Telstra is half owned by the australian goverment, I doubt if the government would let them outsourse to India or China, or indeed California.
Err, yes. Whilst they remain half-owned by the government they are influenced by government policy. (overseas outsourcing is bad, mm'kay?)
That's the reason why they're so desperate to be fully privatised. If it will increase profit to outsource all their front-line call centres to India or wherever, then as a fully independant, publicly listed company, they'll do it.
They (the subsiduary) kept the IT support staff to a bare minimum and expected them to work hugely excessive hours. If Telstra are anything like this they may have problems keeping people to support their environment.
Telstra are.
Telstra are trying to shed themselves of employees at every possible opportunity. (This isn't factless ranting, this is published - browse through australianit.com.au's archives) Telstra are desperate for their share price to raise so the government is able and willing to sell their part of the company.
The network is falling to pieces but Telstra are getting rid of tech staff as fast as they can.
I believe Telstra will in future be nothing more than a brand name controlled by high-level management that just control the contracting companies that do the actual work.
How good this is depends on your political leanings, I guess, but it scares the hell out of me.
They're a pack of lying monopolistic bastards who break the law at every opportunity
I'm no fan of Telstra, but lets step back a bit here. Telstra don't break the law at every opportunity - they're not that stupid/evil. They do bend the rules whenever it suits them - legal law breaking!
Telstra is an amazing business. It has near-monopolistic control over every market it enters (all telecommunications, cable TV, Internet), yet its prices are definately not competitive.
If no-one was ever sacked for buying IBM, then there must be a lot of companies that say, "you can't go wrong buying from Telstra".
Meanwhile back in real life millions of scam artists, spammers and paedophiles remain confident that legal loopholes exist that allow them to do what they do without fear of prosecution.
Cookies security problems? That's so 1996... Get with the real problems the Internet needs laws to prevent.
My home-built system is running an Asus A7N8X Deluxe, which handles 5.1 on hardware. If I wanted to turn my computer into a home cinema or have surround sound for my games, I wouldn't even *need* one of them there fancy sound cards.
It's interesting that you've been succesful building a home cinema machine (DivX box/whatever) using onboard motherboard sound.
I would be the first to admit that my home audio setup isn't going to win any THX awards any time soon, but I like to get decent audio out of the meagre budget I have for these things...
When building the computer I used a 1Ghz Celeron CPU with a Soltek S370 motherboard, and the generic "AC97" chipset audio, into a Pioneer Pro Logic amp. So not new gear, but not old.
The result was that it sounded okay, but the centre channel was distorted sometimes and the rear channels experienced a sort of "waving around the room" effect.
I dug out an old SoundBlaster PCI 64 and put that in the machine. The problems with the surround channels disappeared and there was a noticeable lack of hiss in playback.
New motherboards crammed full of features? Sure. Quality? Not yet. Do people plugging $15 speakers into their computer care? No:-)
It's great to see that a list is being kept of the programs that are IPv6 capable... that run under Unix systems.
Any such lists for programs that run under other IPv6 operating systems? Like Windows? (yes, it has IPv6 support!)
Any other mainstream OSes have IPv6 support? (MacOS?)
Re:Oh, simpler times...
on
Hamvention
·
· Score: 1
All too used to punching in a channel or a web address and having content delivered immediately, I guess.
But where's the fun in that?
If you could just dial up a country on radio and know that someone there will respond, would you really want to...?
Gavin VK6HGR
Re:Oh, simpler times...
on
Hamvention
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But seriously, my experience is that this event as with most ham radio things has been dwindling over the years. Anyone else feel that way?
It's a shame too because the community spirit of the ham radio operators rivals that of the early days of the Internet. But the Internet has lost its spark (or at least it's friendliness) far faster than amatuer radio.
Its true that in many countries amateur radio licenses have started to fall in number... some blame "the internet" and others say that it's "young people" who have no interest anymore in technical hobbies. Hardly. I'm 24!
