It looks like they are heading in the right direction decent chances of success. Lets hope they can keep improving the tech, to the point we can buy a roll of cheap solar panel to lay with worthwhile output.

The question is not "is streaming worth it?" its "whats in the contracts?". Like anything you can have good and bad business contracts, and if you are an artist, then hearing "streaming" and saying "yes" or "no" based on that alone is a huge mistake, as big as you can make anywhere contracts are involved. If anyones wants to stream your music for free, read the fine print even more closely.

These stats do seem a bit out of line.

Akamai reports average 4.5mbit (and due to their network they have fat pipes in all capital cities) and so does the other one a quick google found - zdnet

pirate party?

This article makes it sounds like he'll be running as an independent. I just did a little more research and see that he has joined the Finnish pirate party.

Any other company and i'd agree and say give them the access they need.... But Microsoft.... after being such asses since their early days locking in companies with buggy proprietary apps and doing everything they can to not support public APIs properly, keep all their information secret, spread FUD about competitors (linux) I say, suck it up Microsoft, how does it feel now?

this is surely going to be controversial, but this county needs fibre to the premises for the future. if the libs get from protest vote against labor they will do a lot of bad things.. waste $billions on a rubbish nbn that will set the country and companies technology investment back a long long way. Then they will damage or sell medicare, they wont invest in schools even though the education system needs some help. If you dont want to vote labor DO vote for one of the smaller parties instead. There are enough around to pick from, personally im thinking pirate party australia - worth searching them out if you think you might be interested.

future

Well, im happy to see some of my tax money go on it. Someones gotta do it first, and most tech improves as its developed and tested. Im also happy to see australia developing such tech. Lets hope its proven successful and keep an eye out for the next generation. Solar is good and getting better but as said above large scale geothermal runs at night. I also wouldnt worry about cooling the rock down. Our planet has a core of molten rock, theres a lot of heat down there.

I did wonder how kodak failed after inventing the first digital camera. But this article spells it out - too slow to improve it, and once behind not rich enough to catch up. Sad to see, but you cant undo poor choices by management.

As for solar, it is making quite a difference where I live. Details here:

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/rooftop-solar-reshapes-energy-market-in-south-australia-18272

Have a look with google maps around the suburbs near the citys in australia (eg: adelaide south australia ) to see just how much there is here. You wont have to look far to see it. My house has generated 3.5megawatt hours off a little 1.5kw system in the last 3 years. About half my energy needs. I just forget about it and it keeps ticking over. The tech keeps improving and becoming cheaper too.

At least hes quoting real numbers, and hes got experience in private large scale telco business. He knows his stuff. We dont get the same details from the media that would cross his desk. I do hope we see the rollout start to speed in the next 12 months though. http://www.nbnco.com.au/about-us/our-people/executives.html

or... they'll just cash in on the 'were going to....' and it'll never actually happen.

copper

Good questions, but one ive not seen asked yet:

What is the cost of re-routing as required and re-terminating every copper pair at the the node installations? And do people want many new dark green cabinets dotted around the suburbs.

Battery backup will be required, but the high end telco grade batteries last a lot longer than 2 years, and the lead can be recycled and acid disposed of cleanly (easy to do on a large scale).

FTTN Is not a good long term solution. Better than nothing, but very short sighted and wasteful. If they want to cost it they should include how much money already invested in FTTP will be wasted, how much an FTTN network will cost to complete, and how much it will cost to upgrade it to FTTP in the medium range future when we need it. If the total is more than 10% extra, its probably worth doing it right the first time and going straight to FTTP.

There are pleanty of areas that dont have copper at all, or have bad copper now, which telstra where telstra have not been deploying upgrades due to knowing the NBN is coming. Seems silly to go and install copper infrastructure in this day age. Just flog a dead horse that much longer will they?

Co-ax doesnt cut it. Even if high sync speeds can be obtained, put a whole street or more on the segment at those speeds and load it up and speed will fall. Same goes for long range wifi. Along with copper, both techs are not suitable for city population density in to the future.

we all knew it

nokia - big $ in R&D, linux.. had a great platform but failed to bring it to market quickly enough. Then MS got involved, and the good stuff was canned, R&D dollars in the bin, and now, they seem to think that bringing out 10 new models every few months that all look exactly the same with the same name and a new number is going to do it for them. Winpho.. so borning. And who ever though that a menu with a bunch of different size squares on it was appealing. That person made the biggest mistake in recent times!

I was at my mother in laws place last week. a housing estate where there is not enough copper to go around, thus to this day she has adsl only on pair gain and speeds are dismal, telstra are the only wholesaler and the service is expensive. So, its either lay more copper, or lay more fibre. I know which one is the best long term plan and its the one which would benefit everyone in such a situation - FTTH.

