Still As Life

It’s weekends like this weekend, even more so, days like today, that the $39 a month for my 3G modem is well worth it.

Yes there have been plenty of other times it has proved invaluable, such as keeping my internet usage at uni below 150mb. After all, to get another 5gb at uni it would cost me $35 anyway.

However, last night while I was out, either our router had gotten fed up with life and hit the reset button, or someone helped it out. Thus our ADSL2+ settings were wiped, along with all of my port forwarding, remote access and so on. Yay.

That in and of itself is not a hugely significant problem, it’s just annoying and frustrating. The main problem is that I don’t have the internet connection details that are particularly important, such as the username and password. Okay, that’s alright, I can deal with that.

Can’t get through to my landlord on the phone around lunch time today, so I send him a message asking for the details, or asking if he can come around and put them in himself.

He calls me back a couple hours later and tells me he doesn’t have the details and that the internet here is managed by the Japanese guy that lives next door (my landlord owns the house next door as well), and to go ask him or the Japanese girl that also lives there for them. So, Rhi and I go over there and ask her about them since he didn’t seem to be around. She doesn’t seem to have any idea what we are talking about and tells us that our landlord probably hasn’t paid the bill and so it has been cut off. We explain to her that that is not the case, and so she goes in yelling the guys name and asks him about it. She comes back and tells us that they aren’t looking after the internet anymore and that all the details have been given to my landlord. We then ask if we can talk to the other guy, because he was only at our place a month ago putting the username and password in our new router. She proceeds to tell us that he isn’t there. This is less than 2 minutes after we heard her calling his name and talking to him in the next room. Talk about insulting.

Anyway, she also tells us that the Chinese couple that Rhi and I share a house with know the connection details as well. So we come home and ask them about it. I thought it would be odd that they would know the details and not have already put them into the router. We ask them and they tell us they don’t know them but that they would go and talk to the guy next door. They did and he, even though is supposedly not there, tells them that he doesn’t have the details anymore and that the net was probably cut off because of the bill not being paid. I have explained to all of them that that is not the problem, the bill was not due to be paid yet, and if they would actually listen to me, they would realise that they routers username is set to user@isp.com.au and the password is set to who knows what, but there are 12 stars. Why? Because it has been reset to the factory default settings.

So, try to call my landlord again and no luck so I send him another message. I have not yet heard back from him, but I tell you I am unimpressed.

We have gotten it back finally, but man am I not happy about the organisation of things here, or about being so blatantly lied to.

Not happy Jan.

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According to an article earlier today on the Sydney Morning Herald, the censorship ministers will be discussing giving an R18+ rating to games at the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General (SCAG).

At the moment, the highest rating a game can have in Australia is MA15+ and there is almost no ID checking taking place to ensure that purchasers are over 15. As the highest rating is only MA15+, there are games that get banned, though if anyone wants them, they are always acquirable from overseas anyway, or, some games that really should have an R18+ rating get through under MA15+ even though they really shouldn’t be.

The Howard Government avoided this. So it intrigues me, that the Rudd Government, with their plans to attempt to censor the internet, are looking at removing the strict censorship laws on games. The strictest in any Democracy in the world.

I have no interest in the games that get banned, and for that matter, I have no interest in the majority of the ones that don’t, but as I’ve said to people before, if movies can have an R rating, why can’t games? They are effectively the same content, just consumed by the audience in a different fashion.

I’m all for the R rating on games, why? As I said, there is a lot that slips through under MA that should be under R, and by the sounds of it, ID checks will be required for them, so content that should not be available to minors will not be openly available to them like it has been.  In addition to that, the higher rating provides more for parents to go off of when choosing what to allow their kids to play and since things that should be in R, not MA will be in R, it will be easier for parents to determine what games are definitely not suitable.

Plus the hypocrisy of the government will amuse me. That’s just a bonus though, not really a reason.

It does of course have to be approved by the Commonwealth as well as all the attorney-general of each state and territory, so who knows what will happen.

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I don’t know if Macicism is a word. Google returns nothing but an expired domain.

Either way, I am using it to describe what Kobi Shely was attempting to research and explain in the Macheads documentary that was written about in the Sydney Morning Herald.

In the article on the Sydney Morning Herald website, they seem to be grasping at straws on how to describe the cult-like following of Apple’s Macintosh computers.

As a very happy Mac owner, I can explain it in the following way:

You will never understand it until you are part of it, when you are part of it you won’t know you are.

My Macbook Pro is the most beautiful laptop I have ever owned, and aside from the superior 17″ Macbook Pro, and some of the high end Sony Vaio’s that cost twice as much, it is one of the best laptop’s on the market.

One thing from the article that is particularly relevant is this:

“He said most Macheads volunteered “ease of use” and “design” as reasons for their devotion but this did little to explain how a subculture could develop around a computer.”

These things are very true, but until you own one, you cannot truly appreciate this.

