Monthly Archives: November 2002

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Age: Singapore: “Local authorities have

Age: Singapore: “Local authorities have agreed to lift a decade-long ban on the importation and sale of chewing gum – but determined masticators will still need a doctor’s prescription before buying the illicit confection.
Under the terms of a new free trade agreement with the United States, Singapore has been forced to relent on a ban that is estimated to have cost American gum manufacturers tens of millions in lost sales.”

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http://www.whichbook.net: I’ve been waiting for

http://www.whichbook.net: I’ve been waiting for a site like this since I first heard of the net. Whichbook recommends books based on your preferences. Choose from the “Mood and style selector” or “Plot, character and setting selector”. You can choose from a ten point sliding scale on the mood selector (happy or sad; optimistic or bleak; sexy or unsexy, etc); or select the age, race, sexuality and gender of the main character, plot shape or location on the plot selector.
If only I could find a book site that said ‘if you like these, you’ll love these’.

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Age: “Australia’s federal and state

Age: “Australia’s federal and state governments are under fire for taking a blinkered approach to information technology spending – ignoring local companies and alternatives to Microsoft.”
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“According to the federal “e-government” strategy, Better Services, Better Government, announced last week, Canberra will encourage trials of open-source software within the framework of fit-for-purpose and value-for-money.
But the moves come too late, says shadow federal minister for information technology, Senator Kate Lundy; federal IT spending with Microsoft has already placed the government in an “innovation straitjacket.””
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“Open source has begun to make inroads locally. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Centrelink and Bureau of Meteorology recently made separate decisions to move part of their IT infrastructure to Linux. Early this year, the Northern Territory Department of Education replaced Microsoft software with the open source word processing suite StarOffice 5.2 in its 160 schools.”
(As a reward for making it that far, Moo!)