WebWilly

e-textbooks :)

2011-08-22T09:13:00.000+10:00

SCHOOLBAGS bulging with text books will soon be a thing of the past, as laptops, smartphones and iPads are increasingly used in classrooms.

James Cathro, who is managing director of Campion, Australia's largest supplier of school textbooks, stationery and educational software, says classrooms are yet to feel the full impact of new technologies - but it is already profound.

"It (e-textbooks) won't happen in the short term, but it is only a matter of time before it is commonplace in every school," he said.

"While the e-book revolution is only at the early stage in schools, laptop and now iPad usage by students is high and continues to grow, so it is a logical step that the demand for e-textbooks will increase."

Most schools in South Australia now have classroom sets of laptops with more and more also providing ultra-portable tablets and installing interactive whiteboards.

This is forcing schools to ensure their students are "multiliterate" - have ability to understand and communicate in a multimedia world.

Flinders University School of Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics Associate Professor Paul Calder said new technology was making a significant impact of education.

"We're seeing a significant increase in the number of electronic devices that students bring with them to class. Most have a laptop, but it also includes portable devices like iPads or tablet devices and a mobile phone," he said.

"How effectively they use them is a work in progress and all educators are developing what works best."

Professor Calder said there was no doubt these devices were here to stay in the classroom.

"The device is just so useful for access to information, it's not just static, it's interactive, which works so well in the educational sense," he said.

"They will become an integral part of all classrooms, especially as the costs come down.

"Tablets can be used again and again and materials can be updated easily."

Aberfoyle Hub R-7 Year 1 and 2 teacher David Sickerdick said he had used e-books since the school had installed electronic white boards.

"It's certainly more difficult to maintain their (students') attention because they are bombarded with multimedia devices at home... so classrooms have to run with the pack," he said.

"It's highly motivational for them because it's big and bright.

"In all areas of our curriculum we use them (e-books) as another tool to focus on teaching them to be multiliterate."

Staff at Thebarton Senior College are using iPads to investigate best practices in senior school curriculum and plan to roll out class sets once the research is complete.

Student Hadi Bahrami said he found electronic resources were much easier to read and manage.

"It is easier to find the information you need and so much easier to carry around than lots of books," he said.

The Need for Speed

2011-05-05T11:11:00.000+10:00

The need for speed

Lucy Battersby

May 5, 2011

The people of Brunswick are about to road test the $50 billion national broadband network on Victoria's behalf. Will it be worth it?

THE workmen's trucks have been dubbed ''traffic blockers'' and footpaths have become chequer-boards of old and new concrete, but Brunswick's residents and businesses are preparing to test optical fibre broadband on Victoria's behalf -even if they are not exactly sure how to use it.

There are about 2600 properties in the small test zone between Lygon Street and Sydney Road, and just under half of those have agreed to an optical fibre connection network that will deliver broadband internet at speeds of up to 1 gigabit a second. That's 10 times faster than the fastest broadband commercially available today.

NBN facts.

Clint Fisher is the owner of the Retreat Hotel on Sydney Road, and he says the main reason he is getting a fibre connection is to replace the ageing copper wires in the 170-year-old pub that he says slow down his ADSL connection.

The optical fibre broadband will make it easier to stream music from the web, Fisher says, but beyond that, it won't have a significant impact on the running of the pub.

''If [free wi-fi] became more economical, then we would provide that, but, to be honest, I don't think it would make much difference to us as a pub and a music venue.''

Fisher's position is similar to that of other residents who spoke to The Age - they know faster internet is better, but they don't know exactly why.

But the Retreat's dodgy wiring does help explain why the broadband project is going to cost $50 billion: over the next eight years, NBN Co, the company the government has set up to build the network, is going to replace Telstra's copper wires with optical fibre in nearly every property and street in Australia.

NBN Co will replace Telstra as the owner and seller of fixed communications, solving the industry's competition impasse of the biggest company competing at a retail level against its wholesale customers and controlling access to its network. The federal government will raise $27 billion to fund the first half of the project by selling bonds on the international credit markets. It is also considering selling infrastructure bonds to Australians and may provide more details in next week's budget.

NBN Co expects to borrow the rest itself once it is earning income and able to repay corporate lenders. According to its business plan, released in November, NBN Co anticipates repaying the government by 2034.

Other countries are building public optical fibre networks, but none is as big or expensive because Australia is unique in respect to its combination of size, population and prosperity.

That something this costly is under way in Brunswick is not really suggested by the appearance of book-sized grey boxes attached to the outside of houses or workers digging up the footpath.

Brunswick resident Kerin says she made a decision not to get a free connection because she wanted to protect the aesthetics of her house, even though this means she, or any future owners of her property, will have to pay for a connection when the copper network is turned off.

''[It is an] informed decision - being a low-tech user and wanting as little as possible on the outside of the house. I do not do downloads and things. It is beyond my needs,'' she says.

The owner of the Kitchen Kultcha cafe on Glenlyon Road, Chris Lytras, has no complaints about the trucks or construction crews and says his building will be added to the network as soon as possible. But the only immediate use he can think of for fibre broadband at a cafe is offering free wireless internet to customers, and he already does this.

Brunswick is also a test site for using Telstra's existing underground pipes to slide cable underground and straight into houses. This is meant to be cheaper, faster and less disruptive than laying new trenches. This option is supposed to save $1.7 billion in construction, but it costs $13.8 billion to lease Telstra's tunnels.

However, it increases NBN Co's revenue, because Telstra has agreed to decommission its copper network, thereby forcing customers onto the fibre network. Property owners who do not get a free connection in the initial rollout will have to pay NBN Co to revisit their property to install a connection, or rely solely on mobile networks for communications.

The rollout in Brunswick has not been without surprises. Telstra technicians contracted by NBN Co have found asbestos in the concrete lining the pits that hold all telephone cables, and in some cases pits were already full of cabling. The lining had to be replaced with plastic and new pits dug to accommodate more cables.

Altogether, contractors have had to rip up and replace at least 700 square metres of concrete in the test site. NBN Co says costs like this have been factored into the $50 billion national construction cost (including payments to Telstra).

No one knows what condition the rest of Telstra's infrastructure is in around the country, or how much needs to be replaced before it is fit for NBN Co to lease.

It is likely Telstra will be responsible for the cost of preparing tunnels for NBN Co as part of the leasing agreement, which is still under negotiation and remains confidential.

With the rollout in five mainland test sites nearing completion, NBN Co will soon start focusing on the next 19 test sites. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has announced fibre will be rolled out in a further seven sites in Tasmania later this year, adding to three sites already connected and using the fibre.

NBN Co is still working out where to go after that, but the Labor Party has promised the independent MPs who helped it to form government that regional areas will be a priority.

While the rollout is well under way, the project does have its critics - of the cost, the fact the government is building a new monopoly, and NBN Co's deal with Telstra to turn off the phone and internet capabilities of its hybrid fibre cable network, except for Foxtel services, which runs past 2.5 million households.

''What I want to see is really a much more competitive marketplace, and I think creating an NBN that is like the old Postmaster-General's Department - that is, effectively a monopoly - is a very, very bad idea,'' says Michael Porter, national director of research and policy at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia.

Porter does want to see faster and more reliable broadband spread around Australia, but believes NBN will be duplicating a lot of infrastructure.

He is also concerned that the deal between NBN Co and Telstra to turn off the hybrid cable will shut down a viable market. He is concerned that the commercial deal to decommission hybrid fibre cable and force customers onto NBN Co's fibre will give consumers less choice between different technologies.

Fibre will be the only fixed option by the time the network is complete. Optus also owns cable that runs past roughly the same areas, and is rumoured to be working on a similar deal with NBN Co.

''What we should be doing is commissioning by speed and quality. We should not be commissioning by technology,'' Porter says.

Janelle Brennan, of the Hobart suburb of Midway Point, has been using an NBN fibre connection since August. While she and her two teenage sons mostly use the internet for entertainment at home, Brennan says she could not go back to ADSL (on the copper network).

''It is just incredible - the ability for us to download movies and stuff off [ABC's] iView. It has changed the way we think about television,'' she says.

For $80 a month, the family gets 200 gigabytes of downloads at peak times and 200 gigabytes off-peak. While this costs more than they were paying for the old connection, she says it is worth the price and includes an internet telephone.

Their connection downloads at 100 megabits per second and uploads at 40 megabits per second. ''Video conferencing would be a breeze,'' she says.

Broadband will eventually alter every household in the country - not because everyone will suddenly become data hungry, but because every home or office will get new cabling and plugs.

NBN Co will issue plugs with two points for telephones and four points for internet services. All four plugs could be used for separate internet connections, or spread between television, utilities smart meters and any new inventions.

Households will be able to buy each service from a different provider.

Houses in regional areas will be fitted with a wireless or satellite receiver rather than fibre and will get a constant dedicated supply of at least 12 megabits per second. This is different to commercial wireless networks, which are shared between all users and have fluctuating speeds.

By 2021, every home and business is expected to be using NBN Co's fibre rather than Telstra's copper network.

While Telstra is both a retail and wholesale company, NBN Co will be strictly wholesale. It has promised to offer every wholesale customer the same service at the same price, regardless of size. This is likely to see many new companies entering the internet market.

''The National Broadband Network will transform communications markets in Australia,'' says Ed Willet , commissioner with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says.

''Telstra will remain a large player in communications markets, but it will lose its advantage in monopolising fixed-line infrastructure. Telstra competitors will compete on a level playing field, for the first time buying the same access service in the same way on the same terms as Telstra.''

There are still many other potential hiccups that may be beyond the control of NBN Co or the federal government. For example, Leighton Holdings, the parent company of three construction firms bidding for a billion-dollar contract with NBN Co, was recently forced to raise $757 million after disclosing massive cost blowouts and delays in two public-private partnership projects in Victoria and Brisbane.

These issues, including problems in Leighton's Middle East operations, could make it harder for NBN Co to select it as a long-term construction partner. This narrows its choices. Already NBN Co has suspended its original tender process and is working on a new deal, after accusing bidders of inflating their quotes.

Another hurdle is the lack of skilled technicians and manpower available for the project. Tens of thousands of workers will be needed to dig trenches and install fibre-optic cable.

And then there are state property laws, which require NBN Co to collect written consent from owners before entering a property - a bureaucratic nightmare involving millions of permission slips.

Before the state election, the Brumby government announced it would give NBN Co an exemption to trespass laws, as the Tasmanian government has done, so every property automatically gets a fibre connection. But a spokesman for the Baillieu government told The Age that ''the Victorian government has no plans to change trespass law to accommodate the NBN rollout''.

This could leave the state with some houses connected to fibre, some still on copper, and, when the copper is decommissioned, some with no connection.

Brunswick's network is scheduled to go live before July. It will be the only Victorian NBN site until mid-2012, when the second phase test sites of Bacchus Marsh and South Morang are activated.

Asked whether the whole project can be completed, NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley says:

''You create a big machine and it just replicates. You get a momentum going and you replicate. It is not a one-off - it is not like trying to build a harbour bridge or a Snowy Mountains scheme. We will be doing the same thing over and over again, and we will be getting better and better at it and more efficient at it as we go.''

But unlike the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the NBN is not a project that can be pointed at and said to be ''for crossing water''.

The Labor government is counting on Australians finding ways to use faster broadband that will justify the project's cost and the disruption it causes.

Lucy Battersby is Telecommunications Reporter.

iPad 2 is it 4 u?

2011-03-03T08:46:00.002+11:00

The wraps come off iPad 2

Stephen Hutcheon

March 3, 2011 - 7:42AM

Apple CEO Steve Jobs briefly emerges from his medical leave to unveil the second-generation of the popular iPad in San Francisco.

Thinner than the iPhone 4
Available in Australia on March 25

San Francisco: Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs has taken the stage to unveil the iPad 2, the upgraded version of its market-leading tablet computer.

His appearance is a surprise given he announced he was taking medical leave in January as a result of pancratic cancer and a liver transplant.

He's back ... Steve Jobs has unveiled the iPad 2. Photo: Reuters

Jobs said the new iPad - which goes on sale in the US on March 11 and in Australia on March 25 - was an "all new design" with a new processor that would make the device twice as fast.

A new version of the Apple mobile operating system - iOS 4.3 - will also come out as a free update on March 11.

"The first thing is it's dramatically faster," he said, talking about the new dual core A5 processor. "It’s up to nine times faster on the graphics."

Steve Jobs says the new iPad 2 will be 33 per cent thinner. Photo: Getty Images

As expected, the iPad 2 comes with front and rear-facing cameras and a built-in gyro for advanced gaming.

The Apple CEO said the new iPad would be 33 per cent thinner - from 13.4mm to 8.8mm thick. He said that would make it thinner than the iPhone 4. The iPad 2 will also be lighter: 590 grams versus 680 grams.

He said the iPad 2 would come in two colours - black and white. "And we will be shipping white from day one," he quipped, a reference to the long-delayed white iPhone 4 which has been held back due to production issues.

Dressed in his usual black mock turtle neck and faded Levis, Jobs said the new iPad will go on sale at the same starting price. The base model iPad sells for $699 in Australia.

"We think 2011 is going to be the year of iPad 2," he said.

He also announced a swag of new apps, accessories from cables to multicoloured magnetised covers.

The Apple co-founder was in good form, poking fun at the competition. He said they had been "flummoxed" by the iPad and declared that this year would also be the year of the iPad "copycat".

Jobs said Apple had sold nearly 15 million iPads last year, generating $US9.5 billion in revenue in the nine months after its launch.

Jobs also announced that Apple had sold over 100 million books on the iPad's iBookstore.

He said the majority of Apple’s revenues now come from these post PC devices such as the iPad.

Apple turns 35 on April 1.

Among the other announcements are:

Apple has just shipped its 100 millionth iPhone

Apple has paid out a total of $US2 billion to app developers

There are now 200 million active iTunes accounts

Apple has sold over 100 million ebooks in nine months

Stephen Hutcheon is in San Francisco as a guest of Apple.

2011-02-19T09:17:00.001+11:00

Scary new world's uncertain Borders

Richard Flanagan

February 19, 2011

Book customers are being told to spend double the amount of vouchers for beleagured bookstores.

THE failure of Borders and Angus & Robertson has little to do with online selling and much to do with corporate stupidity and greed.

REDgroup Retail, the owner, was a typical early noughties business, created by a private equity firm, overly indebted, seeking to make up the growing difference between its mounting debt burden and its more humble income by using its businesses to fleece customers and suppliers.

Thus in 2007 came the unedifying and frankly disgusting attempt by Angus & Robertson, bearer of the oldest and one of the proudest names in the history of the Australian book trade, to charge small Australian publishers for simply stocking their books, demanding up to $20,000 to make up for their supposed reduced profitability.

While REDgroup's chairman, Steven Cain is now telling the federal government the company's failure is in part because of the government's decision not to open up the book market to parallel importation and thus, supposedly, cheaper books, that didn't stop the company routinely charging above recommended retail prices for its books. If it was worried about retail pricing, it wasn't reflected in its own pricing structure.

A&R's strategy was, I was told some years ago by one of their senior executives, to go to war with the publishers and win. They looked to retailers like Woolworths as their model, with their crushing of the suppliers and producers as the key to making more money.

Ugly as all this was and hubristic as it has proved, there is no comfort for anyone in the failure of the two chains. Together they are believed to represent about 20 per cent of Australian book retailing. The independent bookstores account for about another 20 per cent. Combined, they were the segment of book retailing in which many of the books that matter most to an Australian identity and culture were sold. It was also here that the books we think important to a larger idea of our world and ourselves - novels, essays, poetry and histories - were sold.

Publishers needed that critical mass to push many books that otherwise might have been dubious commercially over the red line into a small profit. It meant a first novel, a history, a book of essays might just be able to sell 3000 copies. But with Borders and Angus & Robertson in voluntary administration, with the independents struggling and more and more closing, those days are perhaps gone. Many small publishers we have come to see as vital - Text, Black Inc, MUP to name a few - must be looking today at their future publishing schedules with very heavy hearts, wondering how on earth they can continue to make it all work.

Many large publishers will continue the process already begun of sacking staff and slashing their Australian lists, telling authors that despite their promise or their record that the market has vanished. To survive they will concentrate ever more on the books stocked by the discount department stores - Kmart, Big W and the like: celebrity titles, overseas mass-market hits, cookbooks. Here today and gone tomorrow books, ephemera, massively discounted by the department stores, sometimes below cost, as loss leaders that might drag the punter into the shop to make some other more profitable purchase.