Amateur radio has changed as times go on. unable to put up big antennas in your back yard to work stations internationally? All you have to do is pick up your handheld radio and connect via a voice-over-IP gateway and talk all you want worldwide.
The UK's foundation license and Australia's proposed introductory license are trying to solve the problem we all seem to have of "no time for that". By making that first step into the hobby that much easier to get, more people are willing to give it a go.
It is a fun and rewarding hobby that goes well with computing as a hobby (a different level of geekdom?) or as a different technical hobby if you're stuck with computers all day at work...
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.
I forget how many times I have read that sentence when tracking down really strange problems with Microsoft apps and operating systems. They don't offer a patch most of the time, they'd might has well have written,
"Microsoft knows this is a problem with this product but you're just going to have to buy the next version and hope we fixed it, because we sure aren't fixing it now!"
As I mentioned above, the book is very easy to read. Flickenger has a "conversational" writing style I found easy to parse. If you hang out with Linux geeks very much, you'll recognize his way of communicating and easily assimilate what he has to say.
You know that if you start using words such as 'parse' in every day language, you probably do hangout with geeks very much!
(and they probably find words such as parse easy to communicate with, too):-)
Because it would probably have never been published.
Sure, it's fun to re-write a bit of the LOTR in the style of your favourite author, but try doing it with an entire chapter... or an entire book. The witty and humerous style of, say Douglas Adams would quickly become unbearable on something as big as LOTR.
It's a bit like translating Shakespear into Klingon. Well, yes, do it if you want but the world reads Shakespear as it was written and as it was intended! Everything else is a waste of time...
how many of us have walked into a bank, an insurance company, telco, a large parts wholesaler (any industry) or any other heavy user of 'serious IT' hand seen the clerk using either an original green screen IBM 3270 terminal or a PC running a terminal emulator?
The IT industry has moved on, but these sorts of comapnies are very stuck in a 'if it aint broke, don't fix it' attitude (especially banks).
Whatever the reason (technically valid or not) the managers of these dinosaurs can't see that their 100,000 sessions or whatever it is running at all - even if their hugely custom software ran at all - using a huge cluster of cheap PC servers (oh look, we're back to a mainframe again!)
I think I'll be getting my power, insurance, phone bill, bank statements, car registration bills generated with one these old machines for a very, very long time to come.
Considering the drivel Alston normally comes up with, this interview seemed to be quite good. Anyone involved in the Australian IT and/or telecommunications industry would be honestly shocked and amazed that Senator Alston even knew what 'spam' was! (even if he still doesn't read his own email)
The Australian government has already declared by 2008 all TV transmissions will be exclusively digital. Digital signal is available now, and although the picture quality is very good (not quite DVD quality, but better than any video or free-to-air signal outside the studio) - it seems nobody wants it.
TVs with digital decoders built in are just coming on the market, as are HDTVs... for the rest of us there is a $600 odd decoder to buy to make our perfectly working analogue TV work with digital.
The government here doesn't even seem interested in making spectrum available for use in other purposes as the new digital TV channels are largely in between the existing analogue channels ! (except for channel 0,1,2 which suffer interference due to their frequency)
Continous arguments by the govt and media companies haven't yet settled on arrangements for multi-channeling, or data-over-TV or any of the other cool digital TV features. Some media companies want some features, other want different ones. Insert much political nonsense... lather, rince, repeat.
At the moment, it's just 'normal' TV that you receive through a digtal black box.
After 2008 there is supposed to be no more analogue signal. No more spare TV in the bedroom. All need a digital decoder to function as they did before.
Oh, did I mention that we use a digital format that is almost completely incompatible with every other worldwide format?
Digital TV? Looks nice, government, but tell me why I need it and not why you want it!
Don't jump in to digital TV too quickly, guys, it resulting mess is not worth it...
