Posts by Diogenies

Gadzooks !

You mean something that was posted on the internet isn't true .

RE great Australian firewall

You mean the one the Kevin 747 want to implement ?

Icon as helicopter is closest to plane that dear leader so loves

Read the story more closely

An Alaska state judge has ordered Palin to preserve the contents of the account. - OK so far so good then ....

The emails Palin's office has valued at $15m were sent by various state employees to her husband, Todd, who is not a state employee. State bean counters say it will cost $960.31 to search each employee's account.

NOTE : THESE ARE EMAILS SENT BY STATE OFFICIALS SENT USING OFFICIAL STATE EMAIL ACCOUNTS TO HER HUSBAND !

GOT IT ?????????????????????????????????

@bluegreen

It was a trick question - just ask Verity

For those whingeing about fixed width

make your browser window smaller

I seem to remember another study

done a long time ago in the US where the (US) researchers determined it would be cheaper for the US Govt to track russian diplomatic staff by issuing them with credit cards with a limit of $5k (paid monthly by USGOV) than use FBI agents for the same task

plus ca change...

Evil Graham beat me to it

Just goes to show how old concepts come back again ... I think I remember Tom DeMarco in his little red book on OOAnalysis(or was the OODesign book) - or was it one of his Australian disciples (Rob Thomsett) saying that the principles of structured programming/analysis/design held true in an object world.

Smiley 'cause if ED is only SD with Objects I am in !

Code reviews

No wonder windows is a mess - if any code had been reviewed the naughty things would have been cleaned up pronto !

@ perhaps its me

Well said sir !

My sediments exactly. - I have visted many phone shops looking for a mobile phone that just makes calls and sends texts and a calendar - no camera, no games, no silly ringtones and was laughed at by the sales people...

I used my nokia 5110 for 5 years, and would probably still be using it but I was forced to give it up when I moved to the bush (needed cdma) and now that I have moved back to the big smoke now use a samsung Esomething (as cdma reception here is awful) .

I suspect many reg readers are bowerbirds (ohhhh shiny must have)

And my personal favorite

We (the governement) are going to ban edison bulbs to save electricity.

BTW we (the governement) are going to phase out analogue TV so you need to buy a box (electrikally powered no less) if want to use your perfectly good existing CRT, or go out a buy a new one - you want what ?!?!? - A CRT with a digital tuner (snigger snigger chortle snigger ) ?

What about this loverly plasma or lcd jobbie (nah its not a penis extension unless its at least 50"), built in tuner, component digital input, gold connections, better pictures, and ... continue sales pitch here

Think of the penguins !

Never yet met a business owner

where he would like the customer to send his accounts receivable to him, and his suppliers accounts payable to the governement.

I also have a strong recollection of here in Australia in the 80's the then President of the Liberal(ie Conservative) Party carrying on about the 'roonous' tax rate on business. He was at the time CEO of Elders/IXL a multi billion company - that was until the Socialist Bookshop in Sydney put up a huge poster showing comparative rates of tax vs income and it turns out Elders/IXL and most of the aus equivalent of fortune 100 were paying an effective tax rate considerably less than 10%. And I will never forget one company managing its affairs so that instead of paying capital gains tax on $20m from the sale of an asset of (which would have been about $10million at the time)actually recieved a 500k tax refund !

At the time I was paying an effective 40% (effective = total $ earned ./ total tax paid ) ---- It still burns !

Patenting fire

When the great land of Oz reformed it patents system, a patent lawyer patented fire as a demonstration that the new system was even more dysfunctional than the old.

The the callerid case here he talks about "circuitry that detects the origin telephone number of an incoming telephone call and compares that number with numbers in the directory for identifying the calling party." -

If apple copied his "circuitry" then they may be in trouble (is sofware "cicuitry"?).

Flame icon for the great patent on fire

What business is the music "industry" in ?

