wonk v3.0

IPTV is here … but don’t hold your breath ( The Age / Louisa Hearn )

From the article: “While telecommunication companies in many other developed countries have been investing heavily in improving broadband services, Telstra has been accused within the industry of lagging behind - something that Optus and other smaller telcos and ISPs say they are working hard to reverse by building up their own broadband infrastructures.”

With residential VoIP slowly making its way into households providers are starting to look towards the next step in the so called ‘triple play’ - IPTV. IPTV is simply the delivery of TV programming over the internet, although more specifically realtime or on-demand programming. This is in contrast to existing video distribution over the internet which requires the user to wait while the video file downloads before they are able to start watching it.

There is nothing magic or mystical about IPTV, but it does require a lot of bandwidth between the provider and the subscriber. ADSL2+ is going a long way towards solving this problem, but many households are not close enough to their exchange to be able to get a reliable high-speed connection. With Telstra’s FTTN rollout in doubt consumers may have to wait a little longer before IPTV becomes a reality.

End of the DVD Party? ( Business Week / Ronald Grover )

From the article: “Now small but troubling signs are emerging that the DVD market’s growth could be trailing off faster than Hollywood expected. On June 30, Pixar Animation Studios cut its earnings-per-share estimate for the second quarter to 10 cents from 15 cents, due to slower-than-expected DVD sales of its blockbuster The Incredibles. The stock of Dreamworks Animation dropped sharply in mid-May, after the studio reported that returns of its own blockbuster Shrek 2 left sales 5 million short of its forecasts.”

Although the article is from the US, I noticed a lot of unsold Shrek 2 and Incredibles DVD when strolling through shops in Melbourne as well. With the number of cinema goers declining it will be interesting to see how the movie execs will react to this. No doubt they will want to blame piracy, and this would certainly be a factor, but probably not as big as the studios would have you believe.

Net TV poised to make the switch ( The Age / Graeme Philipson)

From the article: “When TV stations start to broadcast over the internet there will be no need for pay TV. Pay TV succeeds because it uses a proprietary broadcast network, based on satellite or cable, as its transmission medium. It controls who can receive the signal by controlling the technology.

When any TV station can broadcast over the internet and anybody with a high enough bandwidth Internet connection can receive it, pay TV will cease to exist. Like the BBC black box, it is an interim technology. I give it 10 years, which means Foxtel might become profitable at about the same time its technology becomes redundant.”

There are some limited forms of internet tv around currently but the quality is too low for regular consumers to bother with. The rollout of ADSL2+ and other high bandwidth tail connections will encourage people to experiment more with streaming video, which should in turn drive further developments in that area. As the article hints at, pay tv only works because the provider has exclusive access to the delivery medium. Once high quality content is available over the internet the pay tv operator’s current infrastructure advantage will turn into a liability.

Backing
up is easy to do. (The Age / Sam Varghese)

Is this a review or an advertisement? I really can’t tell. As a bonus it also
includes the incredibly stupid advice:

“Given the gargantuan size of today’s Windows environment, it
is advisable to store these backups on a hard drive; removable media would
require user intervention to change media.“

Yes, lets all back up from a hard drive in our computer, to another hard
drive in the same computer. Don’t worry about fire, theft, etc. As long
as your data is on two hard drives it will be perfectly safe.

“Earlier versions of Ghost could be used off a floppy; this version is understandably much bigger and hence the use of the CD for the recovery process.“

All hail the bloatware! Nobody would want to boot of a floppy these days anyway. Right? Of course, it is also perfectly understandable that the loss of an important feature wouldn’t draw a negative comment from the ‘reviewer’, since this isn’t really a review anyway.

Linux 10 times more expensive? Get the facts, watchdog tells Microsoft. (ZDNet Australia)

Back in June I commented on the (at the time) new series of Microsoft ads inviting people to ‘get the facts’. It was pretty clear from the start that the ‘facts’ Microsoft were offering were somewhat one sided. It seems that the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK agrees. From the article:

“A print ad from Microsoft which bore the headline “Weighing the cost of Linux vs.Windows? Let’s review the facts” offered a comparison between a Windows and a Linux machine which, according to Redmond, demonstrated that “Linux was found to be over 10 times more expensive than Windows Server… for Windows-comparable functions of file serving and Web serving. The results showed that IBM z900 mainframe running Linux is much less capable and vastly more expensive than Windows Server 2003 as a platform for server consolidation.”"

I think everyone was already aware of the fact that a mainframe costs more than a desktop PC, but Microsoft seems to think that proves Windows is cheaper than Linux. Go figure.

Hackers go after DoubleClick (United Press International)

I guess they got tired of all the advertising..

ABC to peer with PIPE (Whirlpool)

This is a fairly major event in Australian Internet history. The ABC is arguably the biggest content provider in Australia, and this marks the first time their content will be available over a peering link to medium sized ISPs. I won’t go so far as to say it marks the beginning of the end for the ‘Gang of four’, but it is a step in the right direction.

I just viewed a flash advertisement for Microsoft Windows Server System. I won’t reproduce the whole thing here, but the animation finishes with the quote:

“Windows Server offers a saving of 11%-22% over Linux in 4 out of 5 workload scenarios.“

It attributes the source of this data as being an IDC study of the North American market, and offers a link to “Get the facts”.

Let’s assume this data is correct and in 4 out of 5 workplaces Windows Server is the most cost effective IT platform. What this data would also saying is that in 20% of cases Window Server is not more cost effective than using Linux. If your business were to go out and install Windows Server without thoroughly evaluating the Linux platform there is a 20% chance you would be wasting money, and that is a pretty big risk to take.

So as they say, Get the facts, evaluate all options before making a decision.

About a week ago I made reference to an Article written in PC Magazine about the open source PBX Asterisk. This morning while browsing through my web server logs I noticed the following visitors to my Asterisk post:

63.167.10.254 - - [15/Jun/2004:04:48:04 +1000] “GET /blog/2004/06/asterisk-article-in-pc-magazine.html HTTP/1.1″ 200 14133 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=asterisk+%22pc+magazine%22” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

63.167.10.254 - - [15/Jun/2004:07:06:57 +1000] “GET /blog/2004/06/asterisk-article-in-pc-magazine.html HTTP/1.1″ 200 14133 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=asterisk+pbx+%22pc+magazine%22” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”

63.167.10.254 resolves to mailny.ziffdavis.com, which would appear to be an external internet gateway in NY for Ziff Davis, the publishers of PC Magazine.

So hello to the good folks at PC Magazine! You may wish to note there are no huge advertising graphics in the middle of this text. I find the text much easier to read without them. Maybe you could try it too!

Asterisk: An Open-Source PBX Gateway (PC Magazine).

PC Magazine have thrown together a series of ads with some small text blocks around them related to Asterisk. If you’re interested in reading the article instead of just looking at ads I’d recommend viewing the print version instead.