A new partnership between Victorian optical communications company CEOS and Hitachi will see Passive Optical Network technology which can deliver information up to 200 times faster than existing broadband available to households in Australia and New Zealand early next year
There is a difference in the quality of copy papers from different companies. I know this, I learned from the experience of being the bunny who always had to remove the jammed — and quite often mauled and mangled — poor quality paper from various laser printers and photocopiers over the years.
This doesn’t explain why, on needing to purchase more paper recently, my brain turned off and suddenly decided that the unknown element of ‘Artrite Office’ copy paper would be a good idea. Needless to say I regretted the decision and have since had the offending section of my brain surgically removed. Continual jams caused by an origami quirk that produced lovely concertina folds, but no actual prints.
I’m back with my regular Reflex paper and happily in the land of print once more.
HP and Sun are likely to feel Telstra’s wrath because BigPond users’ email has been slowed over the past two weeks. BigPond mail servers began to stall early this month and the slowdown continued for 10 days, which the ISP blamed on a bug-ridden software upgrade
According to this article Xerox is currently developing:
…automated document design software that takes the text, graphics, and other elements that might be parts of a complex document and flows them iteratively into example page layouts.
Users can define rules such as corporate colours, logos etc, and the software will come up with what IT perceives as the best designs.
So some software could be making design choices in the near future. I don’t like the idea of software essentially telling people that good design can only be achieved by following certain formulas. I can just see it now. Bigbad Co has fired their graphics department leaving it all up to the most junior person in the company and this software. This person is now dubbed the whatever-they-are-AND-graphics-guy. (His first task might be to design himself some new business cards – possibly.) Guy inputs photos, text and diagrams and lets the software do it’s magic. He presents 3 designs to Bigbad Co. I can see a couple of different scenarios here. a) Bigbad Co loves ’em all because a computer can’t be wrong, or b) Bigbad Co asks for a gazillion changes and ends up spending hours hitting the “design it” button until they get the design “they” think is right.
On the other hand it could turn out to be a valuable time saver for when you want to see a certain design applied to say different page sizes or orientation.
Xerox are also looking at developing it for other media such as web and PDA.
Lick me, I’m a macintosh. The title alone is enough reason to read this article about the Apple way of… stuff.
The Joy of Tech – cat comic. Love this comic, I’m sure this is what my cat does/attempts to do when I’m stroking the keys on my iBook instead of him.
I want this tree in front of my house.
SETI@home is preparing to make a major change to their client and backend. The new system ‘boinc‘ will be a general purpose client and accept work units from other projects (selected by the user). This will open-up SETI@Home’s millions strong user base to academic projects that cannot afford supercomputers. As boinc is an open source framework other distributed projects will also be able to use it giving boinc a larger installed base than SETI@Home
Honda has brought the mass production of zero-emission hydrogen vehicles a step closer to reality by developing a cheaper-to-make, high-performance fuel cell stack needed to power the cars
A couple more MT plugins from the prolific Brad Choate have been added to the system.
First is Sanitise, which allows unwanted HTML to be stripped from comment displays. This was due to a problem caused by a closing tag being cropped by the recent comments section and the entire index page turning an attractive shade of italic. The problem on the index page is fixed and the comment italics are still visible in their original location. Very useful.
The second plugin is Supplemental Category Tags, which provides a handy previous and next navigation linkage for the category archives.
Also added Kevin Shay‘s FirstNWords, a helpful plugin for setting excerpts to a nominated number of words rather than characters.
Now all I need is functionality for author archives to be added and I’ll be a happy camper.
Our federal representatives are doing their best to rid Australian inboxes of junk email — for their own benefit as much as anyone elses
An audit of e-commerce Web sites by the Victorian government has found less than 1% met all the requirements for the Commonwealth ‘Best Practice’ model
Long-time C|Net reporter and Politech operator Declan McCullagh has been contacted by the FBI, requesting that he retain all records regarding his talks with Adrian Lamo. The problem? The FBI’s letter was sent under the auspices of a law which applies only to internet service providers
The Bass Station is an old-school boom-box case modded to include a built in a WiFi access-point, along with: a 120GB hard drive, and an MP3 decoder, and that is controlled using a web browser. Besides being able to play MP3s, it can also stream audio to other devices in its local area network, double as a file-server for file-sharing
The P2P networking approach that threatens to make the recording industry obsolete could also bring about a more reliable Internet
Web developers want to light a fire under Microsoft to get better standards support in the company’s Internet Explorer browser, but they can’t seem to spark a flame
Rob has created a site where you enter in your Giant grocery-chain ‘loyalty card‘ number and the site responds by serving you a printable barcode for someone else’s loyalty card number. Paste the barcode over your own and help poison the Giant database. Nothing like monkey wrenching the system
The Straight Dope explains all the weird keys that come with standard PC keyboards
Sony has crammed a raft of new features into its next generation PlayStation games machine, but Australian players will have to wait until at least the second half of next year to buy one
New UK regulations that will implement a European directive on copyright could mean up to two years in jail for file-swappers
Telstra admitted that up to 720,000 Australian telephone services, or 10% of the lines it monitors, fail every year
Cooligy is applying an idea from Victorian engineering to solving a key stumbling block in the development of high-performance chips — how to cool them down
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