PGTS Journal Edition 0037
October, 2010

Broadband - Who Needs It Anyway?

It's been quite a long time since anything was published on this website. That's because I have been busy working full-time as a perl programmer. Most of the time I spent working on this site has been devoted to maintaining the PGTS Humble Blog. This was mainly to proffer the (very humble) opinion that the Internet Filter planned by the Australian government was a large gormless pile of dingo poo, not to mention a massive waste of public money.

Recently, there has been an election in Australia, and as it turned out, Communications and IT was a Big Ticket Item. To be more precise, Broadband policy (or lack of it) became a crucial issue in deciding which major political party eventually came to occupy the parliamentary seats on the speaker's right and which party languished on the opposition benches (on the left).

It seems that the opposition have taken on board the fact that Australians don't really consider a high speed fibre network an important issue as an article of faith ... Either that or they (The Liberal Party) are slow learners ... Because the members on the left hand side of the house are clinging stubbornly to their vehement opposition to the National Broadband Network -- We just can't afford it! -- They say. There are better things to spend the money on! (like a top shelf paid parental-leave scheme?)

This (lack of) policy has prompted an article on the topic of Australia's National Broadband Network Debate - Part 1 submitted by our present scribe, writer and historian Dan Byrnes. As others have done, Dan makes the rather apt comparison of Broadband with rail and road infrastructure, both of which had to be built with public funds. And it wasn't long before Dan followed up with Part 2.

There is a review of 64-bit Kubuntu 9.10, constructed from notes I jotted down last year. At the time I was rather underwhelmed by the new version of Amarok. Since then I have mellowed considerably. I may grow to tolerate the new look Amarok, but not to love it as I did the 1.4 version. Most of this is rather dated. And even though there are ongoing issues with 64-bit Kubuntu, the 64-bit (server) version of Ubuntu 10.04 is rock solid!

In addition, there is a perl script that kludges the Resolver config file in Ubuntu 10.04. (In fact it should work with most versions of Ubuntu).