would have to physically burn the eye to do damage, and at any great distance the diffraction of a 10.6 micron beam minimises its effectiveness. Even if you had a kilowatt it would be tough to damage an airliner let alone the eyes of someone onboard. Don't forget it's a moving target. You'd need a pretty decent sized curved mirror or other focusing device and a high quality tracking system to do any damage at a distance with a CO2 laser. Up close and personal however you can lop off somebody's arm with one =)
What is more of a problem is a few watts Nd:YAG laser (1.06 micron) since it's easy to get high energy pulses out of them and they are both infrared and not eye safe. Also easy to get for laser machining just like the CO2. The required reflector is around 10x smaller to get a similar effect on the target due to the shorter wavelength.
If you could get a single 1 mJ pulse into somebody's eye they'd never know what happened to them but they would have blood all through their eyes in an instant! Now if your laser delivers 1 J pulses at a couple per second, you would have to get 0.1% of the light into their eye for any pulse and they're in major trouble.
That's why accidents occur with these things! It's infrared after all. Plenty of people get severely injured by pulsed Nd:YAG lasers all the time. Imagine if it were deliberate! Imagine the amount of havoc you could cause in one day without anybody knowing what you were up to!
Note: I do not advocate tougher measures on lasers. I work with them all the time and I'm not an idiot about it. Guns are still easier for a dumbass to point and shoot and consequently they get used for that purpose a hell of a lot more. But I do agree that people with no real business to have a high powered laser shouldn't be able to buy one over the counter. You have to go through a certain amount of trouble to get guns, explosives, even drive a car, so I think it's fair enough to show you know how dangerous your shiny new laser thing is before receiving it. Nothing will stop a determined person, terrorist or hobbyist, from making a dangerous laser and keeping it a secret, but forcing people to know something before selling them a dangerous piece of equipment which can instantly cause harm at a distance isn't unfair. You have to actually run someone over with a car.
1 mW laser pointers are still virtually harmless and it annoys me to hear people go on about them, especially in relation to obtaining compensation for some injury nobody can disprove. 5mW is more serious and I'm prepared to charge anyone with assault who deliberately points one in my eyes. I go to enough trouble at work to avoid that and I don't need some dipshit injuring me outside.
As a side note, the article mentions that laser light shows sometimes illuminate a cockpit but doesn't mention what happened as a result. For the same reasons as above I'm doubtful that a lightshow could be more than a nuisance at >500 m from the show. After all the beam is waving about in the sky and is normally just a few mm wide at the laser so it's going to diverge pretty quickly and sweep past the viewer delivering a low peak intensity, low energy pulse. Annoying yes but not dangerous unless by some freaky coincidence the beam tracked the cockpit for a large fraction of a second.
I recommend using a Class 4 laser, maybe a 25 W CO2. Just enough so that when the intruder enters the beam they get the hell out. And need a new shirt.
Plus you can tell your friends and local regulators that 10.6 microns is "eye safe" =)
Not only would it not kill you, but on the 100th cup you drink, you enter Matrix mode. Time slows down, you can see everything unfolding clearly before you, and you can rearrange everything to save the day.
;)
Or I should stop watching Futurama after the 10th cup. Something like that
Get me another one, this one's shaking too much.
I thought Red Hat dropped the embedded systems market a while ago when they said as much. They dropped RCOS and RHEL a couple of years ago, according to my memory. I was using RHEL at the time, on an Altera Excalibur PLD / ARM micrprocessor chip. I was reading about the dropping of RCOS and the dropping of RHEL, but I don't remember any references. Some of what I read was on their website (developer part).
I have a feeling they don't know which market they support. Dropping the consumer desktop was a bit of a blow for their supporters, as nobody can claim Red Hat will be in it for the long haul any more. Finally a reason to go with a better distro.
We are not throwing resources, we are exercising imagination and initiative. These are not limited resources, they are amplified by being used... and they are the same things needed to solve problems on earth.
Labour, clever people and energy are some of the limited resources that are consumed by such an endeavour. Consider if these could be used in a better way, such as to invent a way to de-pollute the atmosphere, replenish the ozone layer, or figure out how to stop people from starving to death.
Crime fell drastically during the first Moon landings, because most everyone was glued to the story unfolding on live television. We should try to do this again.
