"If the energy expended on useless hacks like this was instead used to improve the usability of Linux, Microsoft would be out of business by now.
"
Yeah, but if we were the kind of programmers who could resist the temptation to play with "useless hacks", we would have taken the job at Microsoft in the first place.
"I am reminded of the old tale about NASA spending all that time and money developing zero-g pens while the Russians just gave their cosmonauts 10 cent chinograph pencils and got on with the next task.."
Or the Chinese deciding to use a couple of hundred dollars worth of oak as a reentry shield (oak -> charcoal -> nice one-use ablative heatshield) rather than blow millions on some pretty tiles which keep falling off anyway : )
"Subjects: Chili cookoff on Friday! (Reminder number 12)
Used mattress for sale.
Marking newsletter for [today] (that only marketing people care about. EVERY F---ING DAY!)
Someone [at the building across town] left their lights on.
Cake in the breakroom [at the building across town]
Now, I LOVE email. But Merciful God STOP THESE PEOPLE. "
..and that's why god gave us client-side filters. 90% of this kind of brainless crap comes from the same 6 people, and unless one of them is your immediate boss, you can probably get away with filtering everything from the offending addresses direct to trash or/dev/null or whatever.
As an added bonus, when one of the 6 finally sends out something vaguely relevant, you can explain why you didn't get it (usually followed by a dozen requests from wokmates to show them how to use 'this filters thing')
"Important information survives (usually). Trivial information gets lost. This is how it should be. There's no reason to preserve every bit of data for 'historical' reasons."
I've worked on research projects whose primary source was day-to-day accounting records of a small business running in Egypt during the 11th century. The records were preserved in part because they were at the bottom of a trash pile. The records gave us a huge amount of information about everything from transport methods to the ability of the state to collect tax. Most of the 'important information' from that period which people though was worth preserving revolves around which ruler stomped which other ruler's butt. Our 'trivial information' gave us a lot of stuff which we knew nothing about before, stuff which helped explain why ruler X had the economic wherewithall to stomp ruler Y's butt and, well, more interestingly, what it was like to live under ruler X or Y.
The same applies today. Yeah, a record of what your family ate for dinner for the past two weeks is truly trivial. But what it will say about daily life, the transport of food, diet, cooking technology, food storage & a whole lot more about life in the early 21st century might be invaluable to some historian in a thousand years.
Your 'trivial information' is someone elses data goldmine and vice versa. One of the things I really like about computers is they allow you to keep a lot of personal shit you might otherwise have to trash because it gets bulky. The chances that I'll hang onto all my mail & all my parent's mail and all my grandparents mail is pretty good when it fits onto a CD rather than choking up my small apartment with boxes. The chances that some future historian will get to read ordinary everyday mail rather than just the mail of presidents and kings in a thousand years is getting better.
"Macs use a custom disk format and drive mechanism, so can't be read on standard (ie most widely available) floppy drives. Blame Apple for that one.
"
There's several third-party applications that let you read mac floppies on PCs. M$ just hasn't bundled it into the operating system. As a point of comparison, macs read PC floppies via a CDEV which was once upon a time a third-party piece of freeware. Apple saw this ability as useful and added it as a (removable) default option; M$ for some reason hasn't seen the ability to read mac floppies as useful leaving end users to find & add the capability themselves. Enough said.
"I actually believe we have better interoperability today than any other OS out there."
So that would be why I can stick a Windows formatted floppy in a mac and have it mount, but when I stick a mac floppy in a windows machine it asks me if I want to reformat this unreadable disk?
Sure, Star Office isn't quite MS Office, but it is much closer than most people think, and it is a heck of a lot cheaper.
I should add the other part of being able to talk my bosses into migrating some boxes to StarOffice was that I'd been using it exclusively for 6 months prior to the switch without telling anyone. When I got the inevitable "but everyone else uses Word, and we have to be able to trade documents with them" complaint, I could point out that I'd been exchanging documents with the person in question for 6 months (complete with oddities such as multiple-author annotations etc) and they hadn't known I was using something other than Word to do so.
Is it just me, or is it actually funny that your reply to my post (which genericly commented that "If pressed hard enough these businesses will undoubtedly find out that for very little expense they can quickly and easily migrate their Microsoft Office data to Star Office" got modded higher than my original post, which described a real life example and some of the real life problems in doing so. : ) Ah, slashdot..