Windows 98 included Personal Web Server. If you install Office you get Frontpage Server Extensions. 2000 server has VPN services. These are all part and parcel with the operating system. How then can my ISP say that even those Windows may let you share data on certain ports and protocols, we forbid it?
First off, I agree that (as many others have said) ISPs should just accept your money, give you your IP address and access and then leave you alone. No port blocking no redirection...
But realise this: not all ISP customers know what they are doing. You mention the built-in web servers that come with Windows - how flawed are they out of the box without patching? Does Joe user serving out holiday photos to his friends and family know how to update his web server? No.
How many of the Nimda etc probes we are (still) receiving have been investigated by the customer's ISP who were contractually unable to do anything about it because their agreement with their customer ends at the router and not the customer equipment?
The customer says, "I don't care - it's none of your business what we do with our account".
ISPs should leave their customers to infiltered, direct internet access, but they need to interfere sometimes to protect users from themselves. (like blocking incoming port 80 by default unless you tell them otherwise)
ISPs who block incoming ports 25, 53, 80 etc only to push their own hosting products are just greedy.
I was looking forward to a movie based on an operating system...
Nah... It'd be a flop. Sun Solaris the movie - opens up with the hapless protagonist flipping the install CD in a junked machine he got for a song at the auction.
2 and a half hours later the movie ends when our hero dies of a caffine overdose just as the machine declares '25% complete!'
Perhaps it wasn't a lack of imagination on the part of the reviewer... The inventors/demonstrators of the technology had something to do with it too (by the sounds of it)
It happened then and it happens now - some really clever brightspark invents something 'cool'. What he doesn't invent is a purpose for the technology - why someone would actually want to buy one!
Think to our time and something like the 'Internet Fridge' - wowzers that's great technology! My fridge can detect when I've run out of something and order me some fresh milk across the Internet. Instead of saying, "Wow, this'll change the world!" we all end up thinking that our nice old 'dumb' fridge works very well thankyou-very-much.
Same attitude in the 1930's I think - the world was perfectly happy reading newspapers, listening to radio (err, I mean the 'wireless') and visiting the cinema.
TV was cutting-edge technology, but they didn't explain why someone would want one!
Bringing mass media into the living room back then was a place already taken by radio. As slashdotters probably realise - it's difficult to unseat an existing technology that's wildly popular... (even if it is obsolete)
Neither of these may be high usage areas, but if they're green on the coverage map, I'll be mightily pissed if my phone doesn't work there after I break down. And I'll let them know afterward, if I live.
I live in Australia and by far the most popular of (the two) mobile phone standards is GSM.
GSM is nice. It operatees between countries and between carriers fairly well. (But at this stage it's not set up for full roaming here. Only for 000/112/911 calls it will pick the closest tower regardless of carrier)
It always amuses me when I go for a long drive out of a capital city and play 'spot the cell tower'. The carriers like to boast their superior 'highway' coverage and to do this each of the 3 carriers sports their own huge, expensive (to install as well as maintain - pay someone to drive several 100Km to a remote site just to check battery levels and tell me that's economical) communications tower every 50Km or so even though the traffic they handle would probably be very small/emergencies only.
The dominate carrier (Telstra) seems to be building base stations along highways and in tiny towns right across the country. I rekon these towers would be lucky if they handled more than one call at once on any given day, but I guess customers like it when they look at their phone and it doesn't say 'no signal'...
Now... I don't know if Verizon uses GSM or if what they use can do this - would it make more sense for areas of low usage for competitors to create one base station to cover the area and just split the costs? The tower isn't likely to turn a profit but its softened a bit because the cost is shared between the companies. Coverage then exists where none did before and customers in 'difficult' and/or 'low usage' areas benefit.
Just in the quiet areas though! In the major towns, cities etc the companies can do as they do now and reap the rewards of their jumping over each other and waving fat cheque books around to sign up the next owner of that tall building or the council of that nice big hill overlooking the city...