It is of course a perfect storm - the ineptitude of a major player in REDgroup, the global financial crisis that slowed retail, a society increasingly besotted by price rather than value, the refusal of the government to either get rid of the GST on books or charge it on online purchases, the rise of e-books and the growth of online selling at the moment the Australian dollar reached record highs.

But as well as the high Aussie, there are other reasons why books are now cheaper overseas. One is that they are so heavily discounted by publishers to players such as Amazon in Britain and the US that many writers there now, in effect, receive only a 3 to 4 per cent royalty on their books, as opposed to 10 per cent in Australia. And because our books may well have to end up at a comparable price to that available online, it may be that a similar royalty ends up applying here.

In Australia, where 20,000 sales is a bestseller, the maths on 4 per cent of an average UK-US price of $14 is sobering - $11,200 for two or three years' work. That is, if you get published. The maths is little better for the indie stores and small publishers whose fate may be as bleak as that of many writers. It becomes a volume game for big publishers and a handful of big retailers.

Some, increasingly more, books that should be published won't be. Some writers will give up. Some that need nurturing will never get a chance. Many good books will never be. In the great halls of Big W and Target you will still be able to buy the latest self-help book or cookbook, or the memoir of an English TV celebrity.

Those who think it's about infinite choice will drag the cursor a few centimetres onto the shopping cart and click on the new Franzen or McEwan, and think that's all there is and that's how it is, and we will once more be lulled into thinking it all happens anywhere else but here.

Some years ago I spent a few weeks in the great suburban swirl that is the Golden Corridor between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, where bush vanishes and suburbs seem to rise in the space of a weekend. As I drove down a new freeway, I saw a koala trying to cross from one new suburb to another construction zone, little knowing that there was no bush left anywhere for it to live.

The position of Australian writers, publishers and booksellers is not dissimilar. Disoriented, confused, hoping to get across the new super-highway before the next B-double wipes them out. I hope we make it, but to where and what, no one can say.

wikipedia turns 10 love it or hate it?

2011-01-15T11:06:00.002+11:00

So what do you know?

Bridie Smith

January 15, 2011

Click to play video

Wikipedia celebrates 10th birthday

Wikipedia turns 10 today, and while it has its critics, the online collaborative encyclopedia is one of the world's top websites, with no plans to go commercial.

BILLIONAIRE retailer Gerry Harvey has been in the news a bit lately. And as federal minister Mark Arbib knows from experience, if you're in the headlines, chances are you're also getting a Wikipedia workout. So while the Harvey Norman co-founder was acting as spokesman for a coalition of retailers trying to pressure the federal government to tax overseas online sales under $1000, someone, somewhere was editing Harvey's Wikipedia entry.

''Gerry Harvey has recently called any person buying online un-Australian,'' began the contributor this month. ''Yet he has failed to provide quality customer service and has not passed on the savings of the high Australian dollar. Basically becoming a billionare [sic] who would rather turn on his fellow countrymen than provide quality service!''

The only part of that paragraph to survive into this week was the un-Australian line. The rest of the rant was removed.

This, says John Lenarcic, RMIT's information technology lecturer and social media commentator, is the website's strength. An example of why the free, collaborative, online encyclopaedia - which turns 10 today - works.

In the decade since the site was launched by American co-founders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia has remained true to its original altruistic goals: to create an open, global, non-commercial online encyclopaedia.

''That's one of the stellar achievements of the site,'' Lenarcic says. ''It's opened up knowledge to the world and allowed people to contribute to this vast body of knowledge.''

Wales, who still dabbles in a bit of editing, believes the site's global growth is limited only by literacy rates and internet access.

The wiki software was created six years before the website's launch, but Wales says applying it to an encyclopaedia was ''the real innovation''. That it worked was not a surprise, but he says the scale of today's ever-expanding site was. ''It's evolved pretty much the way I thought it would, but it's much bigger than I ever imagined.''

What began life as a single, English-language edition has ballooned to more than 250 languages, including Greenlandic, which is spoken by only 57,000 people. That edition recently passed the 1000 milestone for number of entries.

English is the dominant language but makes up less than 20 per cent of the total. There are more than a million articles each for French and German speakers and more than half a million each for several other languages, including Chinese and Japanese. But there is always room for more. A new language can be added by users creating a ''test wiki'' to prove there is enough demand.

The site has its critics, among them co-founder Larry Sanger, who left in 2002 and has since lamented the site's ''lack of respect'' for expertise, which, he says, exposes it to questions of credibility. However, the number of hits alone indicates the resource has become a regular point of reference.

According to web information company Alexa, Wikipedia is ranked the seventh most-used website in the world, with about 300 million page views each day. And despite the success - not to mention the potential dollars that could be milked from that - co-founder Jimmy Wales is adamant the site, which costs millions a year to run, will not accept advertising. Ever.

''We have no plans to do that,'' he says. ''It's just not who we are.''

Instead the site will continue to rely on yearly fund drives, which bring in millions of dollars, cobbled together from average donations of little more than $A40 a pop.

The potential worth of the website, which this year will open an Indian office, its first outside America, can only be guessed at. But to put things in context, the site sitting one spot above Wikipedia in the global popularity stakes is that of Chinese web services company Baidu, which includes Baidu Baike, an online collaboratively built encyclopedia. In 2009, revenue generated by the company was US$651 million.

But a commercial approach is not for Wales. He believes Wikipedia has become a core part of the globe's ''information infrastructure'' and he is not about to compromise that by going commercial. ''We prefer to have broad community support, which has worked for us in the past and we want to maintain that,'' he says.

The site, owned by non-profit organisation Wikimedia Foundation, has only 50 paid positions, most of them technology-based roles such as programmers and operations staff. The bulk of the manpower is supplied by a global community of volunteers. More than 91,000 active contributors work on more than 17 million articles in more than 270 languages.

But what of the accuracy and credibility of the site, which must surely inform its success? Lenarcic believes users should view Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of popular culture - best consumed with a pinch of salt. This plays out in the stats, with Facebook, John Lennon, sex and YouTube the top queries driving traffic, according to Alexa. Searchers don't linger for long, spending about five minutes on a visit to the site and 59 seconds for a page view.

It's not what you'd call in-depth research, but the site doesn't pretend to be the authority. Like many other articles, the Gerry Harvey entry carries an eye-catching banner warning readers that it ''needs additional citations for verification''.

Last December, Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib's page was edited following WikiLeaks revelations that he was in regular contact with US diplomats. The news prompted descriptions of him as ''CIA agent, US mole, traitor, and US embassy hero'' to be added to his Wikipedia entry, at the expense of his portfolios. Arbib's page was altered 18 times over six hours before moderators reverted the page because of ''vandalism by multiple editors''.

The media interest passed and the page has not been modified since December 19.

''Wikipedia is self-correcting and if enough people see that article and flag an anomaly, somebody will change it,'' Lenarcic says. ''If something is open like Wikipedia then there is vigilance.''

However, its strength as an open site can also be its weakness.

''It's not subject to the same editorial process that other publications are bound by,'' Lenarcic says.

The most common gripe is a lack of academic vigilance, a claim that makes Adam Jenkins jump to Wikipedia's defence. A lecturer in information systems at the University of South Australia, Jenkins is also a regular editor of the site and vice-president of Wikimedia Australia, the Australian chapter of the organisation. ''There will always be problems there, but the reality is that there are a great number of experts on Wikipedia,'' he says.

Jenkins estimates that up to 90 per cent of editors who work on complex topics such as mass and formal logic would describe themselves as experts.

''The accuracy comes into play on those complex areas but when you come to ones like society and culture, then we're probably talking 50 per cent of editors who would describe themselves as experts,'' he says.

Jenkins, who is organising a ''meet-up'' at an Adelaide cafe today to mark Wikipedia's first decade, started editing three years ago because he found the concept interesting.

''It's not the topic that concerns me, it's the research. I'm an academic and you live for that stuff.''

He researches within his area of expertise but also edits content beyond that, such as the history of the Australian Capital Territory and cane toads. ''In Wikipedia, everyone's equal,'' he says. He is more than happy for others to edit and expand his work and agrees with Lenarcic that entries are best thought of as providing an overview of a subject. ''You can then follow the links and track down the sources and develop your own picture from there, which is what I recommend students do because it works really nicely.''

Has this search for a quick, easy, digestible overview changed or compromised the way we research? While fans praise the site for its global, collaborative structure and staunch determination to remain non-commercial, critics warn that it risks mixing facts with popular opinion. But whichever side of the online fence you favour, the site has undoubtedly changed the way information is shared, compared and reviewed.

That the website is so often a port of call for frustrated people reflects the position it occupies in contemporary society. Gerry Harvey is a case in point.

''If Wikipedia didn't exist, what could people do?'' Lenarcic asks. ''They could probably go and deface a Harvey Norman store. But these online sites have changed things. Graffiti now is largely purposeless; it's just tagging without any kind of commentary or opinion. That social commentary aspect of graffiti is being subsumed in the digital form through blogging or sites like Wikipedia.''

Bridie Smith is science and technology reporter.

Campbelltown Library

2010-12-22T11:14:00.000+11:00

FOXTEL, iPads, areas that allow teenagers to listen to music and conference rooms open until 11pm - libraries are evolving into one of the coolest places for kids to hang out.

Hi-tech features are increasingly being added to attract teenagers once reluctant to frequent services with a reputation of being quiet and boring.

At the forefront of the innovation is the Campbelltown Library at Newton, which includes a "magic tree" that uses audio and visual technology to create effects from starry nights to bright pink ripples and sounds like birds singing as children read.

An outdoor reading area is another recent feature.

Library services manager Ursula Hickey said the north-eastern suburbs book hub had grown in popularity, especially among teens, since the new look was unveiled in September.

"Teenagers can be noisy, they can watch Foxtel and listen to music or they can sit quietly and study," she said. "It's the type of thing a lot of libraries are making small moves towards."

Architecture firm DesignInc Adelaide managing director Richard Stafford, whose business created the new look at Newton, said bookstore cafes have had a significant influence on the change in community libraries.

"There was a time when you couldn't eat or talk in libraries and now you can do both," he said.

Sam Jonas, 15, liked a library where you could "make a bit of noise".

"I usually go to do research for school projects, but I think it's cool you can use technology and not be scared to make a little bit of noise."

Paper vs Pad

2010-06-09T10:33:00.001+10:00

The iPad's role in saving newspapers is far from certain
ANDREA CARSON
June 9, 2010

It may make delivery easier, but a different partnership is needed for quality stories.

THE young man with a new iPad sat in a city cafe, sipping a short black as he swiped electronic pages, seemingly effortlessly. A dozen or so of us gazed at him through the cafe window. And why not? This machine is many things: lightweight, clever, portable and - having outpaced the iPhone with 2 million sales worldwide in two months - also popular. But will this tablet technology be the miracle panacea for the uncertain future newspapers face?

Newspapers are expensive to own and run. The ''rivers of gold'' advertising revenue of the heady 1980s have slowed as new online tributaries compete for market share. Today, any popular online site can attract advertising. As competition watchdog chief Graeme Samuel can testify, healthy competition drops prices. Advertising rates are no exception.

This paper's technology editor, Gordon Farrer, is optimistic the iPad will provide the ''smart interface'', backed by a company's track record, to get consumers to pay for content. But writing online, Eric Beecher - whose long newspaper experience includes writing, editing and publishing - says it is unclear how the iPad will create advertising revenue for newspapers.

The truth is it's hard to know who's right, because the iPad is an infant. Like all infants, it brings excitement, has wonderful potential, and has some growing up to do.

But it is a winner for Apple chief executive Steve Jobs's marketing team. Even though it has built the iPad without convenient modern features such as a USB port, camera, memory card, Adobe flash and multi-tasking capabilities, Apple has forced a deliberate market space for the new device. It has ensured consumers ''need'' a laptop, an iPhone, an iPod and now an iPad. Why merge functions when you can sell more products?

This model is perhaps a precursor to a better servant for newspapers, but not yet. Salvation waits.

Here are some facts about newspapers:

■The internet is barely a teenager. Western newspaper readership decline began before the internet became a word in the dictionary.

■British research shows quality newspapers have lost fewer readers relative to their circulations than tabloids.

■Quality journalism builds public trust. US media doyen Philip Meyer asserts democracy is strongest when several conditions are met, including survival of ''quality'' newspapers. This is supported by studies showing a positive correlation between healthy democracies and hard-copy newspapers. Meyer says the internet serves democracy as a distributor of information rather than an originator.

■Research shows that online newspaper content is less diverse and more entertainment focused than its print equivalents. Content converges when a medium relies solely on advertising revenue rather than a mix of sources.

For journalism to serve democracy, it seems clear that the content is of most importance. With this in mind, the question is less about whether the iPad is the right delivery method and more about how to sponsor good journalism.

Relying on subscription-based online delivery is flawed because the modern trend is free, free, and free. Rupert Murdoch may think readers will pay for content, but that genie is out of the bottle. Also passe are family-owned newspapers. Moreover, public broadcasters provide a quality non-subscription alternative.

Only niche publications such as business mastheads can get away with charging for content because credible information is specific and not easily found free.

In the United States, quality journalism has been funded by philanthropy. The success story is ProPublica, which recently won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigative journalism. But a philanthropic model requires a steady flow of donations and goodwill. And there is a risk of perceived and actual conflicts of interest. Some Scandinavian and European governments subsidise newspapers. But seeing as we already have the excellent ABC, this seems indulgent.

A more effective model builds on this idea. Innovative partnerships such as a recent one between The Age and the ABC delivered a bigger audience and broader coverage of an important story about Securency, a Reserve Bank subsidiary, and allegations of corruption involving its polymer note contracts.

Time will tell if the iPad was a step in the right direction for delivering newspapers. But clever partnerships to pursue public interest journalism? That is cause for optimism.

Andrea Carson is working on a PhD on the role investigative journalism in broadsheet newspapers plays in a democracy.

Cure for fog

2010-06-08T10:58:00.000+10:00

Fog plan hits turbulence
ANDREW HEASLEY
June 5, 2010

MELBOURNE Airport is supposed to be ''fog-proof'' after a $17 million infrastructure upgrade but as this week's flight diversions showed, the planes and flight crew are not.

Not all of Australia's domestic aircraft fleet are equipped, or pilots trained, to make use of the airport's new low-visibility landing system.

On Thursday, fog caused havoc with airline schedules as several morning flights were unable to land at Melbourne and had to be diverted to Sydney or Adelaide.

Air Services Australia spokesman Matt Wardell said the system primarily benefited international arrivals, as modern long-haul planes had more sophisticated avionics in the cockpit and pilots were trained to use the Category 3 low-visibility Instrument Landing System (Cat-3).

''It's not practical or economical to mandate aircraft to be fitted with it because there are only a few airports Australia-wide that are affected by fog,'' Mr Wardell said.

Melbourne is the only Australian airport to have the system installed.

Mr Wardell said the system was used on Thursday for landings, allowing suitably equipped planes and trained crew to land safely while Melbourne was shrouded in fog.

All of Qantas's Airbuses and Boeing 747s, 767s and 737-800s are equipped with the ''Cat-3'' gear and its pilots trained in its use.

A spokesman said Qantas had 21 older 737s-400s and smaller aircraft flying domestically that were not equipped with Cat-3.

While Jetstar has the equipment on its Airbus fleet used here and abroad and its international pilots are trained in its use, its domestic-only pilots are not trained to use the system.

Tiger Airways and Virgin Blue's planes are not Cat-3 equipped, either, though Virgin is evaluating the technology for its next aircraft purchases.

The airlines said the reason the planes did not have the technology was that until two months ago no Australian airport had it either.

Despite downtown Melbourne looking grey all day yesterday from the ground up, airlines reported that flights were landing and leaving normally.

Is this why Skype is touchy lately? R more people using Skype?

2010-06-04T08:28:00.002+10:00

Five million ready to make Skype calls over 3G
June 3, 2010 - 1:06PM

Nearly five million people have downloaded a Skype phone application launched on Sunday, allowing iPhone users to make Skype calls over mobile networks.

Before the launch of the application for use on high-speed third generation (3G) networks on May 30, consumers could only use Skype on their iPhone when they had access to Wi-Fi. Although some exclusive deals with operators in some countries, such as 3 Mobile in Australia, have allowed calls on the operator's network from different phones from time to time.

"We've had millions of downloads to date," Russ Shaw, Skype's general manager for mobile, told Reuters, referring to global iPhone users. "That's really positive."

