Still As Life

I was just reading a post by Duncan Riley about the potential for banning of things that are commonplace and acceptable today, purely because of the possibility of porn being received via these channels.

Duncan outlines just a few possibilities, Second Life, Skype, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, Usenet, BitTorrent, Blogs, Twitter, regular Google searches and Image searches, internet archives including Google's caching system.

In addition to this, what else is there? If Skype has the potential to allow the receipt of porn and anything else deemed unacceptable, which it no doubt does, than logically so does MSN, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and so on. Any other search engine can potentially be used to search for porn as well as Google.

While I don't deny that a porn filter would be a great thing, if it could be done effectively, as I have said before, when you start this sort of mandatory filtering, not only does the question arise about where does the line get drawn on what content gets filtered, but where does the line get drawn on what methods. Duncan even offered up the fact that porn can potentially be received via email as well, and often is in spam.

So what things get filtered and what don't? As BitTorrent is often deemed as a means for illegal downloading, despite the huge amount of legitimate uses for it, the excuse to filter it out would no doubt be jumped at, but what about everything else?

To filter out all of the possible sources leaves us with practically no internet at all, and then at speeds reduced to up to 78% slower than our already slow connections.

Mr Rudd, you and your ministers need to let go of the controlling attitude and stop even discussing this possibility. When it comes down to it, the only viable solution is to let parents teach their kids and teach parents how to use software filters. If you want, provide education about it in schools. Don't try to filter out the vast majority of the internet though.

Labels: internet, politics, rants

Well this is interesting, I just read an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about energy ratings for computers. There have been a lot of things going on as far as energy conservation and greenhouse emissions goes lately around here. First there was the introduction of the star rating system for plasma and LCD tv's because of the (in my opinion) unfounded argument that they both use significantly more power than CRT's. Now this is fine really, except that I don't agree with much of what I read, but that's for another time.

Now though there is talk of a rating system for computers themselves, from 1 to 5 stars, similar to the system used on white goods like freezers and refrigerators. The article which can be found on the Sydney Morning Herald website from earlier today goes into findings and so on, and sure, I can see why greenhouse emissions need to be reduced and energy needs to be conserved, but as was pointed out in the article, "...most big-brand computer and component makers are already likely to be complying, as they must meet the stricter European laws to ensure global sales." So in this regards, the 24 million or so computers in Australia will be predominately from these big brand manufacturers. Optima, Dell, IBM, HP, Apple and the big brand laptops like Sony, Asus, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Apple and so on. So this means it will most affect the smaller computer stores that put together computers themselves.

These smaller companies are using your everyday components that you find on the shelf and many are not put together with minimum power consumption in mind. Many of the smaller computer store's I have been involved with don't even have the equipment to check the power consumption of a computer.

So any computer that doesn't meet the minimum standard will become illegal to sell. Currently it is being considered for implementation by 2009, so thats plenty of time for these smaller companies to sort out things like this, but I expect it will increase the cost of computers through the small stores and thus affect their sales and income.

This then raises another question for me, unless individual parts are made illegal to purchase, there is no way to police the power consumption of all the computers being produced. While it's not the main computer source, there is a large market of people who build their own computers and computer's for others at no charge. These people aren't going to be checking power consumption, and I don't see any way that this can even be checked.

Aside from making individual parts illegal, which I expect would be a very bad move for the government, the only way I can see for this to work is to put pressure on the component manufacturers to make each individual part meet power requirements, presumably also using a similar system. Of course, this is not unreasonable, but it is going to be quite difficult and a lot of work to implement. To make this worse, the configuration of a computer is near limitless, even in computers from a manufacturer like Dell, anyone can add something else without much difficulty. The only computer market that is even remotely controlled in this regard is the laptop market.

I mean, the chances of there being multiple computers setup exactly the same as my desktop are quite low. I know one person with the same motherboard and CPU as me, and a similar video card, but thats about it, and even in that regard, my motherboard is slightly different. Of course theres far more to it than that.

