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We’d like to let you all know that talented artist, and all round top bloke Mark Tronson, is having a week long art exhibition with the opening this weekend.

Location:
Desires Cafe (Baptist Church building)
Corporation Circuit
Banora Point, NSW

Date/Time:
Opening day 21 March, 2010 – 11:30am
Ends 26 March, 2010

A light lunch will also be provided on the opening day.

All funds raised from this event will contribute to Mark’s very worthy Country Town Tour missions cause.

Mark does some truly amazing work, so even if you don’t purchase a piece of art (you’d be silly not to though really), you’ll be blown away by Mark’s ability.

Big Rock Graphics wishes all the best to Mark and thanks him for all his hard work.

Social networking giant Facebook appears to have shut down the group on the site belonging to Grow Up Australia, a lobby organisation campaigning for a R18+ classification scheme to be implemented for video games in Australia.

On its own web site today, Grow Up Australia claimed Facebook had taken the group down because it violated Facebook’s terms of use. The organisation posted a picture on its site of Facebook’s notification (above).

“While an R18+ [rating] for computer games may be considered a controversial issue, we don’t believe that any of the content provided by the administrators of the group in question could be deemed to violate the terms of use,” said Grow Up Australia in a statement. “Very rarely, an inappropriate comment would be posted by one of the members, however the administrators have always been viglant in moderating the group and removing the inappropriate posts.”

Read the full article on Delimiter.com

Update: Due to the overwhelming attention at the removal of Grow up Australia’s Facebook page, and most likely Facebook reviewing their decision, we are pleased to announce that the original Grow up Australia Facebook page is back. It took less than 24 hours to accomplish this turn around. Let’s see how long it takes for an introduction of a fairer and simpler rating system to be implemented.

The original Facebook group page for Grow up Australia can be found here.

Worth a look at the very least

Gamers4Croydon represent not only the minority of constituents but the majority of the free-thinking world. We’ll let their words speak for themselves, but Big Rock Graphics wholeheartedly supports G4C regarding their policy of levelling Australia’s ratings system to be uniform across all media, and their opposition to a mandatory internet filter.

This is your chance to tell everyone how you really feel about the …current state of state politics. Voting for Gamers4Croydon is about stating that you want your representatives to be more transparent, more progressive, more accountable, more personable, and more willing to listen and engage with the community.

To quickly summarise our policies; Gamers4Croydon supports the R18+ rating for videogames, opposes the mandatory internet filter, supports voluntary euthanasia, is pro-choice, supports marriage equality, wants to introduce an Independent Commission Against Corruption, wants to expand stormwater recycling, supports Electric Vehicle conversion subsidies, will repeal the law restricting the display of R18+ rated DVDs, will repeal the law that undermines free speech and the right to privacy online, will ban all political advertising with public funds, and wants to introduce study of how our democracy functions into the school curriculum. To see these policies in full, go here – http://www.gamers4croydon.org/policies.php

We have House of Assembly candidates in Croydon, Adelaide, Norwood, Light and Mawson. If you do not live in those electorates, we have a candidate in the Legislative Council that you can vote for. We have drawn box “Z”, and a 1 above the line in box “Z” is all that’s required to vote for Gamers4Croydon on the Legislative Council ballot.

We need you to get out and spread the word. Ask your family who they’re voting for. Ask your friends who they’re voting for. Explain to them why you’re voting for Gamers4Croydon, what we hope to achieve in parliament and what we hope to achieve for South Australia. (Feel free to mention prominent government ministers at this point – it usually doesn’t hurt.)

It’s time to engage in the political process and send a strong message about the type of politician you want to see in parliament. It’s time to hold government accountable. It’s time to change the face of Australian gaming by changing the face of Australian politics.

It’s time to be Gamers4Croydon.

If you’re in South Australia and registered to vote in the March 2010 State elections we suggest you consider marking box Z.

They aren’t just for gamers. They’re for everyone who want a fair go system and oppose State sponsored censorship.

Good luck and thank you G4C for political transparency and being a voice of reason.

The head of a computer training college in Docklands warns IT administrators and computer buyers to be wary of upgrading to the latest operating systems before they have been properly tested in the field.

Microsoft last month launched Windows 7 and Apple released version 10.6 of its Mac OS, nicknamed Snow Leopard, in late August.

Melissa Foote, principal of Total Business Service and Training, says her business had incurred higher communications bills after installing Snow Leopard on the machines in its office network because of a problem in the way data was backed up and synchronised under the new operating system.

TBST is talking to Apple about possible redress, but remains concerned that other network administrators are suffering the same problem and may not pinpoint the difficulty until they receive a new phone bill.

Source and full story at www.theage.com.au

Well where do we start? Do we start at why TBST thought it could trust Apple or the choice of off-site cloud computing? Then again perhaps we should start by asking what kind of System Administrator worth their salt would not detail the effects of updating to a new OS before the upgrade?

Let’s just say it’s an expensive lesson learned. One that won’t be forgotten in a hurry.

Perhaps next time TBST will test the waters before upgrading everything and consider Sun, Open Source or even proven (admin: waves to Microsoft) Cloud Computing solutions if they really need it? Nahhh… Not likely with the amount of “experts” that flooded the market for the past 10 years.

As you’ll note our review of Windows 7 is yet to come. The reason being we’re still testing it on a non-critical system and are yet to put it through some heavy production environment testing. Everything is running fine right now though, a few hiccups with drivers and the UAE, but those were sorted out within minutes. Clever folk at Big Rock Graphics