A Skype spokeswoman said the number of downloads of the application was nearly five million by Wednesday morning US Eastern Time.

Shaw said the app saw a good mix of demand across Skype's three main operating regions: Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

However, Skype faced a lot of complaints from web commentators after it also said on Sunday that it would start charging for 3G calls between Skype users next year.

This was seen as a big turnaround since the main reason Skype became popular was because Skype-to-Skype calls have always been free whether subscribers use it on their computer or their mobile phone.

Shaw said the company needs to start charging for the service so that it can fund the investments needed to ensure that the quality of 3G Skype calls stays high.

He declined to give specific details about pricing plans except to say that the service would still be competitive with rival services including traditional cellphone calls.

"We're not going to want to price ourselves out of the market," he said. "I can't ignore the fact that consumers (currently) use us for free."

Apple is expected to announce a new iPhone on June 7. Shaw said Skype would hope to support the next iPhone too but noted that he had no details about Apple's announcement. AT&T Inc is currently the exclusive US iPhone provider.

all the goss on iPad

2010-05-26T10:01:00.003+10:00

Despite some flaws, Apple's iPad sets a benchmark
STEPHEN HUTCHEON
May 26, 2010 - 9:31AM

iPad - to buy or not to buy?

You can finally buy an ipad in Australia. But are they any good? Technology Editors Stephen Hutcheon and Asher Moses investigate.

Apple must have surely smeared the iPad in a thick coat of Teflon because nothing that is being flung at it by the critics appears to be sticking.

Here is a device which has been pilloried, publicly eviscerated and subjected to death by blender, baseball bat and even microwave.
App developers are racing to build iPad games ahead of its launch next month.

App developers are racing to build iPad games ahead of its launch next month.

It has been attacked for being part of a hermetically sealed platform that is designed to keep its users trapped inside Apple's family-friendly content biosphere.

And its reputation has been tarnished by lists of hardware and software short-comings which have been plastered all over cyberspace.

Yet in spite of this, the mere mention of the name or sighting of its smooth glass facade can still set off a ripple of excitement.

Apple says demand has been "off the charts" and sales have exceeded all pre-launch expectations. Apple shipped a million plus in the US in the first month alone and on going stock shortages have resulted in a delay in the international release.

Even in Australia, the delivery date for pre-orders has been pushed back twice since Apple began taking orders on May 10. First it was May 28, then June 7. If you pre-order your iPad today, the delivery advice on Apple's online store just says "June".

And I would be gobsmacked if there weren't crowds gathering outside Apple Stores around the country on Thursday night ahead of Friday's launch.

Is the iPad really "magical and revolutionary", as Apple calls it? Or, are buyers locking themselves into a premium-priced, first generation model which will soon be outflanked by less expensive rivals offering the same touch-screen experience but without the platform constraints?

Here's my take after putting the top-of-the-range 64GB Wi-Fi plus 3G iPad (on the Telstra network) through its paces over the past few days. (See pricing details below).

First, some credit where credit is due. Having conquered the portable music device market and become the world's most profitable mobile phone company inside three years, Apple has once again set the benchmark.

Tablet computers are going to be the next big. Research firm IDC says that Apple's entry into this market segment will lead to a sixfold increase in worldwide shipments of tablet computers by 2014.

The iPad is yet another triumph from the hit-making team led by Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs and his humble design czar, Jonathan Ive, who does amazing things with glass and aluminum.

Weighing 680 grams, the iPad feels heavier than I expected but not so that it becomes a dead weight in a briefcase or (over-sized) handbag.

Using a modified version of the iPhone operating system, the iPad boots up in second. There's no wait, no delay. It's instant-on. And its 1 GHz A4 processor keeps the iPad purring along at a very decent clip.

The 25 cm screen (measured diagonally) displays everything in brilliant resolution, including fingerprints. Apple has used the same oleophobic (oil resistant) coating used on the iPhone 3GS, but for some reason it doesn't seem to work as well on the larger screen. It pays to keep a wiping cloth handy.

No complaints about the battery life either. Apple rates it at ten hours using just Wi-Fi and slightly less when it uses a 3G connection. Either way, the iPad still had ample charge left in the tank even after constant use during a wet Saturday spent mostly indoors.

As you'd expect, it's great for web browsing and using the email functions. The virtual keyboard is not to everyone's taste, but I found it adequate for typing in search terms and rattling off the odd email.

I have more reservation when it comes to any serious word processing. The iPad is not something I'd take out on a reporting assignment, unless it's a quickie.

The iPad really shines when it comes to using it to play games and watch videos. If only videos sold through the iTunes store were cheaper.

The iPad's other big selling point is as an e-book reader. While Apple's iBookstore will be available at launch, it only contains out-of-copyright books. That's fine if you want to catch up some Charles Dickens, but disappointing if you're after something by Stieg Larsson.

Apple is still negotiating rights with local publishers. However, recently-published e-books can still be purchased and read using the Kindle and Borders apps.

The bad bits

The same, however, can't be said for reading magazines, books and iPad-ified versions of newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

It's often hard to work out when to scroll vertically and when to do it horizontally and I find the absence of a "back button" in these type of apps immensely frustrating.

I have yet to come across the type of jaw-dropping interactive magazine apps which have been bandied about in prototype. The result is a so-so experience which feels as if you're just reading a glorified PDF.

As was the case the iPhone, it's the apps which will make or break this device. So far there are about 5000 specifically made for the iPad plus another 200,000 iPhone/iPod touch apps which can be used on the new device.

My biggest gripe is with the iPad is the omission of built-in slots for SD camera cards and USB memory sticks. You can buy a camera connection kit ($39) but that doesn't excuse the fact that these are standard ports in any device and should have been included.

Moreover, when I did upload some video from a small Kodak video camera, I found that the iPad does not recognise .mov videos files. There no such problem when the same files are uploaded to a MacBook.

Another criticism I have is the decision to leave out a built-in webcam. That's just nuts. You can bet that any competitor is going to include one and that the next generation of the iPad will also sport one.

To date, Apple has the market to itself. Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard appear to have shelved their plans to enter the field. But that's not the case for the Taiwanese. And you won't have to wait long to see what companies such as ASUS and Acer up to.

Expect to see maybe a dozen tablet computers - some of them using Google's Android platform - go on show at next month Computex computer show in Taiwan. Only then will we get a true measure of the iPad.

In summary

This is not a substitute for a laptop or desktop computer. The iPad is a completely new class of product which sits between the laptop and the smartphone - a position which makes it a very discretionary purchase.

At first I thought this would be a purely at home device, something you hook up to your Wi-Fi and use when you multitask in front of the TV.

But the added 3G capability - and you will need to take up a separate data plan with one of the telcos because the iPad doesn't support USB modems - makes this a much more versatile device.

Of the peripherals that Apple is offering, the only one I would say is a must is the $49 microfibre case. It protects your iPad and doubles as a angled stand that allows you to type, browse or watch videos without having to prop it up.

Despite its short-comings, the iPad is indeed a trail blazer and I'm sure the second generation will be even better.
All the details

iPad models

Apple has announced the following prices for Wi-Fi only models in Australia:

* 16GB - $629
* 32GB - $759
* 64GB - $879

For the Wi-Fi plus 3G models, Apple has set these prices:

* 16GB- $799
* 32GB - $928
* 64GB - $1049

The Wi-Fi plus 3G models will require users to purchase data plans from mobile providers if they intend to use their iPads outside the range of Wi-Fi services.

Apps

The iPad's fate will rest on the supply and variety of applications (or apps). The iPhone took off on a wave of apps made by third-party developers and the same needs to happen if the iPad is to succeed.

Apple says the iPad will run most of the 200,000-plus iPhone/iPod touch apps on the App Store - although some reportedly don't look so good when they are scaled up for the bigger screen. And third-party developers have created more than 5000 new apps designed specifically for the new device.

Apple has three productivity apps for sale: Keynote, Pages and Numbers. Each is priced at $12.99.

Peripherals

iPad Keyboard dock - $89
iPad dock - $39
iPad 10W USB Power Adapter - $39
iPad case - $48
iPad Camera Connection kit - $39
iPad dock connector to VGA Adapter - $39

Data plans

Telstra is offering the following pre-paid plans:

* 1GB - $20
* 3GB - $30
* 6GB - $60
* 9GB - $80
* 12GB - $100

Telstra says all data plans will be available without a contract, on a month-by-month basis, meaning plans can be cancelled and reactivated at any time. The data allowance is valid for 30 days.

More details: http://www.telstra.com.au/latest_offers/ipad/index.html

Optus is offering both post-pad and pre-paid iPad data plans.

The BYO month-to-month post-paid plans are:

* 2GB - $20
* 3GB - $30
* 8GB - $60

The pre-paid plans are:

Recharge | Included Data | Validity

* $30 SIM Starter Kit | 2GB | 30 Days
* $15 | 500MB | 15 Days
* $20 | 1GB | 15 Days
* $30 | 3GB | 30 Days
* $40 | 4GB | 30 Days
* $50 | 5GB | 30 Days
* $70 | 9GB | 60 Days
* $80 | 8GB | 186 Days
* $100 | 12GB | 60 Days
* $130 | 14GB | 60 Days

All pre-paid plans come with 1GB bonus data which is available until 30/9/10.

More details: http://optusbefirst.com.au/

Vodafone Pre-paid Plans for iPad with Wi-Fi + 3G
Data | Fee

* 250MB | $9.95
* 1GB | $14.95
* 4GB | $29.95
* Unlimited | $49.95

More details at: http://www.vodafone.com.au/ipad

3 Mobile Pre-paid Plans for iPad with Wi-Fi + 3G
Data | Fee

* 500MB (+ 1GB bonus data for iPad customers) | $15
* 2GB (+ 2GB bonus data for iPad customers) | $29
* 3 mobile pre-paid plans include a 200MB one-time bonus when activated online.

More details at: http://www.three.com.au/iPad

Source: smh.com.au

google tv

2010-05-22T08:42:00.002+10:00

Google premieres web TV
May 21, 2010 - 11:35AM

Google TV concept launched

Google expands its kingdom into the living room with an ambitious new service that meshes television viewing with surfing the web.

Internet giant Google is out to expand its kingdom to the living room with an ambitious new service that lets people mesh television viewing with surfing the web.

Google TV, developed in partnership with technology titans Sony, Intel and Logitech and launched in the US overnight, fuses the freedom of the internet with television programming.

Google executives vowed their TV platform would succeed where offerings such as Apple TV have foundered and hopefully capture some of the $US70 billion ($85 billion) American TV advertising market.
Sony CEO Howard Stringer stands near a Google TV display. Photo: AP/Paul Sakuma

Sony CEO Howard Stringer stands near a Google TV display. Photo: AP/Paul Sakuma

"Google TV is a new platform that we believe will change the future of television," Google group product manager Rishi Chandra said after unveiling the new service at a software developers' conference in San Francisco.

"Users don't have to choose between TV and web; they can have both."

Google TV, which is powered by Google's Android software and Chrome web browser, can be accessed using upcoming web-enabled television sets from Sony or set-top boxes from Logitech that route web content to existing TV sets.

The set-top box is key to Google TV. It's a search box, just like on Google's web site. It looks through live programs, DVR recordings and the web, delivering a relatively compact list of results that can be accessed with a push of the button.

Web television has been a minefield for the world's most creative and deep-pocketed companies and, in a sign of the challenge, embarrassed Google engineers struggled initially to get their TV demonstration running, asking the audience to turn off their cellphones, which were interfering with TV remote controls.

Web surfers have never left their desktops for the living room, and television watchers have kept their remotes pointed toward familiar territory despite attempts by Microsoft and by Apple, which was the focus of frequent jokes.

Sony and Logitech said the sets and boxes would be available in the United States in time for Christmas and would be rolled out internationally next year.

"The transition from TV to web is totally seamless," he said during the demonstration for thousands of developers which featured a few technical glitches.

"To the user it doesn't matter where I get my content, whether it be live TV, DVR, or the web. They just want access to it," Chandra said.

Initially, advertising served on Google TV will be the same as seen now by television viewers or web surfers but the internet firm said it was pondering ways to tailor advertising to the platform.

"Millions" of channels

Google TV product manager Salahuddin Choudhary said in a blog post that Google TV would allow TV viewers to get "all the [TV] channels and shows you normally watch and all of the websites you browse all day".

"This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web," Choudhary said. "With the entire internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV - it can be a photo slide-show viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more."

Not the first

Google is not the first technology company to attempt to unite the TV set and the internet and a number of electronics manufacturers are already offering web-enabled televisions or digital set-top boxes.

Yahoo jumped into the internet television arena more than a year ago, teaming up with manufacturers including Sony, Samsung, VIZIO, and LG to embed software "widgets" that let viewers link directly to designated websites.

Google executives said previous efforts had failed because proponents of the technology had dumbed down the web for television, closed it to participation by others and made people choose between using the web or television.

"It's much harder to marry a 50-year-old technology and a brand new technology than those of us in the brand new technology industry thought," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acknowledged to the audience of developers.

Yahoo responded to Google's announcement with word that it was expanding its service to new devices.

"There is no doubt in my mind that the next phase of the internet revolution will be televised," said Yahoo Connected TV chief architect Ronald Jacoby.

Choudhary said the internet-enabled televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes from Sony and Logitech, which are powered by Intel Atom computer chips, would be available in the American autumn through Best Buy stores.

Logitech boxes will feature computer keyboards that act as Google TV remote controls. On-screen home pages will let people search television programming as they do the internet.

Sony chief executive Howard Stringer described it as "a very big deal".

"I can't stress that enough," Stringer said on stage. "When you put all this, as we've done for the [autumn], into the world's first internet television, the opportunities are, in a sense, just mind-boggling."

Google did not announce pricing for the TV sets or the set-top boxes.

Sony is among the electronics companies that brought internet-capable televisions to market, but those sets have typically been limited to letting people access specific websites such as Yahoo or YouTube.

"This is a much broader platform," Stringer said of Google TV. "This is a much more robust platform, which is expandable and grows. It's going to be an eye opener."

Android as remote

Engineers showed off new versions of the Android mobile phone platform, which competes with Apple's iPhone. Android also will run Google TV, turning Android phones into controls that can be used in the same room as the television or remotely across the web.

AFP, Reuters

will u b the proud owner of an iPad

2010-05-08T07:46:00.001+10:00

Apple sets local iPad launch date and prices
STEPHEN HUTCHEON
May 8, 2010 - 1:26AM

Apple says it will launch the iPad in Australlia on May 28.

Apple has announced that the iPad will go on sale in Australia on May 28 with the base model priced at $629.

The launch, which was delayed for almost two months, comes after Apple's announced earlier in the week that it had sold over one million of the tablet computers since they went on sale in the US on April 3.

In addition, iPad users in the US have downloaded over 12 million apps and over 1.5 million e-books.

The same six iPad models will be available in Australia, three Wi-Fi only and three that will also be able to access to high-speed 3G mobile phone network.

Apple has announced the following prices for Wi-Fi only models in Australia:

* 16GB - $629

* 32GB - $759

* 64GB - $879

For the Wi-Fi plus 3G models, Apple has set these prices:

* 16GB- $799

* 32GB - $928

* 64GB - $1049

The Wi-Fi plus 3G models will require users to purchase data plans from mobile providers if they intend to use their iPads outside the range of Wi-Fi services.

Apple's late night announcement also says that the iBookstore electronic book service will be operational at launch indicating that a range of e-books will be available for download from day one.

Local publishers have not yet announced e-book prices in the iBookstore, but in the US average prices range from $US9.99 to $US12.99. There are also many free book downloads available in the form of public-domain books and give-away books by authors hoping to be discovered.

May 28 is also iPad launch day in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK on the same day.

And Apple also announced plans tonight to begin the third stage of the global iPad roll-out in July when the device will go on sale in an additional nine countries including New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.

"Apple has laid out a paradigm of the next 20 years of personal computing," respected analyst and Apple watcher Michael Gartenberg wrote in a blog post earlier this week.

"The rest of the market is not going to cede that to them without a fight. Expect to see weak challenges for the next 30-60 days but some very strong competition as we get into the second part of this year."