First of all, there is no MS Access equivalent. That would mean we'd have to switch over all these little programs that have maybe 10 users to another system.
StarOffice can open & front-end for pre-existing access databases.
Having said that, this isn't exactly a seamless process. Firstly, StarOffice interprets Access queries as tables (ie as the _product_ of a query) so while queries that are a long-ago designed part of your database that don't need redesigning aren't going to be a problem, queries that _do_ need changes from time to time either have to have them redesigned from Access or completely redone on the staroffice side, complete with re-hacking all the dependencies accross the whole &*^%ing database to 'fix' it all. Problem 2 is that StarOffice doesn't give you any of the forms you've carefully madepretty in Access. You have to re-do all your forms from scratch in StarOffice.
I guess I should say the context I have this from is discovering we had more M$ Office installs than we had licenses for. I convinced the powers that be to let me uninstall the excess copies of Office & install the win32 version of StarOffice instead. Since we have several large pre-extant Access databases which I _didn't_ want to redesign from scratch, we now do design changes from machines with legal copies of Office and use StarOffice as a frontend for everyone else. This works fine - limiting the number of people who can do design changes is nice - and you can do data entry, searching, new queries etc from StarOffice no problem. It took a day and a half to re-do all the pretty forms in Staroffice, but this worked out way cheaper than paying for another 8 licenses for Office or whatever it was.
I have no experience with StarOffice on *nix, but there have been several 'ask slashdot' threads on getting StarOffice on *nix to frontend for an Access database, so I'd start there if I was contemplating that kind of setup.
Not to be a luddite, but
you bastards! I used to make up to AUD$5000 a week after tax operating a jumbo in UG mines in Australia.
I actually have really mixed feelings about this. We usually killed 6 or 7 people a year (in an industry directly employing around 10,000), and several people I'd worked with (and one good friend) were on that list. Anything that improves safety is a good thing. It might also have some positive impacts environmentally - shift the cost break-point between UG and open cut towards UG, making for a few less topsoil-stripping open cuts. Just as much cyanide etc pollution in processing the ore either way though.
OTOH, mining was what allowed me (and a lot of other people) to finish school, go to college, and get into my current job (which pays a fraction of what I used to earn, but isn't 13 days a fortnight in a hole in the ground in the middle of the desert : ). Drill holes for 6 months, walk away with $30k in the bank (even after spending half of the last six months drunk), do another year or two of college, repeat. Mining is one of the very few occupations left in the west where poorly educated kids get a chance to get the fuck out of dead-endsville. Great steaming piles of cash - you either get an education, get some real assets, or both. Beats the shit out of flipping burgers for the rest of your life as a consequence of never makeing it out of high school.
So here's to the beginning of the end. A few less of us getting mashed against the pit wall; a lot more of us ending up stuck in low-pay, low-opportunity dead end jobs. Such is life.
"Microsoft will do the software, Dell the hardware, and Unisys will assemble the systems."
Doesn't that sound suspiciously like the joke about Canada being a mix of French, British and American influences - but they got French technology, British food and American culture...?
Main cause of robot death (at least in here in Australia) is being crushed by robots used in underground mining.
OTOH, the death rate associated with underground mining has decreased from about 7 per 1000 per annum to about 3 per 1000 per annum since remote vehicles (I'm assuming people are willing to include these in the definition of 'robots' for the sake of this particular discussion) became fairly common underground.
While still not ideal, the net decrease in deaths is a good thing.
The Aust govt experimented briefly with licensing fees for TV back when TV was first introduced, but quickly found the cost of policing in a country nearly the size of the US with a (then) population of This random snippet of useless information was brought to you by..
In most countries for academic purposes you are limited to photocopying one chapter or a tenth of a printed work, unless the work is out of print in which case you can copy the whole thing.
This is a pragmatic acceptance of the fact that there are benefits to society in keeping IP available and distributed after the point at which the costs of printing, storage & distribution have exceeded the return to the original publisher/author.
Given the vastly reduced costs associated with keeping software titles 'in print' (a download-for-$1 server counts as 'in print'), if as company is too lazy to keep their titles available then IMHO those works have been abandoned. Fair game, at least until said company gets around to 'reprinting' the title.
