wonk v3.0

Winds of change as Webber’s Williams flies (SMH)

From the article: “Williams driver Mark Webber gave his team a boost as he rounded-up his pre-season testing in style by clocking the fastest time in Valencia.

Webber’s time was superior to former Williams driver Ralf Schumacher and Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari. Ralf’s fastest lap in his Toyota was 1:11.005, while Michael was four one-hundredths of a second behind. BAR’s Takumo Sato was nearly three seconds down on Webber.“

I’m really looking forwards to seeing Mark Webber in a more solid car this year. I feel he would have done a lot better last season if it wasn’t for the numerous mechanical problems of the Jaguars.

Solar Tower of Power Finds Home (Wired News / Stephen Leahey)

A good article by Wired News gives a quick overview of how the solar tower works as well as some of the history of the technology. The company building the tower, EnviroMission Limited, has purchased a $1million property near Mildura to build the tower on. Total costs for the project is expected to fall between $500 and $750 million.

ACCC hits Telstra … for $6.5m (The Age / Bridie Smith)

From the article: “Telstra has avoided fines of more than $300million after allegations of anti-competitive behaviour relating to its wholesale pricing of broadband technology were investigated by the competition watchdog.

In announcing the decision yesterday, following a year-long investigation, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission ordered Telstra to rebate $6.5million to its affected wholesale customers and reduce its wholesale digital subscriber line (DSL) pricing by January 1 next year.“

This is certainly a very disappointing outcome for the ISP industry and consumers in general. When you’re a company the size of Telstra $6.5 million can easily be written off as a cost associated with attracting new customers. An advertising expense of sorts. Clearly the ACCC is unable or unwilling to tackle Telstra and ensure fairness in the industry.

Optus calls for leash on Telstra (The Age / Colin Kruger)

From the article: “Optus has called for tighter regulation of Telstra ahead of its full privatisation, especially in new growth areas such as broadband where its competitors are planning to roll out rival infrastructure.

His proposals include giving Telstra’s rivals incentive to roll out rival broadband infrastructure to counterbalance Telstra’s dominance of the local loop and “make sure that the T3 juggernaut does not squash competition”, O’Sullivan said.“

Optus has been on the media bandwagon a fair bit lately with regards to Telstra’s control of the market. With the full sale of Telstra (T3) again on the horizon Telstra’s competitors will need to keep a close eye on them to make sure they play by the rules.

Gritty Roos upstage Cats (Kangaroos / Scott Spits)

The Kangaroos have made an impressive start to the pre-season with 25 point win over Geelong at Manuka Oval. The Roos will go on to play either Adelaide or Port Adelaide next weekend.

This must be the biggest scientific discovery ever, but you won’t read about it in the newspaper. See the site title for the reason why.

The version 2.0 layout of this blog was starting to get a little tired so I thought it was time for an overhaul. A quick summary of the changes:

• Moved from Blogger.com to a local WordPress installation.
• Completely new style templates.
• Posts from v1.0 (Aug 2000 - Sep 2002) are back online, although they are suffering from a bad case of link rot.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be sorting through the older posts to assign them into the appropriate category and see if I can sort out some of the links that have gone 404. If you experience any problems with the new design please leave a comment on this post so I can investigate. Thanks!

Email problems hit Telstra users (The Age / Sam Varghese)

According to the article Telstra customers were suffering email problems between 5:12am and 11:30am. This follows on from the major email problems Telstra had last year resulting in some customers unable to receive email for days. Telstra provided no specific reason for the problems yesterday.

iiNet to Acquire OzEmail (Yahoo / Press Release)

From the release: “With OzEmail’s 230,000 active non-casual customers, including 47,000 broadband users, and 65,000 active casual customers, iiNet’s total customer count will grow overnight to more than 620,000. With OzEmail’s customer base being largely on the east coast, the deal will add further clout to iiNet’s aggressive DSLAM network rollout across Australia.

iiNet will make a cash payment of approximately $82.6 million (USD) to MCI.“

That’s a lot of cash. iiNet could have bought several Comindicos for that price but it appears they are more interested in the consumer market. This seems to be a growing trend with the owners of Dodo Internet recently selling off their wholesale business KBS to Wholesale Communications Group to focus on the retail market.

In other news wireless network provider Unwired has announced the have picked up 17% of new residential broadband connections in Sydney in the 4 months from 19 August 2004. This translates to 13,766 users, most of which were obtained directly through retail channels.

I’ve been using Blog Explosion with this blog for a while, initially in an attempt to get more traffic to my site, but lately just to read what else is going on in the blogosphere. One thing that always annoyed me about it was the number of US political blogs that showed up when surfing. They far outnumber any other sort of blog on there and I have absolutely no interest in reading them.

Even though I’m not a surfer, I was totally stoked when they announced you can now block a category from being shown while surfing. If you’re a member just go to the “Surf Settings” and select “Politics” in the “Do not veiw category” selection box.

You can also select a category you want to read more of. I selected internet, which is what this blog is listed under. Unfortunately the bloggers in the internet category don’t seem to be very active because after a handful of blogs it runs out and starts delivering blogs from other categories. If you blog about general internet stuff you may want to consider signing up or changing your category to internet to pick up a few more page views.