TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

Fibre to the Farmyard. Naturally, I think it’s a common place belief that it isn’t coming to a farmyard at all, because Fibre is expensive to deploy, and is overkill for current and anticipated future requirements for farmers. But, it is important to note that a recent survey by the ACMA found that 35% of [...]

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It seems things just go around in circles in the Broadband realm, with the only forward momentum being competition induced innovation. I suppose the entire industry isn’t to blame for the circling, because a lot of spin comes from Telstra, and well, you can’t have a whirlpool without a violent circular aquatic movement. Despite the [...]

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One of the reasons I can see spammers continually trying to connect to a server, is because they get rejected quickly, and have more than one bot to go and retry. I think the better solution to this issue (and issues related to SMTP auth attacks, and 550 errors), are having an error counter in [...]

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Simon Hackett, and other ISPs have been wanting to get their hands on ADSL2+ from Telstra Wholesale since the release of the product. However, after they attempt to navigate, and visit adsl2+_wholesale.html, they are coming across a 404 page, meaning that there is no wholesale of ADSL2+. Sol Trujillo has long been targetting to trash [...]

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I’m amazed by the amount people are paying for houses at the current moment. It’s a supply and demand situation, as revealed by a report a while ago, that I was reading. Essentially, the First Home Buyers Grant, and other related items forced prices to become inflated by the amount of the grant, and to [...]

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It’s common debate when in discussion about Telstra, that they claim regulations prevent Telstra running a business the way they wanted to. But, when you dig into these deeper then getting your toes wet, you generally find that the regulations are designed to protect consumers from any activity deemed to prevent competition entering the market. [...]

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At the end of last year, I concluded that I would want my Diploma in IT, and was certain to acheive that. I enrolled into the course then, and have found that I have a total of 800 hours (in TAFE terms) of study to complete to get my Diploma in IT. The hours are [...]

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Simon Hackett, Internode Founder was quoted in Australian IT providing an outlook towards the future of broadband in 2008. I find Simon’s views near accurate, of course he has to spin it out towards his own companies agenda, he does afterall buy fast cars and other items of his own personal interest, and that costs [...]

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… and opening on our car now. At long last, we can finally open and close the window on the car. The fix came today, as we were able to track down the auto electrician back at the workshop, and collect the items. Poor bugger has been really sick, and has had us chasing him [...]

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So far, we have been trying to get an issue fixed with the car that has taken 20 days to try and get sorted out. The only issue with the car itself is the back window doesn’t actually work (electric windows), we planned on getting it fixed, but, we seem unable to get a pink [...]

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Yep, straight from the reliable mouth of ZDNet, Telstra rejected possible customers for ADSL2+. The government has been inconsistent also, with it’s Telstra dealings, stating during the election campaign that it would stand strong against Telstra, yet, when the time arises for them to get in a photo shoot and be seen doing something, they [...]

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At least, one window is closing, and it’s not the one I want unfortunately. The window for our registration renewal is closing, and we have a little bit of time to accomplish a few things. We need to get the electric window working, that is, opening and closing, because it doesn’t open, which means we can’t [...]

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The NSW government proposed to roll out free wireless across parts of NSW at the previous election. As per typical government promises, the total work began towards such commitment is absolutely 0. There’s no government based wireless network running for free at this time. And why would there be? Internet access is far from a [...]

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The demolition work has begun to destroy a great work by the Howard government, the established Communications Fund. This Communications Fund was established so that Regional and Rural Communications services wouldn’t fall behind metro areas due to a lack of investment. The fund would generate $400 million every three years for use in investing and [...]

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It’s official, the court has given access to Telstra, government documents relating to the OPEL network decision. Sen. Conroy had no objections to giving them access to material which allows for determination details to be seen by Telstra.  What’s surprising, is Fat Phil was very quick to jump up to every media circus he could [...]

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And on, and on. We are trying to seek the screws involved with our window repair to the car. The auto electrician (who is a well known person to us, and others), is still away, and isn’t working until next week, it seems, so that’s going to cut it a little too close to rego [...]

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… and the pain still continues for the hunt for a pink slip for the car. We are still no closer to fixing the only flaw found with the car, the rear left electric window won’t actually wind down. The wreckers stuffed us around a few times, and the auto electrician got screwed around as a [...]

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Senator Conroy has done something that I define as incredibly stupid. The previous government screwed the sale of Telstra while the network was still in the care of Telstra. They stuffed up big time selling Telstra with the network. The network should have remained government property, leased out to Telstra (and others). The ‘band-aid’ fix [...]

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For some reason the drop outs we were experiencing nightly on the ADSL2+ service have improved, such that we haven’t had a drop out since 7AM, and before that, it was 6PM the night before. That looks to be improving, but we won’t have anything definite til tomorrow, after tonight, so that we can see [...]

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My car is loving the attention it is getting right now, no doubt. I took it back to the auto electrician to get the window part fitted, and.. well, it is one which is broken and doesn’t work. To be expected from a wrecked car, I suppose. Anyway, at the auto electrician, the door latch [...]

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If Australians had to choose between an FTTH network, or an FTTN network, the considerations should be looking both into the long term speed advantage, as well as into the short and medium term damage to competition that could be caused. If we went with an FTTN network, speeds would improve to many users, but, [...]

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We took the car to the auto electrician today, and low and behold, the parts recycler gave us the wrong dang size electric window mechanism. So, tomorrow is going to be spent tracking down the right part, and then seeing if they can supply, if not, venturing a little further south to find one! The [...]

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Introducing ADSL2+. Yeh, we knew it existed years ago, Telstra were just so slow at getting the pills necessary to get it up. Now, however, Senator Conroy, contacted Telstra advising them that he agrees with the ACCC in full, when they said it back in 2006, there is no reason for the ACCC to interfere [...]

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We took the car in for its pink slip last week at some point, and we failed the pink slip for the fact the rear left window doesn’t go down (its electric). What I found amazing then is that the car was just given a pink slip by another mechanic back in August 2007, when [...]

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Reading a somewhat dated document produced by Telstra on the USO sort of makes you see the point they make in the USO area. Some services, and some requests really do cost a lot of money to fulfill. Aboriginal communities have payphones, they try and steal the money out of them, so the USO (or [...]

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I host a trivia room (well, two) on an IRC network, it gets a few visitors, and has a host of regulars and is a great room. I don’t have much involvement in it, it’s just running there, my partner does more with it then I do. The trivia room runs off a MySQL database [...]

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Google Analytics is a great Google service (from the company of “Do No Evil”), but, how useful is it really? They don’t seem to have much in the way of Adwords integration with Analytics for testing a complete visit from click on search engine through to complete sale, and even then, they don’t report adequately [...]

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I’m amazed when I see this sort of items appear in front of me. Some one paying thousands of dollars for a ‘web site’ and getting what amounts to automatically generated rubbish, or unplanned scripting errors and the like. The business today I spoke to had an issue with a website they paid $3,500 for, [...]

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I’ve been watching closely (or is that casually) to try and find the source of many of my drop outs and see if I can isolate it, or do something to slow them or stop them. Unfortunately, they continue to happen. Tonight, at around midnight, it dropped out, and came back later, and dropped out. [...]

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