Uhh.. the reason tigers got hunted to extinction was a bad habit of eating introduced species (sheep etc) essential to the economic survival of the most recent wave of immigrants (europeans). Tigers were basically shot on sight by farmers.
I'm gonna be curious to see what happens when someone starts releasing cloned tigers back into the wild & the buggers start getting into the sheep again. The farmers still have guns..
Put a motor on the plunger which charges a compressed air tank so it charges continually. Have two lines running from the tank to the firing plunger controlled through a SPDT switch, when air is put in at the bottom of the firing plunger, it shoots out and knocks the brick down the barrel, when I throw it the other direction, it will allow the compressed air to flow into the upper input on the firing plunger and retract it, allowing another brick to fall into the firing chamber from the clip.
Don't use air pressure to retract your firing pin - you'll have enough problems with running out of air - load the pin with a weak spring for return. If your really want to save yourself a lot of #$%^ing about, go have a look at a pneumatic nail gun. The amount of punch you get is a function of the surface area of the piston at the back of the firing pin rather than the air psi. Enjoy : )
It's all very well & good if the company you've applied for the job with tells you they can't hire you because your record check spat up something unsightly - you can at least attempt to get it sorted out.
Meanwhile, for those of us who work in fields where there are usually more qualified applicants than positions, you frequently don't hear back why you didn't get the job. I've heard at least one horror story involving some poor sod who couldn't get a job for several years before some potential employer mentioned that his rap sheet included a murder commmited by someone else (sorry, too lazy to even find a referring url, let alone try to verify it : )..
Then there's the social factor - some young educated white kid comes in & applies for a coding job, but huh, what do you know - he seems to have a pile of drug convicitions. Well hell, we need the coder badly, lets at least ask him about it. Scenario 2: some middle aged black guy comes in for a labouring job (along with thirty others), but huh, what do you know - he seems to have a pile of drug convictions. Oh well, hire one of the other thirty. And off our guy goes, wondering why he just can't seem to get a hire lately.
You can now trademark smells, colours, sounds, shapes, and "aspects of packaging" in Australia: See here
The siren used to signal the end of an Australian Rules football game is now a trademarked sound for example. So is the specific shade of blue used by Ansett Airlines on all their planes.
But (just to get back on topic) my understanding is that in order to trademark such things, you either need to demonstrate that the thing you're trademarking is clearly associated by the general public with your 'product' - eg the football siren is instantly recognizable to most Australians or that you've spent a lot of time and effort selecting or otherwise achieving your 'look' - Apple's extensive market research (or coca-cola's design brief for the bottle competition) would pretty clearly make it over the bar.
It'll be inetresting over the next couple of years to see what sort of cases just scrape through & what sort get dismissed as frivilous though.. : )
Haven't seen a 'roo yet? Pick any highway out of sydney. Go for a drive. You'll see your desired roadkill soon enough : )
But seriously, catch a ferry across the harbour & got to Taronga Zoo. Not only lots of kangaroos (live ones!) but also funky things like playtypus' which are really hard to see in the wild. Enjoy.
I've introduced PGP to a number of workplaces, and thanks to the admirable efforts of the pgp people, using pgp is now relatively easy for even the average semi-computer literate office worker. But for those same computer semi-illiterates, the concepts behind what you're actually doing when you click the 'sign this' button in the email window are still not that clear..
As a consequence, and despite my best efforts, I've seen people put their private keys on shared servers, email the wrong key to friends, you name it. I'm dying to be able to eliminate a couple of absolute bottlenecks in my workplace caused by the need for 'original' copies of signed documents to be physically moved from one location to another, but the software used has to be made a bit more idiot-proof first.
I can't in conscience accept a digitally signed document from a user who I know for a fact put their private key up on a shared server just last week. Until I know that that user has either grasped the basic concepts (and has a new key..), or is using software which protects him from his own ignorance, I'm going to have to continue to deal with paper sigs. Others may not feel like being so paranoid or ethical.
Politics isn't the only place with this sort of problem. I can't think of the number of businesses I've seen who've gone 'hey, we need to look up to date - lets get that email thing, and print the addresses on all our advertising & business cards' but then don't actually check it..
I worked briefly at a video production house (you'd think they'd be sort of tech savvy) which had the email thing, but no-one checked it. One day when I was bored I logged in & amongst the hundreds of other unanswered queries etc was one particularly poigniant string. It was from a (now) former major client. First a request for a quote. Then a 'c'mon, we have to have this quote by friday', then a 'where the fuck are you guys', then a 'don't worry, we went elsewhere'. All this had happened about two weeks earlier..