I think there are cheaper ways to reduce crime than send people to Mars. One such way is to teach them properly in school so that they are motivated to better themselves.
Shouldn't we consider it a general religious imperative to learn what we can about where we came from and what else there is, starting with the history of other planets (including the life on them, if any)?
We seem to be doing a pretty good job with unmanned probes. If we can visit all the planets in the solar system multiple times for the cost of one manned mission to Mars, I think we would learn more with the probes. As far as religious imperatives go, I seem to remember helping the poor and dying as being a priority. It ranks above curiosity in my mind. A good 80% of all humans live in poverty, with no hope of ever working their way out of it, and they probably don't care about what's on Mars.
You can save an awful lot of starving people with the kind of money it would take to send people to Mars. It would create employment at home and in the communities needing help. It would create wealth by creating new customers who can afford to watch a Mars landing rather than trudging half a day to find pulluted drinking water. It would reduce the number of people supporting or becoming terrorists, since less people would be angry at the smug westerners who wouldn't help them out.
If you're only going to spend a certain amount on non-essential projects, I think it should go to raising the worldwide standard of living until nobody has to die of starvation (what a horrible and helpless way to go, really). Of course some space missions could be considered essential, for the technology they generate. After all it might make it that much easier to help others with better technology at home.
So you're telling me that somebody executed an attachment on a critical machine running windoze?
I think your cluebat should come out of retirement ASAP. Preferably all the sysadmins dealing with the downtime should get five minutes alone with the luser(s) responsible.
Yeah I actually tried that hack out - my friend from tech-junkie.com brought over his brand-new GF4 Ti4600 reference board that NVIDIA gave him for review, and I added a jumper to flip it between GF4 and Quadro. Yes that was me doing the soldering, and it took ages since the through-hole resistor leg was bigger than the surface-mount resistor pad ;) I'm sorry that the article is down but the site doesn't exist any more. Enough encouraging replies could get the article up on his private site though...
;)
Anyway the result was that the Windows drivers said we had a Quadro, but since my friend also had a Quadro reference board of whatever model is comparable to the GF4, we found that the real Quadro had extra OpenGL features that the fake one didn't. We tried BIOS swaps etc. and we never did get a Quadro... except for the one that NVIDIA already gave us
As an aside, the hacked GF4 is in the machine I use regularly at home and it's in front of me now. Still working perfectly, although I've never set it to Quadro since that would be a bit silly now wouldn't it... =)
We simply start our own company, claiming to have all this IP that SCO is infringing upon. We also publicly claim that SCO has admitted wrongdoing, and that they will settle with us out-of-court by giving us $2bn to drop some battle we are about to win for $5bn.
We then all invest in this new company. The stock price rises because we're all buying it. Because the stock price is rising, every other investor out there jumps on the bandwagon, selling SCO stock because they assume we're going to kick SCO's arse.
SCO stock plummets, burning all those who invested in SCO when its price was high. Our stock rises up through the clouds. About 5 minutes before we are ordered to prove that SCO has violated our IP, we all sell our stock and our company folds, burning the other half of the investors who were dumb enough to invest in our company based on nothing but talk.
Net result: SCO gone. Us rich. Stupid investors poor. Some investors have learned their lesson, and another SCO is that much harder to inflate.
And then I wake up; it was all a dream. Geeks aren't organised enough to pull it off. Or are they...
Plus the binary on my Mandrake 9.2 system is just 26476 bytes!
Plus there's so much variety to be had. Such as:
dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip >~/hda1.img.gz
(if you want a compressed image)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1
(if you want to wipe the partition prior to selling the drive)
and of course my favourite:
dd if=/dev/zero count=1GB | gzip | gzip | gzip | gzip >~/readme.txt.gz.gz.gz.gz
(to demonstrate phenominal compression!)
The fun part is to get your friends to try reading the above file (which is 21729 bytes). Hours of laughs!
Sorry but NMR uses pulsed RF, not pulsed lasers.
And I know of at least one successful QC implementation in solid-state that uses pulsed lasers for the gates, whereas the guys trying solid-state with controlled electric fields haven't gotten very far.
Not only that but they probably aren't the first to demonstrate in a solid either.
I worked in a lab that already did that late last year, in the Laser Physics Centre, ANU, as evidenced by a recent PhD thesis by Jevon Longdell, and many conference presentations. Although technically it was a controlled-phase gate, but they are functionally equivalent anyway.
