House of Representatives Committees
House Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications
Inquiry into IT Pricing
On 24 May 2012 the Committee resolved to inquire into IT price discrimination, following a request from the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy.
We employ people for industry. Welders, electricians, mechanics, etc. to build or repair mining machinery, among other things. Some work sites do mandatory drug testing.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who back right off when they hear about that. "Would you pass a drug test?" "Oh... I think I'll give that job a miss."
Or, "I don't know, maybe." "Well, are you a regular user?" "Is two or three times a day regular?"
We once had an employee get drug tested and the testers called the test machine's manufacturer because they thought it was broken.
He returned positive results to everything.
Meandering back towards the actual topic: screw smart drugs, it's 2012, where's my neural implants?
The bible has been in human hands for centuries and copied by hand before printing presses came in. A spelling mistake here, bad handwriting there, the next guy comes along and misreads a word and then 'fixes' the sentence so that it makes sense. I'd be shocked if there was a single page in there that hadn't changed. And that's only accidental changes.
Looking at the things politicians do today, when it's easier to fact-check and catch them out than ever before, I find it completely believable that people just... mis-copied parts of the bible to justify whatever they felt like doing. It's not like people in the year 900 were going to get on Facebook and compare notes with people in other countries. They'd probably never touched a copy of the Bible. Probably couldn't read. A man with a bible could tell people it said anything. Make some changes in his copy, noone would ever know.
NBNCo wholesale charges will be the biggest single cost to RSPs. RSPs will have no alternative but to pay. NBNCo have in their wisdom chosen to charge a sliding scale for speed (AVC) and for data (CVC). The effect of this is that we are going to have fibre capable of 1Gbps to which half the country connect at 12/1Mbps (NBNCo Corporate Plan). I can appreciate the need to charge for data, because that is what places the load on the network, but if you are restricting consumption through data there is no need to restrict speed.
Woz is wise in moving to Australia, because the rich will have their fast 1Gbps connections (at least $250/month) subsidised by the poor with their 12/1Mbps connections ($50/month). If it wasn't a national roll out, then it would be too expensive to roll out just for those prepared to pay for a 100Mbps or faster connection. A similar situation exists with electricity infrastructure where transmission lines have been upgraded to support MacMansions with multiple air-conditioners. The cost of the infrastructure upgrades are then shared across the network, including those too poor to pay the running expenses for an air-con.
Wait, wait, what?
Firstly, big electricity consumers get big electricity usage bills. They pay more money so the company can perform the infrastructure work to support them. At least, that's how it works where I live. We don't pay for a connection to the power grid and then electricity is free.
Secondly, it's a false comparison. The NBN isn't an existing network where we're performing upgrades to support heavy users, it's running brand new cabling everywhere for everybody. The single biggest cost in the rollout is digging up and running millions of kilometres of fibre cable. You're looking at a massive cost to get 12M fibre links to all households. Delivering 1000M instead of 12M to a household isn't a big deal, the big expense is the same either way.
I don't know for certain because I haven't seen NBNCo's financials, but I very strongly suspect the $250/month gigabit users are subsidising the 12M users. Exetel offers 12M NBN links for $35/month and that's not going to pay for the line to be run to your house, never mind internet service.
There's more to life than pixels. Specifically, bitrate and codec. Or are broadcasters in my area the only ones who broadcast HD material that looks terrible with blockiness all over the screen whenever the camera moves?
There's a lot of room for improvement before we reach the limits of 1080p.
4.0 and 4.1 don't have very harsh CPU/GPU/RAM requirements, the big problem is storage space.
4.0 uses significantly more space than 2.x so it's complicated to upgrade a lot of phones. Even if the phone has plenty of internal flash you might only have a 512MB system partition, so upgrading means re-partitioning flash to allocate more space to the OS, which is apparently too difficult to do as an OTA update.
With Cyanogenmod I believe you can use a custom bootloader to wipe and repartition then load the 4.x OS image onto the blank phone over USB.
Okay, I've broken the Slashdot rule and read the article.
Can anyone tell me why this is so much better than traditional RAM with a SATA attached SSD? Or using hibernate to disk with an SSD? Is SATA so slow and laggy that there's a big benefit to attaching flash chips to our RAM slots?
Retaining data in RAM without power is cool as a technical feat, but my SSD doesn't take long to fill my RAM chips.
If the problem persists and is not secondary to a rogue program/daemon get a 3.5 ft (approx. 1 meter) length of sucker rod* and have a chat with the user in question.