Having just come back from the theatre here myself in Perth, Western Australia here's a few more thoughts... Like jstockdale, it's 03:30 in the morning so apologies for the spelling mistakes!
Ok. It was a good film. No, great film. The sound was incredible, the visuals were so spectacular and so unbelievably detailed I was scared to blink in caes I missed something...
I'm not what you would call a 'religious' fan as some people seem to be and I saw the film as it was - a masterpiece. State-of-the-art does not even come close to describing the detail of the sets and the impact of the sound. (albeit computer generated - but I dare you to spot the differences)
It was worth getting to the cinema at 7 o'clock for the midnight screening just to see the 'hard core' fans play light sabre fights in the cinema foyer until the ushers came and broke them up. Those damn ushers!
Writing this now, I can remember more about the fight scenes and the breathtaking space battles than the finer points of the plot. Especially the political stuff. Heck, I can't remember some of the movie's main character's names! That stuff just lost me but it'll probably make more sense once I see it again.
That's the one minor gripe - the finer points of the plot didn't hit me on the first viewing. I guess to really undertand the film, you have to see it twice!
Go see the film. If you're dedicated go to the midnight screenings. If you really want to have fun, dress up in a black cape and leather boots and wave a plastic light sabre around while you're waiting (just mind those cinema staff):-)
Slashdot Mirror
So... something new happens that could knock us all offli@%#&$* NO CARRIER
Telstra is half owned by the australian goverment, I doubt if the government would let them outsourse to India or China, or indeed California.
Err, yes. Whilst they remain half-owned by the government they are influenced by government policy. (overseas outsourcing is bad, mm'kay?)
That's the reason why they're so desperate to be fully privatised. If it will increase profit to outsource all their front-line call centres to India or wherever, then as a fully independant, publicly listed company, they'll do it.
They (the subsiduary) kept the IT support staff to a bare minimum and expected them to work hugely excessive hours. If Telstra are anything like this they may have problems keeping people to support their environment.
Telstra are.
Telstra are trying to shed themselves of employees at every possible opportunity. (This isn't factless ranting, this is published - browse through australianit.com.au's archives) Telstra are desperate for their share price to raise so the government is able and willing to sell their part of the company.
The network is falling to pieces but Telstra are getting rid of tech staff as fast as they can.
I believe Telstra will in future be nothing more than a brand name controlled by high-level management that just control the contracting companies that do the actual work.
How good this is depends on your political leanings, I guess, but it scares the hell out of me.
They're a pack of lying monopolistic bastards who break the law at every opportunity
I'm no fan of Telstra, but lets step back a bit here. Telstra don't break the law at every opportunity - they're not that stupid/evil. They do bend the rules whenever it suits them - legal law breaking!
Telstra is an amazing business. It has near-monopolistic control over every market it enters (all telecommunications, cable TV, Internet), yet its prices are definately not competitive.
If no-one was ever sacked for buying IBM, then there must be a lot of companies that say, "you can't go wrong buying from Telstra".
Meanwhile back in real life millions of scam artists, spammers and paedophiles remain confident that legal loopholes exist that allow them to do what they do without fear of prosecution.
Cookies security problems? That's so 1996... Get with the real problems the Internet needs laws to prevent.
My home-built system is running an Asus A7N8X Deluxe, which handles 5.1 on hardware. If I wanted to turn my computer into a home cinema or have surround sound for my games, I wouldn't even *need* one of them there fancy sound cards.
:-)
It's interesting that you've been succesful building a home cinema machine (DivX box/whatever) using onboard motherboard sound.
I would be the first to admit that my home audio setup isn't going to win any THX awards any time soon, but I like to get decent audio out of the meagre budget I have for these things...
When building the computer I used a 1Ghz Celeron CPU with a Soltek S370 motherboard, and the generic "AC97" chipset audio, into a Pioneer Pro Logic amp. So not new gear, but not old.