Source: smh.com.au

Drop Bears make Facebook

2010-04-28T09:39:00.001+10:00

Mythical bear creates Facebook monster
AMY BRADNEY-GEORGE
April 27, 2010 - 11:31AM

Surprise success: Nick Getley created the Drop Bears fan group on Facebook

A man and his imaginary animal have shown what a quirky idea, a Facebook page and like-minded people can do.
In the world of Facebook, anything goes. From competitive titles such as "Can this pickle get more fans than Nickleback" to the neurotically skewed "Inbox (1) makes me nervous", the variety of pages available on this social-networking giant is both overwhelming and hilarious.
It's not hard to spend hours browsing through Facebook, finding out friends "hate it when inanimate objects look like they have scary faces", "pretend to text in awkward situations" and thought they were the only ones to experience "The Mini Spaz Attack When Your (sic) In Bed, Half Asleep And Imagine Your (sic) Falling".
With millions of Facebook members becoming fans of these pages, it's one of the quickest ways for people to share common beliefs, interests and experiences online. It can also be an unlikely place for business ideas.
Facebook says pages give "public figures, businesses, organisations and other entities" an opportunity to create a public presence on the site.
While they can be used as a way to connect with fans, the user-generated pages seem to be more about connecting people through experiences. In the process, many page creators are learning about business sense within social networking sites like Facebook.
Nick Getley, who created a page for the mythological Australian drop bear (see below), says he originally wanted a humorous way for Australians to relate to each other online.
"As far as I [can] see, I have created a monster, there were only pages for official products at the time and now there are fan pages of everything," he says.
With 72,605 people liking the page, at last count, Getley says he gets hundreds of posts every week.
"They range from nostalgic stories of people who had their fathers scare them with drop bear stories, people who have played a prank on tourists, to foreigners actually seeing the page as evidence itself and then writing their concern as to why people would be a fan of vicious wildlife," he says. "The most fun we have is referencing the 'Great Drop Bear Massacre of 1999' - a fictitious event, obviously, but of Lord of the Rings proportions."
While Drop Bears was Getley's first page creation, he is also involved in managing another 20 or more pages. Getley has even liaised with some businesses about pages he wanted to create, such as the page for Streets Ice Cream's Bubble O'Bill.
"I always liked Bubble O'Bill [ice creams], so when I created a page for them and the fans started growing I asked for permission to get the page verified," he says.
Before Facebook's recent introduction of "community pages" for users who "share similar interests or experiences", Getley says page owners could be asked to verify their legitimacy. To sustain the Drop Bears page he even created a website selling Drop Bear T-shirts.
"I never wanted to make money from the page but we had something like three weeks to authenticate it as a sort of business, so I designed drop bear T-shirts and made a website to keep the page going," he says.
"I like being involved in pages because it's a lot of fun being able to talk to so many fans. It's been a real eye-opener career-wise, too."

User-generated

He says that while he is a fan of bands and businesses on Facebook, he thinks the user-generated pages are a more unique part of his social-networking experience.
"[These] fan pages have the same feeling you got when you were a kid in high school and you were a fan of something that felt obscure, or overlooked," he says. "At least once a week on my fan pages I see posts that say, 'Wow, I had no idea you could be a fan of this!"'
On the other side of the screen are the Facebook members clicking away in agreement. Kelly Hodder, a member who admits to being a "serial page joiner", says it is a fun way to explore Facebook.
"My first impression is that [these] pages are funny - well some of them. Some of the pages I've joined are because I agree with the subject of the pages and want to show my support," she says.
Hodder, who is a fan of pages like "Lindt", "Bubblewrap", "Yelling At Inanimate Objects" and "I Wish Music Played During Epic Moments of My Life and Not Just in Movies", says she never realised how many pages she was actually joining.
"I've been on Facebook for a couple of years now and I guess they add up," she says.
"The bulk of the pages that I join are ones that my friends have joined and they pop up in my news feed ... it's definitely a serial thing [for me] to join."
While Getley says there can be a sense of community around these types of pages, Hodder thinks they are more a surface-level aspect of Facebook.
"I mainly go on there to 'connect' with my friends who I don't see much any more ... I guess it communicates some of my thoughts, beliefs, interests to my friends without me having to actually tell them," she says.
But when visiting pages such as "When I Was Younger I Put My Face Close To The Fan To Hear My Robot Voice" or "When I was your age, everyone wanted a Nokia 3310. Not an iPhone", the level of interaction on the sites shows how much of a community is being built by this technology.
Regardless of whether people have "become fans", or "liked" a page after the recent changes, they add a quirkiness to Facebook that is endearing.
After all, there's nothing quite like signing on and seeing one of your friends enjoys "Looking through a textbook and pointing at pictures and going, 'that's you"'.

Legends of the fall

Drop bears are vicious, deadly animals created in the spirit of true Australian humour to scare unsuspecting people. While the stories and descriptions vary from person to person, drop bears are generally said to resemble koalas, sit in gum trees and drop on unsuspecting victims. Tourists are the most common targets for drop bear stories and it's common for a group of Australians to join in with the joke once someone starts it.
Drop bears have also been popularised by writer Terry Pratchett in his novel The Last Continent and in an ad campaign for Bundaberg Rum.

Another way to engage your customers

Facebook pages are designed as a way for public figures, organisations and businesses to connect with Facebook users.

To create a page, you can go to facebook.com/pages, click on "Create Page" and select what type of page you want to set up. While personal information is not included on a page, Facebook does require that it is linked to an individual person's Facebook account.

After creating the page, the process is similar to setting up a user profile, with sections for information about the focus of the page, photos and other customisable tabs available.

Once active, the page can be suggested to Facebook users and the more people clicking "like" to a page, the more opportunity there is for advertising.

Pages are connected to users' news feeds and the "suggestions" section of the home page, which means updates from the page and responses from users connected to it are spread through a range of networks on Facebook.

The most successful pages are ones that actively connect with fans. Optus has a section of its page dedicated to news from celebrity Kim Kardashian, who is on tour in Australia.

As well as being able to upload photos and videos of the celebrity, the section is linked to her Twitter feed, which is an effective use of new-media cross-promotion.

Another strategy, used on pages such as Pandora Jewellery, is to regularly post status updates asking people to share stories on the page. Companies can then hear directly from the people and those voices are broadcast across each of the user's networks in connection with that company.

Facebook also offers free reporting by measuring people's engagement with the page, the impact it is having and basic data on the types of people accessing it.

When used effectively, Facebook pages may be an asset to online marketing for businesses, organisations and public figures.

Source: smh.com.au

Fontainebleau - McCubbins Retreat

2010-04-24T10:25:00.003+10:00

McCubbin's retreat is crumbling
GABRIELLA COSLOVICH
April 24, 2010

HIDDEN away on the north side of Mount Macedon, the wild and under-developed side, an important part of Australian art history lies neglected and crumbling. Its name is Fontainebleau and it is the former country property of the much-loved Australian painter Frederick McCubbin.

Few know of Fontainebleau's existence; even people steeped in the arts are unaware that the woods of Mount Macedon harbour McCubbin's former home. And yet, it is real, and remarkably intact, a Gothic timber cottage virtually unchanged since when McCubbin painted some of his best-known works there early last century, including The Pioneer.

But its future may be in jeopardy. That it has remained untouched and spared from the bulldozer or soul-stripping renovations is greatly due to Fontainebleau's discreet owners of the past 31 years - brothers Mark and Paul Cutler, who no longer reside at the property. The Age tracked them down this week.

The Cutlers set up a not-for-profit trust to buy Fontainebleau, paying about $75,000 for the property in 1979. It is now valued at between $1 million to $1.5 million. Astonishingly, despite the home's great cultural significance, no one else cared a jot about it back in 1979.

''It was up for private sale and nobody bought it, nobody wanted to know it,'' says Mark Cutler, ''We kept it going to the extent we could, but nature is winning that battle. Without us living there and being there it would have fallen over many, many years ago.''

The Cutlers are now living in Hobart and Fontainebleau's sole resident is ''property manager'' Trevor Hoare. But the Cutlers do not have the resources to maintain the home and its seven hectares of garden and bush. Nor do they want to sell it. The last thing Mark Cutler wants to see is Fontainebleau ''turned into a resort or a multi-millionaire's weekend playground''.

It was brother Paul who was instrumental in the purchase of Fontainebleau. A teacher, he had been looking for a secluded property close to Melbourne that he could turn into a place of education, contemplation and creativity.

Just as McCubbin fell in love with Fontainebleau when he stumbled upon it during a Christmas holiday in Woodend in 1901, so too did Paul Cutler, even though he was initially unaware of its history. He quickly learnt of the McCubbin legacy and saw it as perfectly synchronised to his own goals. But Paul Cutler's plans to transform Fontainebleau into a retreat never eventuated. He lived at Fontainbleau for 21 years, and raised his children there.

In 2000, Paul Cutler moved to Hobart, where he is completing a PhD on Buddhist philosophies - and still holding on to his dream for Fontainebleau. But finding someone willing to help fund that vision is another issue entirely.

About five years ago, Mark Cutler met Ian Roberts, from the Harold Mitchell Foundation, to talk about the future of Fontainebleau. At that time, the foundation was looking for a place to set up residential artist studios in Victoria, but that is no longer a priority.

''Look, I do think it's a pity, but I have to add that I used to work in the old Ministry for the Arts and Arts Victoria and I know the number of historic buildings; there are many, many historic buildings of great consequence. The purchase of them is one thing, the upkeep of them is another,'' said Roberts, the foundation's executive officer.

The decline of Fontainebleau has been a major concern for the Woodend and District Heritage Society, which has watched with despair as the property ages. Recently, former National Gallery of Victoria curator John Jones brought a group of curators to Fontainebleau ahead of a major exhibition of the artist's last decade of work, which opens at the Bendigo Art Gallery today. ''The bushland (around Fontainebleau) is so important because, after Heidelberg, it really is the most famous Australian painting spot,'' Jones says.

Fontainebleau's addition to the Victorian Heritage Register this month has buoyed hopes for the property's preservation.

The heritage listing affords some protection to Fontainebleau - no significant works can be done without a permit - and also means the owners are eligible for financial assistance to help with conservation works.

The Cutler vision for Fontainebleau is closely aligned with that of McCubbin's great-grandson David , who is heartened to learn that the house is owned by two brothers who are sensitive to its spirit and legacy. ''It's a huge relief to know that it's not some snide, pernicious little turd who has inherited the property. Sounds like their heart is exactly in the right spot,'' he said.

Privacy or not!

2010-04-22T09:22:00.002+10:00

10 nations complain: Google betrays privacy
April 21, 2010

Officials from New Zealand, Canada, France and seven other countries are raising privacy concerns about Google's mapping service and the company's fumbled foray into social networking.

Although the concerns they raise are not new, the officials said the online search leader too often forgets people's privacy rights as it rolls out new technologies.

The bulk of the complaints are over Buzz, which Google launched in February as part of its Gmail service. Buzz quickly came under fire for automatically creating public circles of friends for users, based on their most frequent email contacts. After complaints, the company apologised and made changes to the service.

But in a letter sent this week to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, privacy and data-protection officials from the 10 countries said they are still "extremely concerned about how a product with such significant privacy issues was launched in the first place."

It said Buzz "betrayed a disappointing disregard for fundamental privacy norms and laws. Moreover, this was not the first time you have failed to take adequate account of privacy considerations when launching new services."

Google Street View, a mapping service that includes street-level photos taken by cameras mounted on cars that sweep through neighborhoods, is another area of concern. The officials complained that Google launched it in various countries without "due consideration of privacy and data protection laws and cultural norms."

"In that instance, you addressed privacy concerns related to such matters as the retention of unblurred facial images only after the fact, and there is continued concern about the adequacy of the information you provide before the images are captured," officials said in their letter, posted on the Web site of Canada's privacy commissioner.

Google said it has "discussed all these issues publicly many times before and have nothing to add to today's letter."

"Of course we do not get everything 100 per cent right — that is why we acted so quickly on Buzz following the user feedback we received," the company said in a statement, adding that it tries very hard to be upfront about what data it collects from users and how it uses the information.

The other countries that signed the letter are Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. Australia was not included.

The officials called on Google to create default settings that protect users' privacy and to ensure that privacy control settings are prominent and easy to use.

"We recognize that Google is not the only online company with a history of introducing services without due regard for the privacy of its users," the letter says. "As a leader in the online world, we hope that your company will set an example for others to follow."

Facebook is one such company, drawing the ire of officials in Canada, Germany and elsewhere for the way it handles user privacy. Canada's privacy commissioner has been investigating changes Facebook made late last year to its privacy settings. Those had given users more granular controls but also nudged them to reveal more to the public.

AP

Source: smh.com.au

Got to love Skype?!

2010-04-20T16:41:00.003+10:00

Aussie stranded by ash marries via Skype
LOUISA HEARN
April 20, 2010 - 12:44PM

Technology has saved a Australian-British couple's wedding after they were stranded in Dubai by the volcanic ash cloud disrupting flights in and out of Europe.

Relatives and friends watched Sean Murtagh, 24, from west London, and Natalie Mead, a 30-year-old Australian, take their vows on a laptop fitted with a webcam which was broadcast via Skype to assembled family and friends in Britain.

The groom borrowed his smart shirt and trousers while the bride wore a dress she had in her luggage and the airport hotel donated flowers, balloons and a wedding cake as other stranded passengers joined in on the celebration.

"They have decorated the lobby of the hotel. They made us a three-tier wedding cake, set up a laptop with Skype and a projector," Sean Murtagh said.

"It's spellbinding the amount they have done for us.

"It's been an incredible day. We were never going to forget it anyway but we certainly won't forget it now."

Although the couple were recently married at a civil wedding in Brisbane, they had also planned a ceremony for family and friends in Ealing, west London.

Natalie Mead told Gulf News: "Passengers stranded in the hotel were getting excited for the first time in days when they heard about our wedding; some even helped me with my hair and make-up. It was also great to see everyone in the UK on our wedding day, even if it was via webcam.

"It has been an amazing day and we are just so grateful for everything that everyone has done for us. It is definitely a story to tell the grandchildren. There was no way we were going to let this volcano stop us [from] getting married."

Caroline Black, a celebrant who conducted the online ceremony from London, said: "It was just like any other wedding except the bride and groom weren't there."

"We have seen an increase in the past few days in terms of video-calling because of the [flight disruption] situation," a Skype spokesman told AFP.

"I've heard of executives stuck in the US on the way back to London running their companies via Skype."

Cisco said that the disruption of flights in Europe due to a dangerous layer of ash spewed into the sky by a volcano in Iceland had led to a surge in interest in its "telepresence" technology for online meetings.

"We have seen a huge spike in usage," said Fredrik Halvorsen, newly minted vice-president of Cisco's telepresence technology group.

"We have had all our demo centres and all our video rooms across the world populated by everything from big corporate clients to [small- or medium-size businesses] to government ministries."

- with AFP

Source: smh.com.au

The home phone catches up with the 21st century

2010-04-14T09:23:00.002+10:00

FOR years, it was the only way we could reach the outside world, but with the introduction of mobiles and the internet, it soon became something many of us could live without.

Just as the home phone was becoming an endangered species, Telstra this week introduced a new product that it says has completely reinvented it.

The new T-Hub combines the power of the internet with the convenience of a landline. It is a tablet console with an 18cm colour touchscreen and cordless handset.

Using the touchscreen, users can make and receive hands-free calls as well as send and receive SMS messages to other Telstra mobiles and T-Hubs.

Jenny Young, Telstra's executive director for consumer marketing channels, says bringing the internet and the home phone together is a "milestone".

"We're really excited about it," she said. "We're sure Australians are going to enjoy the capabilities it delivers."

The screen is filled with icons that are short cuts to websites. They are accessed wirelessly using a BigPond broadband connection.

Users can log on to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and access information like the weather forecast and news and sports headlines or videos.

The T-Hub will be available to customers in various bundles including a home phone with unlimited local calls, a BigPond broadband plan and a wireless modem gateway. Existing Telstra home phone and internet customers can buy the T-Hub for $299.

While the home phone looks to the future, Tristan O'Brien, of Belair, was admiring its past at Antique Market in Grote St yesterday. "It's good to keep a bit of history . . . especially if they're collectable," he said. "I think some of the things we can do with echnology these days are not necessary, things like social networking. But I guess it enables people to keep in touch easily."

Podcasts & Wikis turn cafes into lecture halls

2010-04-13T09:06:00.001+10:00

NATALIE CRAIG
April 11, 2010

Monash University economics-law student Evelyn Young enjoys a coffee while listening to lectures downloaded on to her laptop.

Monash University economics-law student Evelyn Young enjoys a coffee while listening to lectures downloaded on to her laptop. Photo: Craig Sillitoe

Many university students are using new technology to catch up on missed lectures.