Power supply: Antec TrueBlue 480w
Motherboard: Asus A8N-E
CPU: Athlon 64 3500+ 939
RAM: 2x 512mb Kingmax DDR400
Video card: HIS Radeon X800 GTO 256mb, 256bit
Optical drive: LiteOn CDRW/DVD Combo Drive
Optical drive 2: Pioneer DVR-109 DVDRW
Wireless: Belkin 802.llg PCI wireless card
Additional HD Controller: Promise SATA1510 TX Series
Hard drive 1: Seagate 120gb PATA
Hard drive 2: Samsung 30gb PATA
Hard drive 3: Western Digital 80gb PATA
Hard drive 4: Seagate 200gb SATA
Hard drive 5: Seagate 400gb SATA
Hard drive 6 & 7 in RAID 0: 2x Seagate 320gb SATA
2x 120mm fans
2x 80mm fans

Sure, I don't doubt there is any number of combinations of my hardware in Australia, but the number of combinations is huge, to control this will be a massive undertaking, and as I see it, any attempt to remove the control I have over the hardware in my computer in this regard is an attempt at my freedom as this is something I love being able to do exactly what I want with, when money permits of course, which it hasn't for a while now as much of the hardware would show.

I think this is a very extreme measure and doubt it would come to that but I suppose with some of the inaccurate "proof" I've seen for power consumption for the plasma's and LCD's (for another article), I expect there could be just as much of this around for cutting back computer power consumption, so I suppose one can only hope it doesn't get too bad.

Labels: hardware, politics, rants, technology

I was just having a read through a news article on the Sydney Morning Herald regarding Kevin Rudd's new education plans and am I the only one that finds "...the Government's plan to provide computers to every high school student..." a complete waste of my taxes? I knew about this before Labour were elected, yes, and this was one of the many things I counted against them.

I just went and had a look at the details on the official Australian Labour Party Website at an article from November 14th titled "Federal Labor's Education Revolution - A School Computer For Every Student In Years 9-12"

So reading through this, that's all well and good, but "A Rudd Labor Government will invest $1 billion over four years to turn every secondary school in Australia into a digital school." And, "The National Secondary School Computer Fund will allow secondary schools to apply for capital grants of up to $1 million to acquire new or upgrade information technology equipment."

That's a lot of taxpayer money, but here's what I don't understand about it, every student has access to computers anyway, why do they all need their own, and if they do, why shouldn't they have to work for it like every other person in the country? Sure, I have my own computer, I have my own laptop as well. Actually, if we want to get into specifics, I'll be completely upgrading my desktop in a few weeks time at which point I will have two quite powerful computers, along with my Macbook Pro, and my old laptop which is still decent, despite its generally dieing. And hey, you know what, I'm a university student that doesn't live at home. I have to pay all my own bills, rent, phone, internet, power, car, etc and aside from my HECS, I get no government assistance at all. I get no money from Centrelink, no rent assistance, no free computer gear, I have to work for it all and pay FULL taxes at the same time.

So here is the biggest thing, yes, my university has better computer facilities than most school's, but the fact is, the vast majority of school's already provide adequate computer access for students, along with internet access. As it was, at one of my schools, albeit a private school, they had almost as many computers as they did students, and it was a small school, I'm talking 50 students. My other school, a public school, had at least 5 computer labs that I know of, for all I know there could have been more as I kept finding them all over the place as well as the library which had a computer section with 40 or so computers in it. Additionally, they had laptops and projectors that were loaned out to students for use in classes if they needed them for whatever reason. As I said, this was at a PUBLIC school.

I am sure the grant would be great for schools to upgrade labs and so on, but in my experience, most schools already have systems in place for this sort of thing. The public school I mentioned had a 3 year rotation in the 3 main labs and library. One lab would be upgraded each year and any extra money in the budget meant one of the other smaller labs would be upgraded as well. Every 3rd year the library would be upgraded along with one of the labs.

