Randomrants

James Murdoch said this today (Source ABC News)

“It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it,”

“In this all-media marketplace, the expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision, which are so important for our democracy.”

“Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the Internet.”

and the clincher

“The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit,”

now compare a few of the gems of Ferengi philosophy… thinking of the history of News Corp.

Ferengi Rules Of Acquisition

1. Once you have their money … never give it back.
3. Never pay more for an acquisition than you have to.
6. Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity.
10. Greed is eternal.
13. Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.
16. A deal is a deal … until a better one comes along.
19. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
33. It never hurts to suck up to the boss.
34. Peace is good for business.
35. War is good for business.
41. Profit is its own reward.
45. Expand, or die.
48. The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.
52. Never ask when you can take.
59. Free advice is seldom cheap.
60. Keep your lies consistent.
76. Every once in a while, declare peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies.
82. The flimsier the product, the higher the price.
85. Never let the competition know what you’re thinking.
89. Ask not what your profits can do for you, but what you can do for your profits.
97. Enough … is never enough.
99. Trust is the biggest liability of all.
106. There is no honour in poverty.
162. Even in the worst of times someone turns a profit.
189. Let others keep their reputation. You keep their money.
202. The justification for profit is profit.
239. Never be afraid to mislabel a product.
242. More is good … all is better.
285. No good deed ever goes unpunished.

I rest my case.

Tags: General, twitter by Me
1 Comment »

So it is finally time to build a new pc here in the Wolfcat household… after 5 years the old one after having most of its internals replaced over the years is about to be made history….

I thought I might as well crowd source what I want… yes I have a budget in mind…. which you can ball park anyway from the stuff below…. yes it has to be a PC not a Mac… and it does have to last me a while… so keeping in budget but getting the best I can….

what would you change from below…

• Intel Core i7-920 2.66GHz
• Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3R Intel Mainboard
• GA-EX58-UD4P (decided to go up a model for the extra ram and sata ports)
• Western Digital Caviar Green Power 1.5TB 7200RPM 32MB SATA 3Gbs
• Western Digital Caviar Green Power 1.0TB 7200RPM 32MB SATA 3Gbs (didn’t need the extra expense of the 500meg as I already have a 1tb drive as well… 2tb will be enough to start with :-))
• Pioneer Blu-ray (BDR203) Writer DVD
• Pioneer Blu-Ray BDC-S02 Combo Drive (Opps I really don’t need a blue ray writer… so money saved here goes the on the motherboard upgrade and extra ram)
• Kingston DDR3 6GB PC-8500/1066 (2x2GB) CL7 Value Ram x2
  
• Kingston DDR3 6GB PC-10600/1333 (3x2GB) x2 (bugger it … going for the 12gig of ram option… read that ddr3 ram likes to be in lots of 3 🙂
• Cooler Master RC-690 – Black ATX Tower Case – Top I/O Ports (460W)
• Thermaltake M9 – Black ATX Midi Tower Case (430W)
• Gigabyte GF9800GT, 1G, DDR3
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (to be replaced with 64bit Windows 7)
• Leadtek WinFast PxDVR3200H PCIEx1 – Hybrid, FM (whilst a tv tuner would be nice… I might be able to get my old one to work.. and if not meh :-))
• Benq 23.6″ G2412HD BLACK LCD – 2MS / WUXGA 1920×1080 / D-SUB / DVI / HDMI

The Old Computer

… what I am upgradign from…  oh this will be a change…

• Pentium 4 2.4Ghz
• Western Digital 1.0TB 7200RPM 32MB SATA 3Gbs (motherboard only supports 1.5gbps) + 250gb and 320gb Hd’s (1tb and 320gb to be migrated)
• LEG DVD 16x Dvd Burner +Pioneer DVD/CDRW (Burner to be migrated)
  
• 2 Gig DDr2 Ram
• Creative SB Live Sound Card
  
• No name 300 Power supply as the last one blew over a year ago.
  
• No name case which hasn’t had the side on it for many years (see photo)
• Geforce FX 5600
• Windows XP Sp3
• Chimei 22″ LCD (Currently in VGA mode as old video card doesn’t support dvi at panels’ native resolution) (to become second monitor)

Tags: General, twitter by Me
2 Comments »

(yes I know I do need to work on this blog more….)

The Australia runs a story (well o.k, they don’t have any journo’s left so the run a wire story) about Twitter, bashing it again… this time with the none to provocative headline of “Twitter useless as public opinion gauge” (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25590556-12377,00.html)

Whilst I am sure others could go into a lot more detail… this is just a short rant about what a load of crock the article is.