FIRST-YEAR tertiary students are spending less time on campus and more time online, as podcasts of lectures become increasingly common.

Three out of four students use podcasts of lectures and a third believe online lecture materials can be a replacement for attending classes, according to the nationwide survey of 2422 first-year students by the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne.

Students spent an average of four days a week on campus in 2009, compared with 4.4 days a week in 1994.

They were studying online for 6.5 hours a week, compared with 4.2 hours in 2004 (the earliest online study data available).

Better computer access and an increase in students' work commitments had fuelled the changes, centre director Richard James said.

While students believed online lecture notes could be a replacement for attending classes, he said there was no evidence to suggest that they routinely did that.

''Student engagement is multifaceted and not necessarily indicated by the time spent on campus … For most students, e-learning complements, but does not replace, face-to-face classes,'' he said.

Universities cannot force students to attend lectures, although some tutorials carry a ''participation'' mark.

Many warn students that lecture recordings are not a substitute for attendance, and are designed for revision only.

But while academics and students say attendance at lectures is declining in all year levels, universities say study patterns are more nuanced as students use technology to complement traditional teaching methods.

Monash University has this year added visual content to audio recordings of lectures - with the potential for more than 1 million downloads a week.

Pro-vice-chancellor Marnie Hughes Warrington said that while physical attendance at lectures could be declining, the system had increased participation overall, with students using the technology in different ways.

''Mature-age students listen to the lectures multiple times for reassurance, while students with family commitments now have access to university study … For some, listening to lectures in another space, like a library, where you're next to other people doing the same thing, is understood by some people as being in a lecture in some way.''

Evelyn Young, a fourth-year economics and law student at Monash University, listens to all her lectures online at home, and says she learns best by meticulously transcribing notes.

''It helps me absorb the information better. It takes, like, five hours to type a two-hour lecture but I generally break for coffee,'' she said.

She rents in Glen Waverley and works 25 hours a week as a sales assistant. Her grades are good and she emails any queries to her lecturers. But they would like to see more of her.

Last year, her international law lecturer threatened to turn off the audio-recorder at crucial moments. ''He hated the recording system and he warned us, 'Sometimes I'll just turn it off if I'm going to say something important' … He thought it was bad for us.''

But e-learning technology could be vital to the survival of universities. The federal government has promised funding to universities to increase participation of people from non-traditional backgrounds, so that 40 per cent of the population has a degree by 2025.

Online access to lectures, tutorial discussions and readings is already allowing regional students and those with family commitments a chance to study.

La Trobe University is overcoming the tyranny of distance for remote students of teaching, who are part of a pilot program using iPod Touch to create a ''virtual classroom'' off campus.

Deakin lecturer Paul Nicholson is teaching a course to students at the Melbourne, Geelong and Warrnambool campuses called ''creating effective learning environments''. There are no physical lectures.

''It's a mediaeval technology, the lecture, and it's so inefficient,'' he said. The cross-campus course instead uses online materials, podcasts and a collaborative ''wiki'' website.

Universities, once the gatekeepers of knowledge, are now disseminating free information online on sites such as iTunes U and Academic Earth.

So why bother going to campus - and why bother paying? ''Students are continually telling us … there's a sea of information out there. I need somebody to guide me through it,'' RMIT deputy vice-chancellor Professor Reid said.

And if students still stay away? ''Good teachers will always attract a crowd.''

iPad buyers react

2010-04-06T08:13:00.001+10:00

'Like a gorgeous woman': iPad buyers react
April 5, 2010 - 9:56AM

Apple sold between 600,000 and 700,000 iPads on launch day in the US, with analysts predicting over 7.1 million of the tablets will be sold worldwide this year.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster noted that the iPad was doing better than the iPhone, which sold about half a million units in its first weekend in 2007.

But now that the iPad is in the hands of early adopters, the hard work for Apple begins.
Andreas Schobel reacts after being among the first to purchase an Apple iPad.

Andreas Schobel reacts after being among the first to purchase an Apple iPad. Photo: Reuters

Eager customers intent on being among the first owners of this new class of gadgetry stood in long lines across the US on Saturday. They seemed willing to buy first - and discover uses for the iPad later.

In some ways, it was reminiscent of the lines and hoopla surrounding the 2007 launch of the first iPhone. The difference: People knew then that the iPhone would replace their existing cell phone, an appliance that has become a must-have for everyone from uber-geeks to stay-at-home mums.

With the iPad, which fits somewhere between phone and computer, Apple must convince people who already have smart phones, laptops, e-book readers, set-top boxes and home broadband connections that they need another device that serves many of the same purposes.
Apple customer Andres Schobel holds up his two new iPads at an Apple store in San Francisco. Hundreds of people lined up hours before the Apple store opened to purchase the new iPad which debuted overnight. Click for more photos

Many of the earliest iPad buyers say they will have a better idea of what they'll use it for only after they've had it for a while.

That didn't stop them from imagining, though.

Beth Goza has had iPhones and other smart phones, along with a MacBook Air laptop, yet she believes the iPad has a place in her digital lineup. She likened it to a professional tennis player owning different sneakers for grass, clay and concrete courts.

"At the end of the day, you can get by with one or the other," she said outside an Apple store in Seattle's University Village mall.

But she clearly doesn't want to just "get by." She's already dreaming up specific uses for her iPad, such as knitting applications to help her keep track of her place in a complicated pattern.

Danita Shneidman, a woman in her 60s, wanted one to look at photos and videos of her first grandchild, born this week in Boston.

And then there's Ray Majewski, who went to an Apple store in Freehold, N.J., with his 10-year-old daughter, Julia. The iPad is partly as a reward for her straight A's in school, and partly a present for himself.

"I like the electronic books, and my daughter is really getting into them as well," Majewski said. "I was thinking of getting a Kindle (e-book reader) but then said to myself, 'Why not get an iPad because I can get so much more from that than just reading books?'"

The iPad is essentially a much larger version of Apple's popular iPhone, without the calling capabilities. Just a half-inch thick, the device has a touch screen that measures 9.7 inches on the diagonal - nearly three times the iPhone's. Also like the iPhone, it has no physical keyboard.

For now, Apple is selling iPads that only connect to the internet using Wi-Fi. Those models start at $US499. Versions that also have a 3G broadband data connection will be available by the end of the month. They will cost $US130 more, with the most expensive at $US829.

In Apple stores in Seattle and on New York's Fifth Avenue, the atmosphere was festive, with employees cheering and clapping as customers entered and left. One kid arrived at a San Francisco store in a homemade iPad costume.

Some analysts had predicted the gadget would sell out on Saturday. Although there didn't seem to be problems with supply at Apple stores, two Best Buy stores in the Washington, D.C., area didn't have iPads in stock for sale when they opened.

People could also "pre-order" iPads online to arrive Saturday. Prasad Thammineni did just that, but had to chase the UPS guy down the block from his office in Cambridge, Mass., to get his iPad.

After playing with it for a few hours, his impressions were mostly positive. Typing on the on-screen keyboard wasn't as comfortable as using a laptop with a regular keyboard, and Thammineni said he found himself using several fingers but not touch-typing normally. Still, he said, it was much easier to use than a Kindle keyboard.

But the weight of the device might keep him from typing on the go. Thammineni said that after about two minutes of holding up the device with one hand and typing with the other, it got too heavy, even at a mere 1.5 pounds.

Once the initial iPad excitement settles, Apple may have to work harder to persuade a broader swath of people to buy one. Many companies have tried to sell tablet computers before, but none has caught on with mainstream consumers. And while early adopters who pre-ordered an iPad in recent weeks have gushed about all the ways they hope to use it, skeptics point to all the ways the iPad comes up short.

They argue the on-screen keyboard is hard to use and complain that it lacks a camera and ports for media storage cards and USB devices such as printers. They also bemoan the fact that the iPad can't play Flash video, which means many websites with embedded video clips will look broken to web surfers using Apple's Safari browser. And the iPad can't run more than one program at a time, which even fans hope will change one day soon.

College student Brett Meulmester stood in line at an Apple store in Arlington, Va., to try one out without buying one yet because of cost.

Lower prices could push wider adoption, but when Apple slashed prices for the iPhone just months after its release, early buyers were irate. Tom Quinn, of Sea Girt, N.J., wasn't worried about paying a premium for being one of the first to have an iPad.

"When that happened with the iPhone, they gave out $US100 credit," he said. "If the same thing happens with the iPad, I'm sure they'll do something similar."

For others, cost was clearly not an issue - nor convenience, it seemed. Siggi Manz, a software developer who lives near Frankfurt, Germany, was spending just 20 hours in New York to snag one. Manz, who already carries Apple's MacBook Pro and iPhone, said the iPad would be ideal for note-taking.

"Opening a laptop is sometimes impersonal because the monitor is between us, and the iPhone is too little to really honestly type," Manz said.

James Stuart trekked to Seattle from Canada, where, like Australia, the iPad won't be on sale for another month - too long, in his mind.

"It's like a gorgeous woman - you just want to touch it," he said.

In San Francisco, tattoo artist Max Ackermann is convinced the iPad will "define a giant change in how we perceive computers in general."

Exactly how, Ackermann isn't sure. He and others admit their belief in the iPad grows out of an unwavering devotion to Apple and its products.

Standing outside an Apple store in Arlington, Va., Saturday, was John Kay, a 27-year-old employee of AT&T. He would pay for just about anything Apple made and said, "If they came out with a $US1000 microwave, I'd buy the microwave."

AP with Asher Moses

Source: smh.com.au

Google faces new book-scanning lawsuit

2010-04-02T08:15:00.003+11:00

April 1, 2010 - 11:14AM

French publishers will launch a second lawsuit against internet giant Google for digitally scanning their books for its vast online library, one of them said on Wednesday.

"We are taking our turn at going into battle (against Google), along with some of our fellow publishers," Antoine Gallimard, the chief executive of major French publisher Gallimard, told AFP at Paris's annual book fair.

He said that three other big French publishers Albin Michel, Flammarion and Eyrolles would join the action.

Google "has been making us promises for months... and yet continues with its illegal digitisation," without the publishers' consent and in breach of their copyright, Gallimard said.

Google France declined to comment to AFP on the case on Wednesday.

A French court in December ruled that Google had breached the copyright of three publishers owned by the La Martiniere group by scanning entire books or excerpts and putting them online.

It ordered Google to pay 300,000 euros ($442,000) in damages to the publishers and to stop digitising French books without publishers' approval. Google has appealed the decision.

Opponents of Google's scanning activities have also brought a challenge in a US court against its book-scanning agreement with US authors and publishers.

In France, digitisation has become bound up with the sensitive issue of protecting French cultural and intellectual property in recent months.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced a major government plan to scan the country's national treasures and vowed to protect French heritage at a time of suspicions over Google's digitisation drive.

Google said this month that it had reached agreement with the Italian culture ministry to scan up to a million books housed in the national libraries of Rome and Florence.

AFP

Source: smh.com.au

Brandkarma

2010-03-27T07:37:00.004+11:00

Brands on notice as rating website launches
JULIAN LEE
March 26, 2010 - 10:04AM

The wisdom of the crowds as well as its collective buying power is being harnessed to reward companies that treat the planet and workers well and punish those that don't. A web-based service created by an Australian launches this week to enable shoppers to vote on which companies treat their staff, customers, suppliers, investors and the environment the best.

Thought to be the first of its kind the service invites users to comment and rate a company based on up-to-the-minute information it publishes about the world's top 300 brands.

By aggregting the individual opinions of thousands of users 'the crowd' determines how good or bad a company is. High-scoring companies are likely to attract more custom from communities of concerned shoppers, while lower-scoring one will be encouraged to do better.

Brandkarma founder Craig Davis said it adds "another voice in the room" to balance those of NGOs, corporations and governments in the debate around sustainability.

"The question around the choices that we make is becoming more significant. People exercise those choices - in effect their vote - every time they buy something," said Mr Davis, whose day job is chief creative officer at Sydney advertising agency Publicis Mojo.

After more than 20 years of creating ads for global companies such as Nestle, Shell, Unilever and Ford, Mr Davis said he asked himself the question: "What kind of world do you want to live in - and leave to your kids." The answer is a service that borrows social networking tools to create a Facebook of brands that claims its mission is to "help people help each other make better brand choices and encourage companies to be good to all their stakeholders".

A brand's overall performance is easured by its appearance on the website – red is bad while green is good – and by its overall score that can allow comparisons to be made with competitors. He said he was not worried about companies that were receiving poor ratings rorting the system as they "would eventually be found out". He would make money out of selling the insights gleaned from the data back to companies to "make better brands" but would not divulge any personal information of users. Experts in the field of ethical or consumer activism welcomed the idea. Oliver Wagg, the managing editor of Ethical Investor magazine, said that Australian consumers who were interested in shopping sustainably had few places to turn to for information.

"An increasing number of directories and websites are emerging to help consumers make the right decision about 'green' products and services. But these sources generally point consumers to products and services that brand themselves as 'green', leaving them to carry out their own verification and of course open to false advertising, or 'greenwashing'," he said.

Although Brandkarma is thought to be the first service of its kind in the world, consumer activism in generally has already taken root.

A US-based service called Carrotmob is gaining traction with its co-ordinated grassroots efforts that leverage consumer power.

In October its Australian debut attracted 200 people who shopped exclusively at a Surry Hills supermarket that had pledged 20 per cent of its sales to go towards the "greening" of the store. More such events are planned.

Source: smh.com.au

YouTube becomes a TV Station

2010-03-12T12:55:00.002+11:00

YouTube becomes a TV station tomorrow
JULIAN LEE
March 12, 2010 - 12:02PM

YouTube's first major move away from being a video-sharing site and towards an online TV destination begins early tomorrow morning when it begins streaming free live Indian Premier Cricket League matches.

The Google-owned YouTube yesterday unveiled eight sponsors, half of which are global brand names. HSBC, Hewlett Packard, Coca Cola, Samsung, Indian mobile phone company, Airtel, Honda motorcycles, an Indian university, and one of the teams, the Bangalore-based Royal Challenger team were named as sponsors of the initial 56 matches of this season.

YouTube does not disclose the dollar size of the sponsorship packages but interviews with executives have indicated that because this initiative is a new one they are not asking advertisers to pay over the odds.

At least 32, 30-second ads will appear during the play in each match watched live or on demand later.

The cricket deal is part of YouTube's ambition to become a destination for internet users as a place not just to upload content but watch it, in the form of movies, sport and concerts, said Leigh Terry managing partner of media buyers OMD.

"Rather than just going to YouTube and searching for a video they hope to become a destination much like a portal where people can go for a variety of content, not just sports," he said

"I have a feeling that this is just going to be the first [of others] to come."

Mr Terry said that while YouTube's success at attracting audiences was not in doubt - an estimated 36 million videos are watched by Australians each month - it had struggled to gain advertising dollars. "The audience hasn't been the problem, it's the quality and the exclusivity of the content," he said, adding that initiatives such as this addressed that.

Source: smh.com.au

Internet access seen as a right:

2010-03-10T08:27:00.001+11:00

Internet access seen as a right: poll
March 9, 2010 - 11:20AM

More than three-quarters of people across the world believe access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll carried out for the BBC indicates.

The poll, which questioned more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries, suggested strong support globally for access to the web.

The findings released on Monday come as efforts are stepped up across the world to increase net access, with the United Nations leading a push for more people to be given the opportunity to get online.

Countries including Finland and Estonia have already ruled it is a human right, said the BBC.

"The right to communicate cannot be ignored," Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, told the broadcaster.

"The internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created."

Almost 79 per cent of those questioned said they strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the description of the internet as a "fundamental right of all people." This included people who had access and those who did not.

A total of 87 per cent of internet users questioned in the poll, carried out by GlobeScan for the BBC, felt access should be a right, while more than 70 per cent of non-users agreed with this view.

Mexico, Brazil and Turkey were among countries where support was highest, according to the survey.

The findings also suggested people in a diverse range of countries felt the web was a vital part of their lives. Three-quarters in Japan, Mexico and Russia said they could not cope without it.

South Korea, where nearly all citizens enjoy high-speed net access, had the greatest majority of people - 96 per cent - who believed access was a fundamental right.

The US Treasury Department on Monday eased sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Sudan to allow exports by US companies of services related to web browsing, blogging, email, instant messaging, chat, social networking and photo- and movie-sharing.

"We're supporting the right of free expression," US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday

The decision to allow exports of web tools to Iran was intended to allow Iranians to "communicate without being blocked by their own government", she explained.

