A few years back, when last I looked, the BSAA (local Australian tentacle/surrogate of the BSA) were treating each PC sold as representing a certain quantity of licensed software that would be in use. They then compared this with some software license sales figures (the accuracy of which is another question), and if there were more deemed licenses in use through new PC sales than there were actual license sales, (guess what! there were!!) then that was their damning evidence that teh piratez were stealing Christmas.

This meant that some 40 staff desktops and 120 teaching laboratory computers at my workplace (a university CS department) which were bought with no OS license and installed with Debian, actually contributed to the BSAA's frothy-mouthed argument that rampant piracy was costing Australia many quality local jobs employing drones to process purchases of software produced overseas by US companies... that incidentally booked most of their profits via subsidiaries based in Ireland, thanks to its low low rate of corporate tax at that time.

So there you have it:
- I am a pirate
- my work was full of piracy
- you probably are a pirate too

because I/they/you have the temerity to buy machines with no OS to run free operating systems and free applications.

Australia - rhymes with failya. :-)

D'oh - thanks for spotting my arithmetic screwup. Serves me right for posting in haste. And you have a great point about how the savings work out w.r.t. marginal tax rates. Consider me corrected...

Yes, after stopping up cracks and installing insulation, solar water heating is the best thing that we can do here in Australia as well - using thermal solar energy to supplant electrical resistive heating is incredibly appropriate. For places without enough sun, there are air-to-water heat pump hot water systems which make more sense than resistive heating for the coastal regions of Australia; they aren't much good for winter in the high country though - we get down to -8 deg C at night, which is nothing compared to lots of Europe and North America, but much lower than the coastal areas. I suspect that the higher humidity at the coast may help a bit too with how much heat you can extract from the (above-freezing) air.

This is not surprising, but not that encouraging either. If you pay for a bit of fancy landscaping and planting around your house before you sell it, you can often improve your house resale value by much more than the cost of the work. Solar also offers a warm glow of righteousness far out of proportion with energy generated.

Where I live (50km south of Canberra, Australia), we're paying ~20 of your Earth cents for a kWh during the day around here, so if you assume 7kWh per day from a 1kW solar installation (not that hard here, as we get a lot of sun), it takes 14 years to earn back $3900. Electricity will certainly go up in cost during that time, but I wonder whether you wouldn't be better putting $4000 into some safe-ish investment and concentrating on reducing your energy usage instead.

For years, I was holding out for Nanosolar or First Solar to get domestic panels out at somewhere nearer to $2/kW and without so much embodied energy in the panels, but they don't look to be interested in domestic sales. Until then, the only reason that panels are cheap in Australia is because of very high government regulated feed-in tariffs and purchase subsidies, which are just middle-class welfare masquerading as a renewable energy policy.

Until the government killed the program, there were businesses here doing energy efficiency assessments to see if houses qualified for interest free government loans to improve energy efficiency or install solar systems. An interview I heard with one assessor gave the impression that most houses had considerable inefficiency to rectify before it made any sense installing generating capacity. New Australian houses are still much less insulated than new houses in northern Europe or North America, rely too much on resistive electrical heating for the house and for the hot water supply, and the current fashion for building faux-Mediterranean rendered boxes with no roof overhang guarantees high cooling costs in summer. Old Australian houses often had no (as in, ZERO) insulation in them. Visitors from northern Europe are amazed at how uncomfortable and slapdash many of our houses are.

From the summary: "prototype phonic gear" - are they going back to speaking tubes like the ones on old ships?

Perhaps you meant to write "perhaps you meant"?

Or perhaps you were meant to write that by vast forces beyond your control, which acted through you to correct that misuse?

Seriously, folks, it's best to read your posting carefully if the whole reason for your posting is to encourage correct English usage.

Enough with the meta-pedantry, on with the nerdy reminiscences of old-school CGI... anyone who thinks that the original Tron graphics look cheesy should read more about what went into that film; when I saw that film in 1982, it was far ahead of anything else that had been done with computer animation in the mainstream media.

When you understand how much traditional effects and animation handiwork went into fusing the CGI with the actors and animation, it's clear that the film effects were as good as you could make them with that technology at that time. With a bit better script, it could have been a much better film.

You obviously never used the Sun Member Support Center. Getting a report on your installed base felt like one of those children's book with the 45rpm record that would read a few words to you and then play a xylophone note when you should turn the page:

20 rows of results... ding! Turn the page!
Another 20 rows... ding!
Losing will to live... ding!

...with no apparent way to export the data as a big file. Wow, who would have thought that the big future of computing was somebody copying and pasting rows of data from a #$)@ Web app.

If only Sun had spent less time on all their zero-revenue "Project [some fancy name]" boondoggles, and more on Project Let's Not Piss Off Our Existing Customers.

Linux fdisk or GNU parted - change the units to sectors and you can then print the partition table out in raw sector LBA offsets.

