I found this picture today and thought it was pretty funny that it cost more than the billable amount to print out, let alone send.
Another LOL at the expense of Telstra.
Big Telstra Bill
Archive for October, 2008
Big Telstra Bill
Friday, October 31st, 2008Landmark Freedom of Speech Decision (in Canada)
Thursday, October 30th, 2008http://torrentfreak.com/p2pnet-wins-landmark-hyperlink-case-081029/
Basically, the question of whether linking to something constituted “publishing” it has been debated for quite some time.
Yesterday the Canadian British Columbia Supreme Court ruled specifically that “Although a hyperlink provides immediate access to material published on another website, this does not amount to republication of the content on the originating site. This is especially so as a reader may or may not follow the hyperlinks provided.”
It basically means that as long as you somehow anonymously publish the defamatory material to some site that’s not yours and then link to it, your ass is covered.
Filter list will not be known
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008Whilst I am still confident that the filter will fail, this interesting article came up: http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;355409327;pp;1;fp;4194304;fpid;1
It says that the list of blocked sites will not be disclosed, and not available under Freedom of Information.
—————- Above is from yesterday before I fell asleep —————-
OK, now for today’s stuff.
An article I found:
http://business.theage.com.au/business/broadband-tender-process-farcical-20081027-59sh.html
implies that members of the Terria consortium are trying to delay the tender proces because they are apparantly making shitloads of money from reselling Telstra’s copper, $500000 a day in fact (well fact according to the article).
The writer of that article seems to be ignorant of the fact that $500000 a day is nothing compared to the revenue from owning a monopoly fibre optic network. Therefore, that is not the reason Terria is trying to “stall” or “game” the NBN tender process, if that is what they are doing at all.
TransACT withdraws from Terria
Monday, October 27th, 2008As you may have heard already today, TransACT, the main provider of broadband services in the Australian Capital Territory has withdrawn from the Terria consortium. The Terria consortium originally started with 9 members and are now down to 5.
I will re-inforce a point that I have made many times before. As much as I hate it, the only NBN tenderer which could get it built before I become some retired old man who has lost all interest in the internet is Telstra. Here is a summary of the reasons why:
- They are the company with the most existing relevant infrastructure. They have ADSL in more telephone exchanges than anyone else, so they also have backhaul to more exchanges than everyone else.
- They have a track record for rolling stuff out really fast. Look at their Next G network. The Next G network building started November 2005 and was launched October 2006. However the validity of this point may be reduced by the fact that they cannot be forced to wholesale them to competitors by any legislation or the ACCC or anybody else.
Yes, I’m still below the required word count, but I’ll fix this up tomorrow. Got to go to sleep now. Yes! Exactly 200 words counting to “now”.
Internet and 1.5TB SATA Hard Drive
Sunday, October 26th, 2008OK, I thought Australian internet was bad, but then I found this on Digg:
A shitload of tangled phone lines
Maybe I should lower my standards a bit…
I also discovered this review on Digg of Seagate’s new 1.5 terabyte internal SATA hard drive. According to StaticIce, the lowest price it is available at in NSW is $315, making it cost 20.8c per gigabyte. For comparison, also according to StaticIce, a 1 terabyte hard drive is $158, making the average cost 15.8c per gigabyte. A 750 gigabyte one is 14.53333333333333c/GB (rounded to 16 significant figures). 500GB is still the best value at 10.6c ($53). Smaller capacities also have the advantage of being able to be used in a RAID configuration to provide the same capacity at up to double the performance.
While having 1.5TB in a single 3.5 inch hard drive represents a significant milestone for mainstream information storage density, it is still not worth it(tm) for mainstream use.
In other news, I’m thinking of turning my desktop computer into a virtual machine host with Xen to play around with and so my desktop isn’t sitting around doing nothing, and my router is crashing a bit too often, so maybe it could take over it’s job. I am also still trying to get my old, but working and with ample spare toner Canon LBP-660 printer working under a non-Windows operating system (FreeBSD).
Blogging
Saturday, October 25th, 2008I haven’t blogged for a while, but I realised that blogging would be a good way to improve my written expression skills (because I suck at English). I am also aiming to make each post at least 200 words, so that I actually force myself to write enough content. So as of the start of this sentence I was at 48 words, and talking about the word count is a really cheap way of increasing the amount of words.
Now to talk about something important, Australian internet filtering. I would like to start off saying that my personal opinion of Senator Stephen Conroy is that he is an asshole. Now I will try to justify that in essay format.
According to Unrepentantfenianbastard, a contributor to Urban Dictionary, asshole means:
Anyone who doesn’t do exactly what you think they ought to do, exactly when you think they ought to do it.
I think that Senator Conroy ought to smash his head through a CRT monitor right now. He didn’t do that, so therefore, he is an asshole.
Back to the main subject though, internet filtering gained a lot of attention recently when Senator Conroy attempted to silence Mark Newton (an engineer at Internode, an Australian ISP) from openly expressing his negative views of him on Whirlpool, Australia’s most popular online forum[citation needed]. This article outlines the steps that Senator Conroy undertook to attempt to achieve that. As shown by the mere existance of that article, he was extremely unsuccessful and only served to make him look like a communist nutcase.
Well that’s my first blog post over, hopefully I write something tomorrow.
Hello world!
Friday, October 24th, 2008Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!