Posts by Paul Campbell
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Surely it should be given the additional recognition of becoming a decile 11 or 12 school.
Oh great now there's going to be some National cabinet minister actually asking that question ....
-
personally I just don't want to be arrested for being naked ....
-
I for one am offended by my long time personal protest of dipping a teabag in water to protest about being a taxpayer but not having a vote (I lived in the US for 20 years but never took citizenship), not even for the local school board, coopted by a bunch of johnny-come-lately wingers who don't really seem to understand what that whole Boston tea party thing was all about.
NZ's sensible idea of letting everyone who's a resident (and therefore a taxpayer) vote is so much more civilised.
-
It's friday some interesting links (vi boing-boing):
Mow the lawn (possible NSFW)
The EFF opines Is the Queen now a copyright criminal?
Talking about iPods and the Queen - who on earth thought this would be a good idea - she will not be amused - they should have got her a "wiiPod" ....
-
Well I guess part of my (slightly) pro-ATM bias is that I've been doing digital TV for a while - it and ATM go together really well - many cable TV headends are in essence just big ATM switches with modulators hanging off them (there's a reason why transport stream packets are 188 bytes long - each fits in 4 ATM cells) - a lot of IP data in cable plants float around on ATM as well
-
Rich - your list is probably about right - but assuming you're running ATM under everything on your fibre it's not a big stretch that you can choose an ISP, a TV provider, and a VOIP provider independently - for example you might choose take city-wide broadcast ATM virtual circuits (VCs) from a city-wide TV provider, telephone VCs from telecom, IP packets on VCs from a ISP, etc - of course each of those would probably love to lock you in with their particular bundle .... but we already see that happening now
-
I'm in 2 minds about the IPTV as killer-app - living in Dunedin, full of hills, cable of some form makes sense for lots of people - really though it depends on what 'dark fibre to the home' means if it's dark fibre back to some colo then I guess it depends on what my ISP provides and will route to (and if they can handle the load), on the other hand if the fibre goes to a cabinet with more limited backhaul then a more traditional ATM ring containing broadcast TV makes sense.
But suppose the fibre goes past my house, I race out with a shovel, dig a trench, hook up a cool fast modem - it's still dark fibre until there's someone at the other end .... one real problem we have is that the ISPs probably don't have the capital to hook up the other ends of the fibre - look at the current ADSL+ build out - most of the country is still waiting - my ISP (Orcon) has managed to build out some of Auckland, and a little bit if Wellington - the rest of us are waiting - much as i like them I'm starting to look to jump
Oh yeah and a quantum .... it's a really really small thing
-
part of the local issue is that Dunedin is HUGE, especially for it's population - in fact most of it is farmland, very little of it is 'city', though by far the bulk of the population lives in urban areas - the people up in Middlemarch do have genuinely different needs and concerns from those in the city, but because most of the voting population is urban they get little representation
I think your argument about the students has some merit - but do you serious;y expect the current council to listen? the anti-stadium meeting filled the town hall last night, but the good ol' boys in the tartan mafia will ignore it
-
depends on how much bandwidth they are throwing at it HD sized streams are going to strain your software decoder while SD sized ones wont
-
The basic issue there is that they chose MPEG-4 rather than MPEG-2 (which every other broadcast service on the planet used at the time) for DVB-T broadcasts here - technically it's a good choice - except that no one makes hardware for it (including cheap silicon) - so from a business point of view it's probably been an uphill battle. It also means that things like Windows (and Linux too) haven't been able to test against these different streams and stuff that has never been tested is by definition broken
In the US everyone's wanted to switch to MP4 for a while - bandwidth is much more precious over there - but can't because of the enormous installed base of old slow settops that would have to be replaced - literally something like 100 million of them, mostly owned by the cable/satellite companies who would have to replace them all at once - so choosing to start freeview with Mp4 is forward thinking (they can't do it for the NZ freeview satellite service because the share streams with Sky and would have to change out all the Sky settops)