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The Internet

Raising Doubts About Australia's Broadband Upgrade Plan 98

Posted by timothy from the doubt-doubt-doubt dept.
RcK writes "In addition to the rising controversy of the possible Australian version of the Great Firewall Of China already mentioned several times of late here on Slashdot; the viability of the proposed AU$5Billion internet infrastructure upgrade promised by the Federal Government during their 2007 election campaign is under fire. The MD of arguably Australia's leading internet company, iinet, has branded the proposal a waste of taxpayers money. Steve Ballmer, during his current Australian visit, has also weighed in on the topic and diplomatically indicated that Australia should get on with the job. Much of the current criticism appears to surround the likelihood of people in remote areas being left out of the proposed plan. Ironically, where I lived previously (remote town in central Aus — nearest town over 400km away) everyone had, at the absolute least, subsidized satellite internet, and most had ADSL. In my case a flawless 512k connection for ~4years. However, I now live 5 minutes from the center of a capital city and due to archaic telephone infrastructure cannot get ADSL, and even line noise is too great for dialup!" Today's front page at Whirlpool Broadband News also features several articles relating to the saga.
Microsoft

Microsoft Bids To Take Over Open Document Format 256

Posted by kdawson from the pinching-the-oxygen-feed dept.
what about sends in a Groklaw alert warning that, by PJ's reading, Microsoft may be trying to take over ODF via a stacked SC 34 committee. The article lists the attendees at an SC 34 meeting in July and gives their affiliations, which the official meeting materials do not. (The attendees of the October 1 meeting, which generated a takeover proposal to OASIS, are not known in full.) "Why do I say Microsoft, when this is SC 34? Look at this ... list of participants in the July meeting in Japan of the SC 34 committee. The committee membership is so tilted by Microsoft employees and such, if it were a boat, it would capsize ... Of the 19 attendees, 8 are outright Microsoft employees or consultants, and 2 of them are Ecma TC45 members. So 10 out of 19 are directly controlled by Microsoft/Ecma ... [I]f the takeover were to succeed, SC 34 would get to maintain ODF as well as Microsoft's competing parody 'standard,' OOXML. How totally smooth and shark-like. Under the guise of 'synchronized maintenance,' without which they claim SC 34 can't fulfill its responsibilities, they get control of everything." A related submission from David Gerard points out that BoycottNovell has leaked the ISO OOXML documents, which ISO has kept behind passwords.

Comment Duh (Score 1) 146

by aleph (#23800841) Attached to: Anti-Technology Technologies?
The poster makes it sound like the sky is falling. OMG, if you download terrabytes of data/month on your residental account they might *gasp* charge you!

Australia has had metered plans pretty much since inception. Most are of the "XXgb then shape to 128kbps" variety. There have been companies offering unlimited, but they either go under, or oversell at a horrendous ratio.

If the cost of bandwidth, as a proportion of operating cost, goes up for the ISP, then something has to break. Either they introduce some type of allocation (metered plans) or the overall quality of service needs to go down (they oversell more). It's not some grand conspiracy, it's *possibly* money grubbing, but it's far more likely just trying to keep on top of a ballooning cost.

Really, unless you're streaming hdtv 24/7. it's *not* a huge issue. I have 60gb/month in total, and even when I'm leeching a bit I'll be lucky to go through half of that. Often I'll only use a couple of gigs. And I'm still considered a _heavy_ user ffs.

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