Fantastic Video Conference System

Found a great video conference system. Check out Sightspeed.com . I have had to investigate it for training with my daughters condition. The school she is going to be attending via teleschool uses it.



Over a standard 1.5Mbit connection it appeared i was getting at least 15Frames per second.



Very Impressive!!!

Basics of SEO

To simply improve your search engine ranking requires a series of steps. These steps will be discussed over the comming weeks.

Computers running on LIGHT?????

Just found an interesting article regarding advances in computer technology. Instead of using electric signals the whole system would run on light instead.

This poses the question though - can it run completely on light - no, not that i can fathom from the articles. There would still need to be some level of electronics involved but the logic circuits would use the light switching circuits to achieve much higher theoretical speeds than current silicon technology can achieve.

More information can be found here.

Yet another one bites the dust!!

Well it looks like yet another ISP has bitten the dust. Reports on Whirlpool have stated that administrators have been appointed to handle the affairs of Wild I&T. Their reports have stated the following

Administrators Ferrier Hodgson admitted that "returning control of the Company to the Directors is not a viable option". A sale of the business is being pursued, and the Administrators recommend a liquidation of the company.
Quoted from whirlpool.net.au

This is really starting to show how bad the industry is. The questions need to be asked. (1) Is it just way too competitive for smaller ISP's to make a living out of this industry or (2) is there a monopoly that is just forcing the smaller ISP's out of business to ensure they stay afloat themselves.

In my personal opinion - option 2 is looking to be more likely the reason for it. I know thru contacts in the industry that the Telco Giants are continually giving discounts with one hand then charging double or more for something else. You think you are going to be getting ahead on one front then they sneak a higher charge onto something else in the back door and slap you in the face with it.

Seems to me that someone needs to work out where the priorities lie. I know that the majors are in it to make money as well but how far will they go to ensure their own survival and profit margins.

Another ISP bits the Dust

Yet another ISP has bitten the dust. RAWNET - a regional ISP of northern queensland has been turned off by its upstream provider. This just goes to show that it is hard to make a living out of the ISP business.

Reports are still rather sketchy about why this has happened but i would like to speculate that they have gone in too hard and too fast. The required infrastructure to set up something of this scale takes months of planning and constant tuning until it is right.

Talking from experience - I attempted to set up and run a small ISP myself. After nearly 3 months of negotiations with providers i still had not signed a single contract that could guarantee me service for my clients. No wholesale provider would ever guarantee that they themselves wouldn't have their service turned off at any point. Even though they provide the infrastructure and the data source.

To me this indicates that the whole industry in general needs a good shake up.

Wireless or not??

The question is simple. How much "wireless" technology can we have before we run out of bandwidth. I know from my own training that there are physical limits to how much information we can put into the "free air space" that surrounds us.

A story on ITWire (Unwired & Austar: "Spectacular performance" needed to succeed) shows how major companies are looking to push us into the whole wireless environment.

I am already starting to see on a regular basis people having issues with existing 802.11 systems. They are often having to change channels on a regular basis to avoid cross talk between networks. A recent installation i was involved in was attempting to use a very directional attenna to achieve a link between 2 buildings. These buildings are 400m apart. Both ends had extremely high gain attenna's to achieve enough signal strength to maintain link. Upon starting up the "receiving" end of the 2 points we picked up 14 wireless networks all within line of sight of the attenna. Out of interest we swung the attenna around thru 360 degrees and picked up a total of over 100 wireless networks. This was all within a commercial environment - imagine what a domestic or home environment would be like.

Can i ask the simple question. When will it all end. People are already stating that mobile phones are causing cancer. Wouldn't the massive adoption of wireless networks and the amount of transmission power required to send data over longer distances cause the same sort of issues?

We also have a limit to the amount of physical frequencies available (lists might be available on ACMA). There is also a limit to the amount of data able to be sent on each of these frequencies. Cables allow for basically the same amount of frequencies to be sent down it as there are frequencies transmitted via wireless. (again there are limits to this too). Fibre allows for multiple streams of information to be sent down a single fibre. You can transmit multiple streams all at the same frequency simply by using a different color. To me this seems a better option. The more adoption of fibre there is the less it will cost to install and maintain. This also leads into a recent story regarding FTTN and FTTH. Both of these technologies will allow extremely fast internet/telephony/IPTV services all on a single piece of glass.

Well that has been my rant. Lets hope that someone might be able to make a judgement call on this.

Australia Backwards - Yet Again

Now i think it has been a while since i really had a whinge, But i think this really warrants it.

Read this first

As usual with the Australian government they have decided to try and limit the amount of content Australian and the international Internet users are allowed to view.

Google has really summed this whole attempt of running our lives with the comment - "If such advanced permission was required, the Internet would promptly grind to a halt."

How can we allow the Government to limit how and when we search the internet. How can they restrict the details of particular items due to the "possibility" that there may be offensive or copyrighted material.

This leads me to further points which i will not get into at this point for fear of making this entry too big. Needless to say, i believe that the Government and in general the whole "World Goverment" system is backwards in trying to protect us from the 1% of morons and immoral people that could cause problems.

I know that piracy is a major problem, however instead of trying to "block" the problem why not try to work with the people who are pirating the software etc and try to compromise and understand why they are doing so. If major companies like "Redhat" and "Ubuntu Linux" are able to give away their software but still make money why can't some of the music industry work out a way to save money, make it cheaper to purchase the material and therefore reduce the amount of piracy that is happening.

Been a while

Well it has been a while - work commitments etc have caused me to forget about my ramblings.

Not for much longer.

I will start my ramblings again shortly as well as a new job. Hopefully this blog will soon turn into a daily posting site.

More to come!!

repost : Who's fault is it

The question has been raised recently - who should pay for the time involved in fixing a problem that isn't actually related to the fault they rang about.

I know that is a cryptic question but the longer explanation is following.

The caller rang up saying that the application involved was continually crashing their computer and was costing them lots of downtime and lost worktime etc. After nearly 4 hours of diagnosing and many expensive long distance phone calls let alone the time involved or wasted in the diagnosis - the fault is finally found to be another companies rival software installing system files that conflict or corrupt the original application.

Now how do we ever prove that they have purposefully or innocently made their application corrupt ours. Who do you bill for that lost time. Or do you simply put it down to "Customer Service"

This question has been raised a number of times by all of us - and no one can come up with a correct answer. The following could be some possible outcomes

1. Bill the Customer - The customer decides that they are paying too much and will go with the competitor instead. This means lost business

2. Bill the Competitor - They then turn around and bill you for any faults that they claim are from your software affecting theirs. This could then be put further into them falsely claiming against your software. Result --> your company could go broke

3. Take it on the chin - Well this seems to be the most common option taken by everyone. The problem here is that you still really do lose out. Why should you be supporting someone else's application when they couldn't be bothered to write it properly in the first place. On the up side - your client remains happy and you don't end up with a war between companies.


Well i have had my little whinge for the day. I will be posting this on my other blog as well. It is at a new address. http://helpdeskhell.connect2us.net