Sucker rod def. — 3/4, 7/8 or 1in. hardened steel rod, male threaded on each end. Primary use in the oil industry in Western North Dakota and other locations to pump 'suck' oil from oil wells. Secondary uses are for the construction of cattle feed lots and for dealing with the occasional recalcitrant or belligerent individual.
The exchange rate is part of it but locked down distribution channels are the larger part.
A while ago, one US dollar was worth 1.7 Australian dollars. So something worth US$50 in a US store would be put on shelves here for AU$85. And then the exchange rate changed. One US dollar was worth one AU dollar. But things don't sell for their cost, they sell for as much as the seller can get and that's the pricing Australian consumers were used to. So that US$50 item would still be sold for AU$85 and someone would pocket the AU$35 difference.
The second part of this is distribution channel lockdown. Companies producing goods make deals with their US distributors to force those distributors to refuse to sell to Australian buyers. That leaves Australians and Australian retailers forced to buy from the designated Australian distributor at inflated prices.
What the grey market does is break that distribution lock. That's all. Some US citizen buys goods in the US from the US distribution channel, pays the US price, ships them over and sells them in Australia for far less than the authorised Australian distributor charges Australian retailers. If it wasn't for the locked down distribution, Australian retailers would skip the authorised Australian distributor and buy from a US distributor at US prices.
Another reason Australians are complaining is, with Internet sales, people nowdays can *see* the prices being charged elsewhere. 15 years ago, you'd have no idea what something sold for in another country. Now, we see Skyrim appear on Steam for US$50 for US gamers and US$90 for Australian gamers.
Yes, we get charged US dollars on Steam. 90 of them instead of 50, because the US Steam site sees I have an Australian IP address. And you have to send the packets much harder to make sure they get all the way across the ocean, you know? There's sites where you can order a game and they'll go to their local retailer, buy the game, open the box and then email you the Steam key. You can type it in your Steam client and download the game. Absolutely ridiculous.
Translation: "We did some things we thought would work, and then later we stopped doing the things that weren't working and did more of the things that were."
In an ideal world, governments behaving sensibly wouldn't make headlines.
Oh, the DNS server isn't working properly? I'll just SSH in and fix it. By connecting to it over the network. Using DNS.
Relying on DNS works fine... until it stops working fine, due to software bugs or hardware failure or whatever. Being able to remember the IP address of your gateway, DNS server, web server, etc off the top of your head doesn't sound very useful, but network admins don't need to be told that they'll miss it.
Jelly Bean update gave a fresh new life to my aging Nexus S. It's a fantastic update. UI is very smooth and responsive.
You want to try it on a Galaxy Nexus. I was writing a message to someone, switched to the browser to check something mid-message, switched between the browser and the home screen a few times because the animation was so smooth and I wanted to see it again and forgot what I was doing.
As a matter of fact I have liked the packaging of every Nexus product I have bought as well as even thought the graphic design was good.
I came to the comments to say just that. My Nexus One and Galaxy Nexus both had nice, simple packaging, so making this out to be a Google-wide problem is a bit much.
You're overlooking the other major upside to this patent: technical details will be available to MythTV's developers and added to the commercial skipper.
Just plugging it into a modern TV can be difficult. The stock composite cables produce a pathetic image with distortion all over the place. You need component to even do 480p. Not having a HDMI port is terrible, I bought a more expensive AV receiver with component inputs specifically to accommodate my Wii.
Low resolution in a cartoon-y Mario game is fine. Lack of connectivity isn't.
Australians use the word 'prawn', actually. Just so you know.
When Australian comedian Paul Hogan used the phrase, "I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you" in an American television advertisement, it was intended to make what he was saying easier for his American audience to understand, and was thus a deliberate distortion of what an Australian would typically say.
Slashdot Mirror
Did *you* read before commenting? The summary said:
Australia is currently in the middle of parliamentary inquiry into the country's disproportionately high prices for technology.
Google turned up a reference
House of Representatives Committees
House Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications
Inquiry into IT Pricing
On 24 May 2012 the Committee resolved to inquire into IT price discrimination, following a request from the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy.
We employ people for industry. Welders, electricians, mechanics, etc. to build or repair mining machinery, among other things. Some work sites do mandatory drug testing.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who back right off when they hear about that. "Would you pass a drug test?" "Oh... I think I'll give that job a miss."
