Warren Seen

but his views on the state of the ADSL2 market here in Tasmania are spot on!

Repost of a comment submitted to this piece on Business Spectator, in case it gets edited or does’t end up being posted at all.

Hackles raised, set phasers to KILL.

You had me nodding my head until the last paragraph, what a ridiculous conclusion! The argument that all the Internet is used for is piracy and porn has echoes of Richard Alston, our former comms minister who was illustriously crowned the “world’s biggest luddite” for making a similar assertion.

First, I want to cover off this porn argument: basically, you’re making a moral judgment here - the vast majority of porn on the internet, whilst tasteless and lacking in artistic merit, is actually legally created by consenting adults in jurisdictions in which it is legal to operate. Raising this as being in anyway relevant to the FTTN debate is a straw man argument designed to tug at conservative heartstrings.

Secondly, piracy: Where did you source the figure of 60%? Has it been independently verified? Because it smells funny to me. If you really have concrete evidence that all of this data is illegal, then why is there not an enormous backlog of court cases prosecuting these alleged pirates?

I would submit it’s because “60%” is a made up figure promulgated by an industry group such as the RIAA or MPAA in the US, who are trying to tar many legitimate users of software distribution systems such as bittorrent, as pirates.

The fact is that many of these groups are threatened by the internet, not because of piracy, but because the participatory nature that high-speed networking enables means that the existing music/motion picture/television industrial-complex is currently being smashed apart.

Consumers, tired of being treated like the personal pocket book of these industries in exchange for pitiful offerings are becoming producers of content, cutting out the fat middle-men and engaging their audiences in new media ventures that are far more relevant, personal and engaging than anything the TV or motion picture houses have ever produced.

The “mainstream media” is dying, they just don’t know it yet.

Please, explain to me why, in 2008, you cannot design a washing machine that has a fail-safe mode of operation when filling?

Yes Simpson, I’m looking at you and your alleged “Ezi-Sensor” upright washing machine that we bought 3 weeks ago, which has proceeded to flood once, and attempted to overfill a further 2 times - luckily I was there to stop it. Since you know, walking across a tiled floor with standing water on it to operate an electrical device isn’t on the list of things I do for kicks.

Seriously, how much would it cost to add a cutoff to the solenoids if, you know, water is gushing out of the bowl and onto the floor? I would have thought that would indicate a non-standard mode of operation!

It’s not rocket science. It’s not even software engineering. It doesn’t even require any electronics!

FFS.

Dear Ubuntu. Please don’t go blacklisting the prism54 driver on me again? kthx!

For some reason, the v1 of this card (aka the Made in Taiwan version) doesn’t seem to work with the new p54 drivers…

For reference, in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist change this:

# replaced by p54pci
blacklist prism54


to this:


# replaced by p54pci
#blacklist prism54
blacklist p54common
blacklist p54pci
blacklist p54usb


I mentioned Morfik a while back, the little Tassie company that was taking on Google with a number of patents.

Today they were featured on Qik, interviewed by Scoble himself. Check it out.

Telecommunications in Tasmania pretty much sucks. It’s expensive, choice is limited and we’re at the mercy of a certain incumbent with monopoly on interstate connectivity. The state government is dragging its feet and has been for the last 5 years, wasting our money in the process.
We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more.

It’s Digital Tasmania. Come, join us… *

* Void where prohibited. No purchase required to enter. 5c refundable deposit in SA.

After having signed up for slicehost six++ months ago, I’ve finally gotten around to migrating this site from my old shared host onto my new slice, so here it is. Everything appears to have come across smoothly, although it took more than a few hours to tweak everything to my liking.

In the end, I opted not to host my own email, a strategic decision based on the time and effort required on my part to set up, configure and most importantly, secure and maintain a mail server. Instead, I spent fifteen minutes of my time setting up Google Apps. Being able to keep my personalised email address, with 6Gb of storage and full access via POP3 and IMAP (although it’s a tad quirky since GMail doesn’t support folders in the traditional sense) plus access via the GMail web UI on the go, it offers the best solution for my mail needs across multiple machines.

It’s been a busy time of year for me surprisingly, so much so that I’ve again picked up the GTD book and made another, more concerted effort to get my “things” done. It really feels like I don’t have enough hours in the day with all these different things on the go, and I’ve really noticed the relief that comes from being able to “braindump” everything that’s on my mind and start tackling it in a sensible way.

I’ve never been one for new year’s resolutions, but I definitely have started making plans to be more proactive this year, rather than just letting all this “stuff” control me. So here’s to new beginnings…

• Tassie lags nation in net take-up | Mercury - The Voice of Tasmania
  A bare 54 per cent of Tasmanian homes are connected to the internet and just 28.9 per cent of homes have a broadband connection. The state lags the national averages of 63 per cent and 43 per cent respectively.
  (tags: broadband tasmania)

• If Telstra wins the fibre fight it will be on the way back to monopoly | Business | The Australian
  THE battle to build and control the nation’s fixed fibre to the node broadband network is almost literally a battle to the death between the country’s two biggest telcos, Telstra and Optus. In a really fundamental way it is the pivot point for the competi
  (tags: fttn broadband)