AFP

Source: smh.com.au

botnet

2010-03-05T07:50:00.003+11:00

Spanish botnet could have paralysed an 'entire country'
March 4, 2010 - 10:33AM

Spanish criminals who stole bank details from computers around the world did not realise the power of the illegal network they had created which could have paralysed an entire country's computer systems, police said.

Police gave a news conference on Wednesday, a day after they arrested three people for what they believe to have been one of the biggest computer crimes ever detected.

They declined to identify the men, aged between 25 and 31, from small Spanish towns, whom they suspect of infecting more than 13 million computers with spyware.

Police believe the men were not expert hackers and bought their virus program on the black market before using it to take over other people's computers in order to create a "botnet," a network of enslaved computers.

"Fortunately this botnet of 13 million computers was controlled by someone who hadn't realised how powerful it was," Juan Salon, the head of the cybercrime unit of Spain's Civil Guard Police, told a news conference.

The network would have had much more computing power than the one used in a notorious "cyber-attack" on Estonia, police said, adding that it could in theory have been used for a similar assault on a nation's vital computer infrastructure.

Estonia accused Russia of being behind the 2007 attack, which swamped websites belonging to many of the country's institutions, putting them out of action. "Thank God, their criminal mentality wasn't very sophisticated," said Salon, who said the men apparently tried to offer their botnet to criminal gangs for hire, but do not seem to have made huge profits although they made a comfortable living.

The criminals used the virus to infect machines - initially exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser - which then allowed them to record key strokes and login credentials. This botnet was known as "Mariposa" - the Spanish word for butterfly.

The leader of the gang was caught with personal details of 800,000 people, said the Civil Guard. Government institutions and companies had also been affected, it said, although it declined to give more details.
The Age, 5th March 2010

new home 4 webwilly

2010-02-26T09:14:00.003+11:00

Is this the new home for webwilly or an alternative Holdfast Bay instead of Hobsons Bay ?

Billy Joel - a touch of history

2010-02-17T09:05:00.001+11:00

clik on

Billy Joel

to view

Facebook for who?

2010-02-14T13:35:00.002+11:00

AS YOUNGER generation Y users are turning away from Facebook, their grandparents are filling their places on the social networking site.

Computer users aged 55 and over are the fastest growing group to sign up to sites such as Facebook and MySpace, often using them to keep up to date with the lives of family and friends, especially grandchildren interstate and overseas - assuming they aren't among the growing number of younger users abandoning the social networking sites.

Figures show that the number of older users of Facebook increased nearly tenfold in America last year, while university-age users declined by 55 per cent.

Australian figures show that about one in five over the age of 55 is connecting through Facebook, with 550,000 logging in. Facebook claims to have more than 7 million users.

Social network strategist Laurel Papworth said Australia's take-up rate was generally about 2 to 3 per cent higher than the US for computer use.

The online community has responded by creating groups such as ''My grandma is on Facebook'', ''My granny is on Facebook and I love it!'' and ''Proud Nannas, Grandmas, Pas and Grandpas on Facebook''.

''Senior citizens are time rich and want to go where their grandchildren will go,'' Ms Papworth said.

Deakin University marketing and consumer behaviour specialist Associate Professor David Bednall said the 55-plus generation had used computers in the workplace and many now had the time to devote to social networking sites. He said the increase in usage came off a low base.

''If they have the mechanism and, particularly, if they have the time to do it, they are now learning what all the fuss is about … it's a catch-up,'' Professor Bednall said.

He said older users accessed social networking sites for the information they wanted and then logged off, whereas younger users tended to use the sites for long periods.

''[Older people] are not doing it for the sake of it; they might find somebody, or get in contact with someone but it is more purposeful rather than just enjoying the dialogue,'' he said.

Children's author Goldie Alexander used Facebook recently to advertise her latest book, Hedgeburners.

She became a Facebook user three years ago to keep in touch with her grandchildren but found it had its limits. She now has 41 Facebook friends but uses it only ''spasmodically''. ''It is mostly only when people contact me because I never remember the password,'' Alexander said.

''Mostly it is for the grandchildren and when other writers contact me, although I have convinced one grandchild to email me instead.''

Alexander, who says she is well into the 55-plus age bracket, is an avid user of other technologies such as Skype and YouTube.

''I think every generation has their own way of communicating. This generation is partnering later, and I think it keeps them from being lonely, so they spend more time on it than the older generation,'' she said.

But some older users have a harder time adapting to the social networking world, said Ms Papworth. ''All the [senior citizens] I have come across start off really nervous, but they get more confidence.''

Ms Papworth said the concept of the Facebook ''friend'' puzzled some. ''Some people would come to me saying, 'I don't understand why people I don't know want to be my friend; isn't that rude if I say no?'.''

Strange weather we are having or not!

2010-02-13T11:40:00.002+11:00

SEASONAL CALENDARS FOR THE MELBOURNE AREA

Compiled by Dr. Beth Gott of the School of Biological Sciences, Monash University.

All over Australia, Aborigines had their own local yearly calendars. Just as the climate in Kakadu is very different from that of Melbourne, so the Wurundjeri had their own way of marking the changing seasons. The division of the year into four seasons comes from Northern Europe, and does not fit Melbourne. We still think of winter as an unfavourable season for plants, when northern European trees drop their leaves and become dormant, but for our native plants, especially the small tuberous herbs, winter is a season of growth. At this time the bush is green, and the temperatures are rarely low enough to stop growth. The unfavourable season is high summer, when water is scarce, and much of the ground flora becomes brown and dies off. Water-plants such as Cumbungi are usually green during the summer, they die off during the winter.

Alan Reid originally suggested a calendar for the Middle Yarra region which has six seasons. Autumn, Winter, Pre-spring, True Spring, Early Summer and Late Summer. Glen Jameson (Victorian Naturalist 1996, Vol. 1 13 pp.26,67,123,269,313. 1997, Vol. 1 14, p.4S.) has modified this to: Late Summer, Early Winter, Deep Winter, Early Spring, True Spring, and High Summer, and has given lists of many plants and animals to be found in each of these seasons. Alan Reid agrees with Jameson, but emphasises that the seasons vary from place to place - for example the coastal seasons of the Bunwurrung would have been different.

Jones, Mackay and Pisani, from the University of Adelaide (Jones, D., Mackay, S. & Pisani, A. 1997 Patterns in the Valley of the Christmas Bush: a seasonal calendar for the upper Yarra Valley. Victorian Naturalist 114(5):246-249.) have proposed a seven season calendar.

This has Kangaroo Apple Season (December), Dry Season (Jan-Feb), Eel Season (March), Wombat Season (April-August), Orchid Season (September), Tadpole Season (October), Grass-flowering Season (November). The Museum of Victoria has chosen to follow this pattern in its displays in Melbourne and at Coranderrk. The Museum have named the seasons after the Woiwurrung language names for eels, wombats, and orchid, tadpoles and grass, but it is not known if these names were used by the Woiwurrung.

All the above are attempts to find the natural seasonal divisions of the area based on modern observations. Although William Thomas gave some seasonal happenings, that also did not represent the Aboriginal view. In the seasonal descriptions which follow we have combined elements of Jameson and Thomas, and have tried to include the activities of the people.

Lifestyle depended very much on the rhythm of the seasons. People moved over their extensive territories in regular cycles, maximising the availability of food and shelter. When food was plentiful there were opportunities to carry out ritual responsibilities and opportunities for ceremonial gatherings.

They were always mindful of the seasons in selecting the localities in which to spend their time, taking into account not only the natural features of the ground, but the facilities for obtaining food.

Much was known about the stars and the seasons. People could read the sky. For example, they would know that when a particular constellation appeared it was time to hunt a particular animal, or dig up a particular plant. See Thomas v.21, p98 "they are great observers of the starry heavens" for details. The flowering of particular plants was often used to mark seasonal events. Even today, fisherman use the flowering of the Coast Tea-tree in early November to mark the entry of Snapper into Port Phillip Bay.

We will start our survey in March, because this marked the end of the dry summer.

Late Summer, February - Mid March.
After the dry hot summer, the Autumn rains arrived and the days became cooler. People started burning those parts of the land where the scrub or tussock grass had become too dense during the summer, but they were advised by their elders where and when to burn, taking the weather into account so that the fires did not spread too far. It was important to clear the undergrowth and provide fertilising ash so that the small tuberous food plants could grow well after the rains came in March. Burning also made it easier to catch animals. Plants which had suffered from lack of water during the summer were now able to renew growth. DJAAK, Wattle gum wattle gum, was plentiful, and in the middle of this month the WARRAK Banksia or Honeysuckle, Long-leaf Box and Silver-leaf Stringybark came into blossom, providing sweet nectar, and attracting birds. March has been called the Eel Season, Eel because the female Short-finned eels were moving down the streams to the sea; the male eels had been leaving in smaller numbers during the spring and summer. These were an important food, and among the vegetables there were the starchy roots of the water plants, which began to die down after their summer growth. Some late summer fruits such as mistletoe berries were also available. Birds started to flock before heading north for the winter, to be replaced by other birds which will soon start to arrive from Tasmania.

Early Winter, April & May.
All sorts of fungi appeared with the rains, while the ground was still warm. BUNJIL, the Eagle, was building his nest, and the Brush-tail and Ringtail Possums were mating. Bolin Bolin billabong started to fill. Many different moths emerged, and were food for birds during the day and for Sugar and Feathertail gliders at night. Eastern Grey Kangaroos and Wallabies fed on the new growth.

Deep Winter- June, mid July
This cold time of the year slowed down but did not stop plant growth. Animals such as Echidnas were breeding, birds nesting. The flats near the rivers and creeks were often flooded; and the low lands generally were wet and cold, and unsuitable for camping, so people moved to the best sheltered spots on the uplands, where they were able to catch koalas, possums, and wombats, and to find grubs in the trees The leaves of the water plants had become dry and brown, but the small tuberous herbs were green and growing; the roots of both were good food. Fragrant nectar came from BURGILBURGIL, Honey-pots, Acrotriche serrulata, a small shrub which hid its flowers close to the ground. BULAIT- Cherry Ballart formed fruit. People constructed good bark WILLAMS (shelters) and kept fires burning for warmth. They wrapped themselves in rugs made from possum skins.

Early Spring - Mid July, August
As early as mid-July, MUYAN, Silver Wattle, started to flower, the first of the wattles to do so. It earned the name of 'Barak's Wattle' because when he died at Coranderrk on August 15th 1903, MUYAN was in full golden bloom. Yellow Box also flowered, providing much nectar. Early Nancy was the first of the small food plants to flower, and by late August the MURNONG was budding.Pacific Black Duck People moved slowly towards the lower lands as the spring temperatures rose, there they were able to snare ducks, to catch other kinds of wild-fowl, and, as the season advanced, to get eggs from the nests of all kinds of birds.

True Spring- September, October.
This was a time of plenty. Lilies, Orchids and MURNONG floweredmurnong, and still provided root vegetables. Greens were consumed in large quantities. Flowers were everywhere -Wattles, Hop Goodenia, Burgan, Kangaroo Apple, as well as orchids and small lilies which had been building their tubers over the winter. Snakes and Lizards became active, young Kangaroos came out of the pouch. Migrant birds - the Sacred Kingfisher for example, returned from the north. Tadpoles appeared in ponds, and the river, fed by melting snows from the mountains, flowed into the flood-plains and replenished the billabongs. Water-plants put on green leaves. Nowadays this flooding is prevented.

High Summer November, December, January
WARRA WARRAP/GARRONG, late Black Wattle, with pale yellow blossoms, flowered in November. As the summer advanced, the land began to dry, and people congregated around the reliable water-sources, the creeks, rivers and billabongs. Fish was an important food - Galaxias moved up the river from the sea. Where rocky falls blocked the river, as in the Prince's Bridge area and at Dight's Fails, fish would accumulate in large numbers, and could be easily taken. Eels started to come downriver. Fish traps were set. Water sources were important for the wildlife, so large animals such as Kangaroos and Emus would come to drink and could be caught. Lizards and snakes were active. Grasses flowered - Kangaroo Grass, Wallaby Grass, Spear Grass, Tussock Grass and the Common Reed. Fruits ripened -, MORR - Currant-bush, GARRAWANG - Apple-berry, White Elderberry, Kangaroo Apples and sweet LAAP - Manna, could be collected beneath the WURUN - Manna Gums The small tuberous plants died back, but the women still knew where they could dig for their roots, which at this time were at their best. . When people went up into the mountain gullies to get firedrills, they ate the pith from the centre of the treeferns. In the warm weather, big shelters were not needed unless it rained.

As food was plentiful, large gatherings of the tribes and clans took place. With permission from Bunurong clans, people went to the sea-coast to swim and gather shellfish and the fruits of Pigface and Coast Beard-heath. Flounder and Flathead could be speared or netted in the shallows, and shellfish were gathered.

The Dandenong Ranges were the hunting grounds for both the Bunurong (Western Port tribe) whose land lay to the south, and the Wurundjeri (Yarra Yarra) tribe whose land lay to the north and west. When the first pastoralists came: Blacks from the Western Port and Yarra Yarra tribes were frequently seen during the summer months, hunting in the forest for wallaby, possum and koalas.
Our knowledge of pre-European life in Victoria is fragmentary and sometimes confusing. Below is listed some of the names of Aboriginal seasons as recorded by three writers working separately during the nineteenth century.
Season Thomas
(Wurundjeri) McCrae
(Bunurong) Blake
(Wurundjeri)
Winter Per-ring-nger-wein, Perrin
(perein = no more sun)
Moode-bo-ram Perrin Birrin
birrin
(mudangan,
wudawiin = cold weather)
Spring Moo-de-e-ram Pareip Pareip
Summer 1 Nerrem-nre-wein
Nerrim-ngerwein
Nger-wein = sun) Bullarto n'yoweenth
(plenty sun) Pareip
Summer 2 -Wygabil-ny-ewin
(Old Man sun)
Autumn Berrip Manemit (?good) birrin

from the Herring Island website

the touchscreen coffee table

2010-02-09T15:12:00.001+11:00

Microsoft Surface brings Minority Report to life
ASHER MOSES
February 9, 2010 - 2:02PM

Microsoft launches the Surface, a multi-user, multi-touch coffee table computer.

Microsoft Australia today began selling its $21,000 Surface touchscreen coffee table computer, which responds to natural hand gestures and real-world objects and will soon be deployed in stores across the country.

The computers, which feature a 30-inch multi-touch touchscreen panel, are controlled by hand gestures like the iPhone and the technology found in the science fiction movie Minority Report.

ANZ, Curtin University and Lonely Planet have already signed up to deploy the technology and Microsoft expects thousands to be adopted by the retail, hospitality, education, automotive and financial services industries by year's end.
Microsoft developer evangelist Michael Kordahi demonstrates Surface's multi-touch capabilities. Click for more photos

Microsoft developer evangelist Michael Kordahi demonstrates Surface's multi-touch capabilities. Photo: Adam Hollingworth

* Microsoft developer evangelist Michael Kordahi demonstrates Surface's multi-touch capabilities.
* Microsoft claims Surface makes computing more social.
* Lonely Planet's Surface app.
* The Make Words spelling game designed for primary school kids.
* In bars, Surface can be used to flirt with people sitting at other tables.
* A Tennis game for Surface developed by ANZ for attendees of the Australian Open.
* AT&T has rolled out Surface machines in stores across the US.
* Tech specs available at the customer's fingertips inside an AT&T store.
* Photos can be manipulated and shared using iPhone-like multi-touch gestures.
* Some hotels and restaurants are using Surface as a digital menu.
* The maps application on Surface.
* Move over jukebox...
* Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division.

Developer nSquared, which has been designing Surface apps for the education industry, believes Surface will soon replace digital whiteboards in classrooms.

First unveiled in 2008, the machines have already been introduced into 19 markets around the world.

Some US restaurants and hotels - such as the Sheraton, Starwood and Harrah's chains - let customers order food directly, book entertainment and play music and games using the table.

Surface computers can also interact with non-digital objects placed on top of them, including digital cameras, mobile phones and business cards. For instance, photos could be sucked out of a camera, manipulated on the screen using touch and then shared over email.

In AT&T stores in the US, customers can compare mobile features and plans by placing handsets on the Surface screen.

"The goal here is to make the technology so natural that you don't even notice it," said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division worldwide.

"It takes the digital world and analogue world and sort of merges them - you don't need a mouse, you don't need a keyboard; it's touch but it's touch at a whole new level."

