The restaurant had been preparing Nam Prik Pao, a red-hot Thai dip which uses extra-hot chillies which are deliberately burnt. But the smell prompted several members of the public to call the emergency services.
Oops..
Category Archives: News
GetUp Climate Cleverer Advert
This is a neat little spoof of the Federal Governments climate change propaganda by GetUp! in Australia. They’ve been raising money to try and get it aired during the AFL Grand Final tomorrow (Saturday 29th).
You can watch it on YouTube as well..
Bip is no more – RIP Marcel Marceau (1923-2007)
In 2003 Donna and I had the rare privilege of watching Marcel Marceau perform in Melbourne, and so it is very sad to hear that he has passed away today, aged 84. This former resistance fighter was a true artiste who could move an entire audience with the smallest of gestures and expressions. He, and his troupe, got a standing ovation that night.
The ABC has a transcript of a wonderful interview that Kerry O’Brien did with him in 2003 during that same tour, it is well worth a read, and ends with this wonderful quote:
The rest, as Hamlet said, is silence.
And I will do for the public this.
If only the video was there to watch what that last mime was..
SCO files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection
Here’s the title of the press release: “The SCO Group Files Chapter 11 to Protect Assets as It Addresses Potential Financial and Legal Challenges”, which you can find here. They say reorganization “ensures business as usual.”
It may also act as a useful extra delaying tactic in the determination of how much they owe Novell in their trial..
Some of SCO’s remaining claims were yet to be decided at trial, which was to begin Sept. 17. The trial will be stayed under bankruptcy law, according to Novell public relations director Bruce Lowry. “We’ll be looking at our options,” he said.
MSOOXML rejected as ISO standard
A ballot on whether to publish the draft standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, as an International Standard by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has not achieved the required number of votes for approval.
The official ISO press release is now available.
It’s good to see that trying to rort the standards process hasn’t worked this time, and a badly broken standard has not been foisted upon ISO through dubious means.
US $30,000 – the cost of a “yes” vote for OOXML in Sweden (Updated)
Apparently Microsoft sent a memo to its Gold Partners instructed them to join the Swedish Institute of Standards and vote yes for OOXML. This memo has now leaked to the media and IDG has broken the news.
The Groklaw volunteer “Ghost” has translated part of the IDG news report and there is now an alternative translation at OS2World.
Swedish newspaper, Computer Sweden, now confirms that Microsoft did send out e-mails to get Gold Partners to get them to vote via one of the Gold Partners that received the e-mail and phone calls from Microsoft. According to the e-mail that Microsoft sent out and only to few partners, at least that is what Microsoft claims, Gold Partners expect to participate at the meeting with SIS (Swedish Standards Institute) and “to vote yes to Open XML”. The partner companies are also asked to participate to a number of meetings after the vote to “show good will”.
Basically Microsoft told its Gold Partners that in return for the expenses accrued through doing Microsoft’s bidding they would be recompensed via marketing subsidies and other support. Here are some very good reasons why OOXML should never make it as a standard.
The FFII Sweden described it thus:
In meeting at SIS yesterday on the standardisation of Microsoft’s OOXML file format (i.e. in principle the file format used in Office 2007) 23 new companies suddenly appeared that had not previously participated in the working group, a majority of these companies are Microsoft partners. From a clear NO-majority among the members, the result in the course of just one day became a YES. The final result was 25 in favour, 6 against; 4 members left the meeting. This also means that the work with hundreds of suggested corrections have been made void in one day; they will not be forwarded to ISO in any form — despite strong criticism against the proposal from several significant parties. Among these, most had been active since before, e.g. National Archives, The Royal Library and Sun, all of which had submitted criticism on several points.
If people can buy standards like this then the process is broken and worthless..
Update
Sweden’s SIS has now declared this vote to be invalid:
The Swedish working group of SiS, Swedish Standards Institute, Document description languages, SIS/TK 321/AG 17, decided on 27 August 2007 at a vote to vote for making Office Open XML an ISO standard. Today the board of SiS decided to invalidate the vote. The motive of the decision of the board is that SiS has information suggesting that one of the members in the working group has participated in the vote with more than one vote. […]
Dick Cheney talks sense on Iraq – in 1994
Shame he seems to have forgotten about this..
Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families — it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?
Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.
That was Dick Cheney interviewed on CSPAN in 1994, now up on YouTube.
(Via)
Shuttle Endeavour damaged by falling ice
This doesn’t sound good..
An analysis of images taken during Wednesday’s lift-off in Cape Canaveral, Florida, shows that the shuttle’s underbelly was hit by a piece of ice – rather than foam from its external fuel tank as previously believed, he said. The impact left what appeared to be a 19 square centimetre gouge near the hatch of one of the shuttle’s landing gears.
Hopefully carrying teachers on the shuttle isn’t bad luck..
It’s official, Novell, not SCO, owns Unix and Unixware copyrights
Groklaw has the details, but Judge Kimball has ruled in SCO versus Novell that:
[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.
Additionally he has ruled that:
SCO is obligated to recognize Novell’s waiver of SCO’s claims against IBM and Sequent
There is now a text version of the judgement.
A sign of what’s to come ?
Given the state of the drought in Australia, perhaps this is what we have to look forward to if things getting worse here water wise..
The water supply to residents of the Turkish capital Ankara has been reduced to two days on, two days off because of a severe drought. The water level in reservoirs supplying the city has dropped to less than 5% of capacity, as the country suffers one of its driest years on record.