* Posts by zemm

10 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Mar 2014

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

zemm

Australia went metric money on 14 February 1966. My FIL bought a horse that day and he and the seller had to figure out the new fan-dangled dollars! We still have one of the biggest coins in common usage: our 50c coin is about 32mm wide.

BOFH: I'm so pleased to be on the call, Boss. No, of course this isn't a recording

zemm

Re: Duplicate Asset Tag numbers!

They can also burn the asset number into BIOS so they are retrievable through software, or at least they used to. Back when I was a PFY in the days of Windows NT 4 the place I was working at had that. Of course we had 10000s of computers.

A bridge too far: Passengers on Sydney's new ferries would get 'their heads knocked off' on upper deck, say politicos

zemm

Re: They could

I totally recall seeing that documentary too! It would be exciting to visit Western Europe with minutes of travel instead of a whole day of flying around the long way!

Windows 7 goes dual screen to shriek at passersby: Please, just upgrade me or let me die

zemm

Was there supposed to be a photo or something? It would have been nice to see what the article was talking about

We, Wall, we, Wall, Raku: Perl creator blesses new name for version 6 of text-wrangling lingo

zemm

Re: Next release

There was speculation that Perl 5.32 could simply become Perl 32 and go from there -- like Java.

Says the guy who still uses Perl 5.10.1 as bread and butter... There is a project to upgrade to 5.16 when CentOS 6.x becomes completely EOL and we'll have to be on CentOS 7; not sure what we'll do after that. Our code breaks spectacularly around 5.22!

TPG glasses Vodafone with 4,000 km of new fibre

zemm

Re: Compatible handsets

I know this is three months late, but mostly, yes. For 3G Voda uses 850/900/2100 (phasing out the 850, see below) where Optus uses 900/2100. For 4G (LTE) Voda uses 850/1800, Optus uses 700/1800. Many phones support the 850 LTE but only the newest support 700. Either way, 1800 is common.

I've been switched and - surprisingly - have only noticed improvements. But then I haven't gone rural yet.

There is a pit lid with the TPG logo and a new trench going to an existing Vodafone tower near my house. I can only assume that this is one of the newly upgraded towers that is now providing full bars to my phone, rather than the droppy-out Optus signal!

As for "all phones" - as far as I know Optus-locked phones would have worked with the old TPG SIM card, but not with the replacement Vodafone-based SIM. So if you are using a phone locked to Optus it would stop working until you either get it unlocked or replaced.

Telstra 'snot boxes' challenge Turnbull's FTTN plan

zemm

I have to say that I also have been impressed by the promptness of Telstra's techs fixing faults. Not impressed that the line has to be completely (or almost-completely) dead before they'll do anything though.

I've had to report my line being down twice over the last six years. Both times it was actually fixed on a holiday (once a Saturday and once on a public holiday, Queens birthday IIRC). The first time it was actually just the voice that dropped out: ADSL2+ continued to work and I could report the fault via VoIP. The second time the ADSL2+ kept dropping out every couple of minutes and you could barely hear the other person on the end of the line through the scratchy sounds. They did tests and couldn't fault it but couldn't deny the noises on the line. The tech even called and said "it sounds perfect" - no, they had diverted the line to a mobile. He plugged his own handset in at the pole and confirmed the fault was upstream, then he switched us to another line and everything came back. I do worry how many spare lines there are!

Thinking back, every house I've lived in during my adult life has had issues with the phone line at one point or another. Whether "too far" from the exchange to get ADSL (when next door neighbours on both sides had it already) or simple water damage. I'm not sure if FTTP would be better in this regard, but it couldn't really be worse!

zemm

Re: Proper system maintenance should be done

" Just keep your hand out of my pocket when you're doing it."

Original NBN plan kept all hands out of your pocket. I don't understand this argument, since it was funded through loans that would have been paid back - with profit. Money that would only come from people actively using the network. Don't connect and it would cost you nothing, not even from taxes.

Are you also accusing me of taking "your" money when I got my home loan (albeit at ~1/100,000 the scale) to stop renting and purchase a property?

zemm

Re: Sad day for the plebs!

Can you get a static IP address on your "nice" cable? That's actually stopping me from moving from 7Mbps ADSL2 to HFC.

zemm

Re: It's not an uncommon story

We were quoted at over $2000 per month on a 36 month contract to get 2Mbps fibre (Yes, TWO MEGABITS) with a quota (IIRC 200GB/month). On the Gold Coast, 2011, where there was already fibre in the street (our phone lines got cut once and the tech showed me the cables in the pit while he was repairing them), but not within the then-planned NBN 3-year plan. Our office was a few doors down from a Telstra call centre, so not out in the sticks. I'd hate to think how much a 10+ Mbps service would have cost! I was working for a small-ish business at the time and there was no way it could afford that. (It didn't even last the 36 months anyway: can I blame Telstra's congested ADSL?)

And there's no way that that $72k+ could be justified. Even if the business paid $5k installation - Malcolm Turnbull has said that paying to get fibre installed would have been cheaper than this - current NBN 100Mbps plans are around $100/month. $72k vs $8k for the same time period, for 20-50x faster? Realistically it would be even cheaper if "everyone" in an area connects at the same time, since the installation crews would do them all in a row, and the infrastructure is installed together.

The original NBN basically used the subsequent monthly fees to pay for the initial "free" installation. The quote above would have cost over $10k for the installation if there was no contract. The thing with the real NBN is there was no way it couldn't break even (eventually) as you'd have a connection for 50+ years, even if you changed retail providers every year.