10% of the numbers of people using twitter generating 90% of the content is a shit load of people actually (if 2 million people alone are following one celb!).  And the number is higher than a lot of blogs and newspapers anyway on how much public opinion they actually get.

A quick look at the The Age poll page for example gives you a real highlight as to user numbers. I will take the big leap and presume that the numbers interacting with The Australian and The Age are even within 50% of the same… have a look at the voter numbers on this page http://www.theage.com.au/polls/sport/form2.html

THE BIRD : What punishment should Ben Cousins receive for his one-finger salute?
A fine – 24%
Suspension – 12%
Nothing – 63%
Total Votes: 651 Poll date: 31/05/09

Striking decision : Are Sydney right to suspend Barry Hall from the club?
Yes – 40%
No – 60%
Total Votes: 5 Poll date: 07/07/08

WISHFUL THINKING : Should the AFL abandon its plans to establish a second Sydney team in the next four years?
Yes – 85%
No – 15%
Total Votes: 1233 Poll date: 04/02/09

So less than 10% of the readers of The Age are giving their opinion…. Come on Oz, lift your game, or should we just do a poll on how many people actually read the paper…..

Tags: Annoyances, twitter by Me
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Well I hope this works….

(20 minute 1 take audio file, excuse the quality and the stuttering :-))

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This is me reading out all of my 760 followers 🙂   I have been on twitter since May 07, and have managed to write 10,00of these things.

I have made friends some of whom I have meet, many whom I have not.  I have seen twitter grow from a fringe of very early adopters to something that gets main stream media coverage.  I have personally been involved in helping cover the bushfire disaster that happened on Black Saturday and covered two earthquakes… one of them I may have caused 🙂

I have seen new words come into play and have had one or two too many drinks with a number of you.  Thankyou all for following, thankyou for all your advice, humour and friendship.

Cheers

@wolfcat

Tags: twitter by Me
1 Comment »

O.k… I am 24 hours away from leaving and printing out my final set of maps for the trip. I have located all the camp grounds that I need to as well so have tweaked the maps as well.

The other thing was that I plan on doing a good number of hours around Silverton and Broken Hill, so I will arrive in Broken Hill late Friday leave on Monday Morning, which gives me 2 full days.

I have also started to use the hashtag #wtrip08 if you wish to follow the tweet stream. I will be able to receive direct messages only so conversation may be a bit one way. Why the hell should I pay $29 for 100meg of data on my prepaid phone!

So here is the route day by day…

Tuesday 16/12/08: Melbourne to Echuca/Barma State Forest: 272 km

View Larger Map

Wednesday: Echuca to the Willandra National Park: 418 km (Just south of Ivanhoe)

View Larger Map

Thursday: Willandra National Park to White Cliffs, via Ivanhoe and Wilcannia: 400 km

View Larger Map

Friday: Broken Hill 274 km (Depending on Weather and Road conditions which I can work out at White Cliffs, I can take the main sealed route to Broken Hill, by travelling back to Wilcannia as well)

View Larger Map
Saturday/Sunday: Base myself in broken Hill.. will go out to Silverton for at least half a day as well

Monday: Broken Hill to Burra: 356 km (Remembering to be in Burra before Thorougoods Cellar Door Closes to stock up on some of the best Cider in Australia)

View Larger Map

Tuesday 23/12/08: Burra to Adelaide Airport: 161 km. Most important thing to be at the Airport before Cat arrives from Melbourne.

View Larger Map

Total Distance of trip will be if I only followed the maps 1,881 km – Will over 2k by the time you do all those other running around bits e.t.c… but a holiday I am very much looking forward to.

Plus the return trip home from Adelaide will be via Millicent and the coast taking a few days to do that as well 🙂

Tags: General, RoadTrip 08, twitter by Me
1 Comment »

yes I am a nerd… guess that is why I have my own domain with a blog hanging off it as well 🙂

But that aside I thought I would outline the tech I am taking on the road and why.

Computer: Asus R2H:  – Built in GPS, Touch Screen, SD Card Reader
Software Loaded: Win XP.OziExplorer, Nokia PC Suite, Irfan View, NxView (Nikon Software)

This is the primary tool of the trip for storing and managing all the data.  With this computer mounted on the windscreen of the car I have all the maps, music and photo handling that I could need. (well maybe not all.. but certainly all I can afford 🙂

Hanging of the computer is a WD Passport Drive and a Logitech Webcam to act as a trip recorder as well and a little FM transmitter for music.  (a lot of very bad singing to 80’s music coming up for me!)

