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Things could have been different in 1788

Perhaps if both sides of politics took the time to read the facts http://aph.gov.au/library/pubs/BN/sp/AsylumFacts.htm and stopped going for the lowest common denominator,  this would not be an issue.

Instead we play gutter politics with the most vulnerable, when what we should be doing is educating people.  Yet the problem seems to be that educating takes longer and doesn’t fit the soundbite

Good on @DBCDEgov using the #openinternet tag!

Thats the funny thing about people.  You can’t please them.  Don’t bother, you can’t.  Add politics into the mix, a socially divisive issue and you have yourself a recipe for disaster and nothing more.

Let me get this straight first. I am against the filter, it won’t work, never will, and I will just get around anyway.  My reasons for this are around the fact that all governments of all persuasions would be to tempted by the lure of the vocal minority to secure votes. Sorry but the No Clean Feed People need to be as organised, financially together and focused as the Christian Lobby groups that seem to be pushing this.

Stilgherrian wrote a great piece on The Drum the other day about the Internet Filter.  However if you read the article nice and slow, paying attention to the big words you will notice he was drawing a very clear distinction between the person and the policy.  Yet the vast majority of the comments are about the person.

Now in the last few days a couple of interesting things have happened. Firstly the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy joined twitter @DBCDEgov. My first reaction was “ well that ain’t going to go down well the natives “ and secondly, the people behind that account are going to have be fairly thick skinned.

Didn’t take long (and by long I mean minutes) before the No Clean Feed people were jumping up and down all over that account. Jumping up and down on one policy of a massive portfolio isn’t going to change jack shit. (Or as they say, wake up and smell the cat food).  Then yesterday the Department made a change to the overall timetable of the policy along with a few changes to the possible implementation methodology of the filtering policy.  Then shock horror, to communicate these changes the department very rightly attached the #openinternet hashtag to links to the press release.  Why, because that is what they should have done.  They are trying to communicate a policy to the group that the policy effects.  Yet, the critics quickly said “oh the irony”, “outrage”, “WTF”.

Of course they did, if I was in the Department running that Twitter account, so would have I.  It is no “#budgies” hashtag AKA Budget reply, but a well targeted approach to getting their message out. But no to the “rabble” it was just more petrol on the fire.

One final point.  I see lots of people saying, well I won’t vote for Conroy (people who do not live in Victoria btw and can’t vote for him regardless).  Sure, you can take a single policy approach to an election. Or worse still a single person approach to an election.  But if you think that the Liberals (remember their great filtering software, the one the 14y/o broke in 5 min) will not jump at this kind of policy when it suited them I am afraid you are seriously disillusioned.

Renters facing a huge digital divide… thanks to the NBN

I’m surprised no one has mentioned this before (ok course they have, but I just haven’t seen it).  In a flash of inspiration from a Delimiter article re the NBN roll out in Tasmania being Opt Out, not Opt in, I realised we are on the verge of a massive new digital divide.

This new divide will between home owners and renters. If you rent a house and the landlord hasn’t got the Fibre connected to your house and your landlord doesn’t get tech you are basically screwed.  Say the cost of connection is $200 and you have to pay it when you move in, you still run the risk that 6 months into your lease the house gets sold out from underneath you.  Then you are up for the $200, plus breaking your 12month or 24 month plan, reconnection fees when you move.  So that one connection could cost you $500 before you even blink.

Think about your own landlord for a minute, what if they own more than one house are they going to stump up the cash to get them all connected.  Most of us have horror stories of landlords not fixing the basics in a house let alone paying for something new.

In my current place I am lucky, my landlord would, but then he is a techie so of course he helped me try and fix noise issues on the ADSL.  How many landlords fall into this category, very very few I would say.

If my house was a unit and my landlord got the need for the NBN but no one else on the strata title did… they even in the best case scenario I am still out of luck.

The NBN has the prospect of creating a whole new generation of digital natives that work in real time across the country or the world.  A technology that like ADSL before it, break down the barriers to entry for many fields.  Yet we run the risk that those who are least able to afford it will be left even further behind.  (At least with ADSL, the phone is connected already). Unlike Finland which has made broadband access a right, we are still arguing as a nation whether we need it or not.

With uptake rates being bandied about around the 30% mark, what hope will those that cannot afford their own home (even those of half decent wages these days!) have of being connected.

I know in the future I will look at houses and one of the key things will be its connection to the NBN, but what about those left behind!

