As a few students have already noticed, the official team listings for 433-440 Advanced Software Engineering Project have been placed on the subject web site. I hope to have a great year with everyone involved!
I’ll now have to start setting aside a beer budget for team A…
Is it just me or does the Australian Government fundamentally have something against its citizens using the Internet? The latest is a proposal to require ISPs to ban users who are caught pirating copyrighted material. I thought punishing criminals was the job of the police?
However, I have worked out what the reason is behind all these attempts to destroy Australia’s internet access: the Government is attempting to dissuade or prevent people from using the Internet so that our crappy networks will be able to handle the increasing bandwidth needed for multimedia transfers (think YouTube, IPTV, Skype, etc). Instead of upgrading the networks I’m sure it’s much cheaper to just stop people using them. Devious bastards.
Some good news from browser makers today to put a cap on a great year for browser development and innovation.
Another Linux distribution looks to be hitting the net in the next few days, dubbed PyroLinux. The site looks impressive but I’m seriously underwhelmed by what I’m reading about the OS itself. For starters, it’s based on Ubuntu and seems to have just added some packages in by default, including non-free drivers and codecs (a la Mint) and some “fancy” apps like Avant Window Navigator dock.
Whilst I’m all for diversity in Linux distros I would prefer if people actually had something to show, or at least had a semi-original idea, before submitting their distro on Digg and trying to build hype. I mean, really, why on Earth would anyone want to use PyroLinux? To save themselves the 5 minutes it would take to install AWN?
Seems like Auran is in a bit of trouble. The developer of the new MMO Fury, as well as classic RTS Dark Reign, is in a bit of financial difficulty and look to be pinning their hopes on changes to Fury (new content and payment model) to get them out of it. Hopefully they do recover – the Australian games industry just keeps running into obstacles and a prominent developer shutting down cannot be a good thing.
In case you’ve been living under a rock – or simply don’t care about mobile development – Google recently released a public preview of Android, a new platform for mobile devices built on top of a Linux kernel. You may have heard of it before as it turns out that Android is the thing everyone assumed to be the Google “gPhone”. Well, they’re not releasing a phone but with a ton of device makers on board to use Android (sounds like everyone except Apple, surprise, surprise) I don’t think anyone is going to mind.