The AT&T Documenters Workbench has the best spell checker I have ever used. If you keep spelling "the" as "xqy", it learns and copes to the point where it can will offer "then" to xqyn". It knows that "rhw" might be "the" as well as "tje" is "the" as it knows keyboard layout. It was also the best spell checker for then/than lose/loose and it would adapt its dictionary based on reading level so it won't get tripped up on efficiency/efficacy

Someone needs to find out who (if anyone) owns the copyright and make it open source friendly.

AT&T had other tool kits too that would be very useful to the modern world but they seemed to have disappeared.

While I agree that competent users of vi or emacs can all do the same things, I feel that the major difference between the two is related to what happens when a cat walks on the keyboard.

GOSSIP is still the required email system for the US DOD and other government agencies. It is just that SNMP is an allowed migration plan thanks to two words I added to a very large document a long time ago. There is no functioning X.400 email system that I know of. Exchange was catching up with the very broken ISODE which had been the reference implementation for decades.

That is the ITU's current plan. It was also a core concept of the X.400/X.500 based email systems.

It can cost more because the real numbers are starting to surface. The pre-election numbers were based on published data which was wrong. Right now the predictable capital expenses of this project are growing at rate that is out of control. There are also some major labour shortages as there are only so many people who can put the fibre in the ground -- mostly due to very old rules about certifications needed to work on anything involving electricity or working in a telco pit.

The first step of the new fibre network is to make sure that each exchange has a reasonable amount of fiber connecting it to the core. This hasn't been done yet and it will take years to do just that at the current rate. Once all the exchanges are hooked up, that breaks the ADSL monopoly and allows existing ISPs to install their own equipment in exchanges and drop their prices while offering naked DSL or port binding or even last mile 10 gigabit ethernet.

The second step is to roll out to the existing RIMs. These are remote extensions of the phone exchange switch and sometimes have ADSL at slow speeds. These tend to have fiber connections to them already but that fibre can't be upgraded to higher speeds since not all fiber is equal and the new stuff is more equal than others. The RIMs are part of the Node infrastructure and many already have ADSL2+ DSALMs but not enough back haul capability.

The third step is to upgrade DSLAMs combined with a rollout of replacement fiber where the existing copper is failing. The current list of areas at high priority for replacement will require every crew that is currently doing the core fibre install several years.

There are some areas that have two HFC networks, ADSL2+, 4G and are passed by competing fibre networks as well. Those areas are now last on the priority list.

Another issue that has annoyed many people is that the old maps of "when do I get fibre" would mark huge areas in "build out within two years" when the only parts that were planned was often connecting a new building or subdivision to the NBN. Those areas have all been removed from the map now.

When talking about the last mile CAPEX, the previous plan assumed nearly every house would be connected and factored in price increases that were above the current rate of inflation. Existing line cost about $36 per month which covers its written down CAPEX, the dial tone and minimal maintenance. Replacing that was expected to cost about $5,000 or now $7,000 per house at today's costs. While that can be factored over whatever term the government is willing to provide the loans, at the current rate it adds $35 per month to everyone's phone lines for 30 years which doubles the costs of the non-data user's phone. If there is any decrease in take-up, those costs start to raise rapidly. When the costs of 4G is less than the cost of a wired connection, what will the take up rate be in 5 years? If it isn't close to 90%, the finance plan breaks. With the demise of the wired phone and desktop computer combined with decreasing costs of wireless service that works anywhere, I can't see how the number of fixed wired services will not decrease.

So a lighting strike will take out both? You will also find ground loop problems and while ethernet is only supposed to work at about 110 meters, it will work to about double that before it starts not working and you may need to force the network into 10 or 100 mb mode.

There are several major reasons for backup:
1) computer/drive/house is destroyed
2) files were accidently deleted
3) historic archive

For #1 you have to find a way to restore onto new hardware which might have problems if you don't have the crypto keys off site too.

For #2 a local drive is the best and most automatic but it has to be able to store several versions of files (why didn't Linux get the VMS file preservation option?)

For #3 the best option is clone the hard drive every few months/years. Or better yet, remove old drive and install a new one and restore your data so you can check your data is still intact.

I tend to use backup servers which use rsync and linked files to allow several versions and deal with some data deduplication. About once a week I copy that data set to another disk and then get that off site. The result is I can restore screwups in about 5 minutes and if the place burns down, I am out out a week of data. Sicne the disks keep getting bigger, I also have backups from years ago should the tax man want to know about something specific 5 years ago if the paper records were to be unreadable. My typical backup server build is a freebsd box booting off a flash stick card and then lots of disk. The result is I only need a copy of the flash stick and and a disk and any generic PC to restore the data.