If the fibre option is expensive to the end user, and its quicker to make because you dont actually have to make it because most people cant/wont shell out the cash, then the market for high quality streaming services that can be delivered via FTTH will be smaller, perhaps too small to exist at all. That is a massive loose for Australia. We have the technology, the skills, so please feed the industry what it needs to grow for us to be leaders in the field.

the linux based nokia phones were a real contender. I know someone who purchsed one of the first and last, before it was was pushed out of the lime light and killed by elop in his plans to go winphone. "oh no, hes got no aligence to microsoft, he is just a major shareholder^, and wants to trash all the quality IP nokia have developed in the last 5 years that is about to come to fruition, and kiss balmers ass while making the worst business decision for nokia, and finland".

My mate who bought an N700 i think it was - He really liked it. Nokia labs had done an excellent job making a lightweight linux OS for phone and QT themes that worked well on a small screen. As a phone it could stand on its own merits, and for a geek it was fantastic. He told me he was able to compile wireshark from source on the phone, and it 'just worked' and was useable with no code modification. Fantastic!

Whatever app you choose, being able to do that wins over the geeks (like android did with its openness in the early days) and the geeks are who less technical people ask for advice before they go to the phone shop. Most geeks now say "android, perhaps iphone if you like it... but what ever you do DONT get a windows phone - there is no software and nothing runs on it".

^ of course when it was reported he was a major shareholder, he sold all his shares. Im sure hes spewing about the money that netted him (enough to live rich for the rest of his life, and then some) before he kills nokia and with microsoft shooting them selves in the foot weekly by trying to push users where they dont want to go....

I dont know if state needs to go, but it does need to be reduced, and have no say in classification which should be a federal thing.

As someone who lives in SA, and voted the way I did over the r18+ issue, I can say for sure that other problems we have here - eg not enough water in the river murry due to too many water licenses along the river and in particular cotton farming licenses in the eastern states (in dry australia, how does that make sense?), would not be solved at the federal level as most people there do not see it from south australias point of view and dont take this environmental problem seriously.

Having said that though, there does seem to be enough problems solving that one even with a state government. Some issues can remain state, but most would be fine at the local or federal level.

forced sales to people who dont know

I needed to help my mother in law buy a pc last week.

Microsoft have done a good job of manipulating the sales channel. Its getting quite difficult to buy a machine with windows 7 and that is how they have created these windows 8 numbers. Similar to how as a pc skyrim player you cant buy the current DLC yet, as MS have paid bethesda to make the download exclusive to the 360 for the first month. And you would assume they paid quite a lot for the privelage. I assume money has also put win 8 on all the new machines. They know how to play it.

Most of the puchasers at the local department store dont know or care about the OS. They just hear "latest windows" and "new and shiney" and buy it. But what do they think after they use it? Thats the real test. Yes windows 8 is shipping out in volume on OEM systems, but now what?

I bought one of the last low end old windows 7 machines in the shop, put a 27" screen and some good speakers on it, and my mother in law loves it. But if people dont even know what they are buying, and MS is getting win8 on the machines, what does that even mean? and who even cares? haha.

agree with most of the above. the heading sounds like what people want to hear, but there are no details, and the details always fail. the internet it too big and international in nature. the first 2 posts have it right.

Australia has always been over censored, and has a strong political culture of censorship. Attempts to censor the net so far have failed. Kids need education and support, and those spruking "think of the children", while speaking popular words, really badly need more education themselves on the subjects they speak of.

money talks

money talks in most the world. a lot of people want to support him. there is little to no trust in the us everywhere. KDC bought his way in to NZ with an agreement to invest, and if he has the content that people want at me.ga and builds the cable, and keeps the data in NZ, he will be in a pretty strong position.

The NZ courts seem to be offering him a lot more than the american ones. Building the cable will be massively expensive, but if he can do it, then the second time around I reckon NZ would be likely to protect him like they should have in the first place (I dont think they saw this coming). Also, Australia is real close by, and has a lot of fibre, so even if he cant cross the planet a nice fall back plan would be an NZ to Sydney pipe (2153kms or 1338 miles), at which point he could peer with southern cross networks...

yep

long time centos user for the servers, fedora user on the desktop here. gnome 3 was the end of gnome for myself and the other 3 colleagues who I work with (every linux user in this redhat business). We all run xfce now, and I am looking to move to cinamon next time I move to a newer OS where its going to with just a yum install (not like my current and close to EOL fedora 16).

