Skip to main content

Please don't ruin The NBN (Too late!)

The Australian opposition launched its Broadband policy today. Inferior in every way to the current National Broadband Network and no cheaper in the long run due to the cost of maintaining the old copper network.  Is the cost of electing the LNP having inferior infrastructure, more expensive health care and poorer education?

Do the opposition plan to charge all the people who are already connected to the NBN the $5000 they will make me pay to get FTTP once they get elected? My house is over 3.5KM from the exchange and I get 3M over ADSL2.

You have got to question the motives of the opposition - are they protecting their biggest donors? They will be winning the next election regardless of what they say or do between now and September so there is no reason not to allow the NBN to proceed except for vested self-interest.

One thing is for sure - if they ruin the NBN I will be cancelling my Foxtel subscription and will never buy anything associated with the backers of the LNP.

I wonder if we can get a Green senator elected in the ACT? Unlikely but I will be pushing the idea with friends and colleagues.

[6 Jul 2013 update] The recent change of Prime Minister has made the election a lot closer. The opposition now may have to start doing some work. The free ride may be over.
[10 Oct 2013] It was a false dawn and the second senate seat went to the LNP. We will have to try again next election.
[16 Sep 2014] The government has managed to slow the rollout of the NBN to a crawl and has wasted money with review after review and commission after commission into anything it can, all with predetermined outcomes.
[11 July 2017] The NBN finally made it to our house. Sure enougth our distance to the node is 1053m and the attanable speed is just over half what I have been getting from  VDSL2 for the last four years. So I connected for a week to check it our and then cancelled.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Extended Attributes Are Inconsistent in Windows 8

I have upgraded my laptop to Windows 8 and all was fine for about three hours and then I started to get an error when trying to run any application that required Administrator privileges. Half an hour of Googling led me to this blog post   Case of the broken uac prompt This problem was caused by downloading themes. The final theme I had decided on included a new sound theme. Clearly at least one of the sounds did not play (the one for the UAC prompt!). Changing the sound theme (right click on desktop, choose "personalisation") to Windows Default sorted out the problem. Doing a clean install would also have fixed it but that would have been a drastic solution and as soon as I installed a new theme it may have happened again.

Beware vnc and upnp

My new linux box got hacked yesterday. I was careless. My ADSL router has upnp support and it is turned on by default. I enabled "Remote Desktop" in Linux - which is a version of vnc - and decided not to set a password as it would not be accessible from outside the local network. That was my first mistake. Last night I noticed a second connection to the linux box. Someone was using the browser and had connected to Western Union and was trying to install the flash plugin. They had not got very far as Fedora 14 does not install Flash on a 64bit system as it is still in beta so the install is not straightforward. I was able to disconnect this errant person before they got any further and I then disconnected the ADSL line from the modem to prevent another attempt and proceeded to diagnose what had happened. I checked the preferences for VNC and noticed the automatically configure the network check box had been selected and that it was reporting an external address could be

"No child processes" error on Linux

A problem was reported by a customer. They were getting a failure and in the logs it reported error → waitpid failed 'Reason: No child processes' The “No child processes” error came from waitpid() after using  fork/spawn to launch a utility to load data into a data base. Upon detailed investigation it appears it is possible that some other process that the user is running has changed the default handler for SIGCHLD - possibly the shell (e.g. bash!) used to launch our server processes. If the signal handler is set to SIG_IGN then when a process is started using fork()/exec() the return code from the process is NOT returned and waitpid() cannot retrieve the response code. The most likely reason for "No child processes" error from waitpid() is that the signal handler for child processes (SIGCHLD) is not set to SIG_DFL. This should not be possible however it seems that on Linux a process run in the shell (or maybe a shell process) can set it