Or, "I don't know, maybe." "Well, are you a regular user?" "Is two or three times a day regular?"
We once had an employee get drug tested and the testers called the test machine's manufacturer because they thought it was broken.
He returned positive results to everything.
Meandering back towards the actual topic: screw smart drugs, it's 2012, where's my neural implants?
30 seconds on Google turned up this article and a speech on the subject.
The bible has been in human hands for centuries and copied by hand before printing presses came in. A spelling mistake here, bad handwriting there, the next guy comes along and misreads a word and then 'fixes' the sentence so that it makes sense. I'd be shocked if there was a single page in there that hadn't changed. And that's only accidental changes.
Looking at the things politicians do today, when it's easier to fact-check and catch them out than ever before, I find it completely believable that people just... mis-copied parts of the bible to justify whatever they felt like doing. It's not like people in the year 900 were going to get on Facebook and compare notes with people in other countries. They'd probably never touched a copy of the Bible. Probably couldn't read. A man with a bible could tell people it said anything. Make some changes in his copy, noone would ever know.
How is that different from today's Raspberry Pi up to supercomputer?
Relevant Twitter bot: https://twitter.com/StealthMountain
NBNCo wholesale charges will be the biggest single cost to RSPs. RSPs will have no alternative but to pay. NBNCo have in their wisdom chosen to charge a sliding scale for speed (AVC) and for data (CVC). The effect of this is that we are going to have fibre capable of 1Gbps to which half the country connect at 12/1Mbps (NBNCo Corporate Plan). I can appreciate the need to charge for data, because that is what places the load on the network, but if you are restricting consumption through data there is no need to restrict speed.
Woz is wise in moving to Australia, because the rich will have their fast 1Gbps connections (at least $250/month) subsidised by the poor with their 12/1Mbps connections ($50/month). If it wasn't a national roll out, then it would be too expensive to roll out just for those prepared to pay for a 100Mbps or faster connection. A similar situation exists with electricity infrastructure where transmission lines have been upgraded to support MacMansions with multiple air-conditioners. The cost of the infrastructure upgrades are then shared across the network, including those too poor to pay the running expenses for an air-con.
Wait, wait, what?
Firstly, big electricity consumers get big electricity usage bills. They pay more money so the company can perform the infrastructure work to support them. At least, that's how it works where I live. We don't pay for a connection to the power grid and then electricity is free.
Secondly, it's a false comparison. The NBN isn't an existing network where we're performing upgrades to support heavy users, it's running brand new cabling everywhere for everybody. The single biggest cost in the rollout is digging up and running millions of kilometres of fibre cable. You're looking at a massive cost to get 12M fibre links to all households. Delivering 1000M instead of 12M to a household isn't a big deal, the big expense is the same either way.
I don't know for certain because I haven't seen NBNCo's financials, but I very strongly suspect the $250/month gigabit users are subsidising the 12M users. Exetel offers 12M NBN links for $35/month and that's not going to pay for the line to be run to your house, never mind internet service.
This addon will translate Youtube comments for you.
And, of course, there's the indestructible Nokia.
xkcd: Extrapolating
There's more to life than pixels. Specifically, bitrate and codec. Or are broadcasters in my area the only ones who broadcast HD material that looks terrible with blockiness all over the screen whenever the camera moves?
There's a lot of room for improvement before we reach the limits of 1080p.
EA
YOU UNDERSTAND THAT BY THIS PROVISION, YOU AND EA ARE FOREGOING THE RIGHT TO SUE IN COURT AND HAVE A JURY TRIAL.
Newegg preferred account.
THIS AGREEMENT REQUIRES THE USE OF ARBITRATION ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS TO RESOLVE DISPUTES
You know it's legal because they use capitals.
4.0 and 4.1 don't have very harsh CPU/GPU/RAM requirements, the big problem is storage space.
4.0 uses significantly more space than 2.x so it's complicated to upgrade a lot of phones. Even if the phone has plenty of internal flash you might only have a 512MB system partition, so upgrading means re-partitioning flash to allocate more space to the OS, which is apparently too difficult to do as an OTA update.
With Cyanogenmod I believe you can use a custom bootloader to wipe and repartition then load the 4.x OS image onto the blank phone over USB.
Okay, I've broken the Slashdot rule and read the article.
Can anyone tell me why this is so much better than traditional RAM with a SATA attached SSD? Or using hibernate to disk with an SSD? Is SATA so slow and laggy that there's a big benefit to attaching flash chips to our RAM slots?
