Island Life by David Slack

The leader might be willing to bolt himself steadfastly to the slightly left of centre ground in order to secure the prestigious job, but the bungy rope must be getting pretty damn taught, if the expression on Maurice's face is any guide.

Let's consider this thesis: I don't give a flying fuck at a donut what Maurice Williamson thinks about anything. Either he goes out in public and supports party policy, or he can piss off. His lemon-twat routine following the 2002 election certainly did nothing for his credibility or standing in the party.

And with all due disrespect to Mr Trotter, I'd treat his confident pronouncements on the inner thought processes of National donors (do I could?) with the same turbo-charged bullshit detector I apply to Hooter's in the other direction.

BTW, ku-don'ts to RNZ, TVNZ and Three for their lightweight coverage of this policy announcement. You really couldn't find any informed analysis or commentary from industry sources, and therefore had no option but to go with (shock! horror!) David Cunliffe pouring scorn on National.

Come on guys -- for months on end, you've been bitching and whinging 'where's National's policy'. Then when you get some, you're not so much asleep as the wheel as comatose.

Craig: Wouldn't informed analysis require actual policy detail? Yes, it sounds good from the headline announcement, and a marked change in direction from National's usual "leave it to the market" stance. But we need to know how the money will actually be spent, and whether (despite his protests to the contrary) it really will end up lining the pockets of incumbents.

As for Cunliffe, his strong reaction is going to come back to bite him, since he now comes across as wanting to do nothing.

Craig: Wouldn't informed analysis require actual policy detail?

It would require TVNZ doing their fucking jobs, and I saw precious little evidence that anyone was actually trying rather than trying to run a fraking lame gotcha on Bill English.

I spend thousands on hosting in the USA because no-one here can set me up with a fast enough server and a big enough data allowance.

There's no way that providing fibre to every home is going to fix this problem for you. Your problem isn't access, it's the service you're wanting from your ISP.

It would be incredibly inefficient for everyone who wants to host services to run a server farm in their basement. You're far better off using a hosting service which provide you with hardware, bandwidth and support.

The fact that you cannot find this service locally is probably because there is not enough business to support a service like this in NZ to the scale needed to make it economic. In addition, unless the vast majority of your customers are NZ based and there is a decent exchange between your service provider and your users' ISPs you will probably find most traffic will transitinternationally anyway.

The fact that you cannot find this service locally is probably because there is not enough business to support a service like this in NZ to the scale needed to make it economic.

No, it's because of the lousy peering model Telstra and Telecom introduced 4 years ago.

Sucks, but may revert to something useful again sopmeday soon.

But we need to know how the money will actually be spent, and whether (despite his protests to the contrary) it really will end up lining the pockets of incumbents.

That is a very fair question. By the same token, it would be interesting to see how much of the money spent over the last few years to establish KAREN and the government shared network ended up lining the pockets of the incumbents.

My brevity may have muddied things. When I say a fast enough server and a big enough data allowance what I'm getting at is the need to have a connection to my US customers that delivers a page quickly. That requires both an adequately provisioned server and also a good fast pipe. I'm not able to offer that from this end of the Pacific, and that's regrettable. For example, everything Peter Mott was offering when he ran 2Day.com was comparable in the level of service and reliability I get from my hosts in the US. The shortcoming was that he couldn't give me a fast connection for my international customers (more than 90% are overseas) and he couldn't even remotely match the data allowance.

I'd like to be paying that money here because it would help sustain IT jobs and businesses in NZ, and I'd like to see that become a larger part of our economy. I'd also like to be hosting it here so that when, say, a raid array fails, I can either go downstairs to the office or drive to Takapuna to deal with the mess.

Surely the value is in the content not in the transmission of bits.

If 90% of your customers are in the US then your data should be as close as possible to them - after all, every time one of these customers hits your page the same data is sent over the same link, this is highly inefficient. Far better to send one copy (your content) to a repository close to your customers and minimise the distance over which replicas are sent.

<<Warning Science Content>>
As an aside, due to the distances involved and the default settings of most PC's the algorithm used in TCP/IP makes transmissions with high round trip delays (due to the number of hops and the speed of light) highly inefficient as the rate will be backed off drastically due to the long acknowledge time for each packet - closer is usually better.

If 90% of your customers are in the US then your data should be as close as possible to them - after all, every time one of these customers hits your page the same data is sent over the same link, this is highly inefficient. Far better to send one copy (your content) to a repository close to your customers and minimise the distance over which replicas are sent.

I agree with this in theory. But in principle this distinction should matter less as the internet grows. The very nature of the design of the net is that it should work around these things. Our relatively weak international link, and the fact that we have international data charges means that it doesn't work in NZ.

I'm not an expert in tcp/ip, but isn't the delay less the distance, and more the number of hops? I mean, comparing the speed at which the signal travels, to the time it takes to get through a computer and get re-sent at each hop... it's the two feet from one side of the server to another that slows it down as much as the 7000 km across the Pacific.