Camera: Nikon D90: with a 18-55mm and a 55-200mm VR Lens kit configuration.  Further I have also purchased for the trip the ML-L3 wireless remote control (hopefully to get long exposures of the night sky outback) and 2xUV Filters for both lens’.  I got two so I can swap my lens’ and don’t need to swap the filter.  The filters only set me back $19each from JB, so that wasn’t a big problem.  I only have 1 4gig SD card (Class 6 rated), but given that I have the computer and a WD Portable HD as well space is not a major problem and I doubt I will shoot more than 4 gig even in RAW in one go 🙂  And the R2H reads the SD HC cards just fine so I can empty a card pretty damned quick if I need to.

Mobile Phones: I am taking two phones.  One my trusty Vodafone powered N95-8gb.  Which will be on the whole trip.  One it will act as a back up gps device and datalogger of the trip as well.  And secondly it will also be used to geotag reference photos when I am away from the car and the UMPC.  I can’t afford the new GP-1 for this trip so I will be forced to geotag manually  (oh the humanity!)  But the phone acts as a great way to get this data in a reference image via the Location Tagger software.  The other phone in a Telstra Next G – Telstra 156 with external antenna (big hat tip to @johnH for the antenna).  This will act as my emergency phone.  People can call into me and I can call out if there is a problem.  From looking at the maps of my route I am down to less than a few hundred k’s of a 2000k trip outside phone coverage.

I have a 150watt DSE Power Inverter to keep all the batteries running as I go as well.  So I can power things up on an as needed basis as well.  I have a car charger for the Nokia so can run that easily and charge the other phone/camera/UMPC on a rotating basis as needed without any additional expenses as well.

So that outlines most things and all the purchases I have made in the last month or so for this trip.  I am not allowed to spend any more money on toys 🙁 but I think I may just have enough to get by for a week on the road by myself.

Tags: General, gps, Nikon D90, Photos, RoadTrip 08, twitter by Me
1 Comment »

Well who would have thought 12 months ago that I would be writing a post about the US Elections and Twitter. (see this post as a primer on what Twitter is all about)

But here I am. A lot has been written about Sarah Palin, the DNC and RNC and the keynote speeches from both of them and what people are thinking at the time.

But now Twitter and MSM(main stream media) to a degree are combining for the next stage. For Australian readers who are familiar with the Worm, twitter is the worm with a thousand voices. What people think and feel is no longer just a turn of a dial, but a short sharp statement of text. Now people can see not only that people agree or disagree with something, but why they think the way they do.

Yeah, yeah all the twitterati know this, but was is new in this.

From Yahoo “Current TV to broadcast `tweets’ during debates”

“During the debates, the network bent on viewer-created content will broadcast Twitter messages — or “tweets” — from viewers. In close to real time, Current will display comments on the screen while Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama face off.”

Now what is interesting also is that the conversation is already happening, but now it will be expanded to those that are not taking part already.  The “in-crowd” of twitter as it were will no longer have the debate to themselves but it will be open for all to see. (all that is in America that have access to Current TV)

For the “in-crowd” and those of us outside the US who can find the debates online (someone is going to stream them aren’t they??? well the comment from Current.com says they will be streaming the debate as well) we will also be able to join in the conversation simply by added #current to any discussions.

So the US Presidential debates will become a global conversation that people can watch listen and interact.  Perhaps even some of us outside the USA might even get to influence a swinging voter or two.

The election will effect us out here in the rest of the world.  We may not get a vote, but now we at least can have a voice.

Tags: General, twitter by Me
1 Comment »

Obama’s speech seen by 38 million viewers, this is the headline that was used by  NPR on this story
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94112461 from Associated Press.

Then they put this line in at the bottom “Obama’s audience might be higher, since Nielsen didn’t have an estimate for how many people watched Obama on PBS or C-SPAN Thursday night.”

And thus when MSM (Main stream Media) can not monitor what is going on it can not understand it and use dumb words like “might be higher”.  Also the article doesn’t mention that the democrats.org website also had the speech streaming as well.(via silverlight so I didn’t get to check it out)   Then to make things even more confusing this was global.

I and many other people I know watched the events live from all over the world, I was tlaking in the twitter back channel to people in Melbourne, Sydney, San Fran, Brisbane, Perth e.t.c about events as the CSpan stream came in.  At which point I switched to the ABC local stream and told all the people on my twitter list and in my office to watch that version).  So there were hundreds of people that I have some form of contact watching Obama’s speech.  And mainstream media says “Might” .

