Hoorah, finally a US government report from 13 agencies admits that humans cause global warming according to New Scientist.
Of course, having admitted there’s a problem the question is how long will it take them to get around to doing anything about it ?
This is a really neat idea, a 40GB Lacie USB Hard disk with an installation of Mandrake Linux 10.0, ready to plug into a PC and go.
They even ship it with a mini-CD so that you can boot it on systems that won’t boot from USB, which is a neat idea.
This is taking the Knoppix bootable CD idea to its logical conclusion, now you can carry your entire PC with you without needing to carry a PC with you, if you see what I mean. 🙂 Now all we want is something that will detect the architecture and boot the relevant bootloader for the system, so you can run it on a Mac, etc, too.
It would appear that the Australian Prime Minister John Howard has gone into the spam business according to the ABC and News Interactive, he’s hired his sons company Net Harbour (no link as I don’t support spammers) to spam folks in his local electorate with pro-Liberal material.
This, of course, raises the question of where did they get their email addresses, and have Net Harbour been blacklisted yet ?
Even more ironic is that one of John Howards opponents in the forthcoming election is longtime anti-spam campaigner Troy Rollo, founder of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email, Australia (CAUBE.AU) and iCAUCE.
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that they’re spamming folks outside of the electorate, and I’m wondering if they’ve hit anyone outside of Australia as well.
If you’ve had one of their spams, leave a comment with details or email me at antispam at csamuel.org please!
Oops, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has pulled up Microsoft over an advert that tried to claim that Windows cost less to run than Linux.
Unfortunately the advertisers only managed to achieve this claim by including the cost of the hardware into their "study" and putting Linux on a massive IBM Z900 mainframe (which it runs on quite happily by the way) against Windows on a tiny dual Intel Xeon 900MHz PC.
The IBM Z900 costs upwards of US$500,000 whilst the dual Xeon PC would probably cost around US$1,000 to US$2,000 (if you could still buy one these days). With at least a possible 250:1 head start on the hardware costs, it’s no wonder Linux failed this not-very-independant little test..
Groklaw has a link to a rather amusing photo from HP World where someone put SCO and IBM in adjoining booths..
Says it all really.. 😉
Yay! After years of people repainting the “Windows” key on keyboards Linux users have their own Linux keyboard which will be available in Europe later in September by Cherry GmbH (no, it’s not on their website yet).
Oh great, this blog reports that Microsoft has just patented sudo.
Only 20+ years of prior art..
Now remind me again why Australia signed up for the “Free” Trade Agreement with the US?
For some time now I’ve been playing around with a Hauppauge Nova-T Terrestrial Digital TV (DVB-T) card under Linux with lots of success, including the fact that I could bring a card from the UK to Australia and have it work.
What I’ve always wanted to do is to somehow create DVD’s of programs so I can watch them in our nice warm lounge rather than on the computer downstairs where it’s cold and not very comfortable. I’ve been playing around with importing them onto my Apple eMac to try and create a DVD with iMovie and iDVD with no success as the Apple QuickTime tools don’t support multiplexed video and audio streams in a single MPEG. 🙁
However, thanks to Doom9’s website I’ve found ProjectX, a java application for demuxing MPEG Program Streams (PS) and Transport Streams (TS).
It’s provided as source only (under the GPL) but easily compiled with the Sun Java SDK and appears to run fairly well, at least as far as detecting what’s multiplexed into a MPEG PS file, I’ve not yet tried to extract that information as I’ve got quite a few things to do around the house today..
Brendan Scott of Open Source Law has written a very interesting paper on Open Source and the IT Trade Deficit in Australia.
GrokLaw has a HTML version of the report but I thought I’d reproduce Brendans Summary and a paragraph to further illustrate what I’ve been banging on about on the dangers of IP laws with regard to IT..
Over to Brendan..
1.1 Key points:
(a) Failure to adopt an open source operating system costs Australia on the order of
$430 million per year, even assuming licence costs substantially below RRP and
after allowances for contributions to the local economy.(b) If the cost of other applications were included this figure would be substantially
greater.(c) Open source can convert Australia’s current software rental trap into a capital
investment, boosting jobs and the information economy.(d) Open source has the ability to make considerable favourable adjustments to the
balance of trade and to do so in the short term.(e) Significant reductions in expenditure on software imports can be viably achieved by
open source substitution — i.e., without foregoing the use of functionality as business
inputs.(f) Open source is also relevant to preserving market access for equipment
manufacturers through software embedded in equipment.
2. About Australia’s IT Trade Deficit
2.1 Each year the ACS funds the production of a review of Australia’s IT trade deficit. The
most recent, released in October 2003 (Australian ICT Trade Update 2003,
http://www.cfses.com/ict2003_trade.htm) indicates that Australia ran a $14 billion deficit in
IT trade in the most recent year (2003) and that, under the incumbent, closed source,
licensing model for software, this deficit has grown at an average rate of 7.4% per annum.2.2 There is a an even closer correlation between the recent, dramatic, decline in Australian IT
performance in the five years following the announcement, in April 1998, by the
Government that it would extend the scope of copyright monopolies (through what was later
to be called the Digital Agenda Act) to be brought into line with US practice.
Given that it looks like an unpleasant truth that the US-AU "Free Trade" Agreement will get passed and almost certainly bring us gems of legislation like the DMCA and US patent law
It’s the Patent Law that is especially frightening for those of us in the IT industry, if you wonder why then please read this article from the Sydney Morning Herald about
how a lawyer recommends that the patent system be abused, including:
Monopolies are the only way to make real money these days, and patents are fantastic because they allow you to establish legal monopolies.
It was necessary not only to patent the way we were doing things, but also to think laterally, and patent all the ways other people might do them as well, not so that we could actually do these things ourselves, but so we could prevent others from doing them.
I find it amazing that someone can say that sort of thing and it not raise serious alarm bells..
Now given the first quote, and the fact that Microsoft are busy applying for patents in the US at the rate of around 10 a day, what does that say to you about the sort of things they might try and do with them.