Introduction to free software by Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry does his take on understanding free software, and software freedom.

Saturday 19 September is International Software Freedom Day. Software Freedom Day aims to promote and inform about programs that are freely available to everyone to install and use.

For more information:

General information.    http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/
Information about the Canberra events http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/Canberra
Information on some of the programs being given away http://www.theopendisc.com/programs/
Open Source as alternative      http://www.osalt.com/
One of the distributions of Linux available on the day http://www.ubuntu.com/
Another distribution of Linux available on the day http://fedoraproject.org/

Future shots, sustainability film challenge for young Victorians

Future Shots is a short film challenge to all young people living in Victoria.

Tackling one of the most important issues affecting the world today: SUSTAINABLITY

The challenge is to make a film of three minutes or less, of any type or genre that addresses the key question:

Sustainability: What’s it all about?

Future Shots is looking for creativity, inspiration, discussions and solutions.

You are encouraged to explore, interpret, and then commit to film your personal ideas about sustainability, what it means to you and your community and how you think it can be achieved.

Films entered into Future Shots by the 21 September, 2009 will be placed in the draw to win either a Sony HandyCam or an Ipod Touch.

If you have already completed a short film under three minutes on sustainability don’t miss this opportunity to be in the draw for another great prize.

Read the Future Shots guidelines to make sure your film meets the requirements, and enter.

More info at Future Shots. And yeah you should be under 21 years of age…;)

Inform: An Interactive Fiction Design System

Inform: An Interactive Fiction Design System

“Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics and by the practical experience of some of the world’s best-known writers of IF.”

Kick Like a Girl. Women and AFL

Kick Like a Girl is a part of research project being undertaken by Lisa Gye at Swinburne University, which examines the roles that women play in the support, maintenance and advancement of AFL football in Australia. The high levels of participation by women in AFL football are well documented. As well as being passionate supporters of the game at every level, women now occupy roles which have, until recently, been dominated by men – as media commentators, umpires, coaches, club administrators and AFL commissioners.

Website: Kick Like a Girl

Software Freedom Day 2009

A world wide celebration of Free and Open Source Software and the community behind it.

Talks:
* Beginning programming with Python, Minh Nguyen
* GIMP, Andrew Thornton
*  How to move to open source, Daniel Jitnah
* OpenOffice, Jessica Smith
*  Introduction to distributed version control with Mercurial,
Duana Stanley
*  Demo/workshop: Installing Linux on your netbook, Wen Lin (BYO
netbook!)
*  How to back up using Clonezilla, Wen Lin
*  Build your own website with Drupal, Simon Hobbs

Workshops:
* Introduction to WordPress, Kathy Reid
* Advanced WordPress, Kathy Reid
* Hands-on hardware hacking (Arduinos), Andy Gelme (limited
places, may be a small cost for hardware)
* Inkscape, Donna Benjamin

–
Software Freedom Day 2009        http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/melb

11am – 4pm, Saturday 19 September
Melbourne PC Club Rooms, 2nd Floor, Chadstone Place, Chadstone
Shopping Centre. (See Map at http://luv.asn.au/sfd)

The Cove Movie and the Dolphin Research Institute

IN LESS than two weeks, an annual event that environmental activist Ric O’Barry calls a genocide will begin. By the time it ends in March, as many as 23,000 dolphins will have been ”harvested” in Japan.

The lucky few will be shipped off to aquariums around the world, to spend the rest of their lives performing. The unlucky ones will be brutally slaughtered, their carcasses butchered for sale in Japan – often deliberately mislabelled as whale meat – or merely dragged out to sea and left to rot.

This grim scenario is laid bare in a documentary, The Cove, which follows the efforts of Mr O’Barry and his colleagues to reveal what goes on at the Japanese fishing port of Taiji.

More from Karl Quinn’s article at The Age

Other links:

• Petition – www.takepart.com/thecove

• www.thecovemovie.com

• If you’re on Facebook, check out The Cove group – lots of daily updates and comments from people around the world about the movie and reactions

Dolphin Research Institute -  1300 130 949

2009 Class Clowns National Grand Final

The 2009 National Class Clowns Final will be held on September 15 at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne. Featuring Triple J’s Dave Callan as emcee and special feature act Celia Pacquola (2009 Comedy Festival Age Critics Award). Judges include Colin Lane (formerly of Lano and Woodley), Councillor Cathy Oke (City of Melbourne), Wes Snelling and Gideon James (Melbourne Comedy Festival producer).

