Category Archives: AU

Top games

Edge 100 best video games For Aussies wanting to grab a copy, Edge’s 100 Best videogames of all time (air freight) has landed in newsagents (well, a few of the better ones), though all but one copy had been snapped up by the time I visited MagNation today at lunchtime, so you’ll have to be quick. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait a couple of months for the sea freight edition to arrive.

The release of the list of games made the news worldwide, with Legend of Zelda: Ocarina being awarded the top gong.

Meanwhile, GameTunnel has named the top 100 indie games of the last three years.

MODM, NAS, APC and other acronyms

I’m sorry Cam. I was intending to go to tonight’s MODM (Melbourne’s Online Digital Media) event at Fed Square, but after a bugger of a day at work (that started before I even left the house, and got steadily more frenetic) frankly, on a cold night like this, I just wanted to get home to my warm house and a bowl of soup. Hope it went well though.

In my spare moments today, I’d been eyeing off today’s Zazz offer — a basic desktop machine for A$453 (inc shipping). Basic it may be, but it’s actually got more grunt than my secondary desktop machine, which is getting old and is far from dazzling in its speed, and sometimes frustrating compared to the faster PC. (Also its USB ports don’t work, and I haven’t got the energy/expertise to figure out why.)

I was finding that tempting enough, then I found myself reading this month’s APC on the train home, an article about setting up a NAS on an old PC. Ooh. Now there’s an idea. Glenn isn’t the only Geekranter who’s been looking at options for this — it’s been something I’ve been thinking about for some time now. (I did try leaving files on the MG35, but it’s not ideal, and it’s very slow via Ethernet.)

So I’ve ordered the Zazz deal for a new secondary desktop, and while I wait for that, I’ll try and figure out how to swap the Windows XP licence off the old PC and onto the new one (and Ubuntu onto the old, to run the NAS as per APC’s suggestion — though NAS-specific OSs such as FreeNAS also look like a good option).

More broadband in Crikey and the ABC

Economist Joshua Gans has taken up my cause of “what the hell do we need fast broadband for?” in CoreEcon More broadband in Crikey and the ABC – he asks, “why should we give money/monopoly rights/subsidization to Telstra to create a higher speed network? If there was some economic benefit in it then it would fund itself.”

Would someone please ask Kevin Rudd that same question? Please don’t spend $10b of my taxes so that pimply-faced teenagers can download porn faster.

Japan and Korea has pervasive 100Mb networks. Has there been a big business uptake? No, they’re using that bandwidth for gaming. Don’t get me wrong, gaming’s great and all, but I’d rather you spent my tax dollars on… I dunno… stopping global warming. If I want to game, let me spend my money on it, not the taxpayers’.

It used to be that TV was the opiate of the masses. Now it appears to be downloadable video is.

Disproportionate Response?

Aussie software pirate extradited to the USA because enough people downloaded software cracked by him and his cohorts that, had every single copied program been sold would have generated retail revenue of $US50 million.

In a fun aside, the article points out that anyone accused of pirating software worth more than USD$1000 could also be extradited.

Now I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve seen commercial software cracked it’s so that it could be used as shareware – try before you buy. Which I see as a perfectly reasonable thing to do, given the returnability and fitness-for-purpose clauses within commercial software – i.e. if it sets fire to your house, it’s your problem not ours. So testing before dropping hundreds of dollars on something seems sane. And those who would steal the software rather than test it were never going to buy it in the first place, even if it was impossible to pirate software. I really don’t see what the problem is.

In the meantime, the USA is the only country which voted against a resolution for an arms trade treaty to control the proliferation of small arms in areas of conflict.

I think the places that copyright law is taking us will lead to an uprising. This is getting ridiculous.

Australian PM spam

Someone’s spamming Australian email addresses with a fake news bulletin about PM John Howard having had a heart attack. It includes a link supposedly to The Australian newspaper, but which in fact goes to http://www.theau-news.org/ The spams come from a variety of addresses, with subject lines such as “John Howard, the current Prime Minister of Australia have survived a heart attack” and “Best surgeons are struggling for the life of the Prime Minister”.

The domain was registered only a few days ago, to a post-office box in Nova Scotia, Canada, and apparently the site tries to install malware.

SYDNEY, February 18, 2007 08:56pm (AEDT) – The Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard have survived a heart attack. Mr Howard, 67 years old, was at Kirribilli House in Sydney, his prime residence, when he was suddenly stricken. Mr Howard was taken to the Royal North Shore Hospital where the best surgeons of Australia are struggling for his life.

Click on the link below to get the latest information on the health of the Prime Minister:

The Australian – keeping the nation informed
Continue reading →

PS3 in PAL territories

Sony’s PS3 will be available from March 23rd in PAL territories such as Australia and Europe. The Age reports it’ll retail for A$999 in Australia, and it’ll be the 60Gb hard drive version — the cheaper version won’t be sold. The BBC notes Europeans will also get the more expensive model.

Now, how many people are umming and erring because they want a PS3, but are still officially boycotting Sony because of the rootkit debacle?

AU copyright laws

The AU guvmint’s new copyright laws have received royal assent. Attorney-General Philip Ruddock feels compelled to an FAQ about them.

Hmmm. You’re not allowed to circumvent CD copy-protection. I wonder if that includes holding down Shift to stop the Autorun as you put it in the computer?