As well as 'deep rural' users, the other place you might want to seriously consider sat. based connections is if you're in a country who does or is considering backbone level censorship - eg Singapore. Just by making it clear to the media etc that this shit is relatively easy to physically bypass may help prevent implementation in the first place.
"In any event, this entire thing has some disturbing connations,... it should be lost on none of us that this is a rather aggressive extention of governmental authroity
into our own homes, and I do not recall even being consulted about it, much less inviting them in."
Telecommuting is a rather agressive extension of employer authority into our homes. Part of the baggage which comes with that extension may include all sorts of government, legal & customary regulation/authority. I don't think that just because my employer wants to save a few bucks by having me work from home for half the week should mean that my employer also gets to throw out all regard for the body of laws and regulations built up over the years which are designed to protect me (regardless of whether you think those laws etc actually do so - that's a seperate debate).
If my employer wants me to work at home, he/she has two options: to find some mutually agreeable way to continue to ensure I am provided with the safe workplace etc I am entitled to by law (too hard? don't try & save pennies by getting your workforce to telecommute then); or to turn me into a contractor, passing responsibility for everything from workplace safety to (potentially, depending on what country you're in) healthcare and retirement benefits over to you in exchange for a larger paypacket. And if you were dumb enough to get sucked into becoming a contractor and taking on all that for only a hundred bucks or so a week extra, more fool you.
I get around this one by having an old copy of word 5.1a on a mac server (& on the mac side of my ppc at home) with the word 98 filter installed on it:
I guess this is as much an 'ask slashdot' as a response, but it seems relevant..
What's the story with patents aquired in other countries? Can I patent something here in Australia and have the protections provided by that patent automatically apply in, say, the US (in the same way copyright works). If so, has anyone done comparisons on the ease/cost/speed of getting patents in different countries? Can I patent something 'outrageous' in a country whose patent law and practice is somewhat more flexible and expect it to hold in other countries?
Alternately, if you have to get seperate patents in every country in which you want protection, does the fact you already have a patent for gadget X in country Y get you any sort of fast-tracking when you want to re-patent gadget X in country Z? Does this still apply if gadget X would not normally survive the patent process in country Z because patent law and practice in country Z tends to be a bit tighter than in country Y?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but if we were the kind of programmers who could resist the temptation to play with "useless hacks", we would have taken the job at Microsoft in the first place.
"I am reminded of the old tale about NASA spending all that time and money developing zero-g pens while the Russians just gave their cosmonauts 10 cent chinograph pencils and got on with the next task.."
Or the Chinese deciding to use a couple of hundred dollars worth of oak as a reentry shield (oak -> charcoal -> nice one-use ablative heatshield) rather than blow millions on some pretty tiles which keep falling off anyway : )
"Subjects: Chili cookoff on Friday! (Reminder number 12)
..and that's why god gave us client-side filters. 90% of this kind of brainless crap comes from the same 6 people, and unless one of them is your immediate boss, you can probably get away with filtering everything from the offending addresses direct to trash or /dev/null or whatever.
Used mattress for sale.
Marking newsletter for [today] (that only marketing people care about. EVERY F---ING DAY!)
Someone [at the building across town] left their lights on.
Cake in the breakroom [at the building across town]
Now, I LOVE email. But Merciful God STOP THESE PEOPLE. "
As an added bonus, when one of the 6 finally sends out something vaguely relevant, you can explain why you didn't get it (usually followed by a dozen requests from wokmates to show them how to use 'this filters thing')
"Important information survives (usually). Trivial information gets lost. This is how it should be. There's no reason to preserve every bit of data for 'historical' reasons."
I've worked on research projects whose primary source was day-to-day accounting records of a small business running in Egypt during the 11th century. The records were preserved in part because they were at the bottom of a trash pile. The records gave us a huge amount of information about everything from transport methods to the ability of the state to collect tax. Most of the 'important information' from that period which people though was worth preserving revolves around which ruler stomped which other ruler's butt. Our 'trivial information' gave us a lot of stuff which we knew nothing about before, stuff which helped explain why ruler X had the economic wherewithall to stomp ruler Y's butt and, well, more interestingly, what it was like to live under ruler X or Y.
