I'd have to double-check, but i'm pretty sure her electorate is still in the western suburbs of Melbourne. I don't remember if she actually came from there, however, but that may lead to the accent being thicker if she did.

No, they weren't. Ryan 'Icculus' Gordon was porting the dedicated server. I don't believe the client was ever promised. (could be wrong there). He's got other paying work to do than work on the UT3 client for no monies, anyway.

It's more that a bunch of subsidies that the ISPs were relying on dried up a few years back and weren't renewed. They had to scale back the installation of equipment in rural areas well. Also, Australia has roughly the continental area of the US... but only 20-odd million people (mostly on the coast, fortunately). This makes things a bit more spread out and more expensive. Then there's the $rape charged for data, which the ISPs currently can't control easily.

Not in Australia there isn't. There's ADSL, and there's only one single ADSL standard (well, two if you consider ADSL/ADSL2+). and there's Cable. (and dialup modems/satellite if you want to be picky, and lets face it, who doesn't!). No one's really investing in cable anymore, since the infrastructure for ADSL already exists, and just requires exchange upgrades and back-haul upgrades, instead of in-street wiring of cable and back-haul upgrades.

That's several million homes in Australia who all get an adsl modem from their ISP, and if the isp recommends a wireless router/adsl modem, then they're pushing a path that allows them to invest in R&D on newer features. They all still offer the simple ADSL modem, but there's plenty of room for people with multiple computers (something a large fraction if not the majority of australian households now have) to warrant the availability and simplicity of a modem/router pre-configured by the ISP to just work when you plug it in.

That, for some reason, keeps posting stories about Australia. Riiiight.

Wow, this has to be some of the best revisionism I've heard in a while.

Questions to keep in mind when reading the parent:
* Just how in debt was the Australian government when they sold off nationally owned utilities, debt which they inherited from the previous administration, who's in power currently?
* Just how pathetically overbearing was Telstra, given that it owned both a consumer branch, and the infrastructure, and could essentially charge whatever they liked?
* Who's benefited in the meantime thanks to organisations like the TIO and/or the ACCC?
* How painful was it for third party ISPs to get wholesale ADSL and layer-2 routing from Telstra at a break-even price until the above organizations stepped in?

This isn't to say that there aren't concerns here (particularly on the filtering/censoring front), but separating the infrastructure from Telstra has the opportunity to ensure that wholesale to alternate ISPs is not trodden on again.

I wouldn't have been surprised if it was actually one of the ad servers the site uses.

What extra heat source would that be? They removed one by combining it with the other and then using 45nm fabrication processes to cut down on the power requirements... Protip: that's less heat, not more.

And concentrate all of the unit's cooling focus onto one area instead of two, which should reduce the noise comparatively.

From the reports i've seen, usb flash is a bit slower to write to, generally, but read speed is roughly the same. (read this as: takes longer to rip, once ripped, is about the same)

This is based on simple benchmarks that the roosterteeth guys did, though, not sure if it was exhaustive, or if there was some problem with their setup/keys/xbox.

I was wondering about that too. That said, the controls for the dashboard/media center stuff that work with Kinect (i keep wanting to type kinetic) seem to be able to notice when someone has their hand palm-up facing the camera. But how fine of a control you can get through that (detecting twists of the wrist)? I'm guessing not fine enough to get something decent like the spin on a bowling ball, or top-spin on a tennis ball :S

I don't buy games in stores for this reason nowadays. Steam or independent download only.

The problem then would be that it'd have to be disc 1, and ONLY disc 1 that worked this way, or you'd effectively have multiple copies of the game handy.

I think Forza 3 actually did this, mind you. It had a second disc, and offered to let you install it to the hard drive. More games should do this, i guess, but they don't want to force a HD onto anyone, since it's possible to buy an xbox without one.

Uh, who made this "5-year rule" up, exactly? You?
Microsoft sure didn't.

The original XBox had a life-span of about 4 years, not really enough time to recoup losses made. I'm not surprised that as the consoles get more expensive to make, that people want to push them out longer to make a reasonable profit on them.

Uh. Local servers should be running people's copy of visual studio?

The idea here is to allow developer workstations and test systems to go to sleep when not in use, since they just waste power. We're not talking fileservers or webservers here, which have an arguable need for response time and constant powerdown/powerup cycles can be bad for hardware if done too frequently.