Where has the all the money gone? Here are the published figures from all the science, research and innovation tables in the Australian Government’s 2010-2011 budget. These tables list the money spent in each sector and each of the Grant programs going back to FY 2002. The Budget forecasts for 2010 and 2011 are also listed.
Programs like Commercialisation Australia have a 2010 budget of $15m and a 2011 budget of $31.9m.
The total budget for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research in 2011 is $6.15b, (2002 budget was $3.04b).
http://www.innovation.gov.au/General/Corporate/Documents/Budget%202010-11/2010-11ScienceResearchandInnovationBudgetTables11May.pdf
Microsoft’s SkyDrive offers 25GB of free space in the cloud to everyone. However, the standard product requires that you to use Microsoft’s own products to access it. Now, The Download Squad shows how to open up your SkyDrive 25GB using an Office 2010 trial copy. It is not exactly a two-step process, but it’s detailed in full at the Download Squad post. When you’re done, you get a 25GB space on your system that’s instantly synced with the cloud, accessible from the web, and can be accessed from multiple (Windows) computers. Neat stuff.
It does have the downside that files have to meet a particular Sky Drive criteria that they can not be larger than 50MB. To get around this, have a look at SDExplorer tool (windows XP and later), which integrates Microsoft SkyDrive into Windows.
Once installed, there’s not much to see with SDExplorer, it simply does what it promises. Provide your login credentials for your SkyDrive account and the drive that appears in My Computer—seen above—is linked to your online storage. You can interact with it like any other drive.
The two biggest differences between the free version and the Pro version (apart from the price) are:
* the Pro version lets you open directly files from the SDExplorer drive
* the Pro version does away with the SKyDrive limitation of 50MB per file.
from http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/213-the-curse-of-knowledge
Chip and Dan Heath were recently interviewed by Guy Kawasaki about their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. There’s an interesting part where they discuss “the Curse of Knowledge.”
People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. It’s just not true that, “If you think it, it will stick.”
And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.
Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.
JFK dodged the Curse [with “put a man on the moon in a decade”]. If he’d been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon walk back fifteen years.
The official release of Windows 7 is only a few weeks away, and if you’re anything like me, you’re probably asking yourself what effect this will have on your lives. Will the gates of Heaven open up and a consort of large breasted angels descend to guide you into computing heaven? Or will it be more of a low key affair, maybe involving the cast of Friends and a degrading video?
via A Review of the Pirated Copy of Windows 7 I Bought On eBay | Cracked.com.
I’ve never really suffered from jesus phone envy, especially considering the number of features that were missing on earlier iPhones. However, there was one application that could have made me change my mind, and that was the Light Sabre application.
So when i found a Nokia Light Sabre Application, I had to have it.
- Download and install the
Accelerometer API plugin on your phone,
- Download the Nokia Light Sabre sisx file to your phone (do not install yet),
- Set your phone’s date to within 6 months of 11 january 2008 (otherwise the phone thinks the Nokia Security Certificate is expired),
- restart the phone,
- Install the Light Sabre file and start saving the Universe.
With WordPress so popular these days, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger target for hackers, so securing your blog is more and more important. The catswhocode.com provide 10 Easy Ways to Secure your WordPress Blog.
They have a large array of useful WordPress tips and tricks, including another recent one about 10 awesome .htaccess hacks for WordPress.
In a move that could stir up some controversy, Bharat Matrimony, one of most popular matrimonial website in India, has launched a facial recognition feature to help you search for a potential life partner who looks similar to your favorite film actor or actress.
You can either limit your partner search to a selected set of Bollywood actors and actresses or you may even upload someone else’s photo and the “facial search” feature promises to help find other profiles in the matrimony database that match the face in the picture.
This could become a privacy nightmare… If it works as advertised, it would let people locate any random person (that was a member of the Website) that they have a picture of, and get personal details about them.
Too many people knew of the existence of the blacklist. Too many people had motives to see it leaked. Of course, the government (via Senator Conroy)has denied its the ACMA blacklist, but they would say that wouldn’t they…
Blacklists are a flawed method of censorship; they are inaccurate and subjective. The subject matter (child pornorgrapohy) is transferred via other medium on the internet. The time and money being spent on this filter can be more usefully spent attacking those who are breaking the law with tools that work
And here’s a link for those of you who think you have nothing to hide.
The ACMA blacklist article on Wikileaks. Link to theie copy of the blacklist from there.
Mirrors
Can I mention his name 
There’s some text and PDF mirrors of the ACMA blacklist up already, including a MEGAUPLOAD text file of the ACMA blacklist.
By the way, there are serious issues at stake here.
There is a also PDF version of the ACMA blacklist at whatsup.
Update:
Update of Australian government secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist, 11 Mar 2009.
Update of Australian government secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist, 18 Mar 2009.
Wikileaks to Conroy: Go after our source and we will go after you
Up until recently there was not a single add-on available for the Mozilla Firefox 3 web browser that would check the bookmarks for invalid or duplicate entries. Several add-ons existed that were able to perform the checks in Firefox 2. The reason for this was a change in how the bookmark data was stored.
Check Places is the first Firefox 3 extension that can check all Firefox 3 bookmarks for duplications and invalid references aka dead pages. The experimental add-on can be downloaded right from the Mozilla website after logging in as a user. The new Check Places entry will be added by the Firefox add-on to the bookmarks menu. A click on that link will open a new window that the user can use to configure the scan behavior.
It is possible to scan all bookmarks or only selected folders. Exclusions can be made so that some bookmarks or folders will not be scanned in the process. The scan itself can check if the pages that the bookmarks point to exist and if it is stored more than once in the bookmarks.
Some extensions (such as Bookmark Duplicate Detector) could perform some of theses functions, but Check Places is the most comprehensive one (so far) for firefox 3.