An expensive proposition

The machines, which are sold directly to businesses by Microsoft, will initially cost $21,000 for the commercial model and $24,500 for the developer model.

Although the official launch was today, Microsoft has shown off Surface in Australia before, with Lonely Planet announcing last year that it would have the tables in its new Sydney Airport store.

However, this failed to materialise as Microsoft was unable to supply the company with a Surface computer. Today, Microsoft said supply was no longer an issue.

At the recent Australian Open in Melbourne, ANZ allowed punters to play games against each other on two Surface machines. It plans to use the computers for financial planning in its branches.

"This is a consumer technology but we're actually selling it through businesses and they're creating the services and applications that people are using on top of it," Bach said.

"It's about providing this magical wow experience that opens people up to a new way of interacting with technology that they've never experienced before."

Making computing more social

Michael Kordahi, developer evangelist at Microsoft Australia, said the Surface machine's 50 touch points made it a social device that multiple people could interact with at once.

He showed off several apps including a wine bar app that allows customers to flick though various wine choices in a natural way before placing an order. When the wine glass arrives and is placed on the tablet, the screen pulls up various information including suggestions on food that goes with that particular wine and details of the region the wine comes from.

Lonely Planet plans to use the technology in stores to allow customers to plan trips using the company's guide books.

Placing a cardboard "passport" on to the table enables users to drag videos, information and photos about their destination on to the passport, which can then be accessed later on a computer or mobile phone.

Curtin University is adopting Surface to explore new ways of having students engage and collaborate with each other. The university will be working with partners to develop Surface applications that can be used across all departments.

"We have a really strong focus on the concept of what is a next generation learning space ... we see the Surface as an enabling technology that will be quite pivotal for what universities and classrooms are all about - learning and enrichment," said Kim Wisniewski, senior systems engineer at Curtin University's future technology group.

Iain McDonald, managing director of digital marketing company Amnesia, says his was the first Australian organisation to receive Surface computers to experiment with. Amnesia business cards can be placed on the table, which then displays the person's social networking site content and other details.

"When you see people get around the table and touch it for the first time it's a very different experience. The object recognition is really something that nothing else offers on the market ... we've developed things like a car configurator for Audi where you play with elements of the car on the table," he said.

Significant developer support

There are already 250 partners worldwide creating apps for Surface, including four in Australia.

Object Consulting developed ANZ's app, while nSquared is one of Australia's largest Surface developers and has been working on apps for primary schools, high schools and universities.

Today, it showed off the Make Words app, a competitive game for primary school students.

"The only thing that limits the Surface unit is people's imaginations, so we could design and work with an entire curriculum that's in schools at the moment covering maths, geography, English," said Shirralee Willis, business development manager at nSquared.

Willis acknowledged that funding may be an issue for some schools but said she expected the first units to arrive in classrooms within the next few months.

At some Starwood and Sheraton hotels in the US, customers can pay for items by dropping a credit card on to the touchscreen, while those visiting stores of US telco AT&T can compare phone features and plans by placing two different phones on the table.

Casino giant Harrah's has introduced Surface computers at the Rio, which let patrons order drinks, make dinner reservations, book shows, watch YouTube videos, play touchscreen games and even flirt with people sitting at other tables.

At some hotels and restaurants, bills can be split by placing two cards on the table and dragging menu items onto the respective cards.

Music dowloading copyright issues

2010-02-05T08:13:00.001+11:00

Net piracy fight takes body blow
ASHER MOSES
February 5, 2010

HOLLYWOOD studios and record labels are being forced to go back to the drawing board to come up with a new way of combating online piracy after the Federal Court ruled that internet service providers are not required to police copyright infringement on their networks.

The music industry says it may have no choice but to sue individuals for illegal file sharing unless the federal government intervenes with a solution to its piracy woes.

All the major film studios sued iiNet in an effort to force the internet service provider to warn and even disconnect customers who repeatedly download movies illegally.

It was the first case of its kind in the world and the first time an Australian trial had been covered live on Twitter.

In a landmark judgment handed down yesterday morning, Justice Dennis Cowdroy rejected the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft's claim that iiNet ''authorised'' its customers' copyright infringement by failing to act on thousands of infringement notices sent to it by AFACT.

Justice Cowdroy found iiNet had done no more than provide an internet service to its users. He said iiNet did not have control over its customers' use of the BitTorrentfile-sharing software, which customers used to infringe the studios' copyright.

He said: ''iiNet is not responsible if an iiNet user uses that system to bring about copyright infringement … the law recognises no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another.''

Tony Joyner, a partner in the technology and IT group at law firm Freehills, said he was particularly interested in the government's response because the online piracy issues raised by the studios at the trial remained a ''very big and real problem''.

''Everything iiNet says is rational,'' he said. ''They're saying we're just a simple conduit and if people are doing bad things it's not up to us to be the police. The studios are also being very rational and saying it's happening on your turf, so we need you to do something.''

The case, while brought by the film studios, also has a big impact on the music industry, which was hoping for a precedent it could use to force ISPs to co-operate on reducing online piracy. Sabiene Heindl, general manager of the music industry's anti-piracy arm, Music Industry Piracy Investigations, said: ''Today's Federal Court decision suggests that copyright owners broadly may have no choice but to sue individuals for illegal file-sharing. This would be a most unfortunate outcome.''

AFACT executive director Neil Gane said he had 21 days to decide whether to appeal. The studios would now increase their lobbying of the government to change the law to force ISPs to be liable for the downloading habits of customers.

''We are confident that the government will not support a policy outcome which allows for the copyright infringement to continue unabated,'' he said.

Freehills' Mr Joyner said: ''I think the only way there won't be a legislative response is if … an appeal will occur and has some chance of succeeding relatively quickly.''

In July last year, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said he was awaiting the outcome of the iiNet case before deciding whether there was a need for legislative change. Yesterday, his spokeswoman said the government would examine the decision before making any further comment.

Senator Conroy had appeared to be on the side of the studios, saying at a conference in April last year that iiNet's defence in the case ''belongs in a Yes Minister episode''.

Google tablet

2010-02-03T15:04:00.002+11:00

Google tablet to give Apple a touch of its own medicine
ASHER MOSES
February 3, 2010 - 12:15PM

Google's design for a new tablet computer is based on its Chrome operating system and would directly rival the iPad.

Google is trying to one-up Apple, showing off designs for a new tablet computer based on its Chrome operating system that would be a direct rival to the iPad.

Just weeks after launching its own iPhone competitor in the US, the Nexus One, Google might soon extend its competition with Apple further as it seeks to push its search and other products on to as many devices as possible.

Google's user interface designer, Glen Murphy, published mock-ups of a Google tablet on the search giant's Chromium.org website, along with a video of how users would interact with the device.
Google's mockup designs for a Chrome OS-powered tablet computer. Click for more photos

Late last year Google announced Chrome OS, an operating system predominantly for small netbooks that would be based around the web browser, providing quick boot times and easy access to Google's array of online services.

The first Chrome OS netbooks are due to arrive this year, but Google is now considering extending the platform to other devices including tablets, desktops and even big screen TVs.

Chrome OS is a separate project to Google's Android platform for smartphones.

Google's tablet video shows the user interacting with the multi-touch touchscreen in a similar way to the iPad, using similar gestures to resize and interact with windows and launch applications. The device would include a five- to 10-inch screen and an on-screen keyboard.

On his blog, Murphy published an image showing the full range of hand gestures that would be supported by the tablet.

Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt was on the board of Apple until August last year, when he resigned citing a conflict of interest over its Android phone platform and Chrome OS.

Now, the companies are increasingly at each other's throats.

Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs reportedly told staff at a recent "Town Hall" meeting that Google was the one that began competing with Apple by entering the phone industry, labelling the company's "Don't be evil" corporate mantra "a load of crap".

Earlier, Google released an unofficial, browser-based version of its Google Voice app for the iPhone, which allows users to make cheap mobile calls using the internet. This effectively bypassed Apple, which had previously declined to allow Google Voice to be included in its App Store.

Microsoft has unsuccessfully tried to push tablet computers for the past decade, to no avail, perhaps because its designs were bulky and resembled regular laptops. The main difference was that the screens were touch-sensitive and could swivel to lie flat in a slate format.

But Microsoft also sees potential in the new iPad-style, multi-touch tablets, with some gadget sites late last year publishing images of a Microsoft "Courier" prototype. The images suggested it would include two touch screens that face each other in a book format.

Other manufacturers - including HP, Lenovo and Dell - are planning to launch tablet computers based on the Windows 7, Linux and Google Android operating systems.

TechCrunch reported today that, according to anonymous sources, Apple is working on a larger version of the iPad that would function more like a Mac than an iPhone.

Gartner analyst Robin Simpson said other companies including Google would have trouble competing with Apple's iPad because Apple had already developed a strong ecosystem around its products, allowing users to buy content from iTunes with one click.

"You can make great hardware, you can have a fantastic, easy-to-use operating system, but to make it commercially successful I think you need an ecosystem that encourages lots and lots of independent third party development and makes it really easy for users to discover content and buy content," Simpson said in a phone interview.

"It's easy to do hardware, it's really hard to create an ecosystem and Apple's got a head-start on everybody because they've been doing this for four to five years, based around iTunes."

Google would not say when or if it would start selling a tablet, saying, "Chrome OS is still in development and we are constantly experimenting with various user interfaces to determine what designs would produce the best user experience."

The tablet models would compete heavily with netbooks, which are small, lightweight laptops designed for accessing the web, editing documents or working on email while on the go.

To differentiate netbooks from the tablet competitors, PC makers are adding significantly more grunt to their netbook offerings, to such an extent that it's difficult to describe them as netbooks.

Dell today launched its Alienware M11x, which is an ultra-portable laptop with an 11-inch screen but includes a top-of-the-line graphics chip and processor. Dell described the machine as "the fastest sub-12 inch laptop in the universe".

Source: smh.com.au

Controversial or not?!

2010-02-03T07:20:00.001+11:00

Wikileaks shuts down, unable to plug funding gap
ASHER MOSES
February 2, 2010 - 12:08PM

Comments 6
Shining a light in murky places ... Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Shining a light in murky places ... Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Photo: Esther Dyson / Flickr

The anonymous whistleblower website Wikileaks, which has been a thorn in the side of governments and big business for three years, has shut down temporarily because it has run out of money.

The document repository, founded by an Australian living in East Africa, has been the catalyst for countless front-page stories around the world.

It has exposed serious business and political corruption and sparked a political scandal in Australia when it published the federal government's secret blacklist of banned websites.

In a message posted on the site, founder Julian Assange appealed for donations from the public, saying he had received hundreds of thousands of pages relating to "corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others" but did not have the resources to release them.

The site, which claims to be non-profit and does not accept donations from governments or corporations, costs about $US600,000 ($678,000) a year to run, including staff.

But so far only $US130,000 has been raised for this year.

"Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another 10,000 hands and $1000, a million," Assange wrote.

Wikileaks has an impressive track record of exposing corruption, revealing public interest information and keeping organisations honest.

It has published millions of documents and, says the BBC, has fought off more than 100 legal challenges and won awards from the Economist and Amnesty International.

"One of the reasons why Wikileaks is so useful is that it's able to put original documents up - unfiltered by comment and editorial," Julian Petley, chairman of the British Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, said.

In Australia, it caused a major stir in March last year when it published the Australian Communications and Media Authority's blacklist of websites that would be banned under the federal government's internet filtering policy.

The leak confirmed that the blacklist targeted not just nasty sites but a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even that of a Queensland dentist.

Soon after its launch, in August 2007, a document obtained by Wikileaks was used as the primary source for a front-page story in The Guardian about corruption surrounding former Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi.

The site was taken offline in early 2008 after Swiss bank Julius Baer launched legal action to prevent the spread of documents alleging tax and money laundering schemes involving Cayman Islands accounts. The bank dropped the case within a month after a significant public outcry.

Wikileaks was the subject of another injunction late last year when it published a controversial report implicating commodities giant Trafigura in a toxic chemical dumping incident in the Ivory Coast.

It has also published the US Army's operations manual for the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, leaked emails from former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's private Yahoo email account, high-level Scientology documents and the membership list for the far-right British National Party.

In September last year, Wikileaks posted email correspondence between scientists in the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, which was seized on by climate sceptics around the world to suggest that the threat of climate change was being overinflated.

In November, the site released more than half a million US pager messages covering a 24-hour period on the day of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

Media organisations including The Guardian and The Spectator, which have benefited greatly from Wikileaks, have run editorials urging people to donate to the site.

A "Save Wikileaks" group on Facebook has just under 1300 members.

Source: smh.com.au

Holiday over- Apple r @ it again

2010-01-27T15:19:00.001+11:00

Apple is set to unveil its new tablet computer, keenly watched by gadget-obsessed consumers, envious competitors and eager content partners.

The new touch-screen device will be modelled - physically and functionally - on the three-year-old iPhone.

And just like the iPhone and the iPod before it, the device will be part of an integrated ''ecosystem'' of services tipped to include functions and content for the education sector, digital books, newspapers and magazines.
The anticipated Apple tablet is said to be modelled on the iPhone.

''Met its match with a rolling pin'' ... the anticipated Apple tablet is said to be modelled on the iPhone.

The tablet, to be named the iPad, iTablet, iSlate, iCanvas or iBook, will inherit the gaming, music and video capabilities available on the iPhone and some of the newer iPods.

Michael Arrington, an influential Silicon Valley technology blogger, has quoted Apple's co-founder and chief executive, Steve Jobs, as calling the tablet ''the most important thing I've ever done''.

That has led pundits to believe Apple's announcement in San Francisco today will put emphasis on the tablet's uses in education. Apple has a long history in the education market, beginning with its earliest computers in the late 1970s. More recently the iPod Touch has been used for learning programs in schools and universities.

“The most significant thing about the announcement will not be the device itself, but the new ecosystem that Apple will announce regarding e-book and entertainment titles, especially by the major education publishers,” said Philip Cookson, a former Apple manager who now runs the Melbourne-based consultancy, Philology.

Apple has also been working with select software developers and content partners to develop a small suite of applications which will be showcased at Wednesday’s event.

One of the companies reported to be among the launch partners is the publishing house Conde Nast. The publisher of The New Yorker and Vogue has already begun selling its GQ men's magazine as a download for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The download, which sells for $3.99 in Australia, contains photographs and articles from the physical publication plus extras such as videos.

Other print content partners could include The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal - both of which have signalled that they are to lock most of their content behind a pay wall and charge readers to access their content.

News Corp’s book publishing arm, HarperCollins is another company mooted to have been talking to Apple about making its books available on the tablet.

According to the blog AppleInsider, the device looks like an iPhone that has ''met its match with a rolling pin''. As well as wireless connectivity, the tablet is almost certain to be configured to use the latest high-speed mobile networks.

Cookson, who has been closely following developments, believes that the device will come in one size, a 25-centimetre screen, and that it will cost between $US700 and $US800, depending on the options.

Wednesday’s launch is just a show and tell session. The device is not expected to go on sale until at least March.

Apple places a high premium on design and it will have almost certainly been led by Jonathon Ive, the British-born designer guru behind most of Apple’s products, including the iPod and the iPhone.

He and his boss have an aversion to buttons, cable ports and switches and the tablet is expect to boast the same svelte look and minimalism that is found in other products in Apple’s stable.

Merry Xmas & Happy New Year to All

2009-12-24T09:00:00.002+11:00

Connecting at Christmas the high-tech wayASHER MOSES
December 23, 2009 - 1:57PM

The Brisbane-based members of the Dobinson family gather for their trans-continental Christmas feast. Photo: Paul Broben

..Three generations of the Dobinson family gathered around a table for a Christmas feast this morning for the first time ever, a remarkable feat considering they were spread out across three cities around the world.

The tyranny of distance was bridged thanks to state-of-the-art video conferencing technology that has typically been the preserve of high-flying executives but will soon begin making inroads into the home.

Far removed from the traditional Skype home video conferencing experience - which is low quality and requires users to gather around a tiny computer screen - the Cisco TelePresence system uses large screens and high-definition (HD) cameras to create the impression that all participants are sitting in the same room together.

The Dobinson family, based in Sydney, Brisbane and the US, won Cisco's "Christmas Connections" competition, which asked families to submit their stories for the chance to connect using TelePresence.

The three eldest sisters - Claire (83), Athlone (80) and Sonia (73) - have been separated since just after World War II, when Claire emigrated to the US.