Unfortunately writing papers takes a back seat to doing the work, so in the wider field few people know about it. It sucks to watch it happen.
Fine. Go ahead and prove me stupid ;)
.*.
..*
***
I like it too.
/. for some reason? I used the PRE tag, honest!):
.*. ..*
***
;)
I once submitted a simulation of Conway's Game of Life to a science fair. Didn't win of course, some stupid tidal calculator (read: lookup table) won.
Plus it looks OK as ASCII art on fixed-font displays (but maybe not on Mozilla viewing
Fits perfectly on a three-line sig. If only I had a sig
Also you could export one file from each machine to the central server, which then mounts them via loopback and RAIDs them as before.
;)
This would be handy when you don't want NBD for some reason. Like some machines have a perfectly good NFS/SMB mount already visible from the server and for those machines you don't mind using loopback. Or whatever.
You could incrementally add 1GB at a time to the RAID whenever you find a good home for it on one of the machines. Just think about whether you have enough redundancy for that drive to fail and take out multiple "discs" from the RAID.
The real downside of these schemes is needing to have all machines on all the time. Unless you use RAID level 1 or similar to achieve a mirrored filesystem. But as you reboot machines they will most probably get flagged as defunct, requiring manual hot-adding them for a resync. Not all that fun if you intend to reboot any of the machines. Running Windows on any of them? Don't try updating drivers then
I like to rush into things. Like the time I patched Windows 2000 into Mandrake 8.1. I didn't even check if it was tested, I just did it. And thankfully it worked.
I don't need to patch very often any more, I guess this patch must have taken care of a helluva lot of problems everybody else still has to fix.
Seriously guys you should be flying by the seat of your pants on this one, just apply the patch. No spyware or DRM or hidden services ready to be exploited. And it's free!
Will the enemy start using mirrors?
Or building-sized safety goggles?
... you insensitive clod!
And neither is my Amiga! It's just about to become *really* popular. Vive la resistance!
Regardless of how old you think your hardware is, you haven't seen old hardware until you visit an active physics research lab.
;)
The one I was working in recently is still using an Apple ][ to scan the dye laser that forms the frequency reference in the world's first and only solid-state quantum computer.
It just goes to show you that the really clever guys simply won't upgrade until either something breaks or the old system won't do what's needed. Otherwise, keep the Apple.
BTW the Apple is sitting near a superconducting magnet, and still works. Its first failure that I know of was a few weeks ago when the power supply died. It's now got an AT power supply hanging off it
more competition, lower prices and higher quality.
If Tel$tra has anything to do with it, we will see less competition, rediculously high prices, and the music will end up sounding like that disabled guy bashing the piano while you're on call waiting.
After all, the ACCC accuses Tel$tra repeatedly of doing a crappy job and maintaining its monopoly using unfair trading practices, such as selling wholesale ADSL access to third parties for more than it retails to its own private customers. Tel$tra is the M$ of the telecoms industry (if we have such an industry in AU).
Oh but Senator Alston would thoroughly disagree with me on all of these points. And when his govt sells off the remaining 51% they own (which will be less than a year from now), it won't even be his problem anymore, he's retiring. After doing such a brilliant job for telecoms and IT, says Howard.
The whole concept that competition will lead to better results for the consumer relies on the competition being unrestricted and the consumer being informed, none of which tends to happen in Australia.
One thing will keep me from seeing this at my local IMAX.
I live in Australia you insensitive clod! Developing nations like Australia don't get to see it on IMAX despite there being a few IMAX screens about.
I would gladly fly interstate to my nearest IMAX to see this film on the very-big screen, and you won't even bother to rock up over pop corn!!!
On a more positive note, there's gonna be a lot of ex-phreaks who will be working on the inside...
I am about to buy an Adaptec 1200A because I have hunted around and found people near me who run Linux servers on them. The 2400 has support listed on the web. So I'm willing to assume the 1200A will work for me.
Microsoft has an internal communication problem, right about the same time the whole friggin' Internet has a communication problem which they are mostly responsible for.
Way to go Microsoft! Now if we could just get you to accidentally disband, the world would be a better place to use a computer.
Check out the Australian project to pipe IP over VHF. It's called BushLAN. The custom hardware is just being finished as far as I know. Linux-based hubs of course ;)