The same applies today. Yeah, a record of what your family ate for dinner for the past two weeks is truly trivial. But what it will say about daily life, the transport of food, diet, cooking technology, food storage & a whole lot more about life in the early 21st century might be invaluable to some historian in a thousand years.
Your 'trivial information' is someone elses data goldmine and vice versa. One of the things I really like about computers is they allow you to keep a lot of personal shit you might otherwise have to trash because it gets bulky. The chances that I'll hang onto all my mail & all my parent's mail and all my grandparents mail is pretty good when it fits onto a CD rather than choking up my small apartment with boxes. The chances that some future historian will get to read ordinary everyday mail rather than just the mail of presidents and kings in a thousand years is getting better.
"Macs use a custom disk format and drive mechanism, so can't be read on standard (ie most widely available) floppy drives. Blame Apple for that one. "
There's several third-party applications that let you read mac floppies on PCs. M$ just hasn't bundled it into the operating system. As a point of comparison, macs read PC floppies via a CDEV which was once upon a time a third-party piece of freeware. Apple saw this ability as useful and added it as a (removable) default option; M$ for some reason hasn't seen the ability to read mac floppies as useful leaving end users to find & add the capability themselves. Enough said.
"I actually believe we have better interoperability today than any other OS out there."
So that would be why I can stick a Windows formatted floppy in a mac and have it mount, but when I stick a mac floppy in a windows machine it asks me if I want to reformat this unreadable disk?
Sure, Star Office isn't quite MS Office, but it is much closer than most people think, and it is a heck of a lot cheaper.
I should add the other part of being able to talk my bosses into migrating some boxes to StarOffice was that I'd been using it exclusively for 6 months prior to the switch without telling anyone. When I got the inevitable "but everyone else uses Word, and we have to be able to trade documents with them" complaint, I could point out that I'd been exchanging documents with the person in question for 6 months (complete with oddities such as multiple-author annotations etc) and they hadn't known I was using something other than Word to do so.
Is it just me, or is it actually funny that your reply to my post (which genericly commented that "If pressed hard enough these businesses will undoubtedly find out that for very little expense they can quickly and easily migrate their Microsoft Office data to Star Office" got modded higher than my original post, which described a real life example and some of the real life problems in doing so. : ) Ah, slashdot..
First of all, there is no MS Access equivalent. That would mean we'd have to switch over all these little programs that have maybe 10 users to another system.
StarOffice can open & front-end for pre-existing access databases.
Having said that, this isn't exactly a seamless process. Firstly, StarOffice interprets Access queries as tables (ie as the _product_ of a query) so while queries that are a long-ago designed part of your database that don't need redesigning aren't going to be a problem, queries that _do_ need changes from time to time either have to have them redesigned from Access or completely redone on the staroffice side, complete with re-hacking all the dependencies accross the whole &*^%ing database to 'fix' it all. Problem 2 is that StarOffice doesn't give you any of the forms you've carefully madepretty in Access. You have to re-do all your forms from scratch in StarOffice.
I guess I should say the context I have this from is discovering we had more M$ Office installs than we had licenses for. I convinced the powers that be to let me uninstall the excess copies of Office & install the win32 version of StarOffice instead. Since we have several large pre-extant Access databases which I _didn't_ want to redesign from scratch, we now do design changes from machines with legal copies of Office and use StarOffice as a frontend for everyone else. This works fine - limiting the number of people who can do design changes is nice - and you can do data entry, searching, new queries etc from StarOffice no problem. It took a day and a half to re-do all the pretty forms in Staroffice, but this worked out way cheaper than paying for another 8 licenses for Office or whatever it was.
I have no experience with StarOffice on *nix, but there have been several 'ask slashdot' threads on getting StarOffice on *nix to frontend for an Access database, so I'd start there if I was contemplating that kind of setup.
Not to be a luddite, but you bastards! I used to make up to AUD$5000 a week after tax operating a jumbo in UG mines in Australia.
I actually have really mixed feelings about this. We usually killed 6 or 7 people a year (in an industry directly employing around 10,000), and several people I'd worked with (and one good friend) were on that list. Anything that improves safety is a good thing. It might also have some positive impacts environmentally - shift the cost break-point between UG and open cut towards UG, making for a few less topsoil-stripping open cuts. Just as much cyanide etc pollution in processing the ore either way though.