The result was that it sounded okay, but the centre channel was distorted sometimes and the rear channels experienced a sort of "waving around the room" effect.
I dug out an old SoundBlaster PCI 64 and put that in the machine. The problems with the surround channels disappeared and there was a noticeable lack of hiss in playback.
New motherboards crammed full of features? Sure. Quality? Not yet. Do people plugging $15 speakers into their computer care? No
Speaking of Windows IPv6 programs...
:-)
Does anyone know why Mozilla under Linux (etc) systems supports IPv6 but Mozilla under Windows doesn't?
I'm really torn having to use Internet Explorer to visit IPv6 websites on my Windows computer
There is an IPv6 capable putty client available at unfix.org.
:-)
It works well but it doesn't seem to like connecting to '4 hosts. (yet...) I renamed the IPv6 version to putty6.exe to get around that problem
It's great to see that a list is being kept of the programs that are IPv6 capable... that run under Unix systems.
Any such lists for programs that run under other IPv6 operating systems? Like Windows? (yes, it has IPv6 support!)
Any other mainstream OSes have IPv6 support? (MacOS?)
All too used to punching in a channel or a web address and having content delivered immediately, I guess.
But where's the fun in that?
If you could just dial up a country on radio and know that someone there will respond, would you really want to...?
Gavin
VK6HGR
But seriously, my experience is that this event as with most ham radio things has been dwindling over the years. Anyone else feel that way?
:-)
It's a shame too because the community spirit of the ham radio operators rivals that of the early days of the Internet. But the Internet has lost its spark (or at least it's friendliness) far faster than amatuer radio.
Its true that in many countries amateur radio licenses have started to fall in number... some blame "the internet" and others say that it's "young people" who have no interest anymore in technical hobbies. Hardly. I'm 24!
Amateur radio has changed as times go on. unable to put up big antennas in your back yard to work stations internationally? All you have to do is pick up your handheld radio and connect via a voice-over-IP gateway and talk all you want worldwide.
The UK's foundation license and Australia's proposed introductory license are trying to solve the problem we all seem to have of "no time for that". By making that first step into the hobby that much easier to get, more people are willing to give it a go.
It is a fun and rewarding hobby that goes well with computing as a hobby (a different level of geekdom?) or as a different technical hobby if you're stuck with computers all day at work...
The spark is still there!
Gavin
VK6HGR
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.
I forget how many times I have read that sentence when tracking down really strange problems with Microsoft apps and operating systems. They don't offer a patch most of the time, they'd might has well have written,
"Microsoft knows this is a problem with this product but you're just going to have to buy the next version and hope we fixed it, because we sure aren't fixing it now!"
As I mentioned above, the book is very easy to read. Flickenger has a "conversational" writing style I found easy to parse. If you hang out with Linux geeks very much, you'll recognize his way of communicating and easily assimilate what he has to say.
:-)
You know that if you start using words such as 'parse' in every day language, you probably do hangout with geeks very much!
(and they probably find words such as parse easy to communicate with, too)
Because it would probably have never been published.
Sure, it's fun to re-write a bit of the LOTR in the style of your favourite author, but try doing it with an entire chapter... or an entire book. The witty and humerous style of, say Douglas Adams would quickly become unbearable on something as big as LOTR.
It's a bit like translating Shakespear into Klingon. Well, yes, do it if you want but the world reads Shakespear as it was written and as it was intended! Everything else is a waste of time...
how many of us have walked into a bank, an insurance company, telco, a large parts wholesaler (any industry) or any other heavy user of 'serious IT' hand seen the clerk using either an original green screen IBM 3270 terminal or a PC running a terminal emulator?
The IT industry has moved on, but these sorts of comapnies are very stuck in a 'if it aint broke, don't fix it' attitude (especially banks).
