Posts by Paul Campbell
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Today's ODT editorial cartoon
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It's a pity the Documentary festival isn't leaving the North island - of course here in Dunedin we're annually treated to a one-of-a-kind documentary festival when the students doing the Natural History Film Making course at the Uni present their work (some samples here)
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Actually I was more thinking of the termite exterminators but now I realise it's spelled differently
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Jolisa: heh - the occasional advertising for Chrisco hampers stuffed through my letter box still make me wonder why one would want to buy a hamper full of lard .... but then my ISP orcon makes me wonder too
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Hard News: The Huawei Question, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Got a note to say that high-speed broadband will be passing by our house within days. Lucky bugger.
Found out this week that next year they will be building it all around my neighbourhood , but not in it - time to rent a back hoe and do it myself methinks - anyone in Belleknowes want to start a fibre co-op? - a friend thinks he can sneak a cable over his neighbour's fence, we could start from there
(in the our fibre free zone we have the largest concentration of home knowledge workers in the city ....)
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I don't think the issue was copyright - there was a court case in which the pirates (aargh!) argued that the US TV had no commercial value in Canada, and that one could not steal something that had no value, and did not deprive the owner of the item. What followed was a burgeoning Canadian trade in pirated smart cards leaking across the border into the US and an ongoing cat and mouse game between the pirates and E*/DTV - I think they basically had crap crypto when they started, these days the pirates have to be able to factor large primes (all they need is one quantum computer .... )
I believe the law has since changed, the US seems to have played the heavy in Canadian politics a lot recently
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I used to work in this part of the industry - integrating crypto into settop boxes for various vendors - I've dealt with all the major crypto vendors, including NDS.
They're all a bit paranoid, very hard to deal with, which is I guess is understandable given the business they're in, building a relationship to work with them was always hard - and NDS were always the hardest of them all - story was they originally came out of Mossad's crypto people and still have that whole spy frame of mind. Maybe the dirty tricks side too. Their code sucked as well.
To be fair to Murdoch I think NDS were doing this before he bought them and my impression is that he was blind sided by all this shit hitting the fan.
Echostar (Dish TV in the US) was a customer of NDS's major competitor, they'd had an ongoing range war with the Canadians who were breaking their crypto (at the time legal, Canada because E* didn't provide the required amount of French language content and therefor was an illegal product in Canada - and legally couldn't be stolen) whether NDS was involved I don't know, though I suspect that the Canadians started off without their help (at least when I had this story told to me from E* people - before the NDS revelations - there was no mention of NDS)
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Hard News: Back to mediocrity, in reply to Islander,
Striding from financial disaster into permanant everlasting debt-
I don't know about permanent, but with the city's current plan to push out paying off the stadium to 40 years it's at least being visited upon the third generation - this in a city that's avoided replacing its aging sewers for far too long and expects a $0.5b infrastructure bill over the next 50 years - it's all beer and circuses for us
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Hard News: Back to mediocrity, in reply to Matthew Littlewood,
In contrast, the "Glass House" looks fantastic from the outside, houses just the right capacity for rugby, and is an absolute barnstormer when packed (the noise that 26,000 made during the Ireland vs Italy match was insane). Location-wise, it couldn't be better placed, either. It helps that the Highlanders have been in winning form for the first time in years- and even against the Brumbies, they were competitive- but I'm pleased the city has it. Even if I share many of the concerns about the financial health of it, and am a bit sad it's not really purpose built for anything but rugby-although there is the University Oval nearby, which is fast becoming a lovely ground, if dangerously susceptible to weather.
30,000, the claimed full house, is a bit unreasonable though (but required if you're going to check the 'cat A' rugby check box), Dunedin only has a population of 120,000 - expecting 1 in 4 of us to attend every thing that happens there was someone's wet dream, someone who wasn't really thinking ahead, or about the financing.
Worse than that, someone ran the numbers recently and calculated that they have to fill the stadium with an event every week if they ever want it to break even. Have you been this week?
Of course it was billed as a "multipurpose" stadium, "not just for rugby" they claimed - until they actually had a big concert there, the same acoustics that bounce the sound around and make it such a great atmosphere for rugby are sucky echoes for music, they've been unable to book a single act since.
As far as location, it should have gone on top of Forbury race course, it would have been a cheaper site and would have left space near the Uni for expansion - but then no one's families would have made money on the deal.
BTW Ron Hamlin's latest blog explains why the latest ORFU bailout didn't do much other than shovel more money down the crapper.
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Hard News: Back to mediocrity, in reply to Allan Moyle,
My nosey peek into the new Dunedin Stadium looks like it'll be a good rugby watching ground too, although it does still look temporary in many places.
At this point Dunedin's fu-bar stadium seems to be uneconomical even if one assumes that a magic fairy is paying the $200m to build it and the $10m a year in interest (for 40 years) year to pay it off.
After this past month's ORFU financing debacle (just one of many, we seem to throw millions at them every few years) it turns out that the quango that built it (consisting largely of current or ex ORFU/Highlanders board members) neglected to contract any of the local rugby teams to actually use it. Family members got great prices for the land though.
Now with the ORFU unable to pay enough to rent it to cover just day to day costs, the next step is going to be year on year multi-million dollar stadium losses backed by the rate payers - we'll see how long it takes before it gets mothballed - people are already calling for that - pretty soon Otago rugby, hoist by its own petard will have no where to play.