Retaining data in RAM without power is cool as a technical feat, but my SSD doesn't take long to fill my RAM chips.
Very, very few people. The point is, it wasn't really that long ago that 1080p screens were up around that price point.
If the problem persists and is not secondary to a rogue program/daemon get a 3.5 ft (approx. 1 meter) length of sucker rod* and have a chat with the user in question.
Sucker rod def. — 3/4, 7/8 or 1in. hardened steel rod, male threaded on each end. Primary use in the oil industry in Western North Dakota and other locations to pump 'suck' oil from oil wells. Secondary uses are for the construction of cattle feed lots and for dealing with the occasional recalcitrant or belligerent individual.
The exchange rate is part of it but locked down distribution channels are the larger part.
A while ago, one US dollar was worth 1.7 Australian dollars. So something worth US$50 in a US store would be put on shelves here for AU$85. And then the exchange rate changed. One US dollar was worth one AU dollar. But things don't sell for their cost, they sell for as much as the seller can get and that's the pricing Australian consumers were used to. So that US$50 item would still be sold for AU$85 and someone would pocket the AU$35 difference.
The second part of this is distribution channel lockdown. Companies producing goods make deals with their US distributors to force those distributors to refuse to sell to Australian buyers. That leaves Australians and Australian retailers forced to buy from the designated Australian distributor at inflated prices.
What the grey market does is break that distribution lock. That's all. Some US citizen buys goods in the US from the US distribution channel, pays the US price, ships them over and sells them in Australia for far less than the authorised Australian distributor charges Australian retailers. If it wasn't for the locked down distribution, Australian retailers would skip the authorised Australian distributor and buy from a US distributor at US prices.
Another reason Australians are complaining is, with Internet sales, people nowdays can *see* the prices being charged elsewhere. 15 years ago, you'd have no idea what something sold for in another country. Now, we see Skyrim appear on Steam for US$50 for US gamers and US$90 for Australian gamers.
Yes, we get charged US dollars on Steam. 90 of them instead of 50, because the US Steam site sees I have an Australian IP address. And you have to send the packets much harder to make sure they get all the way across the ocean, you know? There's sites where you can order a game and they'll go to their local retailer, buy the game, open the box and then email you the Steam key. You can type it in your Steam client and download the game. Absolutely ridiculous.
Translation: "We did some things we thought would work, and then later we stopped doing the things that weren't working and did more of the things that were."
In an ideal world, governments behaving sensibly wouldn't make headlines.
Finland, home of the Nokia 3310. I hope all the nearby buildings were insured.
Oh, the DNS server isn't working properly? I'll just SSH in and fix it. By connecting to it over the network. Using DNS.
Relying on DNS works fine... until it stops working fine, due to software bugs or hardware failure or whatever. Being able to remember the IP address of your gateway, DNS server, web server, etc off the top of your head doesn't sound very useful, but network admins don't need to be told that they'll miss it.
Jelly Bean update gave a fresh new life to my aging Nexus S. It's a fantastic update. UI is very smooth and responsive.
You want to try it on a Galaxy Nexus. I was writing a message to someone, switched to the browser to check something mid-message, switched between the browser and the home screen a few times because the animation was so smooth and I wanted to see it again and forgot what I was doing.
It's literally distractingly smooth. :D
As a matter of fact I have liked the packaging of every Nexus product I have bought as well as even thought the graphic design was good.
I came to the comments to say just that. My Nexus One and Galaxy Nexus both had nice, simple packaging, so making this out to be a Google-wide problem is a bit much.
I've tried that. Nice FPS, crazy high polygon counts and texture resolution. Gameplay's crap though and I can't find a save point.
You're overlooking the other major upside to this patent: technical details will be available to MythTV's developers and added to the commercial skipper.
Watching the Wii on a HDTV now is *just painful.*
Just plugging it into a modern TV can be difficult. The stock composite cables produce a pathetic image with distortion all over the place. You need component to even do 480p. Not having a HDMI port is terrible, I bought a more expensive AV receiver with component inputs specifically to accommodate my Wii.
Low resolution in a cartoon-y Mario game is fine. Lack of connectivity isn't.
Australians use the word 'prawn', actually. Just so you know.
When Australian comedian Paul Hogan used the phrase, "I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you" in an American television advertisement, it was intended to make what he was saying easier for his American audience to understand, and was thus a deliberate distortion of what an Australian would typically say.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prawn#Shrimp_and_prawns