The government is happy to say that up to 93% of the populace will be connected.  That is wrong.  Unless the fibre is taken into the house, that 93% are potential customers only, not actual. Having a phone line is taken as a given, but unless the government does something serious about the connections the divide will not only exist as it does today it will increase.

Now overtime this may become less of an issue as more and more houses are connected,  but that could be 10 years plus.  10 years in digital years is a century of being out of touch.

Even if the govt doesn’t make the NBN opt out (which it should!), at least look at issues like this.  Perhaps a one of tax break would be enough to encourage landlords to take the plunge and then little by little we can break down the barriers to entry.

Missing from the Exif: Express on the Caufield Line

I should have titled this… how to take photos in places your not allowed to.  See the whole City Loop system is under the control of private enterprise and like every other railway station you are not allowed to take photos of trains from the platform in Melbourne.  You can apply to get a permit to do some of the stations, but the underground is very frown upon.  <rant>See terrorists only use high res DSLR’s to take photos… never do they just use a camera phone or a hidden camera.  So if you have a DSLR you are obviously a terrorist. </rant>

This was taken at Melbourne Central one evening heading home after a few drinks. If you are going to shoot in places like this, never have a tripod that will get attention drawn to you very quickly.  But it is possible to get a shot like this (1.3 seconds exposure) hand held if you brace the camera, and always hold your breath, for that extra bit of stabilising.  In this case it was resting against the wall.

I shot this with my Tokina 11-16mm lens to get the whole tunnel in the wide shot.  This helped to get the sense of claustrophobia that is in the tunnel as well.

The next thing is to wait for the right moment.  You can feel a train coming a minute before hand and I managed to squeeze of a few shots just to get my levels about right before the train came. The start of this exposure can be seen just before the Caulfield Loop sign (click through to see the bigger version).  During the exposure the first carriage of the train moved completely out of shot.  This gave me the lines of movement that go right to the edge of the frame.

This is one of those one shot wonders. To get these lines that I have you can only do on the first shot from the headlights of the train.  That is why you should always try and get your levels right before hand for the background, remembering to compensate for the light that the moving object will create as well.

Turns out this is currently my most favoured and commented on shot both on Fickr and Redbubble. Hope you enjoy it as well

Express on the Caufield Line

Camera: Nikon D90
Exposure: 1.3s
Aperture: f/5.0
Focal Length: 12 mm
ISO Speed: 400
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: No Flash
Exposure Program: Manual
Date and Time (Original): 2009:09:14 21:27:22.00+10:00

And you can buy this print here at Redbubble

…..

Details re Photography from Metro Melbourne.

To obtain a permit and see all the t&c go to
http://www.metrotrains.com.au/About-us/Photography.html

Point 18: This permit is NOT valid for photography at the City Loop Stations (Parliament, Flagstaff and Melbourne
Central). Photography is NOT permitted at these stations.

The real reason I'm not Flashing Froyo on my Desire

As a rule I tend to break things.  Not break in the bad way, but break things so they work.  Now that can be from region freeing my dvd player to mashing the hell out of my computer to get software on it.

But I’m not going to flash my HTC Desire and put Froyo on it.  And I think at least some of you need not to as well.  Most of my friends with iPhones just go out and jailbreak them.  Why, so they can make the phone work.  But the jailbreak is very like the flashing of an Android Phone, it gives the power user a whole lot more.

And this is the problem all the “experts” have.  They are power users.  They could hack batch files, create yahoo pipes feeds to pull custom RSS and break their phone to sideload apps.  All great things, and things that I often do myself.  But this is not the general audience, yet we are the ones that build for that audience. (Like the Rubiks cube… most people didn’t complete it)

One rule of thumb I have always had when developing software is.. “If I use the shortcuts that I know all the time to get something done, I’ve done it wrong”.  The audience won’t know the shortcuts.  Some may over time learn them and good for those users.  But the average user will never take the time to learn your shortcuts.  Either it will be intuitive for them or chances are they will go elsewhere.

Now I only have one Android phone and I use it all the time to me it is a computer in my hand and not a phone.  Still to most phone users they are buying a phone first and it does some other stuff a very distant second.  I can still heavily tweak my phone (which I’ve done), but at the end of the day the user experience is the same as anyone else who buys one from the store.

This means I can show people things that don’t require them to void the warranty for example, or risk turning the $800 device into a light weight paper holder.

It pays to remember if you are developing Apps for these phones that the chances are your audience is not as smart as you. So always test and retest on their platform, not yours.  Like with browsers, IE still has market share.  Yes make all singing all dancing HTML 5 Canvas apps with only OGG video if you want, but if you want to reach a wider audience stop and think about IE7.

