That's very painful, but less entertaining than sending them to Lenny (I can neither confirm nor deny that we have sent telemarketers to our Lenny) https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/
Posts by pdf
14 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2012
Must listen: We've found the real Bastard Operator From Hell
Turnbull: NBN won't turn your town into Silicon Valley
Friday 19th September 2014 05:36 GMT
Re: I call Bulls*&$
Upload speed is absolutely limited by technical implementation. For ADSL2+, G.992.5 Annex M is the absolute best you can do for upstream throughput, according to spec - this is what Internode use. It provides a theoretical maximum of ~3mbps, and that drops off very rapidly with distance.
Your feigning knowledge is completely inappropriate. Stop spouting FUD to support your political agenda.
Turnbull's NBN is startup-land's litmus test
Tuesday 17th December 2013 06:02 GMT 
Erm...
Simon, even as an opinion piece, this appears poorly thought out, and unnecessarily snarky. I'd expect this sort of thing in the comments, not in my news feed.
The first argument is flimsy because it rules out other innovations enabling the same outcomes.
So, we're supposed to discount an option we know provides adequate infrastructure to build these business models on, because there might be something, some day, that can do the same?
The second retains some potency but has been defeated by the cost blowouts to build any form of NBN
How does the fact that any build will incur cost blowouts defeat the argument that having to build twice makes the impotent (and only marginally cheaper first time round) option more expensive in the long term? Because surely then you will have not only the build cost multiplied, but also the blowout?
Turnbull's NBN ... will probably deliver 25Mbps to just about every household in Australia. That's better than Australia has ever had before. It's comparable to what has been available in many places. Between G.fast and DOCSIS 3.1 it could even be that Australia gets faster and more reliable connections than the 25Mbps baseline promised.
Well, so long as it will probably deliver 25Mbps, then we'll have Internet connectivity that's somewhere around the worldwide average (which is nothing to be proud of). For all those billions, that seems like a poor result when for a (relatively) little more, we could place ourselves amongst the leaders in this space. And hasn't the baseline 25Mbps promise now been turfed?
In any case, what's missing for business, and the startups you're so quick to denigrate, is upstream bandwidth - and that will remain pathetic under Turnbull's version(s) of the 'NBN'. A lack of understanding of this as a key metric for businesses (or startups) on the NBN really shows a clear lack of understanding of the entire argument surrounding the technology.
Getting it right on the second attempt: Sony Xperia Z1
Monday 18th November 2013 12:37 GMT
I nearly pulled the trigger on this phone, but for two things:
1) The added bezel surface area, and squared-off corners make this significantly less comfortable than other 5" phones, and I don't have small hands - it'd be a serious problem for someone that does.
2) The screen. Whilst it may be an improvement over the previous generation, it's still really quite terrible. Because the device is large, even a relatively minor tilt of the device adds enough angle to the top of the screen to start losing contrast and colour, thanks to the still absolutely appalling viewing angles. This was really the clincher for me.
I am hanging out for Sony to finally get the Z1s announced and shipping - it's expected to have essentially the same specs in a 4.3" screen device, with the only sacrifice being battery capacity (obviously, with the smaller chassis), but this will hopefully be offset by lower power requirements for the smaller screen. Not only that, but if video of the Japanese variant (the Z1f) is anything to go by, the 720p screen is phenomenally better than display in the Z1. Fingers crossed.
Australian politicians 'resisted' debate on new spook powers
Web daddy Tim Berners-Lee: DRMed HTML least of all evils
Friday 11th October 2013 01:50 GMT
Re: He does have a point
What you're failing to understand is that EME *is* essentially a plugin system - the CDMs required for it to work will be custom, closed binary blobs with all the platform-dependent problems that we currently have. And it seems likely at this stage (but who knows, since there's no reference CDM implementation) that open platforms and browsers will not be able to implement support for EME, and that EME must have a far deeper integration with the operating system for it to be effective, otherwise content can simply be captured in the OS once it's rendered.
There's also significant possibility for this to be further abused to lock away standard content - the potential damaging impact of EME on what we've come to know as the open web should not be underestimated.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
