Posts by Dramoth

The precedent...

just claim that you took the documents for a book you're planning on writing that they were yours anyway.

But with the way things are going... that isn't going to help the guy claiming it currently

Dutton's attempt at making Australia into a fascist police state

Nothing to see here, move along... and give me your encryption keys while you are at it!

It was a DDOS attack

By the Australian public... just trying to access the servers and fill out the damned forms.

The good old Liberal Government went with an new fangled IT method of collecting all our data... just to prove to the Luddites that the technology is rubbish and we should move to a 10 year collecting cycle and chopping down more trees to create all those lovely paper forms.

Tease the trolls...

Run linux and setup a virtual box running windows xp or win95 for them to play with.

Then when they try and bill you, delete the virtual box and scream down the phone telling them that they somehow managed to screw your entire computer and it just died.

Tell them that there were essential business documents you had just finished working on and hadn't backed up on that computer and now it's dead and you can't recover them and they were for billions of dollars in sales for the company that you work for. Ask them if they are going to compensate you for your losses as you were going to get a 3% commission on the whole deal.

Bet you hear dialtone before you finish asking for compensation.

hmm

Get together with all the other countries that these big corporations are using tax rules to profit shift their money around before slotting it into a bank in a tax haven somewhere and charge those corporations with tax evasion, present the banks with various warrants and seize the money from the tax haven and spread it around the countries who are owed billions in taxes.

Should pay for a couple of tridents for the UK... or another aircraft carrier for the US.

I reckon that I have something...

that beats all three of those movies in the unwatchable stakes. A movie so bad that Stephan King successfully sued to have his name removed from the original title.

The Lawnmower Man... enough said

I like the way that this luddite government that is doing its best to regress Australia back to the 1950s is bagging anyone who doesnt jump on this cloud thingy.

And P. Lee, you are correct... a single customer cloud is a data centre.

Less latency...

Hang on a second. How can Telescum (AKA Telstra) even consider something like this while the NLP are in power. Those luddites are trying to kill the Internet in Australia by killing the NBN and anything else that even remotely looks like high speed internet. Instead of my house being eligible for the NBN next year, I think that we are now due to get it some time in 2020.

Overdrafts

The way to handle the overdrafts and loans is to use credit insurance. You would need to talk to a credit insurance broker (like one of my prior employers) and get a quote off them. That way, if the person obtaining the overdraft defaulted, you can claim the insurance and get your money back.

However, there is a premium to pay on the insurance policy and you would need to have credit insurance yourself (until such times as you had enough money in the "bank" to cover the amounts you are allowing for the overdrafts). Usually, you would pass the premium money onto the customer in the way of fees and charges on a monthly basis... plus a couple of quid extra for your time and effort in doing the paperwork.

Similar but slightly different

I find it interesting that some of you have mentioned the final mile. I am on the verge of leaving the UK and Ireland, where I have had great broadband for a number of years, to return to my home country of Australia... I will be living 2.5 hours southish of Perth.

Thanks to Teflon Tone and his sidekicks Firesale Joe and Turnbuckle Turnbull, they have pretty much killed the NBN which means that I could well be stuck with a very limited boardband connection (try a satellite connection). And as I am considering setting up a work from home development business, not having a reliable broadband connection could be a major issue.

People in the remote areas are going to always struggle whether there is net neutrality or not. Location doesnt matter.

4k graphics

is it just me or do other people get reminded of the old 4k scene back in the 90's when they see 4K graphics mentioned?

Just to be really pedantic

But the redbacks are only dangerous to small children and the elderly with heart issues. To the normal healthy adult, a redback bite will make you sick as hell for a few days but it wont kill you.

If you want spiders that will kill you... try the funnel web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_funnel-web_spider) to really fuck you up!

Easily fixed

Put a banking transfer tax on all transactions over a certain total or if they hit a threshold frequency of transactions (to stop them hitting the certain total limit).

So if a certain corporation wanted to transfer money from Australia to Ireland (for the dodgy purchase of items). If they tried to transfer it in a lump sum, you tax them on the lump sum if it is over say 100 million... and to catch them if they decide that to try avoiding paying the lump sum tax, they would transfer 10 lots of 10 mill... and did it all on the same day or spread it out over 10 days... at the end of the period, you hand them a tax bill for the total amount transferred out over time.

Either way... the government ends up getting the tax money... and to make sure that you set the frequency transaction tax at slightly higher than the lump sum tax. So if the lump sum is 25% of the total, then the frequency transaction tax is 30%. They will get the hint sooner or later that they can no longer avoid taxation.

