On this week’s A Series of Tubes podcast with Richard Chirgwin, you can hear me talking about Telstra’s HFC upgrades, copyright, and (yeah, I know) still more Twitter.
Preview: Stilgherrian Live Road Trip to Yass
Tomorrow, Nick Hodge is driving ’Pong and me to Canberra for Thursday’s Politics & Technology Forum. But we’re taking a detour to Yass. And the whole event will be a Stilgherrian Live Road Trip.
You’ll be able to follow the live video on the Stilgherrian Live page. However I’m planning to put a page together tonight where you’ll be able to view proceedings on the liveblog, the live video and the Ustream.tv live chat all on one page! Maybe even see our current location on a map, thanks to GPS!
So, what’s happening when…?
Continue reading “Preview: Stilgherrian Live Road Trip to Yass”
Links for 31 January 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 31 January 2009, arranged by intensity of floral attitude:
- Twittering away standards or tweeting the future of journalism? | Reuters Blogs: Reuters News editor David Schlesinger tweets from Davos, beats his own news wires, and then blogs about the experience. If Twitter is changing journalism, his response is “Bring it on!”
- The LEGO Turing Machine | YouTube: The Turing Machine was a hypothetical computing device created by Alan Turing in 1936 to explain basic theoretical concepts in computing. While very simple, a Turing Machine is mathematically equivalent to any other general purpose computer, if slower. So, these guys have built one using LEGO Mindstorms components. The video has a bonus soundtrack via The A-Team.
- A radical idea: Charge people for your product | 37signals: The blog post is from November 2008, but the message is current given all the media flutter about Twitter — which has yet to earn a single dollar of revenue. Need income? Um, charge for your product!
- FORA.tv: “Videos Covering Today’s Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues.” I haven’t checked them out properly yet, so this is really a reminder to self.
- GoodBarry: These guys provide an integrated “Software as a Service” (SaaS) system for small business, covering eCommerce, content management (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing and analytics. All hooked together, and all at good prices. I’m checking them out for a client.
- Life Matters’ Mandatory Internet Filter Transcript | Off Topic with Ashley: An unofficial transcript of ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program with network engineer Mark Newton and Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby.
- Mandatory internet filter | ABC Life Matters: On Thursday, ABC Radio National’s Life Matters interviewed network engineer Mark Newton and Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby. Audio available for download.
- The Economy According To Mint | TechCrunch: Mint is an online accounting system for consumers. Tracing their 900,000 customers through 2008 shows how their spending patterns have changed as the Global Financial Crisis worsens.
- Labor’s “deafening silence” as web censorship trials delayed | theage.com.au:
- Newspapers Saw the Digital Train A-Coming | Advertising Age: Bradley Johnson points out that the newspapers themselves were exploring digital delivery of news in the 1980s, but failed to do anything about it in terms of reviewing their business models.
- OpenNet Initiative: “ONI’s mission is to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance, and to promote and inform wider public dialogs about such practices.”
- The Unmistakable Smell Of Decay | newmatilda.com: With the NSW Labor zombie army smelling worse all the time, party hacks are considering swapping their front-line cadaver, writes Bob Dumpling.
Links for 29 January 2009 through 30 January 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 29 January 2009 through 30 January 2009, gathered by a poisonous frog:
- Study challenges AGs on predator danger | CNET News: A new study from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use (CSRIU) challenges recent assertions by several state attorneys general that young people are at significant risk from online predators on social-networking sites.
- Co-generation Cyber-Cafe Internet coffee appliance | Link: The Link Institute today announced a breakthrough in energy saving to combat global warming: the “Cyber-Cafe”. This unit provides web services for a home or small business and uses the waste heat to keep coffee warm.
- What is so costly to Telstra about 38GB? | Core Economics: Joshua Gans asks the age-old question: if the first 60GB of a broadband plan costs $130, why does an additional 38GB cost $6000?
- ACMA rolls out cybersafety professional development program for educators | ACMA: ACMA’s Cybersafety Outreach — Professional Development for Educators is the national cyber-safety program designed for primary and secondary level educators. It's part of a wider education initiative which will, I contend, be money better spent than on Internet filters.
- Going private | Inside Story: The evidence suggests that publicly-listed media companies are digging their own graves. Does this mean a return to the age of moguls, asks Jonathan Este.
- Australia’s Holy Man likes a Good War | sydwalker.info: Syd Walker profiles Jim Wallace, head of the Australian Christian Lobby, former head of Australia’s elite SAS Regiment and now stormtrooper in the fight for Internet censorship.
- More of London from above, at night | The Big Picture: Boston.com’s The Big Picture is almost always beyond excellent. This set of aerial images of London at night is stunning. Photographer: Jason Hawkes.
- The next P-I might be electronic, and on a plastic sheet | Crosscut: The Hearst empire has been experimenting with epaper versions of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
- http://walterhiggins.net/projects/follower_mosaic.pl: A straightforward tool to create a mosaic of your Twitter followers’ avatar images. Produces HTML for pasting into a blog post or whatever.
- Australian Journalists on Twitter | Laurel Papworth – Social Network Strategy: Ms @SilkCharm has been compiling a list as indicated, with a very wide interpretation of “journalist”. Useful.
- TinEye Reverse Image Search: “TinEye a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.”
- The Phenomenon of Retweeting: A Deep Analysis | Pistachio: A numerical analysis of how people retweet — that is, pass on others’ tweets — on Twitter.
Telstra holds back broadband speeds. Again. (Revisited)
[This story was originally written for Crikey, where it was published on 12 January 2009. I’ve linked to it previously Here it is in full, along with a wonderful follow-up comment from a Telstra PR guy and my extremely snarky reply.]
Confused by Telstra’s rejected low-cal bid for the National Broadband Network? Let’s stir some new jargon into the stew: “DOCSIS 3” and “dark fibre”. Suddenly Telstra’s strategy makes sense — for Telstra — but it delays the rollout of high-speed broadband even further. Again.
DOCSIS 3 is a new system for cable internet which increases speeds from the current 17Mbit per second of BigPond Cable (30Mbit in Sydney and Melbourne) to 100Mbit or more. Last week Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo revealed that the technology is being deployed, but implied that it won’t be offered until they’re forced to by a competitor’s actions.
“We have [DOCSIS 3] as an option if somebody chooses to compete and to compete with us,” he told a conference in Phoenix.
“The only difference is we’ll be there a lot quicker a lot faster a lot bigger, a lot more integrated and with more capabilities than anybody else.”
How does Telstra do it quicker? By quietly stashing away its secret weapons, ready to be unleashed when a competitor tried to deploy their own big guns. Remember how Telstra didn’t sell ADSL2+ broadband, even from exchanges where equipment was already installed, until ISPs like iiNet started selling their own ADSL2+?
This time Telstra will do it quicker by using dark fibre — optical fibre cable that’s already in the ground but not yet “lit up” by the data-carrying laser beams.
Continue reading “Telstra holds back broadband speeds. Again. (Revisited)”
Crikey: Telstra holds back broadband speeds. Again.
The story I wrote for Crikey today has ended up being their lead item, under the completely not provocative at all no Sir headline, Telstra holds back broadband speeds. Again. And it’s free to read.
Confused by Telstra’s rejected low-cal bid for the National Broadband Network? Let’s stir some new jargon into the stew: “DOCSIS 3” and “dark fibre”. Suddenly Telstra’s strategy makes sense — for Telstra — but it delays the rollout of high-speed broadband even further. Again.
The comments have started to come in, starting off with: “Can you please get someone with a real name to write the technology articles?” Poor thing.