OTOH, mining was what allowed me (and a lot of other people) to finish school, go to college, and get into my current job (which pays a fraction of what I used to earn, but isn't 13 days a fortnight in a hole in the ground in the middle of the desert : ). Drill holes for 6 months, walk away with $30k in the bank (even after spending half of the last six months drunk), do another year or two of college, repeat. Mining is one of the very few occupations left in the west where poorly educated kids get a chance to get the fuck out of dead-endsville. Great steaming piles of cash - you either get an education, get some real assets, or both. Beats the shit out of flipping burgers for the rest of your life as a consequence of never makeing it out of high school.
So here's to the beginning of the end. A few less of us getting mashed against the pit wall; a lot more of us ending up stuck in low-pay, low-opportunity dead end jobs. Such is life.
"Microsoft will do the software, Dell the hardware, and Unisys will assemble the systems."
Doesn't that sound suspiciously like the joke about Canada being a mix of French, British and American influences - but they got French technology, British food and American culture...?
Main cause of robot death (at least in here in Australia) is being crushed by robots used in underground mining.
OTOH, the death rate associated with underground mining has decreased from about 7 per 1000 per annum to about 3 per 1000 per annum since remote vehicles (I'm assuming people are willing to include these in the definition of 'robots' for the sake of this particular discussion) became fairly common underground.
While still not ideal, the net decrease in deaths is a good thing.
The Aust govt experimented briefly with licensing fees for TV back when TV was first introduced, but quickly found the cost of policing in a country nearly the size of the US with a (then) population of
This random snippet of useless information was brought to you by..
In most countries for academic purposes you are limited to photocopying one chapter or a tenth of a printed work, unless the work is out of print in which case you can copy the whole thing.
This is a pragmatic acceptance of the fact that there are benefits to society in keeping IP available and distributed after the point at which the costs of printing, storage & distribution have exceeded the return to the original publisher/author.
Given the vastly reduced costs associated with keeping software titles 'in print' (a download-for-$1 server counts as 'in print'), if as company is too lazy to keep their titles available then IMHO those works have been abandoned. Fair game, at least until said company gets around to 'reprinting' the title.
Uhh.. the reason tigers got hunted to extinction was a bad habit of eating introduced species (sheep etc) essential to the economic survival of the most recent wave of immigrants (europeans). Tigers were basically shot on sight by farmers.
I'm gonna be curious to see what happens when someone starts releasing cloned tigers back into the wild & the buggers start getting into the sheep again. The farmers still have guns..
It's all very well & good if the company you've applied for the job with tells you they can't hire you because your record check spat up something unsightly - you can at least attempt to get it sorted out.
Meanwhile, for those of us who work in fields where there are usually more qualified applicants than positions, you frequently don't hear back why you didn't get the job. I've heard at least one horror story involving some poor sod who couldn't get a job for several years before some potential employer mentioned that his rap sheet included a murder commmited by someone else (sorry, too lazy to even find a referring url, let alone try to verify it : )..
Then there's the social factor - some young educated white kid comes in & applies for a coding job, but huh, what do you know - he seems to have a pile of drug convicitions. Well hell, we need the coder badly, lets at least ask him about it. Scenario 2: some middle aged black guy comes in for a labouring job (along with thirty others), but huh, what do you know - he seems to have a pile of drug convictions. Oh well, hire one of the other thirty. And off our guy goes, wondering why he just can't seem to get a hire lately.
You can now trademark smells, colours, sounds, shapes, and "aspects of packaging" in Australia: See here
The siren used to signal the end of an Australian Rules football game is now a trademarked sound for example. So is the specific shade of blue used by Ansett Airlines on all their planes.
But (just to get back on topic) my understanding is that in order to trademark such things, you either need to demonstrate that the thing you're trademarking is clearly associated by the general public with your 'product' - eg the football siren is instantly recognizable to most Australians or that you've spent a lot of time and effort selecting or otherwise achieving your 'look' - Apple's extensive market research (or coca-cola's design brief for the bottle competition) would pretty clearly make it over the bar.
