Jimmy's weblog

After seven years as Australia’s Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Alston is finally gone to be replaced by former Attorney General Daryl Williams.
Senator Alston leaves behind a long trail of “achievements” from his time as Minister, including:

A digital TV regime no-one watches due to its high cost and lack of [...]

The AFL Grand Final weekend produced a magnificent victory for the Brisbane Lions over the Collingwood Magpies. Despite going in as underdogs, the Lions never looked like losing as they led from the first score to the last to win their third premiership in a row - a feat not seen in fifty years.
The [...]

Today’s phrase of the day is “doubleplusgood duckspeaker” from Newspeak; the language used in George Orwell’s book, 1984.
For those who haven’t read 1984, Newspeak was designed to eliminate all redundant language in an effort to limit the scope of people’s thinking. A single adjective is used (in this case “good”) and then strengthened and [...]

Despite Telstra spending a large part of their annual AUD$100 million marketing budget trying to convince us otherwise, it turns out that Australia has one of the world’s most expensive broadband pricing regimes. Australia also has the honour of being having the second lowest broaband penetration level of the thirty countries surveyed by International [...]

WASHINGTON, DC—After decades of antagonism between the two global powers, the U.S. has officially severed relations with Them, Bush administration officials announced Tuesday.
“They have refused to comply with the U.S. time and time again,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, following failed 11th-hour negotiations Monday night. “It’s always unfortunate when diplomacy fails, but we could not [...]

With the news that the RIAA has just sued and settled with a twelve year old girl, it might be time to think about what kinds of people your CD purchasing supports. If you conclude (as I did) that you would prefer your money went to people with slightly better ethics, then you should [...]

The RIAA is offering an amnesty to Internet filesharers as long as they:

Identify themselves with photo ID
Make a sworn statement that they have deleted the files they shared
Pledge to stop the infringing behaviour

For anyone insane enough to consider this offer, I recommend doing a little more thinking and the quotation below from http://counterpunch.org/glahn09092003.html might help [...]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45117-2003Sep8.html
To put it in perspective, Bush hopes to spend more in Iraq and Afghanistan than all 50 states say they need — $78 billion — to finance the budget shortfalls they anticipate for 2004.
The request is higher than the $74 billion the Defense Department plans to spend on all new weapons purchases next year, [...]

What a confusing day today. With the announcement of Telstra’s plans to move heavily towards using open source software, I just don’t know what to believe. On the one hand, Microsoft is evil, but on the other, so is Telstra. ;-)
Telstra has one of Australia’s largest IT budgets so this is a [...]

And people wonder why I laugh every time Bill Gates talks about Windows having a lower Total Cost of Ownership than Mac OS or Linux.

Sobig has overtaken Klez, Love Bug and Yaha in the league table of most economically damaging malware tracked within the SIPS database, having now recorded $14.62 billion of economic damages worldwide [...]