Jimmy's weblog

Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveller, I will not talk about people a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism. — Henry David Thoreau

Archive for September, 2003

Farewell to the “World’s biggest Luddite”

Tuesday September 30, 2003 22:53

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 [...]

A weekend of three-in-a-rows

Monday September 29, 2003 20:50

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 [...]

Posted in Sport | No Comments »

Doubleplusgood duckspeaker

Tuesday September 23, 2003 22:27

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 [...]

Posted in General | No Comments »

Australia’s expensive broadband Internet access

Monday September 22, 2003 19:40

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 [...]

Relations break down between US and Them

Tuesday September 16, 2003 15:40

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 [...]

Posted in General | No Comments »

Download music legally

Thursday September 11, 2003 17:26

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 [...]

Posted in Music | No Comments »

RIAA filesharing amnesty

Wednesday September 10, 2003 20:09

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 [...]

Posted in Music | No Comments »

The (financial) cost of the Iraq war

Wednesday September 10, 2003 15:31

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, [...]

Telstra moves towards open source software

Tuesday September 2, 2003 18:22

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 [...]

Sobig virus most expensive ever

Monday September 1, 2003 20:11

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 [...]

Posted in Windows | No Comments »