Since I observed the process, I'll describe the process as I saw it.
The House votes are all dumped on a table and turned right side up. These were green sheets I'm guessing were 1/3 or 1/4 A4 sheets. Once that is done, there are other tables set up with 7 piles. Each vote is put there by the primary vote (i.e. the #1 vote) or they are set in the "informal" pile. Some people were very efficient with this as they would take a stack and remove all the $major_party1 but others would run around the table place ballots. (Kunth Vol 3?) Once those are done, they are all counted and the #3->#n piles are then checked for preferences. That means deciding which of the 2 major parties gets the by deciding which number is lower, the 3rd box or the 9th box. The ballots are also not cut nice so the middle boxes aren't in the same position and this appears to be a highly error prone process. There are some clues for rapid sorting (i.e. the 9th box has a 9 so they don't get that vote) but the rest is just tedious work. The forms (The Election peoples, and parties Libs, Labor, Greens) all seem to assume a Lib/Labor are going to win #1 and #2.

Once the second preferences are counted, they are called in to the main counting room and all the party reps call them into their campaign HQs.

The Senate count is more of a pain because the ballots are letter sized tall and about yard long. That makes then very hard to sort and same procedure above is used with less efficiency. You can't have nice neat piles on a table since you need several tables to hold all the paper just for the major parties. They had to go with the floor for the minor parties and the below the line votes took even more but that might have been a result of not having any sort of advice on even how to approach the problem (they should have sorted by party next to the others and then sorted by candidate but what do I know, I can't can't even cite the optimum selection sort variation out of Kv3)

Major parties have Scrutineers who watch the count. Out of the 4 in one school that had about 2,200 votes, I was the only one to look at any of the Senate ballots closely and the others left after the House votes were counted. About 100 or so of those 2,000 were votes below the line. There were about 250+ informal votes. Many were blank, some were just wrong. A few voted for 2 parties. One put preferences above the line (only should have picked 1) as well as all the boxes below. One ranked them something like "A B C...Z What theres more?"

The counting staff seems to enjoy some of the odd comments and they seem to have some odd contests...

One winner was someone who wrote something like "legalises weed" and then managed to check the box next to the box with one of the drug reform parties so their vote was for a radical right group with much different attitudes than the voter. Someone else had a whinge about SUVs on the road and another filled up the empty space on with a dissertation about animal which is impressive since the paper was about a meter long. Most of the rest could be described as rude comments about the elected officials.

There were a number of voters who can't seem to count with multiple 2's and there were a few questions about "one or a seven?" The Aussie rules state the officer is to assume vote is valid and try to consider what the voter was trying to do. As a result having an odd squiggle where the number for 3 might go when there isn't a legible 3 is considered valid vote. The scrutineers can ask for a ballot to be reconsidered or point out that one is in the wrong pile but that is about it. Out of 2,200+ votes, there were 4 that were miss accounted for in the first check and caught by scrutineers.

The U-shaped shows that being slightly faster (about 5km/hr) than average is the safest speed to drive. It was from research in 1964 and reaffirmed in thousands of research papers from all over the world.

The opposing opinion comes from a few papers from Aussie universities who get their funding in part from speed camera research and speed camera revenue but most of their work ignores the left part of the curve.

The 3% speeding tolerance in Victoria Australia has had exactly the same effect which has offset the normal drop in accident rates as the fleet becomes safer.

Sir Brian May is a musician and was making a bit more than 6 figures starting a while back. He also did a bit of Astrophysics on the side which might explain why he knows what makes the rockin' world go round.

A former head of AT&T (might have been Fred Kappel, CEO in 1960s) made the comment that you have to design the network to cover the traffic on Mother's Day and everything else is free.

In the direct dial exchanges of the 70s, 20:1 ratios were the target within the towns or exchange clusters. Long distance was priced to discourage ratios that high.

How far are we from having everything in the cloud so home access points aren't doing anything other than running a display?

When Aussie gamers are running their games on machines at colo centres in the USA so their lag times are lower, I would say the days of getting massive amounts of data to a local computer are numbered.

If I can buy a fixed connection for $70/mo or a completely mobile one for the same amount of money at 1/2 the speed, which one are most people going to take? I think the days of having a line run to everyone's home is numbered.

I have a number of messages from the mid 80s that are in MMDF or PMDF format as well as mbox but they are on a reel to reel tape and my new computer doest have any place for the tape to go.

Can anyone in Melbourne read a 9 track tape?