Whatever the reason (technically valid or not) the managers of these dinosaurs can't see that their 100,000 sessions or whatever it is running at all - even if their hugely custom software ran at all - using a huge cluster of cheap PC servers (oh look, we're back to a mainframe again!)
I think I'll be getting my power, insurance, phone bill, bank statements, car registration bills generated with one these old machines for a very, very long time to come.
Considering the drivel Alston normally comes up with, this interview seemed to be quite good. Anyone involved in the Australian IT and/or telecommunications industry would be honestly shocked and amazed that Senator Alston even knew what 'spam' was! (even if he still doesn't read his own email)
The Australian government has already declared by 2008 all TV transmissions will be exclusively digital. Digital signal is available now, and although the picture quality is very good (not quite DVD quality, but better than any video or free-to-air signal outside the studio) - it seems nobody wants it.
TVs with digital decoders built in are just coming on the market, as are HDTVs... for the rest of us there is a $600 odd decoder to buy to make our perfectly working analogue TV work with digital.
The government here doesn't even seem interested in making spectrum available for use in other purposes as the new digital TV channels are largely in between the existing analogue channels ! (except for channel 0,1,2 which suffer interference due to their frequency)
Continous arguments by the govt and media companies haven't yet settled on arrangements for multi-channeling, or data-over-TV or any of the other cool digital TV features. Some media companies want some features, other want different ones. Insert much political nonsense... lather, rince, repeat.
At the moment, it's just 'normal' TV that you receive through a digtal black box.
After 2008 there is supposed to be no more analogue signal. No more spare TV in the bedroom. All need a digital decoder to function as they did before.
Oh, did I mention that we use a digital format that is almost completely incompatible with every other worldwide format?
Digital TV? Looks nice, government, but tell me why I need it and not why you want it!
Don't jump in to digital TV too quickly, guys, it resulting mess is not worth it...
Windows 98 included Personal Web Server. If you install Office you get Frontpage Server Extensions. 2000 server has VPN services. These are all part and parcel with the operating system. How then can my ISP say that even those Windows may let you share data on certain ports and protocols, we forbid it?
First off, I agree that (as many others have said) ISPs should just accept your money, give you your IP address and access and then leave you alone. No port blocking no redirection...
But realise this: not all ISP customers know what they are doing. You mention the built-in web servers that come with Windows - how flawed are they out of the box without patching? Does Joe user serving out holiday photos to his friends and family know how to update his web server? No.
How many of the Nimda etc probes we are (still) receiving have been investigated by the customer's ISP who were contractually unable to do anything about it because their agreement with their customer ends at the router and not the customer equipment?
The customer says, "I don't care - it's none of your business what we do with our account".
ISPs should leave their customers to infiltered, direct internet access, but they need to interfere sometimes to protect users from themselves. (like blocking incoming port 80 by default unless you tell them otherwise)
ISPs who block incoming ports 25, 53, 80 etc only to push their own hosting products are just greedy.
I was looking forward to a movie based on an operating system...
Nah... It'd be a flop. Sun Solaris the movie - opens up with the hapless protagonist flipping the install CD in a junked machine he got for a song at the auction.
2 and a half hours later the movie ends when our hero dies of a caffine overdose just as the machine declares '25% complete!'
Sysops calling you by voice to validate your account. Sheesh! :)
Then sysop ringing you up afterwards and say, "Man, you've been connected to my board for like, 12 hours - don't you sleep?!?"
Maximus-CBCS supported Avatar, and RemoteAcess might of (can't remember - long long time ago!)...
Avatar was actually quite a bit faster to send over a slow link than ANSI.
One of the most popular terminal programs for the PC - Telix - didn't support Avatar so that was probably the reason it wasn't seen all that often...
I liked how 'megacycle' was used as a noun - the signal was 'sent by megacycle'.
That must have intrigued readers of the day. "Wow, you mean they've invented a new sort of bicylce as well??"