There's another gotcha for FAT filesystems on SDHC, in that the filesystem metadata at the start of the partition has no natural power-of-two alignment. If you look into the FAT filesystem that a digital camera puts on an SD card when you format it, I suspect that you'll see a bunch of reserved sectors as padding before the FATs, to ensure that the first data sector lines up nicely with a flash write cell.

Wikipedia gives this lovely formula in their description of the FAT filesystem:

The reserved sectors field is 2 bytes, which allows padding of the alignment of the start of the data clusters to NAND flash write blocks, or even possible an erase block if that would somehow help. (erase blocks on a cheaper Intel SSD are 512kB, not sure about the sizes on SDHC cards or thumb drives).

Ummm, nothing? I already got whacked by the cluebat, but I'd be happy if others could be spared the same pain.

More than a decade after hard drives stopped internally using a fixed cylinder/head/sector geometry, we finally get mass market deployment of a partitioning scheme that completely gets rid of this big, dumb lie.

All the hoo-haa over new drives with 4kB sectors and the way that DOS-compatible operating systems partitioning tools want you to lay out your disk has actually already been experienced by sysadmins for years, when they attempt to come up with partitioning schemes for those operating systems that align filesystem blocks with the underlying geometry of SSD write blocks or RAID 5 stripe segments.

Next time you buy an SD card or thumb drive, stick it into a box with a decent formatting tool and look at the actual start sector for the partitions. You will find that the manufacturers have quietly been using sane partition start sector values (i.e., power of two, not "first sector of second track of cylinder 0") because they know that the performance of the device would be horrible if almost every VFAT cluster write spanned multiple flash write blocks.

And all this stuffing around has been forced upon us because Microsoft never had the balls to say, "you want to rock out with Borland Sidekick or Netware 3.0? Sure, use a frickin' VM, or use a new version of DOS that speaks native LBA to the BIOS. Those are your choices."

All the brainpower and effort that has been wasted on workarounds for the effects of the brain damaged MBR partitioning table could have been much better used actually improving how computers worked, rather than treading water.

Video compression works great for a talking head or pan shots in movies, but try watching HD video of surf breaking, or the tracking shots of (round) football stars running around after scoring a goal, with the fans all going crazy behind them, and you will see from all the lovely blocking artifacts that HD video compression is built on some pretty narrow assumptions.

In fact, a friend of mine has for many years made many sorts of computer animation with lots of twiddly stuff evolving all over the screen, and for a long time it was a toss up whether it was better to distribute it on a VHS tape or compressed with the codecs of the day.

If you think that Tokay is a poor name for an Australian fortified wine made "in the Tokay style", you'll be happy to know that an Australian wine industry body, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to rebrand Tokayoid Australian wines as "Topaque".

FSM knows where they got that name from... I guess you are supposed to drink it while sitting on leatherette sofas, wearing diamonique jewelery.

Just like Ray Kurzweil.

The level of understanding of Internet issues displayed by the Australian Communications Minister is stunning.

Ted Stevens: the Internet is a series of tubes.
Stephen Conroy: unsecured wireless access points are transparent tubes that it is a deep invasion of privacy to look through.

Dear Minister: Driving past a house and picking up traffic on an unsecured wireless network is like walking past the house of a stupid person who is using his hands-free phone by standing on the roof of his house and shouting a conversation down to where his phone is lying. You are bound to hear something that ought to have been private had the person not been communicating in a stupid way.

But this privacy beatup has caused the Minister to bring forth this gem, taken from Conroy slams "creepy" Google:

Indeed. Well, I think the approach taken by Stephen Conroy to Internet censorship is a bit creepy, frankly.

When it comes to his attitude to the Australian Government's own censorship scheme and its secret list of forbidden sites, his response is simply, 'trust us'.

It is increasingly clear that we can trust Minister Conroy to act on his gut feelings.

• Snooping fragments of unsecured wireless comms feels like an invasion of privacy, therefore must be bad.
• Websites which offend against his sense of decency feels bad, therefore he must prevent as many people as possible from seeing them.
• AUD$43B National Broadband Network? Feels so good that a cost/benefit analysis is clearly superfluous.

Yeah, I'm getting a pretty good idea of what I can trust Minister Conroy to do.

Yes, and if they think that everybody uses IE6 is is misguided, or stupid, and would be so much better running IE9 instead of IE6, they they're kidding themselves. The only reason I EVER use Internet Explorer is when I need to use some broken POC corporate web (site/app) that doesn't work under Firefox/Seamonkey. The version of IE with maximum chance of behaving right with those brain damaged web sites is IE6. So tell me again why I want IE9 instead of IE6?

Perhaps a petition:
"Dear Microsoft - please understand that many people still use IE6 because they need to use the web sites that you encouraged web developers to create way back when IE6 was supposed to take over the world. Stop ranting at users to upgrade to IE9; instead apologize to web developers for leading them up the garden path, and ask them to fix their broken web sites to comply with genuine cross-platform standards."

If the broken web sites got fixed, Microsoft could upgrade my installation of IE6 to IE13 for all I care. It's not like I would actually use it as my main browser out of choice.