So yes, the grant would no doubt be helpful in that way as it would allow a bigger budget, but for a lot of schools, my question is, is it really needed? And as far as buying students their own computers, I have to pay and always have had to pay for all of my own equipment and I don't see how it is fair at all that I should have to pay for other peoples gear. I personally think something like this should be restricted to the school only, even having enough computers for one per student located at the school is a waste of money. They aren't all going to be used all at once and I believe it will be a long time before they ever will be, if they ever will be. They can be used for most things yes, but for food tech, visual arts, music, drama, industrial arts, any of the creative and performing arts subjects cannot be completely reliant on computers, they can only partially be computer oriented and I'm sure there are more subjects as well that fit this bill.

The money would be better spent actually upgrading school facilities, such as air conditioning in more classes, and better lab equipment and so on.

Please note, this is just my perspective on it all and I am sure it will benefit someone somewhere, I just don't believe it is a worthwhile use of my and every other taxpayers money.

Labels: politics, rants

At work at the moment we are looking for more staff and there are job advertisements on places like Seek, University of Queensland Student Union Employment, Queensland University of Technology Student Guild Employment and so on. Now there have been a lot of resume's come through and since I do most of the email work, I have the job of going over each resume and deciding which one's are worth printing and forwarding to my boss, and which ones will get a lovely little email in response that reads:

"Dear Jeremy,

Thankyou very much for your application, however at this stage all of the interview places have been filled. Should any of these fall through, we will be in contact again.

Best regards,

Management"

Isn't that nice?

Anyway, here I am going through these resume's, and only a couple of them I would even consider interviewing, but the majority met my boss's criteria, so theres 8 or so got printed out and forwarded onto her. Then there was this one:

Name: Billy K

Address: 85 Bad St

Phone: 0400 000 000

Email Address: billy.k1989@hotmail.com

Drivers Licence: No

Personal Qualities: Friendly, Fun, keen, patient

Interest & Hobbies: Hanging out with friends, going to

movies, talking to peple

Schooling: ********** State High School 1998

Objective: To get a job to save some money and get

Work experience

Availability: Casual

References: Will give when you call.

Of course, this isn't the actual resume, but this is exactly how it was formatted and the exact same way it was written, spelling mistakes, poor grammar, some things not formatted the same as the rest, and so on.

Now, I'm not the employer, but just reading that, why would I want to work with them? So why would an employer want to consider employing them? The resume doesn't even take up a page.

So apart from that, what's wrong with it? Where have they worked before? There's no employment history, there aren't even any references, he says he will only supply them on request, so how do we know anything about him prior to speaking to him? He hasn't even given his last name, just an initial!

Additionally, he only has one school listed, which he left in 1998, so either he is in his late 20's (which is fine), or he dropped out of school. Either way he's been out of school for 9 years and doesn't have an employment history, has he even worked at all in that time? He hasn't said he's doing anything else at the moment, such as tertiary education, nor does he have a drivers license, so how do we know he's even motivated to do anything but the absolute minimum?

His interests are fine, but they show nothing and are basically wasted space. Everything likes those things. They don't stand out. So again this works against him as it builds on what I said before, it shows he isn't motivated. In addition to this he doesn't have any skills listed aside from his "Personal qualities", so how do we know what he can do?

Even his "Objective" is shocking. It confirms our belief that he most likely has not had a job before, despite being out of school for almost 10 years and that he isn't motivated!

This in turn leads us to wonder if he is even being honest in his "Personal qualities" as he clearly is not "keen", not about working anyway.

So please, someone tell me, why oh why would someone want to employ him?

It leads one to wonder about the effectiveness of Centrelink and their job diaries. People have to apply for jobs to keep getting paid by Centrelink, of course they don't have to get one...

I cannot stand these people who seem to think they shouldn't have to work and should get everything for free.

Seriously, this place is so easy to get a job if you show any interest or initiative at all, I mean, its a surf shop, I'm not even interested in surfing or anything surfing related, yet I got a job here!

Labels: politics, rants, work