Posts by Dave Ingram 11 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2007
Same chips and sensors maybe, but did you stop to consider that the lenses could be rather different?
A gazillion megapickels is wasted if the optics are not good enough. That's why a 6Mp photo taken with a Minolta Dynax 5D can be printed as an 8"x12" and look nice, but an 8Mp smart(arse) phone photo is barely passable as a 6"x4" print.
If you want river levels go to the Bureau of Meterology, not to the council. The real time level readings are very good.
http://www.bom.gov.au/qld/flood/rain_river.shtml
The Community Intelligence Map lets you mouse-over most of the river gauges to see what is happening.
http://dcsevocloadbalancer-1646278957.ap-southeast-1.elb.amazonaws.com/evoc
Councils almost NEVER give flood data away, so I can't see them ever overlaying this on a google map to make it easy for people.
Australians like to go on about the vast distances to be covered. News flash! Other parts of the world have to deal with this too. That's why the NBN will be delivered over fibre in the urban areas, LTE in the regional areas and satellite in BFN (rural) areas.
Norway has big chunks of nothing and so does the US. A cow cocky west of Roma is not going to get 100Mb/s on the NBN.
The PPP factors for Norway are about right -- damn that place is expensive!
Eduroam is great when it works, but over the last week I've had 50% luck with it. My 'home' university is in Australia, and I'm using Eduroam in Norway. When there are authentication problems you are all out of luck.
I much prefer the automatic logon using 802.1x rather than captive HTTP pages, especially for mobile phones.
The City of Trondheim has wireless network coverage in the commercial area of town that the public pay for, but they also bring the NTNU university network and Edurom into the area. Such foresight is appreciated and it is great to have my phone be able to check email with Wifi rather than roaming data.
Adobe are shockers for this. Student versions of common applications are have large differences in price. Acrobat X Pro is US$119 or A$148. Lightroom 3 student is US$89 or A$111. Photoshop CS5 Extended is US$119 or A$182.
The downloads are sold from Ireland for Australia, so there is no GST (those prices are the GST free ones). The same 80% discount is applied, but to the rip-off full price.
When students see price differences like that, is it any wonder that they choose the BitTorrent store instead? I'll wear the extra cost, but only because I will pay for software I use and my supervisor is covering some of the costs.
Geez, where have you been? Telecom NZ now run a UMTS 850MHz network (well it is up and down like a bride's nightie), 2 Degrees have GSM and are about to start UMTS (2100MHz I think).
The irony of the iPhone3 & 3GS is that vodafone was the official dealer, but they worked better rurally with Telecom because of the 850MHz support (which was for AT&T). At least the ipwn 4 has 900MHz UMTS support so rural Voda coverage will be better (and same with VodaOz and Optus over the ditch).
I ditched my NZ Voda prepaid and am now using 2 Degrees. I don't care about data and the prices are half that of Voda. Shame about the coverage, but I think it is getting better.
In the past I had an ANZ Visa (oz version) which was the first card in Oz to have a chip. A free USB card reader was provided (which work well for GPG now) so the card could be used for the 'new' verified by visa system.
The idea was that once the card was registered, Visa would know it was a chip card and that for any VbV transactions the card would have to be placed in the card reader, proving that the person making the purchase had physical possession of the card. I think a PIN was needed too.
Given how many Chip cards are around now, why isn't this adopted by the banks? Could it be that managing digital certificates is too hard for the average punter? The tax office has stopped requiring them here for online tax returns.
I've only found one online IT retailer that requires VbV or Securecode and as my mastercard provider didn't offer Securecode I couldn't purchase from them. There response was to get a different card and my reply was that I'd order the gear from someone else.
I have a new mastercard now, no chip in it and no securecode option. Hard to believe it's been issued by a bank owned by HBOS!
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