Ok for all you that have too much time on your hands Walk the Drunk
New Software
Ok well I have decided to go mainstream. I found I could not add the features I wanted to my software and keep my content up to date.
So welcome to the new Brog Blog powered by WordPress.
Haiku the new BeOS
I love this operating system and cannot wait until the first release of Haiku is available. BeOS was/is one of the most responsive and usable operating systems I have ever used. It has features that even current systems do not yet come with, for a history lesson have a look at this OSNews article. It is hard to explain all of the virtues of BeOS unless you have actually used it, but I will give it a go.
File System
BeOS had a powerful journelled 64bit file system. This allowed a maximum file size of 18 million gigabytes (just a tad larger than current hard disks) and full recovery in the event of system outages.
It also had the concept of extended and custom attributes. Examples of file attributes include Size, Name, modified date etc, however BeOS took it one step further. Each file in the filesystem had a MimeType attribute, this dictated (via a standard notation) the type of file. Unlike Windows that relies on file extension this attribute a file in BeOS can be called anything an this attribute dictates what it is.
The next thing it does is allow custom attributes based on the file type. This allowed file information to be stored outside the file in an indexed area allowing for fast searches. An example is images, they had custom attributes of width, height and colour depth. This means you can search for images that are no larger than 120 pixels wide and greater than 16 bit colour depth. Now lets extend that to emails, all of the standard headers are exposed in attributes, meaning you can search on sender, send date and any other you can think of. Now the really interesting upshot of this is that BeOS does not come with a mail client. It does have a little program for reading, editing and creating individual mails but the standard file manager is used as the mail client.
Data Translators
If you have ever played with image editing tools in any operating system you know that each one has its own mechanisms for reading and writing image formats. Photoshop, Paintbrush, GIMP etc all have their own code and options for image formats they handle. I have heard of people editing images in one tool, just to open them in another to save them as a JPEG, because the second tool has better optimisations for compressing and saving JPEG’s. Well in BeOS no image editing program knows how to read and write any image format, they only understand the underlying bitmap format that is used to render onto the screen. Yep you read that right, no program written for BeOS know how to read and write an image of the disk.
The BeOS engineers realising that all this duplicated code was a waste, they implemented the Data Translator mechanism. What this means is you decide what translators you want to install and the programs just call up the list and let you select. This means that you can save and open all formats in all programs, that support images. This was also extended to documents, and via central codecs, videos and sounds.
Resources
Now a version of BeOS was released free for use, so looking up the following resources you will find a copy if you want. Be warned however this is an older operating system and may not work on the newest hardware.
Gay Marriage follow-up
I sent an email of to my local member and the shadow attorny general. To my surprise I got fast responses from both, on in email and the other in writing.
Okay I will start with the oppositions response via email. Nicola Roxon who is our shadow attorney general (ie she would be the head law maker if her party was in power) for the Labor Party.
… The Labor Party will not oppose the PM’s measures to confirm in the Marriage Act the common law understanding that marriage is “a union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others”. Consistent with this, Labor will also not oppose a prohibition on recognising foreign same sex marriages.
more importantly, Labor restates its commitment to remove discriminatory provisions from Commonwealth legislation on the basis of sexuality, following a full audit of existing laws.
…
When complete, this will give same sex couples the rights and recognition of heterosexual de facto couples.
So if they get elected then same sex couples will have the same recognition as unmarried heterosexual couples. This is good, however why then the restriction on marriage. The only reason is the current “common law” interpretation of the current act.
Now my local member Gary Hardgrave belongs to the ruling Liberal Party which introduced the bill to reword the marriage act.
… The Government condemns discrimination in all its forms. However, the Government also believes that it is clearly in the best interests of children for them to have, all other things being equal, the care and affection of both a mother and a father.
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These [new] words represent the current as well as the historical legal understanding of marriage in Australian Law.
…
marriages entered into under the law of another country are recognised as valid under Australian Law. The Government proposes to amend the Marriage Act to ensure that marriages between people of the same sex entered into under the law of another country are not recognised in Australia.
Ok so as it stands they say this is for the children, because they “believe” it is in the best interest of the child. I would like to see the advice or studies they have based that on.
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