Since March this year the Melbourne International Comedy Festival has been hunting down the funniest teenagers across our wide brown land for its annual Class Clowns Competition. We’ve been tracking a rare breed of teen – witty, smart, in Years 9 to 12, willing to perform five minutes of original comic material in front of a crowd and most importantly, they had to exhibit freakish levels of hilariousness!

Taken under the wing of some of the Festival’s finest comedians at group workshops, scores of Class Clownists were given the chance to polish up their stand-up routines, sketches, musical acts and other shenanigans prior to performing in heats around the country. After a series of heats, finals, semi finals and state finals, the cream of the teenage crop has been selected – and are ready to be unleashed – at the Class Clowns National Grand Final.

Twelve of the nation’s sharpest school-aged comic acts will battle it out for their chance to not only be crowned the most hilarious teen act in Australia, but to also pocket $1000 in cash plus and another $1000 for their school.

www.classclowns.com.au

Date: Tuesday 15 September
Time: 1:30pm
Venue: Beckett Theatre, Malthouse Theatre – 113 Sturt Street, Southbank, Melbourne, Australia
Tickets: Full $18, Concession and Groups $12
Bookings: (03) 9685 5111 or www.malthousetheatre.com.au
For group bookings email info@comedyfestival.com.au

Rupert Murdoch is set to charge online readers for news content – but how do you make people part with their money?

Cash for clicks – Kevin Anderson asks what can be learned from the music, video and games industries.

With the recession cutting into profits at News Corp, Rupert Murdoch (sic) has had a change of heart about charging for content online. In 2005, he predicted that the future of content on the internet would be driven by advertising. Now, he believes that if people want their news online, they will have to pay for it.

More people than ever are reading news on the internet, but organisations have yet to find a way to translate those huge audiences into the kind of revenues they had in print. A handful of newspapers, most of them financial papers such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, have instituted digital subscriptions – it is as yet undetermined whether the FT’s introduction of a pay-per-view model next summer will replace or exist in conjunction with its subscription service – and the New York Times charges per article for premium content in its archives. But the planned standalone Sunday Times site will be a trial run for general news providers – and with the advertising market dropping, Murdoch is not alone in looking to charge for online content.

But to what extent are users prepared to pay for it? Music, television and film studios, along with newspapers and magazines, are looking for ways to generate revenue from the web. While some consumers seem prepared to pay for premium content and convenience, most industries still haven’t found the magic formula to convince enough of them to do so. Are there any lessons that the various media can learn from one another?

More from The Guardian

More leg room in Club Class journalism

Written by Jonathan Este for nojournos.no news.

Murdoch as Machiavelli – it’s not the first time this trope has reared its head in the commentariat and I’ll bet your bottom dollar it won’t be the last.

The latest theory is that Murdoch’s enthusiasm for charging for content (let’s discard “pay wall” as misleading) is all about promoting his print products. He spent $1.3 billion a couple of year ago on three “cathedrals of print” (modern, worker-free printing presses) and all the bluster about having to charge for content online is a rearguard action to encourage more people to read the “dead-tree” option.

I really don’t buy this. I think Murdoch is merely reacting to the same social and market forces that are driving every other newspaper publisher in the developed world to consider the same thing: people are increasingly moving online, a move that is particularly marked among younger consumers.

More from nojournos

Mathematical Model for Surviving a Zombie Attack

It is possible to successfully fend off a zombie attack, according to Canadian mathematicians. The key is to “hit hard and hit often.”

Oh yes, somebody actually did a study on mathematics of a hypothetical zombie attack, and published it in a book on infectious disease. So, while we still don’t know what to do if a deadly asteroid takes aim at Earth, an unlikely but technically possible situation, we now know what to do in case of a zombie attack.

“An outbreak of zombies is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead,” the authors wrote. “It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”

Betsy Mason for Wired writes:
Having spent a fair amount of time mixing science with beer in the wee hours while trying to finish a thesis, I’m guessing that at some point, a graduate student who had spent far too many hours tweaking a mathematical model of infectious disease in the basement of a Canadian university said something like this: “What would happen if we made it so they could come back to life?”

More from Wired Science News for Your Neurons…