Thanks to twitter I had a copy of the speech as well before he said it and could see what he was saying line for line and how he improved small parts (very impressive skill) and drop quotes into my twitter timeline.  But don’t forget the audience “might” have been bigger.

It is this grass roots tech approach that paid for his campaign, it is why he refused public funding (he can make more from people on his sms list) that got him to where he is now and shows why someone at 47 years old is a major shift in how things could and should be done.

Now of course being an Australian I cant vote for him but given the effect that Bush had on this country I sure as hell will be hoping that he gets over the line.

If he gives any more speechs along the way myself and most of the people I know “might just watch” as well.

Tags: General, Media, twitter by Me
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Got this email this morning from Twitter…..

Short version outside the US and the UK direct SMS updates will no longer come to my phone. I can still send updates but not receive them away from my computer.

Two things could happen.
1- Twitter is about to suffer a major blow outside countries that have SMS updates now.
2 – If they are fast and australian telco’s aren’t greedy things will be back up to normal very soon.

I am afraid that here in Australia with the way that data charges are that a sms gateway for Twitter may not eventuate for quite some time.

This is a major concern for me. Sure I can still send sms updates, but the receiving of them is vitally important to me to keep the service viable as people have come to use it. If people want me that are not in my circle of physical friends in the last few months I have “DM Twitter” friends for news, information and social gatherings. All sitting in a state of flux.

One of the biggest advantages of twitter was that it broke the IP Model. I can be outside of an IP controlled space (and ironically the IP costs) sitting on an old Nokia 8250 and still follow the world and have to world follow me (not that many did :-()

I only hope that this gets addressed quickly as the Twitter Space was nearly at threshold to break out into true mainstream globally.

I’ll write more later on this subject!

….. The Letter ……
Hi,

I’m sending you this note because you registered a mobile device
to work with Twitter over our UK number. I wanted to let you
know that we are making some changes to the way SMS works on
Twitter. There is some good news and some bad news.

I’ll start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no
longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number. If you enjoy
receiving updates from Twitter via +44 762 480 1423, we are
recommending that you explore some suggested alternatives.

Note: You will still be able to UPDATE over our UK number.

Before I go into more detail, here’s a bit of good news: Twitter
will be introducing several new, local SMS numbers in countries
throughout Europe in the coming weeks and months. These new
numbers will make Twittering more accessible for you if you’ve
been using SMS to send long-distance updates from outside the UK.

Why are we making these changes?

Mobile operators in most of the world charge users to send
updates. When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to
ten followers, you aren’t charged ten times–that’s because we’ve
been footing the bill. When we launched our free SMS service to
the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in
popularity, so too would the price.

Our challenge during this window of time was to establish
relationships with mobile operators around the world such that
our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective.
We achieved this goal in Canada, India, and the United States.
We can provide full incoming and outgoing SMS service without
passing along operator fees in these countries.

We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more
mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we’ve arrived
at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs
and take a different approach. Since you probably don’t live in
Canada, India, or the US, we recommend receiving your Twitter
updates via one of the following methods.

m.twitter.com works on browser-enabled phones
m.slandr.net works on browser-enabled phones
TwitterMail.com works on email-enabled phones
Cellity [http://bit.ly/12bw4R] works on java-enabled phones
TwitterBerry [http://bit.ly/MFAfJ] works on BlackBerry phones
Twitterific [http://bit.ly/1WxjwQ] works on iPhones

Twitter SMS by The Numbers

It pains us to take this measure. However, we need to avoid
placing undue burden on our company and our service. Even with a
limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter
about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada,
India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair
billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass
these high fees on to our users.

Twitter will continue to negotiate with mobile operators in
Europe, Asia, China, and The Americas to forge relationships

that benefit all our users. Our goal is to provide full, two-way
service with Twitter via SMS to every nation in a way that is
sustainable from a cost perspective. Talks with mobile companies
around the world continue. In the meantime, more local numbers
for updating via SMS are on the way. We’ll keep you posted.

Thank you for your attention,
Biz Stone, Co-founder
Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/biz

Tags: twitter by Me
3 Comments »

I have moved the twitter stream of the left hand column of the site and created a new twitter page 🙂

most of my readers are either on twitter and following me (and if not WHY NOT)

if you still don’t know what twitter is or why it is actually really important read this again.

So click on the Twitters link in the top nav, it will give you my twitter feed , plus my twit pics feed as well.

and yes i am still sick, this time i have the flu (and still a broken arm) and have taken more time off work and have lost my voice as well, thus the sad lack of updates on the site.

Tags: General, twitter by Me
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