I have just been doing a management assignment for Uni on the Guy Hands takeover of EMI. What struck me most in my research was that every man & his maiden aunt say that Hands hasn't got a clue. I believe he is either still trying to work out exactly what business the music "industry" is really in (or they don't like what they are hearing), in the sense of "(Odeon Cinemas) is not in the movie business , it is in the popcorn business". Now being an aussie I don't know if the changes he made at Odeon were a good thing or bad , but at least Odeon still exists with a much leaner cost structure than before.

For the last 50 years the music industry has been about 'semi slavery' where a company throws sums of money at artists to basically "own" them for a set number of recordings/songs (and then owning those songs/recordings virtually forever) in return. This worked reasoanbly well when the labels controlled distribution, but now that they don't...

I don't have the answer but I believe the 'semi slavery' model

lies at the core of the problem. Either artists never make the money back & remain in debt to company, or artist becomes unexpectedly popular & have signed too cheap, or "damn I wish they hadn't licensed that song I wrote for use by the neo-nazis for their election campaign", or the next time round they pay artist a musch larger advance because of your track record and either you have 'gone weird' or the public taste has changed and millions of cds are crushed and used as road making materials in china.

At the moment it is the labels by making these payments are assuming most of the risk, and as a result of outsourcing the cd pressing the risk has gotten larger (bad bets that cd will be a huge seller, or don't press enough for demand & illegal copies made) and they (RIAA and equivalents excepted) are still trying to work what they are selling & how to make a profit doing it.

Interestingly it seems to be the artists managers who are fighting a reargaurd action to retain the up front payments as it easier to work out & get paid your percentage when the "big cheque" arrives. They are the ones fighting the so called 'plantation' model (days rates for recording, but higher royalties) as their payments are spread out too, with some flexibility of ownership of the words, music & performance.

As each of the majors is now an international business why are we stuck with performance x only licensed for sale in the UK - whilst the same performance with different cover art (or different sound engineering & here I am thinking about the enormous difference in sound between EMI classic recordings of same performance from Japan vs UK) is only licenced for the US, and neither is licensed for sale (& therefore legally unavailable) in Australia ?

This has led to the farcial situation where I am sitting at the computer with credit card in hand, but because my ip addy or credit card is not US or UK I can't buy what a want (it took a while but itunes finally got to australia) - but I want better than itunes quality (suitable only for use as 'aural wallpaper') - where can I legally go other than a shiny disc that will take a minimum 3 weeks (local store) or 1 week (amazon) to reach me ? I want it NOW !!!!

@ LaeMi Qian - almost there !

One enterprising lawyer copyrights his cease & desist letters so they can't be published on blogs - google dozier internet law copyright

Remember using it as a 3270 emulator

Many fond memories of the $200 taxi ride home from Sydney to the Blue Mountains as we were not allowed to take the damned thing on the train.

Ah the fond memories trying to dial in to the mainframe, squinting at the screen, trying to debug production JCL & PL/1 code gone bad at 2am.

It WAS a huge improvment on jumping in the car & driving 2 hours to work (& once there just stayed as there was no point going home again as you would have had to have left before you got there).

@matt

So you hold your breath whilst charging them then, or don't they exhale c02 in the third world ?

Rignt, coat, door , taxi

Domestic lights used at night aren't they ?

Energy conservation lobbyists conveniently overlook the obvious fact that household lightbulbs are primarily used at night-exactly opposite the time of day in which utilities experience peak load demands for daytime heating, air conditioning and commercial lighting. Peak load shedding is what is most necessary for taking coal fired power plants out of commission.

Reducing nighttime lightbulb consumption of kwhs will do almost nothing to shave peak demand. Moreover, with non-peak kwhs reduced at night, utilities will now have fewer revenues on which to earn a return on their invested capital. Utilities must build up their physical plant to meet the peaks, and the capital to finance that equipment has to be paid for 24 hours a day. Thus, utilities will have to raise rates on the remainder of the kwhs we use for everything else, from washing machines to hair dryers to computers.

