No, they just don't like it when a project that cost a fraction (arround AU$1.5 million) of what theirs did suceeded before theirs did, by a bunch of mechanical engineers at a university that nobody knows about. More details about the project are available at the Center for Hypersonics and UQ news.
We had some lectures from the head of the engineering faculty in first year, and he went into a fair bit of detail on how the system worked. Last I heard was that the project has received further funding, but that was shortly after their mostly sucessful trial run (they couldn't find their rocket for a few weeks in the Australian desert). I've heard nothing else about it since, though. But that's probably because all anybody talks about now is mice in space.
The way it works here in Australia is not quite what most people have mentioned. Our two cable providers (Telstra and Optus) now both offer caps, and most ADSL providers also cap their connections. They restrict the ammount of data we can transfer to and from our modems, with some providers also capping the maximum transfer speeds (Telstra cable at the moment offers an "uncapped speed" service, but I imagine that'll go in a few months time too -- they really can't help themselves). Most providers give arround 3GB a month for arround AU$80 a month for cable, and usually a little more for ADSL. If you use up your limit, you start paying ~13c/MB...
Optus offers a slightly nicer system. Once you use up all your limit, they drop you down to a 28kbps connection, so you join the hundreds of thousands of dialup users in australia on sub-par connections. But at least you don't then pay for phone calls on top of this.
And while I'm complaining about cable networks, it seems that Telstra & Optus can now give each other CATV channels, to "aid competition". Which is really strange, since they were always competing with each other anyway. And the ironic twist is this: Telstra (our partially-government-owned telco, soon to be fully privatized) is charging more for the extra channels from Optus, while Optus is charging less for the Telstra channels. We would have switched to Optus many moons ago indeed, but for some reason, the government wouldn't allow one single unified cable network to be installed, but insisted that both companies install their own. But Optus, not having the backing of the government, decided to put their cable up in more populated areas, so of course, people who actually might use it (like us) miss out.
In conclusion, you really have to fight it! Most broadband users just sat there and did nothing about the cap, and now we're stuck with it. I've always envisioned the USA as a "mondo cheap bandwidth" place, and now that you're reduced to the garbage that we have to face every day...
As a UQ student, I'm lucky enough to see it once a week. Since its last drop, there's now a big long tail from the drop to the funnel. I imagine that, just like before a drop, the physics staff and students will gather round and place bets on when they think it'll break off. Apparently there is a fair bit of money in it...
And this is just one example of how our Federal Government's massive spending cutbacks on higher education, and the consequent reduction in spending on research, can produce breakthroughs in science. But of course, our biggest breakthrough is our Scramjet program -- NASA's hundreds of millions of dollar and hundreds of brilliant scientists and engineers, we did for A$1.5 million (that's about US$7.84), a couple of basements full of shock-tunnels, some second-hand rockets, and a handful post-grad students.
Finally, seeing as everybody enjoys looking at UQ web cams so much, you can also view FoyerCam, an incentive to make us messy students keep out foyer clean in our computer science building. There's more cams here, but having 2 servers/.ed will probably land me (or somebody else) in a great deal of trouble. And of course, no visit to UQ is complete without a visit to kewn.
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No, they just don't like it when a project that cost a fraction (arround AU$1.5 million) of what theirs did suceeded before theirs did, by a bunch of mechanical engineers at a university that nobody knows about. More details about the project are available at the Center for Hypersonics and UQ news.
We had some lectures from the head of the engineering faculty in first year, and he went into a fair bit of detail on how the system worked. Last I heard was that the project has received further funding, but that was shortly after their mostly sucessful trial run (they couldn't find their rocket for a few weeks in the Australian desert). I've heard nothing else about it since, though. But that's probably because all anybody talks about now is mice in space.
The way it works here in Australia is not quite what most people have mentioned. Our two cable providers (Telstra and Optus) now both offer caps, and most ADSL providers also cap their connections. They restrict the ammount of data we can transfer to and from our modems, with some providers also capping the maximum transfer speeds (Telstra cable at the moment offers an "uncapped speed" service, but I imagine that'll go in a few months time too -- they really can't help themselves). Most providers give arround 3GB a month for arround AU$80 a month for cable, and usually a little more for ADSL. If you use up your limit, you start paying ~13c/MB...
Optus offers a slightly nicer system. Once you use up all your limit, they drop you down to a 28kbps connection, so you join the hundreds of thousands of dialup users in australia on sub-par connections. But at least you don't then pay for phone calls on top of this.
And while I'm complaining about cable networks, it seems that Telstra & Optus can now give each other CATV channels, to "aid competition". Which is really strange, since they were always competing with each other anyway. And the ironic twist is this: Telstra (our partially-government-owned telco, soon to be fully privatized) is charging more for the extra channels from Optus, while Optus is charging less for the Telstra channels. We would have switched to Optus many moons ago indeed, but for some reason, the government wouldn't allow one single unified cable network to be installed, but insisted that both companies install their own. But Optus, not having the backing of the government, decided to put their cable up in more populated areas, so of course, people who actually might use it (like us) miss out.
In conclusion, you really have to fight it! Most broadband users just sat there and did nothing about the cap, and now we're stuck with it. I've always envisioned the USA as a "mondo cheap bandwidth" place, and now that you're reduced to the garbage that we have to face every day...
Viva la bandwidth!
As a UQ student, I'm lucky enough to see it once a week. Since its last drop, there's now a big long tail from the drop to the funnel. I imagine that, just like before a drop, the physics staff and students will gather round and place bets on when they think it'll break off. Apparently there is a fair bit of money in it...
/.ed will probably land me (or somebody else) in a great deal of trouble. And of course, no visit to UQ is complete without a visit to kewn.
And this is just one example of how our Federal Government's massive spending cutbacks on higher education, and the consequent reduction in spending on research, can produce breakthroughs in science. But of course, our biggest breakthrough is our Scramjet program -- NASA's hundreds of millions of dollar and hundreds of brilliant scientists and engineers, we did for A$1.5 million (that's about US$7.84), a couple of basements full of shock-tunnels, some second-hand rockets, and a handful post-grad students.
Finally, seeing as everybody enjoys looking at UQ web cams so much, you can also view FoyerCam, an incentive to make us messy students keep out foyer clean in our computer science building. There's more cams here, but having 2 servers