Nothing against our brothers from India and other 2nd and third world countries, but some of their work practices just suck.

A female friend of mine got a job as a team leader for the ATO many moons ago and was placed in charge of an Indian guy who was also quite 'senior' in terms of tenure. Apparently she had to constantly go to her boss and complain about the guy because she would ask him to do something and he would go off and do something completely different to what she asked. She would also be talking to him and he would just walk off and leave her standing there. He just wouldnt take orders from a woman. Apparently, the guy before my friend was younger than this guy and he wouldnt take orders from him either.

And then when they did actually manage to get him to do the work assigned to him, it was substandard.

I studied with a lot of Indians while I was doing my degree 18 years ago and some of them were actually quite talented and could churn out quality code. But then again, those guys were also incapable of working outside of academia and ended up going on and doing masters and PHD's in Australia. And getting jobs lecturing at the uni. The rest of them tended to get done for plagiarism for either copying each others work or for copying directly from books.

Sharks habitually swim past the end of St Kilda pier... quite a few years back one of them actually got lucky when a lunch pack landed right in front of it. The mobile lunch pack, better known as a human male had no idea that he was actually on the menu that afternoon and promptly expired from the surprise.

With Windows pushing me to upgrade...

my windows 8 laptop to windows 8.1 (had a couple of popups 'advising' that it would be worth my while to upgrade as it's free)... I think that I am going to grab one of my Windows 7 ultimate disks and 'downgrade' to Windows 7... or at least move to Linux in the near future!

I can live with a migration to Windows 7. Windows 8/Server 2012 with their no-start button desktops signifies that Microsoft have broken their brains whilst trying to capture a segment of the market that they had already lost... the fondleslab and associated handheld devices.

Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 are the last windows operating systems that I will voluntarily install on a desktop. And I will also be investigating SteamOS as a viable replacement for the OS on my windows gaming machine as more games developers start to port their games to the *nix platforms.

As for productivity, I can live with openOffice or LibreOffice as my productivity suites and I can always write my own email client (sometimes it is good to be a programmer) that can communicate with a *nix based IMAP/POP3 mail server or a Microsoft Exchange server without having to resort to using a browser based application like the Mozilla based offerings.

I stopped using XP a number of years ago and the last company I worked for that was using XP on some desktops, I left nearly 2 years ago... so supporting it isnt going to be an issue.

Either way, I am not going to be too concerned about XP's imminent demise and I wont be signing up to this plug from Dell to migrate to the latest and greatest (WTF... Windows 8.1 is shite) offering from Microsoft.

Being stuck in Shannon... this is the best way to start the weekend... huzzah!

Huh...

They are trying to pass off a dumb arsed drone as being better than the SR71... a plane that was designed in the 1960s and was never surpassed as a THE surveillance plane in the world. You have to love tech that was designed when engineers were still using slide rules (which I learnt how to use way back when) and used to write out their calculations on a blackboard to proof them.

I dont know which world is better... the one where we invented all this shit or the modern day version where they pretend to invent shit!

Region 4 locked DVD players and DVDs and consoles used to be all the rage about 12 years ago. Then some bright spark in the retail industry stood up and announced that region locking in Australia was a restraint of trade and took the government to court over it... I think that it was originally over PS/2 games moreso than DVDs.

Since the court found in his favour, and people have discovered shopping online, region locking kit has gone the way of the dodo.

Saying that, more people are shopping online for their DVDs and Blurays makes me wonder whether the MPAA is counting those sales as being Australian sales or for sales in the country of origin (usually the USA). That trend in online buying could tend to skew the figures for sales in Australia and allow the MPAA to say that piracy is rife in Australia. If they lowered their prices and shipped stuff when the rest of the world gets it, things wouldnt be so bad in Oz...

Is worse than...

While I was at university there was one night when a couple of groups doing the software engineering project were in the same lab and there was one other student in there... sat in the back row, in the corner and he was apparently watching pr0n and rubbing one out when one of the distaff group members noticed it... and promptly fled the room.

Security was called and the students name was taken and he was escorted from the building and his student card was confiscated.

Apparently all the chairs in that lab got replaced, the student got expelled and much better filters got put into the schools firewall software.

So... the moral of the story is never watch pr0n while you are in a work situation.

Thank god...

I was considering getting a technet subscription last week. All I can say is thank god I didnt.