Household power used by lightbulbs is actually dwarfed these days by major appliances and high tech consumer electronics- such as wide screen TVs, computers and video games along with internet servers, the biggest energy hogs besides cars and trucks.

And guess where the extra purchase prices for these CFLs will wind up? In the pockets of Chinese manufacturers, because not a single CFL is produced in the US.

And it gets worse. As Chinese manufacturers add enough manufacturing capacity to produce ten times as many CFLs , they will need several new coal-fired power plants to run the new factories. This comes on top of the already breathtaking pace today of construction in coal fired electric power plants in China - at a clip of one new plant every week. Don't even think about asking about what kind of pollution control will be operating on those Chinese plants.

The great land of Oz has now banned incandescent bulbs, but has now decided to switch of analogue TV - so many people are now buying a Set Top Box so they can watch TV , which means another device to be left on stand by, or they go out and buy a stonking great plasma set with buit in digital tuner (which chews as much power as a fridge) - thus more than negating the savings in lighting

Add a semi colon & compile

There is no point to diagramming something when all you need to do is add semi colons to the text in the diagram and compile.

But this may be an artefact of the fact that only simple examples are used in texts as I can see the utility of these diagrams when there is complicated set of steps at a higher level than a single class or that involves interaction with numerous classes

Phone driving more dangerous than Drink Driving

I know its true because research has proved it and I saw it on Mythbusters the other day - they drank to a smidge below 0.08 (which is higher than the aussie 0.05) - they performed a few tests of different types of conversations (eg tell me 10 things that are in your car, multiply 7 * 9 etc ) and the driving skills shown were demonstrably worse than when they had a skinful.

As for the comment about pilots not talking to ATC what tosh - ATC keep planes seperated enough so that even if you are distracted their is no chance of hitting another plane, or pedestrian , or light post

@ I hope that was a joke

No not a joke, a true nerd woud never allow himself to be even in the same room as a Vista machine. By buying said nerd Vista for Dummies , the nerd can continue to avoid vista machines saying "RTFM" as he hands said book over

Really early adopters

I always have to laugh at job descriptions and stupid requirements for x years experience - starting from when I was a callow trainee programmer back in 1983 when people were asking for 3 years experience IBM system 36's (machine launched 1983) all the way through to one I saw just this morning - 2 years experience maintaining vista and mac osx leopard

It was his strange behaviour that got him ejected

A little more info from the Cairns Post, adding details that sure seem relevant:

“A man’s odd behaviour was what patrons of a Cairns pub say led them to fear he was a terrorist.... Mr Chalk failed to mention he was standing on the dance floor motionless for a period of 20-30 minutes...Mr Chalk also failed to mention he had a side pack on his hip with wires hanging out of it, and the fact that it was 10.30pm and he was carrying a book called The Unknown Terrorist in clear view”.

The wires were from Chalk’s MP3 player.

Shame its not legal

Went looking for dvd's today as Xmas present to myself as I am into old war movies - Battle of Britain, Tora Tora Tora, Dam Busters all AUD 25 (on Amazon USD12 + ph = around AUD25) for a movie made in the 60's & 70's FFS !!!!

Found "Sink the Bismark" on a remainders table for $10 .... oooh that Dana Winters (born in Germany incidentally) ....

Now does anybody know where I can get a copy of Fraulein Doctor (IMDB entry http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064350/) legally or otherwise :-)

Whatever you do - don't mention the war

Even if not true, it seems to us on the otherside of the globe to be typical of government thinking

Think back to Trafalgar Day last year (you when you poms celebrated the 250th anniversary of your most important military victory since 1066) - and many people were bemused by what exactly they WERE celebrating as you weren't allowed the F or V words (minds out of the gutter - French & Victory)

Uses more fuel than than a hummer ?

What do they fuel it with & what sort of mpg do they get ?