Posts by Paul Campbell
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I visited Madurai a couple of years ago (a sad day, Bush was reelected that morning) - it's a pretty amazing place, you've obviously seen the temple - we spent most of our time there being harassed by someone who was very upset about us being there even though we had done everything 'right', bought a camera permit, avoided the places we weren't allowed to go etc etc never quite figured out whether we were being hit up for money or not - certainly a wandering pakeha is a continuing target for the various forms of street life ...... hard to get some space at times
If you're still there make sure you visit the flower market - the Ghandi museum was also interesting
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ah I see .... so we I think we should all go away and work on 'improving' the wikipedia "pavlova" entry ....
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Damn - something I'd have loved to have attended - except that I'm in Seattle for a couple of weeks and um wasn't invited anyway (puts up hand for invite next year, want someone to do a how-to-hardware-hacking talk? :-) - and I could have said 'hi' to Quinn
Anyway sounds like you pulled it off really well congrats!
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actually one thing that's struck me coming back to NZ after 20 years is all the NZ flags everywhere - when I went away they were almost only ever seen on public buildings (I do remember going into the post office once and asking if they were being robbed - their upside down flag being a sign of distress and all .... they weren't amused).
Living in the US for so long I'd always considered their flag fetish as being "something we weren't uncouth enough to do" - these days though we do seem to do it more and more
Of course when we do wave our flag everyone else in the world thinks we're australians ....
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I do this stuff for a living (designing crypto for PVRs for the US cable market) I have to live with it day by day ... sigh .... it's such a pain ....
I actually think it's more like a "Suicide Pact" .... for example saying that "ATI and nVidia love it" isn't really true, I'm sure both consider it a real pain but are implementing it because they are scared the other guy will implement it and not them (note of potential bias: I once worked for ATI designing multimedia silicon, but years ago).
MS are doing it because they are seduced by the bright lights of Hollywood and scared of being sued
The cable companies (and Sky) are doing it in the boxes they rent to you because they make money selling content and this helps their bottom line (same for TV1/2/etc but they don't sell you boxes - I suspect the issues around WMA are purely laziness on their part) and they depend on Hollywood for future HD content.
Hollywood are doing it because they can and it really potentially effects their bottom line - it's really all about HD - currently SD/broadcast TV is low enough quality but having HD floating around the 'net will really rival cinema and DVD onsales.
The big problem of course is who's missing in this list - the end user, the customer, the consumer, you and me. No one in this suicide pact is looking out for our interests - and almost no one actually wants to screw us over, they've just started going down this road where they are going to ...
I'm a Linux user, we got rid of the last non-Linux box from the house this year when my daughter said she wanted a machine like her brother's rather than her Mac .... I also want a nice Apple GSM phone and load it with all my mp3s (all ripped from physical CDs I own) off of my Linux box, and I want to build a MythTV PVR rather than buy (and really you do buy it) a Sky PVR and make it work the way I want to rather the way that Sky wants me to use it .... I'm not out to screw anyone over - I pay for my content already, as I said I own those CDs, I don't tape TV and send it to friends ... my problem is that I haven't joined the suicide pact (did I mention it's really really expensive to join, quite outside the means of an individual)
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One thing no one's mentioned about the whole FN whatever is how they played in the US .... I had the interesting experience of living in Dunedin through the early 80s and left for the US in 84 (the very day the Muldoon govt started to collapse ...). It was pre-internet then and it was if NZ dropped off the face of the earth .... a few years later suddenly all those Dunedin bands were being played on US uni-radio and they were hip - those Dunedin bands got their own "NZ" bin in the local record stores on Telegraph in Berkeley - there were people in there I'd gone to high-school with - it was very strange.
A whole generation of US college kids grew up with Dunedin bands - I currently have a customer in Philly that I visit periodically who's such a fan he'd even made a pilgrimage to Dunedin .... now that I'm living back in NZ I've taken him FN releases as gifts when I go on biz trips ....
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One thing that's interesting here is that it probably means big things for ACT, I just can't figure out what .... either it means that their sugar daddies have left them for the Nats and they're dieing on the vine (well they have and are at this point), or it's all just hit the fan and their supporters will all come back now that they are persona-non-grata inside a National charging full tilt for the middle ....
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But that's not a suprise, everyone knows Hooton's full of himself
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I don't know about the rest of the country holding our breaths and waiting for Auckland to make up it's mind, I think we're mostly holding our breath waiting to see if we'll have to pay for something we'll never use.
I lived in the US for a long time, I saw a bunch of local stadiums built, each ended up screwing the local tax-payers (ie me)
Really rugby is a business now, it should be capitalising itself, if it wants a loan from the public purse to do something like this it should pay interest like any other business would. If the govt is building this as a community resource it should be capitalised by the community (ie Auckland) and rugby should be made to pay market rates to use it so that the community can cover it's loans and make a profit - of course if you did that rugby would just use Eden park most of the time and the stadium would become a white elephant
A lot of people seem to be offended by the sheer size of the thing and the fact that it's just so in people's faces - surely Auckland's full of volcanic cones one could be hidden in?
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'traffic shaping' is a slippery slope - and a steep one at that - basically a top where all packets are created equal and a bottom where you ISP decides which ones they like.
For people like me that use VOIP to 'go to work' (I work for a US company but live in NZ) it's a scary possibility and makes us less competitive in the larger world.
The real problem is that NZ telephone pricing is quite insane - I can call Auckland from any tiny town in India for 1/3 of what it costs me through Telecom from Dunedin - and my US VOIP account (via Vonage) will let me call for less, and will let me call all of the US and much of Europe for free (marginal above the $25/month I pay for the service)
The days when there was a real cost difference between a local call and a long distance one have long gone, roll on naked DSL so I can get cheap local termination for my Asterisk box - next step should be real US-style portable numbers within NZ (including cell phones!)