Author: admin

Rent Microsoft Office for AU$25/year (buy for AU$75)

edit title for correctness and shortness. 9:30pm

www.itsnotcheating.com

Yes, I work for Microsoft. Let’s get that out of the way. The above link will find me, but please don’t send me OEM offers.

Every day I get spam’d to buy OEM Microsoft and Adobe products. For prices ranging from US$10 to US$175, and I can get Office or Adobe Creative Suite on some el-cheapo burnt CD from a fly-by night dodgy-brothers organisation based in a country that doesn’t exist in my school atlas. Thankfully, gmail and the corporate spam filters grab these bogus OEM offers and push the bits into email limbo. As my dad said, anything too cheap is always too good to be true.

As an Australian University Student, would you buy Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate for a year’s use at AU$25? Or the license for life for AU$75?

This is a brave effort by my current employer. Not just for the pricing and delivery method: but  more for the reaction of students seeing Office at price that has been polluting the email system for the last 2 years. Students, a majority being some of the first of the Generation-Yers, have pretty keen senses of what is legit and what is not. 

Will emails flow through their human spam filters?

Frances Allen wins Turing Award

As posted by Anna Liu, Frances Allen won this year’s Turing Award.

This whole industry has been created by two very famous women:

Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace: when Charles Babbage invented the hardware known as the Analytical Engine, Ada started programming -or- the software. A century out of time, these two very smart people collaborated not via email – but letter writing.

Admiral Grace Hopper: whilst Lady Lovelace did not get to see her ideas come to life, Grace Hopper invented many terms, computer programming languages and an industry.

Question: who is the Turing Award named after?

Learning how to Phrogram

Phrogamming: the telling a computer (rather than your brothers/sisters/pets) what to do is both fun; and a potential career choice.

Languages that you may have read about: C# (that’s cee-sharp), Java and C++  (cee plus plus) are big first steps. Like learning to drive a car: you start with some of the basic rules, and progress on to the Indi-500 as you gain more experience.

To get the basic rules down, its good to start with a different language: that’s where KPL comes in.

Go ask permission to install this onto your computer: ask your parent/teacher. Time to have some fun.

Question: name a learning programming language that starts with “L”

VP Dick in town for Mardi Gras?

US VP Dick Cheney is in Sydney town for talks with Australian politicians (here is why). I doubt he will meet with the real Australian hoi-polloi. Mardi Gras ends next weekend, so I am expecting Dick to stick around.

This week has been total traffic chaos after the shenanigans of the two Queens arriving in Sydney. Strangely, one of ships was also called Mary.

Avril and I have friends from Adelaide who were staying in The Rocks last night. The Rocks is the oldest part of Sydney-town, in the heart of the central business district. The Sydney CBD was locked off from Market Street down to The Rocks at 11pm – so they had to walk at least 2kms to their hotel.

Not Tourist Friendly. All this for one man.