Posts by Rich of Observationz
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The nearest PROPER pub to where I live in West Auckland [was in the city]
That'd be the liquor trust, wouldn't it? Though I was assured once by several westies that the liquor monopoly there had zero impact on competition and raised lots of money for charidee.
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To utterly digress:
My Ph.D. dissertation is currently bound by a confidentiality agreement due to intellectual property issues
Does that happen often? I've always thought of the concept of a university was that research (aside from that being done as a specifically commercial venture) was for the advancement of mankind's knowledge and had to be published.
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Like I said elsewhere:
Imagine that NZ was a lot poorer, and run as a dictatorship by ACT. Imagine that maybe 0.1% of New Zealanders could afford to go off to overseas education in a richer country.
Wouldn't the people of this overseas student elite be mainly ACT supporters? The government wouldn't need to make them protest in favour of their class's continued rule - they'd do it all by themselves.
That I think is where the demonstrators were coming from. Which doesn't detract from their right, when visiting a democracy such as NZ, from expressing any views they want to.
Incidentally, I think a pro-USA demo in Wellington would be rather small, and drowned out by anti-Bush Americans. I think the idea of "love my country, hate my government" is a lot stronger amongst expat Americans than the Chinese elite.
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You mean a TCP connection needs 1/40 of the downstream data rate to send its ACK packets? Sounds about right. Though for things like streaming telly, an option is to use UDP send-and-pray and let any noise appear as dropouts, just like on a Sky dish.
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difference between an old room sized mainframe and the latest Macbook Pro
That would be a factor of:
100,000 on disk (10MB vs 1TB)
50,000 on CPU MIPS
10,000 on cost (the other way, obviously)Fibre would be 50x faster than copper, max.
In terms of actual utility, I'm not sure on mainframes, but old-style offices probably got as much work done on an early 80's Wang word processoras we do today on the latest kit. Modern docs are prettier (and you have to have pretty documents to keep up with the competition) but I'm not sure they actually add value.
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My god. I hope it's about three litres in volume.
They sell great 1.25 litre plastic bottles of both the above at the brewery for... about $8 each. A dozen of each, some books, music, and a hammock is my dream summer.
See, I think that might explain why we don't have enough decent pubs. The $25 is rent for your seat plus a bit on top for beer. But a lot of people in NZ (and I'm not sure if this stems from student penury or the after-effects of former economic downturns) would rather save the money and drink at home. NZ bars mostly have to earn their money in two or three nights out of seven.
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Thats network equipment (DSLAM) software not consumer software, BTW. You can't try and hack your modem to get mega-upstream bandwidth.
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Right right answer, wrong explanation
The ADSL system relies on having all the "loud" high bandwidth signals at the DSLAM end and the "quiet" signals at the subscriber end. Running reverse DSL causes too much crosstalk and reduces capacity/distance.
I found a reference to the software actually being available - it's obviusly just the above problem thats stopped anyone deploying it. That, and the fact that home network connections aren't really intended for publishing, as opposed to consumption.
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2-3 B investment in say energy and mass transport infrastructure is more important than fibre to everyones home.
Exactly. We are slightly lucky in NZ in that we are already 85% renewable electricity. We have the opportunity (largely through new wind and water capacity) to get that to 100%, but it'll take investment. At the same time, we aren't so good on transport fuel usage (all those cars and planes) and direct fossil fuel burners in industry.
But 100% renewables is doable - look at this project in Texas (of all places) - four Huntlys!
Interestingly, if we had more sustainable development, it would reduce the cost of high-speed communications. It's a lot cheaper to cable urban apartments than sprawling suburbs. Maybe if we decided that urban sprawls like Albany and Dannemora were excluded from any new fibre rollout, the costs would become more manageable - and it would further encourage people not to live in those places.
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Chorus are planning to have cabinets within 2.5km of 80% of NZ homes by 2012. Thats the unsupported plan, and by my reckoning gives 5-10MBit coverage.
To get down to 1.5km and thus get universal 20Mbit (per this doc) would cost more than Telecom are prepared to spend, as would fixing the (maybe 10-20%) of households with flakey wiring. But I'd like to see a breakdown of the cost of this against universal fibre.
I'm also wondering how much speeds on the new fibre network will be throttled or bandwidth capped. My work has fibre, which we run at a blistering 1Mbit bandwidth - any more is apparently really expensive.