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Australian Democracy is “Microsoft Compatible”

Here is the Australian Electoral Commission documentation on how to register a political party [1]. It includes the requirement for “A Microsoft compatible electronic membership list (and paper copy) providing the following information“.

So a prerequisite for registering a political party appears to be the ownership of a PC running Windows. While it may be [...]

April 6th, 2009 | Tags: | Category: Liberty, Politics | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)

Fads and Internet Services

Richard Glover has written a polemic about fads on the net [1]. His points are essentially good, but he does over-reach them a bit (which is part of the polemic style) and he also seems a little unimaginative about the future of technology. He starts by suggesting that Twitter [2] is a fad. Twitter has [...]

April 5th, 2009 | Category: Misc Computer | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)

Real-World Car Safety Tests

The car safety tests that are required for every new mass-market passenger vehicle are flawed in many ways. Here is a list of the most obvious flaws (please point out any that I’ve missed):

There has been no research to make accurate crash-test dummies to represent women and children, and I believe that there has [...]

April 4th, 2009 | Tags: | Category: Cars | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)

Tithing for Open Source

It’s common to hear a complaint of the form “I get paid to keep computers running not hack an OS” coming from someone who uses an Open Source OS such as Linux, BSD, or Open Solaris.

It seems to me that part of the job of keeping computers running when using Open Source software IS [...]

April 3rd, 2009 | Category: Misc Computer | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)

Google Server Design

Cnet has an article on the design of the Google servers [1]. It seems that their main servers are 2RU systems with a custom Gigabyte motherboard that takes only 12V DC input. The PSUs provide 12V DC and each system has a 12V battery backup to keep things running before a generator starts in the [...]

April 3rd, 2009 | Tags: , , | Category: Misc Computer | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
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