It'll be inetresting over the next couple of years to see what sort of cases just scrape through & what sort get dismissed as frivilous though.. : )
Haven't seen a 'roo yet? Pick any highway out of sydney. Go for a drive. You'll see your desired roadkill soon enough : )
But seriously, catch a ferry across the harbour & got to Taronga Zoo. Not only lots of kangaroos (live ones!) but also funky things like playtypus' which are really hard to see in the wild. Enjoy.
I've introduced PGP to a number of workplaces, and thanks to the admirable efforts of the pgp people, using pgp is now relatively easy for even the average semi-computer literate office worker. But for those same computer semi-illiterates, the concepts behind what you're actually doing when you click the 'sign this' button in the email window are still not that clear..
As a consequence, and despite my best efforts, I've seen people put their private keys on shared servers, email the wrong key to friends, you name it. I'm dying to be able to eliminate a couple of absolute bottlenecks in my workplace caused by the need for 'original' copies of signed documents to be physically moved from one location to another, but the software used has to be made a bit more idiot-proof first.
I can't in conscience accept a digitally signed document from a user who I know for a fact put their private key up on a shared server just last week. Until I know that that user has either grasped the basic concepts (and has a new key..), or is using software which protects him from his own ignorance, I'm going to have to continue to deal with paper sigs. Others may not feel like being so paranoid or ethical.
Politics isn't the only place with this sort of problem. I can't think of the number of businesses I've seen who've gone 'hey, we need to look up to date - lets get that email thing, and print the addresses on all our advertising & business cards' but then don't actually check it..
I worked briefly at a video production house (you'd think they'd be sort of tech savvy) which had the email thing, but no-one checked it. One day when I was bored I logged in & amongst the hundreds of other unanswered queries etc was one particularly poigniant string. It was from a (now) former major client. First a request for a quote. Then a 'c'mon, we have to have this quote by friday', then a 'where the fuck are you guys', then a 'don't worry, we went elsewhere'. All this had happened about two weeks earlier..
kinda offtopic I know, but fuck it.
As well as 'deep rural' users, the other place you might want to seriously consider sat. based connections is if you're in a country who does or is considering backbone level censorship - eg Singapore. Just by making it clear to the media etc that this shit is relatively easy to physically bypass may help prevent implementation in the first place.
Agreed. The users should never be allowed to talk about openly about ejecting or censoring others.
... er, right?
(grin) You have to be joking : )
Telecommuting is a rather agressive extension of employer authority into our homes. Part of the baggage which comes with that extension may include all sorts of government, legal & customary regulation/authority. I don't think that just because my employer wants to save a few bucks by having me work from home for half the week should mean that my employer also gets to throw out all regard for the body of laws and regulations built up over the years which are designed to protect me (regardless of whether you think those laws etc actually do so - that's a seperate debate).
If my employer wants me to work at home, he/she has two options: to find some mutually agreeable way to continue to ensure I am provided with the safe workplace etc I am entitled to by law (too hard? don't try & save pennies by getting your workforce to telecommute then); or to turn me into a contractor, passing responsibility for everything from workplace safety to (potentially, depending on what country you're in) healthcare and retirement benefits over to you in exchange for a larger paypacket. And if you were dumb enough to get sucked into becoming a contractor and taking on all that for only a hundred bucks or so a week extra, more fool you.
I get around this one by having an old copy of word 5.1a on a mac server (& on the mac side of my ppc at home) with the word 98 filter installed on it:
d l/Word_97-98_Converter.hqx
http://www.microsoft.com/macoffice/productinfo/98
Double click on a word doc & it fires up the serverside copy, converts the stupid thing, & lets me save it as rtf or txt if I want to keep it.
Not 100% dark side free, but 5.1 was small, stable, & doesn't install any extensions or other resource hoggers. Good enough.
I guess this is as much an 'ask slashdot' as a response, but it seems relevant..
What's the story with patents aquired in other countries? Can I patent something here in Australia and have the protections provided by that patent automatically apply in, say, the US (in the same way copyright works). If so, has anyone done comparisons on the ease/cost/speed of getting patents in different countries? Can I patent something 'outrageous' in a country whose patent law and practice is somewhat more flexible and expect it to hold in other countries?
Alternately, if you have to get seperate patents in every country in which you want protection, does the fact you already have a patent for gadget X in country Y get you any sort of fast-tracking when you want to re-patent gadget X in country Z? Does this still apply if gadget X would not normally survive the patent process in country Z because patent law and practice in country Z tends to be a bit tighter than in country Y?