Of course, it's likely that the signal was sent on a radio carrier of several dozen (or hundred) Megacycles. (or what we would now call Megahertz)
Perhaps it wasn't a lack of imagination on the part of the reviewer... The inventors/demonstrators of the technology had something to do with it too (by the sounds of it)
It happened then and it happens now - some really clever brightspark invents something 'cool'. What he doesn't invent is a purpose for the technology - why someone would actually want to buy one!
Think to our time and something like the 'Internet Fridge' - wowzers that's great technology! My fridge can detect when I've run out of something and order me some fresh milk across the Internet. Instead of saying, "Wow, this'll change the world!" we all end up thinking that our nice old 'dumb' fridge works very well thankyou-very-much.
Same attitude in the 1930's I think - the world was perfectly happy reading newspapers, listening to radio (err, I mean the 'wireless') and visiting the cinema.
TV was cutting-edge technology, but they didn't explain why someone would want one!
Bringing mass media into the living room back then was a place already taken by radio. As slashdotters probably realise - it's difficult to unseat an existing technology that's wildly popular... (even if it is obsolete)
Neither of these may be high usage areas, but if they're green on the coverage map, I'll be mightily pissed if my phone doesn't work there after I break down. And I'll let them know afterward, if I live.
I live in Australia and by far the most popular of (the two) mobile phone standards is GSM.
GSM is nice. It operatees between countries and between carriers fairly well. (But at this stage it's not set up for full roaming here. Only for 000/112/911 calls it will pick the closest tower regardless of carrier)
It always amuses me when I go for a long drive out of a capital city and play 'spot the cell tower'. The carriers like to boast their superior 'highway' coverage and to do this each of the 3 carriers sports their own huge, expensive (to install as well as maintain - pay someone to drive several 100Km to a remote site just to check battery levels and tell me that's economical) communications tower every 50Km or so even though the traffic they handle would probably be very small/emergencies only.
The dominate carrier (Telstra) seems to be building base stations along highways and in tiny towns right across the country. I rekon these towers would be lucky if they handled more than one call at once on any given day, but I guess customers like it when they look at their phone and it doesn't say 'no signal'...
Now... I don't know if Verizon uses GSM or if what they use can do this - would it make more sense for areas of low usage for competitors to create one base station to cover the area and just split the costs? The tower isn't likely to turn a profit but its softened a bit because the cost is shared between the companies. Coverage then exists where none did before and customers in 'difficult' and/or 'low usage' areas benefit.
Just in the quiet areas though! In the major towns, cities etc the companies can do as they do now and reap the rewards of their jumping over each other and waving fat cheque books around to sign up the next owner of that tall building or the council of that nice big hill overlooking the city...
Having just come back from the theatre here myself in Perth, Western Australia here's a few more thoughts... Like jstockdale, it's 03:30 in the morning so apologies for the spelling mistakes!
:-)
Ok. It was a good film. No, great film. The sound was incredible, the visuals were so spectacular and so unbelievably detailed I was scared to blink in caes I missed something...
I'm not what you would call a 'religious' fan as some people seem to be and I saw the film as it was - a masterpiece. State-of-the-art does not even come close to describing the detail of the sets and the impact of the sound. (albeit computer generated - but I dare you to spot the differences)
It was worth getting to the cinema at 7 o'clock for the midnight screening just to see the 'hard core' fans play light sabre fights in the cinema foyer until the ushers came and broke them up. Those damn ushers!
Writing this now, I can remember more about the fight scenes and the breathtaking space battles than the finer points of the plot. Especially the political stuff. Heck, I can't remember some of the movie's main character's names! That stuff just lost me but it'll probably make more sense once I see it again.
That's the one minor gripe - the finer points of the plot didn't hit me on the first viewing. I guess to really undertand the film, you have to see it twice!
Go see the film. If you're dedicated go to the midnight screenings. If you really want to have fun, dress up in a black cape and leather boots and wave a plastic light sabre around while you're waiting (just mind those cinema staff)