Even Kim Weatherall (who I assumed until the other day was a bloke; but she’s clearly not) notes that some of the significant dodgy provisions have been removed from the bill, particularly with regard to parody. Maybe that means I can produce Mcdonalds on Uluru t-shirts?

The UK is also reviewing its laws, and looks set to legalise parody.

And everybody’s seen this by now, but hey, it’s copyright-related: Google copies Yahoo. I mean really copies.

What I learned from Scrutineering an Election

I scrutineered the 2006 Victorian State Election. Comments are made in the context of the voting systems used there: Preferential for the lower house, and Single Transferable Vote for the upper house. I was in a very safe Labour seat.

  1. HTV cards seem to hold quite a sway over voters; about two thirds of them vote as per the HTV card. In the upper house, HTV cards are unnecessary – the preferences are built in to the system. The informal rate is still disturbingly high.

    Because of this, I think the lower house ticket should allow a single “1”, tick or a cross to be entered – just like the upper house. It would eliminate the need for HTV cards.

  2. How To Vote (HTV) cards don’t affect upper house results. The Democrats were handing out HTVs at my booth. The Democrats weren’t running a lower house candidate, only upper house. The DLP and People Power were in a similar boat, but weren’t handing out HTVs. They all got the same number of Above The Line (ATL) votes.
  3. The ALP don’t care about the upper house. After the lower house count finished, the ALP scrutineers left. No Liberal scrutineer ever showed. The Labour guys said they were there “to make sure the Liberals don’t pull one of their dirty tricks” – no, they wouldn’t elaborate.
  4. Donkey voting is alive and well. I didn’t capture the rate, but I have been told 1%. I think it might even be 2% or more, looking at my figures. But in my booth, a donkey vote could easily have been classified as a “Not the sitting candidate – I hate major political parties” vote.
  5. The preferential voting system is not well understood.

    The VEC has made it as easy as they could for voters to vote formally.

    While the general process of numbering from one to the number of candidates is broadly understood by Election staff, even they don’t get the finer points of what constitutes a formal vote. The general gist for this election was “do as much as you can to make the vote valid” – so if the last digit was missing off a lower house ballot, it was clear what the voter’s intentions were; if the upper house ticket had marks both above the line and below it, the more specific (i.e., BTL) vote was taken. In addition to a “1”, a tick or a cross was acceptable; digits other than 1 didn’t invalidate a formal ballot. Basically, within the voting rules, great allowances were made for what counted as a formal vote. I spent a lot of my scrutineering time adjudicating as to what a formal ballot looked like. Which brings me to:

    • What does a valid “1” look like? Some fonts put a bar at top, or top and bottom. And it seems some people write them like a seven, and others like an upside-down square-mirror-imaged J. Is a half-cross a “1”, or enough of a cross to make a formal vote?
  6. Some people object to compulsory voting.

    Nearly half of the informal votes I saw were completely blank. They suggest a decision to not vote. From my read of this AEC research paper on informal voting, 1.5% – 3.5% points of informal voting are by people who don’t want to vote (something like 25% of people don’t want to vote). These figures correlate to what I saw.

    15% of voters didn’t bother turning up to vote. Another 9% shouldn’t have bothered – their votes were informal. So the election was decided by the 75% of voters who could (both willing and able to) vote.

  7. People are idiots

    Apparently there are some other correlated predictors for informal voting: English as a second language (ESL), little education and too many candidates. The ESLers have no excuse, election materials are provided in the twenty or so dominate foreign languages. Too many candidates for your little brain? Boo hoo. My booth had a stunning four candidates – most people can count to three. Didn’t go to school? Doesn’t preclude you from counting to three. The only reasonable explanation is People Are Idiots.

    This observation is also made in the context of the first point in my list.

I scrutineered to confirm my last point (it’s not that hard, I really couldn’t believe the informal rate was that high), and to challenge my assumption about HTV cards – they don’t work. Wrong. They work wonderfully. I also couldn’t believe that so many people vote “1” for a major party – but I was wrong, nearly 90% of valid votes cast were for the majors. I still don’t know why, but at least I’ve seen with my own eyes that it happens.

Perhaps we should just let our kids vote.

Phone numbering schemes

Raymond Chen writes about the notoriously complicated North American telephone dialling rules.

It would appear that despite the huge population growth over the decades, leading to more than 10,000,000 phones in many major cities (less than that actually, given phone exchange limitations and so on), nobody’s had the guts to change the (xxx) xxx-xxxx phone numbering system that’s been in action over there for the past 50 years. And apart from the issues with cities blowing the limit and getting multiple area codes, they’ve also got problems with cell-phones being tied to regions, rather than being truly nationally mobile.

In Australia we went through short-term pain for long-term gain, migrating from a phone numbering system that was mostly (xx) xxx-xxxx in the big cities (and a lot of variations in rural areas and for mobiles) to being uniformly (xx) xxxx-xxxx, which should allow for plenty of growth over several decades. Perhaps longer if fax machines and dialup modems (and separate lines for them) and even fixed-lines continue to die-off. It’s meant that dialling is pretty consistent.

On the other hand, it has to be pointed out that the North American numbering plan covers some 24 countries and territories, so I appreciate revamping it would be a helluva job.

WA gets summer time

I bet IT people serving Western Australia are groaning… they’ll be trialling summer time in that state from December 3rd until March, and for the next three years. Way to go to give people plenty of notice, fellas!

The next question is, will the vendors get patches out pronto, or just leave users/support people to figure out a solution for themselves?