When Froyo comes as on OTA update I will be installing it that day for sure, but until then I will be using my phone for testing and evaluating software the same as everyone else who has it.

Sometimes keeping your tech dumb does make you smarter.

i've worked out why Apple fanboys line up… they don't like spoilers…

the Itouch multitouch t-shirtSomething I have always wondered why people line up for a piece of technology.  And line up for days and nights in the rain and sleet just to get their hands on a new piece of technology…  Something that will still be around a week later.

Well yesterday I went out and brought a copy of After America, the new book by John Birmingham.. Why did I buy it the day it came out, so I can read it before anyone tells me the ending.  The same with why I have seen some movies on the day they came out.  Thinking about Starwars Ep 1 which I did see opening night gave me my answer.

The movie was crap, and full of problems.  Now that the iphone4 is out and people are complaining about things like it dropping calls when you hold it.

So the fanboys are rushing out to buy a piece of tech before the spoilers come.

……………
Update…

This video from Futurama kind of covers it really….

 

[ video via Engadget]

Why $43B seems a lot for the NBN.. but isn't

Upgrading the NetworkWow, $43Billion for a piece of national infrastructure that will reach approx 93% of the population on a continent that is one of the most sparsely populated continents in the world. Yes $43Billion is a lot of money to you and me.  I’m sure $43Billion would even be a lot to the Gates and Murdoch’s of this world as well.

And this is the rub for the government trying to sell something that people have yet to find the need for (outside of the few that read this blog and my quite geeky friends that is).

Because people here $43Billion and immediately draw parallels to the world they live in.  People say but I am on an average wage (Male:  A$64,594p/a) and go OMG that is so much money it is beyond my comprehension therefore it must be a waste.

So here is a something you can use as a baseline. Roads.  Like the NBN they are part of a national infrastructure and the vast majority are not tolled.  And I would like to point out nor do they make a profit.  (Even most of the toll roads seem to only work as a tax write off scheme).

And while Australia has over 360,000 kilometres of paved roads, consider the freeway.  The forest track was your 300baud modem, then came the paved single lane road your 14.4k modem.  Now we have a national highway mostly single lane but you can do 100kph just fine as your ADSL connection.  But the future lies in your open limit Autobahn without traffic lights, roundabouts and other things to slow you down.  (I really tortured that metaphor).

Of course Australia doesn’t have Autobahn’s the closest we had was the open speed limit in the NT which got throttled to only 120kph. But we do have nice big fat freeways.  Look closely at the cost of a few of them.

  • Currently under construction is the Ballina Bypass (Pacific Hwy NSW), a massive project covering a whopping 11.km, cost $640,000,000 (.6 of a billion dollars)
  • The Albury Wodonga bypass cost $524million in 2007 and is 17km long
  • Eastlink in Melbourne cost $2.5 Billion and runs for 39km.
  • Northern Expressway in Adelaide is 23km long and comes in at very tidy $564 million
  • The proposed Southroad Superway is a massive 4km long project with a cost around the $812million mark
  • Duplication of the Southern Expressway in Adelaide is 18.5km long as will run around the $445million mark.

So here 122.5km of dual carriage road the cost is $5.47billion dollars. (The distance is just beyond the drive from Melbourne to Ballarat.)  Doing some rounding, calling it $5billion for 100km of Freeway.  $10Billion gets you 200km of Freeway, $20 Billion gets your 400km and $40 Billion gets you 800km of all singing all dancing freeway.  (Not even the distance between Melb and Sydney).

And instead of a road that only people between Sydney and Melbourne can use, your money gets you a fibre to the home network to 93% of the population.  Now once this 100Mbps connection is built the cost to upgrade to Gbps speeds is dramatically smaller due to the fibre being the road.

Now a lot of people don’t drive the road between Melbourne and Sydney.  But a lot of business does with road freight on the road.  So whilst you may not use the road directly, the products you buy even at your local deli may well have come down that highway.  So we all benefit from having this road.

We are all going to benefit from the NBN, but like the internet in 1995 not everyone can see why just yet.  But think how much of your life is digital now, now project forward 10 years and there is your business case for the NBN. A project that is for the vast majority of the population and for a damned cheap price once you get over the shock of $43Billion.

(Please note: a transport metaphor was killed to write this post)

(I used the high $43Billion  figure,  not the lower $30billion or so that has been thrown around in the last few weeks since the Telstra deal with NBN Co came out. The lower figure means around 500km of freeway)