I agree with the point of this article, why is everyone trying to redesign the desktop? Some kid of 'start' menu, windows with min/max/close buttons and logically arranged drop down menus is dead simple and consistant. The biggest reson microsoft has been able to hold on to the desktop these years has been their lack of and slow (or non-existant) innovation. Win 8 is about to crash and burn along with gnome 3 for the same reasons. Please guys, keep it simple and consistant.

"As someone who started online life in 1993 with a 2400kbit/s modem" Really? Thats pretty advanced! In 1993 I only had a 2400 bits/s modem. Running telix and getting 240CPS (characters per second) with zmodem downloads. Hehe :) Sorry someone had to say it!

But with the NBN, it is very true that FTTP NBN does have a long life span and that more applications will come along. It will be fantastic for remote access, offline backups, access to high quality digital data in many fields - engineering, mass media etc, and office work between remote sites. FTTP is still a lot of money for a plan which is too short sighted.

@Mahatma Coat: That is unfortunate for you. You may need to consider moving. While everyone wants FTTP for the entire country, the size of the country makes that unfeasable. Hopefully future technology can fill in the gaps, but in the mean time if it works for 93% of the population, I consider that a win.

money

seems pretty obvious that some large commercial company dumped some cash in the right bank account to make that happen to try and get in to the minds of the youth. Doesnt matter though, it wont work. Real geeks dont learn their skillz from shows like that, and the wanna bes that do wont end up being technology go to people, private or comercial.

depends on the offering

Well, the current ISP provided options (usually fetch tv) still require long contracts and physical hardware. 50% of people I know, (older family included) have a media player and or pc of some kind attached to their tv.

Looking at stats which show abc iview is viewed on PCs, I think that misses the point, many (most?) of these 'pc's are really media source for a proper full size TV.

IP TV will see its day if someone can drop the contracts, make it a monthly service, and one that can be watched via a web browser on a pc. All of sudden you'll be able to have pay services and abc iview side by side on the one device, and you'll be able to sign up to trial it lightly instead of being scared of the contract.

At this point, it will take off. If that happens before 2016, then I think there will be no trouble hitting that target. The customers are ready but the industry needs to adapt a bit more to close the gap.

ppau

The pirate party AU has been submitting information to point out exactly the problems with ACTA to comittees involved. It is good to see that we are now giving it a proper evaluation (even though this should have been done years ago, when it was first introduced).

Unfortunately, we also have the TPPA which is too similar for comfort, and most people dont even know about it.

There would be sites that contained data in the url but did not use standard authentication methods and thus the information was sent off shore to the usa. Once its in the usa, australias privacy laws no longer apply (and have already been breached, as customers were not made aware) and the us patriot act does apply, meaning that it can be used against australians. While this is not likely to affect regular users browsing the net on the phone it sets a very bad precedant and should not be taken lightly.

It is a big problem right now, though some things seem to be moving in the right direction. Europe is catching on fast. If there is a pirate party in your part of the world, vote for them next time you have a chance!

false security theatre

I recently flew between Singapore and Thailand, and was handed metal knives and forks to eat with on the plane. I gather this is normal for that region, and I dont see millions of terrorists hijacking planes or people being stabbed because of it. Just people eating their dinner.

It is such a load of rubbish we are forced to deal with in countries where so much money changes hands between mates in the name of this security theatre.

Why do people always think that browser view = on a laptop or at a computer desk? I myself have a latop plugged permanently in to my tv, and wireless keyboard and mouse with the rest of my remote controlls, so do my parents so do many of my friends. Most the people I know who use iview do watch it in the lounge, on the TV and through a decent stereo. While you can have, you still dont need set top boxes, or anything more complicated than a desktop pc and wireless controls. The sooner more people realise this, the better! I'd have signed up for fetchtv by now if I could view it in a web browser alongside iview. The required set top box is a deal breaker, though. Iveiw has it right!

This is refreshing news! I hope the license is well thought out, but this will do a lot of people a lot of good.

Who in Australia do we contact in protest about this? It is a Federal thing I guess.. which department? I want to be more vocal about this sort of stuff. 'They' have their head in the sand!

sgs3?

Why is everyone thinking 'windows tablets' and microsofts OS? To me, this has samsung galaxy s3 phone written all over it. So far all the leaked specs seem dubious at best, but i think 2ghz quad core would be quite likely and at the right time. And if so, I think samsung would keep it in house for a while to keep their competitors a technological step behind.

not suprised

Title should read "aspiring model finds way to be noticed"

http://www.exploretalent.com/jashalottin

Well.. I wouldnt do it, but I dont see that theres a problem. Horse was scheduled be euthenised, dispatched humanely.... so what... ive seen worse advertising material, and now ive seen something novel and different today.