Just an abridged version of my experiences with IBM in Australia....

A company I worked for in the mid 2000's supplied a custom solution for one of Australia's large banks. Unfortunately, the bank also also used IBM to supply some of the infrastructure and support to get to our data centres. In the first year, we had 3-4 major outages which IBM every time blamed the company I worked for of the outage and every time we were able to show it was a problem on the IBM side. It got so bad that when ever IBM blamed the company I worked for of a problem or outage, the bank started to demand that IBM back up their claims before they would believe them.

My company ended up looking great, IBM not so good. I heard that not long after I had gone to work for anything company, the bank ended up dropping the IBM side of things and went with someone else.

I work at a University. You can always tell when the exam periods have started by the fact that you are constantly seeing fire engines on campus.

Students do the most stupid things to get out of doing an exam they have not prepared for.

I have also seen fake student IDs so someone else can sit the exam and other dodgey dealings. It sucks for the staff (I have lost count of the amount of times I have had to evacuate the data centre/office due to a fire alarm) and also screws over the other students since they often need to resit the exam. It also costs the university money since they get charged for every fire department response.

The most common reason I usually get from non-technical people on why they want or why they purchased an iPhone (or iPad) was because they are 'cool' or 'trendy'. None of them has been able to tell me why or what features it has or does better than any of its competitors. Simply put, they didn't give a damn about how well their device functions when they use it, just the image they can reflect or inherit by owning one.

One of the linked articles mentioned a Chinese student placing a 120Gb at a Sydney TAFE but when you look at the location database map option, it is pinned to a location which is about 30-40km's from where it really is. It shows it as being in Western Sydney when it should be showing it as being in/near to the Sydney CBD. If you look at the photos one of them shows a sign for Harris street which is a main road the TAFE is located next to in/near the Sydney CBD. Not sure how it ended up so far away on the map.

As an aside, I wonder how many of these drives are now infected with malware etc by now.

I am not sure where you live that has a large number of mutants who have 'up to ten fingers'. Where I live, most people have 8 fingers and two thumbs.

A little off topic I know but I just needed to say that I miss the old themes.org web site.

I saw this article on gamingonlinux.com last night. I was interested in one when I first saw the article. The casing was OK and you could get some decent hardware configurations, on top of that the pricing listed (for the American market) made the product a reasonable option. So I decided to see what was available for the Australian market and the price was one of the two points I made on why I would pass. The other was the fact that on the Australian Dell Alien page, there was no option for Ubuntu when I looked.

Because I live in an apartment block and have in the past had packages dumped at the communal front door of the apartment block and I work in an industrial type complex where all the delivery people seem to get lost and either don't deliver the package and I have to pick it up from their depo on the other side of the city or it gets delivered to the wrong building and I am lucky to every see it.

Something like this would be great for me since it means I know that it will be delivered safetly and and be secured until I pick it up at my time of choosing.

I work at a place that has a similar policy. Doesn't stop us from using way to many proprietary solutions that are actually worse than the Open Source solution. A lot of that is down to OS religion and people not actually understanding what Open Source is. We have managers (and directors) that believe the software needs to be a shrink wrapped solution from a proprietary vendor like Microsoft to be a decent solution and to be able to get 'Enterprise' level support. Many don't realise that just because you can get an Open Source solution for free that; It is just as good as the non Open Source solution and if you really feel you need to pay for 'Enterprise' support and if this is something you need then for a large number of the solutions you would be realistically looking at, that is supplied as well. For the ones I have investigatedt, support has usually worked out to be cheaper than the closed source solution as well.

Just my $0.02.

... buy spore.

I wanted to buy spore and I would like to buy SimCity but the DRM is just ridiculous. I have had varied problems with other DRM based games and I am over it. Give me a game I can play and also make the saves to my local machine if I want to and I will buy it (if I like it of course). Bundle the game with crippling DRM, not interested. Simple as that.

Slackware for home, Crunchbang for a few of my older devices and currently moving from Ubunutu to Mint at work. I have found Ubunutu becoming less apealing over the last few years as well as less friendly with the Linux world which has caused me a few problems.

Server wise, if I have a choice I go Debian, otherwise if I do have to have an enterprise distro, I go RHEL. The long release cycles of Debian are annoying so if they can get that sorted out, I would be pretty happy and there is a good chance I would start looking at that for my desktop environments again.

There is a simple reason for this. Once you buy the book, you own the book and the only cost you then have is the housing of the book.

A large number of the books a university would need a digital copy of, you need to license said copy. This incurs a yearly fee and ends up costing a small fortune.

Came on to say this. Details can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macquarie_University_Library

Video footage of it in action can be found on youtube eg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thKAS3CPz_c

Zimbra. To a large extent, it's a drop in Exchange replacement which will plug straight into an existing AD environment if you so wish.

Does it come with a free frogurt?