I have been involved in discussions and heard the point of view that Apple products are a status symbol, and are desired for their perceived coolness. I would say, sure, this is all well and good, but, there is more to it than that. I know I have been caught hugging and stroking my Macbook on occasion when there have been threats of taking it away, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I won’t deny that Mac’s are awesomely cool and in some arena’s are a status symbol, however, they are in general far better.

One example that is painfully prominent to me running Vista on my desktop Quadzilla with 4gb of RAM. Idling with Firefox open with 20 tabs, Outlook, and Photoshop CS3, it sits on around 1.8gb of RAM used.

My Macbook Pro with 2gb of RAM running OS X 10.5 Leopard, with Firefox open with 20 tabs, Entourage, and Photoshop CS3, it sits on around 1gb of RAM used.

That’s a massive difference, regardless of the fact that Quadzilla has more RAM to use, there is 800mb extra being used somewhere there.

So either OS X uses much less RAM than Vista, or there is significantly better memory management. I would say both.

Then there is CPU management (probably RAM related as well). I find Vista often lags with things it shouldn’t. When the CPU is sitting on about a quarter usage, RAM at around 2.5gb used, typing on MSN will sometimes lag, music will sometimes skip, simple things like that.

OS X will almost always be smooth. With the 2gb of RAM completely full and switching data between the RAM and swap space, it never has any problems like this. The only times I have ever experienced any of these problems on it are when I am running Vista or XP under emulation on it. As far as I can tell, they are the cause of it, particularly Vista.

Just to point out something else here, the Macbook Pro RAM is DDR2 667mhz, Quadzilla is running DDR2 800mhz which is faster and has lower latencies.

I won’t deny, that when I’m working in both Photoshop and Illustrator, Quadzilla is better for it, but that’s understandable, simply because it is quad core, compared to dual core, and has twice as much RAM. That is not the point of this though.Then there is how smooth the interface is, Microsoft tried to copy it with their Aero theme, but it doesn’t come close to just how smooth and clean OS X is. I’ve heard people argue that it’s not copied, but to say that they have to be very ignorant and never have used OS X.

The whole transparent zoom in and out when you minimize or maximise windows from the taskbar, or when you close a window or open a new one, straight from OS X.

The new Explorer interface has become remarkably similar to Finder in OS X as well. It retains things from XP, but if you have used OS X, you can’t deny the similarities in new features, like the new address bar functions and the new file information section at the bottom of an Explorer Window.

Anyway, the point is, Apple has done something very right.

To summarise, I love my Mac, and if you try and steal it without leaving me a better one, I will find you, and it will not be pretty. However, if you wish to leave me with a better one, please, go ahead.

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It’s been a while since I’ve heard anything about Mr Rudd et al’s internet censorship schemes and so on, so I had been starting to hope they had realised that it would just be digging their own grave.

Apparently not.

It’s no big surprise that the Rudd Government claims the NetAlert software that was pushed by the Howard Government was a failure (from the Sydney Morning Herald website).

Of course they would say that. They want their scheme to take over and give them more control over what people have access to. Hey, I don’t want to see porn, but guess what, I don’t go looking for it, so I am not exposed to it. I see more on TV and in movies than on the internet, simply because as I said, I don’t try and find it. I don’t have to use filters, nor do I want filters.

Yes, sure, NetAlert was a $189 million program with over $15 million spent on advertising it, and  it was expected to be in use in 2.5 million homes, however it was only downloaded or ordered on CD 144,088 times, and it is estimated only 29,000 copies are still being used. So what, I’d rather my taxes be used on something like that than on a filter I do not want in place.

Sure, put the filter in place in schools and public access points if you want, though the majority of these places already have systems in place that work perfectly well for them, but leave private internet connections alone.

As the Liberal communications spokesman Bruce Billson was quoted as saying, “the Rudd Government was rushing to criticise the NetAlert program to set the scene for a “harebrained, half-baked policy dreamt up in the lead-up to an election”. I can’t agree more.

Following that he is also quoted as saying, “Proper supervision should be front and centre of any efforts to protect children from inappropriate material on the internet; supported by additional tools such as content filters, not some mandatory and ill-conceived ‘clean feed’ measure by a government that believes only it has the authority to decide what’s appropriate or inappropriate content for computer users.”

Again, this is very, very true. Mr Rudd et al, it is not your job to parent the countries kids, go look after your own and leave my parents to parent me. They did an excellent job of it, and I have been on the net since I could type with no content filtering.

I do have to admit I find it very amusing that the Tom Wood kid gets labelled as “The Porn Cracker”, is that a label anyone really wants?

By rights, that means anyone who bypasses nanny software is looking for porn and is thus a “Porn Cracker”. Wow. I really have nothing to say to how stupid a label that is, and how stupid it is to assume that he was the first kid to get around it.

While I am sure, at 16 and being able to “crack” a filtering program, Mr Wood is a real internet prodigy, I am certain there are better qualified people to help come up with a better idea than him. Given the current suggestions of your party Mr Rudd, I am also certain that there are better qualified people then you and your ministers. I know, as many people have already said, including myself, and I will say it again, leave the internet alone.

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