- luv-talk - luv.asn.au

Why is there a protest over the East West Link?
by Brent Wallis 04 Jul '14

04 Jul '14

Why? Seems to me that every weekend protest notches up the compo payout for the rich landowners around the proposed development. The greens in particular seem to be the instigators and that beggars comprehension. ? I don't understand..... how does this weekends protest do anything other than up the taxpayer price for an infra need that is long overdue? Sure, public transport needs to be a priority, but in the end, what about moving freight? They can't catch a train or bus. ???? BW

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Re: [luv-talk] btrfs/ZFS, sans raid and bitrot
by Rohan McLeod 01 Jul '14

01 Jul '14

Noah O'Donoghue wrote: > Hi All, > > After reading about bitrot and feeling guilty for storing my most > valuable data on cheap drives (although with backups!) I've been > thinking about moving to something more resilient. > Out of curiosity I googled "bitrot" and whilst there seems to be some usage of "bitrot" in relation to RAM; mostly it seems to be in the context of storage media. As a novice I found: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cow… informative; but apart from a suggestion that it might be related to 'cosmic rays' and thermal magnetic effects; couldn't seem to find (a) a definition which is a measure of bitrot and (b) actual measures of this phenomenon in various media and differing conditions. Presumably as a probabilistic phenomenon; bitrot might be defined in terms of the half-life of the data ? regards Rohan McLeod

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Re: [luv-talk] Why is there a protest over the East West Link?
by Peter Ross 30 Jun '14

30 Jun '14

From: "Lev Lafayette" <lev(a)levlafayette.com> > In this particular case they were lying AND deluded. They knew what the > facts were but deliberately chose not to relay them, and they were deluded > enough to think that this would make a difference on the ground. Every day of war is worth a million dollar and why not keep the business running? I wonder why we are always so shy to name vested interests. Back to the East West Link, the winners are obvious. And the way it was "planned" and gets rushed through makes it quite obvious that nobody cares about the outcome for Melbourne and Victoria. Regards Peter

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A talk tomorrow about privacy etc.
by Peter Ross 17 Jun '14

17 Jun '14

Hello, somehow I remember an open invitation in my inbox, to a talk/meeting about privacy, challenges we are facing and what to do. And somehow the EFF was in it;-) And I thought it would be tomorrow. Sorry about this vague recollection.. it somehow disappeared, I cannot find it. Google does not help me neither. I believe it was on one of the LUV mailing lists last days.. Am I right or did I dream of it?? Maybe the last days watching soccer at unholy hours made me more forgetful than usual. Sorry about the noise Peter

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Natural language processing was ( Re: How best to move system to SSD)
by Rohan McLeod 10 Jun '14

10 Jun '14

Terry Duell wrote: >> Hope that helps somewhat at least ;-) > Don't think so :-( > I'll keep searching for clues. The way Google seems to work these days one > has to be quite enlightened to figure out the right search string to get > an answer that helps. Obviously natural language processing must be an extremely difficult problem, if Google with all their expertise and processing power can't put a natural language, front end on their search engine. I wonder whether some entrepreneurial start-up company with a new idea; might put together software which disambiguates say short English language search questions via a dialogue; then compiles a complex Google search string, to achieve that result ? regards Rohan McLeod

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USB boot order: BIOS or USB issue ?
by Rohan McLeod 05 Jun '14

05 Jun '14

Assembled cognoscenti; I have a Asus-M4A79XTD_EVO mother board with an AMD 3.4GHz Phenom x4 965CPU and 16GB of Ram; with a AMI BIOS ver 2102 (which I suspect is more relevant) !. The problem is when I install a USB composite card reader (4 devices) it grabs all the BIOS USB 'boot options' (about 4 devices apparently) and whilst a USB FDD, (which I wish to access at boot time ) is obviously visible to the BIOS( it is the 5th device); it is not available at boot time. If I remove the card reader the FDD becomes available. Not having much luck googling " BIOS USB boot order"; just finding help with ordering BIOS boot devices; which is not the essential problem Question: Is USB BIOS boot order: 1/ just a matter of the specific BIOS firmware, or 2/ related to the USB port number (ie the plug) or 3/ somehow intrinsic to the set of USB devices ? 4/ something else ? regards Rohan McLeod

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Science, Technology, Science Fiction & Fantasy events coming soon.
by David E Payne 05 Jun '14

05 Jun '14

http://www.meetup.com/Science-Technology-and-the-Future/ has a talk 6pm tonight re Biologically Inspired Engineering & 6 pm Friday has the co-inventor of string field theory. > Monarch's Birthday weekend normally sees a Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention. This year it's a fen run event which won't get nearly as much publicity as the commercial ones. Friday is a chance to check it out for $1-$2! http://www.meetup.com/Continuum_Con/events/186808332/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dav* - (I'm so pessimistic sometimes I think I'll NEVER manage to read everything on the World Wide Web!)

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IEEEVIc Lecture: Big Data Infrastructures:Exploiting the Power of Big Data Wed 4 Jun 18:00-20:00 N Melb
by Rodney Brown 31 May '14

31 May '14

(free for students, IEEE, IET members, otherwise $30) https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/big-data-infrastructures-exploiting-the-pow… John Connell Auditorium, Engineers Australia Building 21 Bedford Street North Melbourne, VIC 3051 Australia -37.801951,144.955618 Wednesday, 4 June 2014 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM (AEST) *Abstract* A revolution is taking place today in Computer Science around the Big Data theme. Many state that big data computing is perhaps the biggest innovation in computing in the last decade. Big Data is not only referring to large volumes; the number of data sets, diversity and arrival rates are also challenges to data-driven science and engineering. In this talk, Professor Timos Sellis emphasises on novel means of managing, analysing, and extracting useful information from large, diverse, distributed and heterogeneous data sets in order to advance the development of new data analytic tools and algorithms and facilitate scalable, accessible, and sustainable data infrastructures. He also presents his views on how to build such Big Data infrastructures and the interesting research and development problems that arise.

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Phone survey ....
by Daniel Jitnah 30 May '14

30 May '14

I just received a phone call ... marketing/survey .. Voice of person on other side: "Hello Mr X, how are you today .... This is a quick survey and will take only 1 minute ... *"You only need to answer Yes to the questions"* !!!!!! Geeee what kind of survey is that when they tell you what to answer before hand!!!! D.

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Digital Certs
by Colin Fee 30 May '14

30 May '14

A colleague has asked if anyone still uses and purchases personal digital certs, the kind you'd buy from Thawte and the like? He reports "In days gone by there was good old Thawte. Not only valid signature but even Notary status. Sold out to Verisign (not all bad as then we got Ubuntu). I got a Verisign ‘person’ certificate (for around $25/year). I think Verisign is no more also." He asks if there is anywhere reliable to get one from?

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