The younger sisters have only seen Claire twice in the intervening years and with their health in decline, an in-person Christmas reunion would have been all but impossible.

But this morning, about 20 family members in Sydney, Brisbane and the US city Herndon, which is just outside Washington D.C., gathered virtually around the same table for a Christmas feast that none of them will forget in a hurry.

"You can talk on email and you can talk on the phone but to actually see people and interact immediately was the most special bit," said Danelle Dobinson, 56, who is Athlone's daughter.

"It was quite funny because it was just like a crazy Christmas dinner anyway, with everyone talking over the top of everybody else and vying for attention and trying to get their message out.

"We had to call for order at one stage."

The event was bitter sweet for the family because it may be the last time they see Claire, who is seriously ill.

"It was especially hard because we weren't sure how she [Claire] would be health-wise and as it turned out she couldn't talk to us and was sleeping most of the time, but we did get to see her," Danelle said.

Cisco TelePresence systems cost between $20,000 and several hundred thousand dollars a piece, far out of reach for most punters. They have been adopted by over 350 organisations around the globe, including ANZ, Telstra and the Federal Government in Australia.

But Peter Hughes, the general manager of Cisco's collaboration business, said versions for the consumer market would be launched within around a year.

"Between Sydney and London or Sydney and New York there is no perceived delay or latency on the call at all," he said.

Already, companies including Microsoft and Logitech sell consumer webcams that attach to PCs and are capable of delivering HD audio and video.

But Hughes said Cisco's systems would be designed to connect up to the big screen TVs in living rooms.

He said consumers were now recording a lot of their video memories in HD using the latest gadgets, and would soon expect to get the same experience from real-time online chat.

"We believe that video is going to really, truly scale human interaction and the capabilities that we have with the technology today mean that it's as good as being there," he said.

Source: smh.com.au

Webwilly and Astrok link

2009-12-03T08:30:00.001+11:00

Hi all

this could be a final sign off for webwilly although I have linked it through with astok in hope that once my hbl email is dicontinued I can blog on time will tell.

Im off to WebBrighton maybe a new blog here?!

Anyway thanks to any and all who have visited this blog in the past

Worth a read

2009-11-26T09:45:00.001+11:00

Building the home theatre of your dreams
ROD EASDOWN
November 25, 2009

Setting up the home theatre of your dreams takes time, money and patience but you'll never regret it.

My mate Neil began lusting after a plasma screen as soon as he heard about them 10 years ago. The stumbling block was always his wife, who couldn't see the point of spending all that money on a big screen when they already had a perfectly good television.

Through the years the prices of plasmas plummeted but Neil's requests to buy one were always met with his wife's standard rebuttal: they're too expensive.

Then, on a one-week visit to New Zealand, Neil happened to buy the right lotto ticket and came home $NZ200,000 ($160,400) richer. The first thing he did was throw away his return ticket on Jetstar to get a "proper" airline seat and the second was buy a plasma. His wife's standard objection was suddenly as empty as the old TV cabinet.

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Screen size - how big is big enough?
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The install - stuff you need to know
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Four days after it was installed I rang her to ask what she thought. "You can't drag me away from it," she said. "It's wonderful, simply wonderful."

Now this is not a one-off story. I know this because the same thing happened at our place. My partner couldn't see any point in cluttering up the wall with a big plasma when we had a perfectly good, if rather dated, 68-centimetre Sony. Right up until Pioneer lent me a road-test unit for a couple of weeks.

All went fine until the guys turned up to take it back. She was inconsolable. So, once again, I floated the idea of buying one and the response, in summary, was: "Yes. Oh yes, yes, yes!"

From my experience, therefore, by far the most difficult part of getting a home theatre is gaining the permission of the person with whom you share the house. And once this particular mountain has been climbed, you may be tempted to assume everything else is a doddle, to which I would respond: "No. Oh no, no, no!"

If you're going down the five-speaker-plus-subwoofer surround sound route - and why wouldn't you? - you first have to figure the best way to work all those speakers into your living room. Despite the many options here (satellite speakers, normal speakers, in-wall and in-ceiling speakers; you can even buy speakers disguised as rocks), it's a task fraught with difficulty, especially since you also have to find enough vacant wall for your large flat-panel screen.

At our place we had to ditch a cabinet and turn everything through 90 degrees to put the screen on a formerly useless free-standing wall, which presented a challenge so great the installer declared it impossible. Then his boss came out and told him how to do it.

Valuable lesson one: when an installer excavates a speaker cable channel up a single brick wall and into the ceiling, do check who is cleaning up. Otherwise it will be you.

Valuable lesson two: when an installer excavates, he does not concern himself with filling the channel back in. That's a job for a plasterer. So now you need a plasterer. After the plasterer you will need a painter.

Valuable lesson three: surprisingly few installers are licensed electricians. If you need an extra power point, your installer may not be able to assist. But what's another tradesman at this point?

Valuable lesson four: check that your installer is familiar with audio installations. Otherwise you may find the speaker cables he inserts are little better than electrical flex.

Once the cables are laid, you'd assume all that's between you and home cinema nirvana is hooking everything up. You're about to learn that nothing in home cinema is ever this easy and this is where it really pays to buy your equipment through a specialist supplier rather than what these specialists sniffily refer to as box shops.

Such people know one brand of amplifier goes all huffy when it's connected to another brand of DVD player. They know how to get around the decidedly perplexing set-up menu system of a variety of 7.1-channel receiver I hesitate to name for fear of being sued to Tokyo and back. They know that some flat-panel screens need far more ventilation than others and cannot be mounted over fireplaces.

After a jolly good laugh, they can even figure how to incorporate your old and much-loved laserdisc player in the system.

And, if they're any good, they'll keep coming back until your Blu-ray player's intermittent refusal to provide any sort of vision with its sound is sorted.

Valuable lesson five: deal with a local business; you'll be going back there a lot.

Installation cost me just over $1000 and, given the work required and the follow-up when all the glitches happened, it was worth every cent. My overall budget, however, proved a tad optimistic.

Observing my own first law of home cinema, I spent as much on the sound as on the vision. My magnificent 127-centimetre plasma cost $5000 and I spent that much again (maybe a little more) on speakers, amplifier and Blu-ray player.

Valuable lesson six: the free movies that come with some Blu-Ray players aren't worth a cracker.

I can't say how glad I am that I bought a sound system with genuine horsepower. The sound is sensational, especially from Blu-ray discs. Sure, there are lots of cheaper, one-brand surround sound systems available but their shortcomings are only revealed at home. One is that they often won't go loud enough and another is that they can sound pretty thin. It's a fact that the bulk of people buying their second home cinema spend vastly more on sound than they did first time around.

The marketing manager at importer Audio Products, Holger Pfeilmaier, has noticed this. "An increasing number of people are realising that a big screen is only part of a modern home cinema," he says. "The focus has started to shift to the other core ingredient - spectacular sound."

So $5k for the screen, $5k for the sound and 10 per cent again for the installation. Total $11,000. So how come I wound up spending more than $14,000? Well, things cropped up.

The Blu-ray player, for example. We tried three before we found one that didn't get emotional about the cabling of my system. I didn't like that one so I paid as much again to upgrade to a better-quality one that not only worked but gave a palpable improvement in both sound and vision quality.

I had to buy expensive HDMI cables because manufacturers never put them in the box, despite breathlessly declaring how many HDMI connections their product has. Should this be valuable lesson seven?

There was also the matter of my partner disliking the cabinet I'd picked and opting for something smaller (thereby doubling the number of speaker stands needed) and considerably more expensive. Which is valuable lesson eight: in all matters pertaining to aesthetics, your partner is right, you are wrong.

There was the painter and the plasterer, of course. And all that other unpredictable stuff, like the slab of beer for the painter when he went above and beyond the call, the surge protector the installer thought was a good idea and some neat conduits that look like skirting boards, which I didn't even know existed when I embarked on this odyssey.

My home cinema has now been up and running for a year, and flawlessly for the past 10 months. Valuable lesson nine: if you watch action movies late at night and have neighbours, you'll need to get some headphones.

I love, love it, love it. Even more importantly, so does my partner. And she'll love it even more when I get rid of that stack of remote controls cluttering the coffee table and replace them with a single smart remote that controls the lot.

Valuable lesson 10: No home cinema sounds as good as a happy partner.

What are your tips for

Source: smh.com.au

Ethical hacking ?!

2009-11-21T09:37:00.000+11:00

Students learn 'ethical hacking'
Saturday, November 21, 2009 » 04:35am

Cyber attacks on businesses has led to a rapid increase in 'ethical hacking' courses at universities.

The threat of cyber attacks on businesses and governments has led to a rapid increase in the number of universities offering students the chance to learn how to hack computer networks.

The degrees have been set to feed the expanding industry of 'ethical hacking', in which companies pay hackers to infiltrate their systems and expose weaknesses.

The prospect of a lucrative career in the security services, police, defence and IT industries has fuelled the popularity in the courses, with hundreds of undergraduates and graduate students already enrolled.

The ethical hacking degree at Abertay University in Dundee was set up in 2006 and was the first of its kind in the UK.

Since then, other courses have been set up at Coventry, Northumbria and Sunderland, with more in the pipeline at Glasgow Caledonian, Edinburgh Napier and Leeds Metropolitan amongst others.

Colin McLean, the programme tutor in Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures at Abertay, told Sky News that teaching his students to hack networks means they will have the skills to protect banks, businesses and the critical national infrastructure against cyber attacks.

'The current people in those jobs are not protecting against hackers,' he said.

'There should be jobs for people who know exactly what hackers are doing and obviously how to stop the hackers as well.'

Critics have warned of the dangers of arming young people with knowledge that could so easily be turned to criminal endeavour.

But, according to Jennifer Higgins, a fourth year undergraduate on Abertay, the boundaries are clear.

'Take, for example, chemistry students,' she says.

'They might know all the chemicals to cause damage but that's not the sort of thing they're interested it, they're interested in putting their knowledge to the greater good.

'You're well educated on the laws and the way people detect things.'

'It's not made to seem glamorous to hack into anything, it's more about protecting the systems.'

The Government claims cyber crime costs the UK economy billions of pounds every year and recently set up its own Office for Cyber Security.

However, the increasing demand has also made ethical hacking one of the UK's fastest growing industries in the private sector.

NCC group, based in Manchester, is one of the largest firms in Europe to offer ethical hacking as one of its services, claiming to have 94 of the UK's top 100 companies amongs its clients.

Chief executive Rob Cotton said the importance of ethical hacking has yet to be fully realised.

'It's actually an arms race. It's the bad guys getting better and better and us, the good guys, trying to overcome them,' he said.

'Business is becoming more aware of it but more often than not organisations turn round and are shocked that they've been hacked.'

''Why would somebody hack us and steal our information', they say? Simple reason is information is valuable, and becoming more valuable as every day passes by.'

With both the private and public sectors increasingly dependent on networked technology, the promise of a lucrative career waging war against criminal hackers is likely to make the ethical option even more mainstream.

Robotics an interesting field

2009-11-19T06:25:00.001+11:00

2009 space odyssey: Brisbane maps robotic futureSCOTT CASEY
November 18, 2009 - 3:10PM Be the first to comment

University of Queensland scientists are working on algorithms to help robots rapidly 'learn' about their environment.

Scientists in Brisbane are blurring the line between biology and technology and creating a new generation of robot "helpers" more in tune with human needs.

The University of Queensland is hosting the the Australian Research Council's Thinking Systems symposium this week, which brings together UQ's robotic navigation project with the University of New South Wales' robotic hands project and a speech and cognition project out of the University of Western Sydney.

Scientists are working towards a range of robotic innovations, from the development of navigation and learning robots to the construction of artificial joints and limbs and the creation of a conversational computer program, a la 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL.

UQ's School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering head, Professor Janet Wiles, said the symposium paired "some very clever engineers...with very clever scientists" to map the future of robotics - and it was going to be a very different world.

"You're bringing together neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, behaviour and robotics information system to look at the cross disciplinary projects we can do in this space," Professor Wiles said.

"We're doing a combination of the fundamental science and the translation into the technology and that's one of the great benefits of our project."

The group aims to advance robotic technology by decoding the way human and animal brains work to equip machines with the ability to operate in the real world.

"There's a strong connection to cognition - the way the brain works as a whole - and navigation, so what we've been doing is studying the fundamental of navigation in animals and taking the algorithms we've learnt from those and putting them into robots," Professor Wiles said.

Over the next two decades, she sees robots becoming more and more important, expanding from their current roles as cleaners, assemblers and drones and into smarter machines more closely integrated with human beings in the form of replacement limbs and joints.

"It's not going to be the robots and us. Already a lot of people are incorporating robot components; people who have had a leg amputated who now have a knee and in the knee. It is effectively a fully-articulated robotic knee [with] a lot of the spring in the step that a natural knee has," Professor Wiles said.

"The ability of robots to replace component parts is an area which is going to be growing.

"This is where you're going to blur the line between technology and biology when you start to interface these two fields."

At UQ, the team is working on developing computer codes or algorithms that would enable a robot to "learn" rapidly about its near environment and navigate within it.

"Navigation is quite an intriguing skill because it is so intrinsic to what we do and we are really not aware of it unless we have a poor sense of navigation," Professor Wiles said.

"The kind of navigation we are dealing with is how you get from one place to another, right across town or from one room in a building to another you can't see."

With about four million robots in households right now, performing menial chores such as vacuuming the carpet, improvements in navigation has the potential to widen the scope of these creations to take a larger place in everyday life.

According to Professor Wiles, the ability to rapidly process information and apply it to the area they are working in will give robots the edge into the future.

"Robots need to learn new environments very rapidly and that's what a lot of our work focuses on.

"When you take a robot out of the box you don't want to program into it with the architecture of your house, you want the robot to explore the house and learn it very quickly," Professor Wiles said.

"Household robotics is going to be really big in the next 15 years or so and this is one of the things you need is for robots to be able to look after themselves in space."

But as Australian universities and international research institutes look into replicating the individual parts of biological creatures and mimic them in machines, the question of intelligence inevitably become more important.

While the sometimes frightening scenarios played out in science fiction novels and films - where so often robots lay waste to humanity - remains securely in the realm of fantasy, Professor Wiles believes that some day machines will think like us.

"There's strong AI [artificial intelligence] and weak AI. Strong AI says there will be artificially intelligent creatures which are not biological. Weak AI says they will have a lot of the algorithms and they do already have a lot of those algorithms," she said.

"The bee, whose brain is a tiny as a sesame seed, already has better navigation abilities than even our best robots.

"So we have a little way to go before robots reach biological intelligence let alone human intelligence but I don't see why we shouldn't take steps towards it."

The ARC Thinking Systems symposium continues at the University of Queensland in St Lucia today.

brisbanetimes.com.au

Source: brisbanetimes.com.au

Thats powerful can u believe it?

2009-11-10T09:43:00.000+11:00

Japan eyes solar station in space as new energy source

November 9, 2009 - 8:26PM
It may sound like a sci-fi vision, but Japan's space agency is dead serious: by 2030 it wants to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams or microwaves.

The government has just picked a group of companies and a team of researchers tasked with turning the ambitious, multi-billion-dollar dream of unlimited clean energy into reality in coming decades.

With few energy resources of its own and heavily reliant on oil imports, Japan has long been a leader in solar and other renewable energies and this year set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets.

But Japan's boldest plan to date is the Space Solar Power System (SSPS), in which arrays of photovoltaic dishes several square kilometres (square miles) in size would hover in geostationary orbit outside the Earth's atmosphere.

"Since solar power is a clean and inexhaustible energy source, we believe that this system will be able to help solve the problems of energy shortage and global warming," researchers at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, one of the project participants, wrote in a report.

"The sun's rays abound in space."

The solar cells would capture the solar energy, which is at least five times stronger in space than on Earth, and beam it down to the ground through clusters of lasers or microwaves.

These would be collected by gigantic parabolic antennae, likely to be located in restricted areas at sea or on dam reservoirs, said Tadashige Takiya, a spokesman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

The researchers are targeting a one gigawatt system, equivalent to a medium-sized atomic power plant, that would produce electricity at eight yen (cents) per kilowatt-hour, six times cheaper than its current cost in Japan.

The challenge - including transporting the components to space - may appear gigantic, but Japan has been pursuing the project since 1998, with some 130 researchers studying it under JAXA's oversight.

Last month Japan's Economy and Trade Ministry and the Science Ministry took another step toward making the project a reality, by selecting several Japanese high-tech giants as participants in the project.

The consortium, named the Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer, also includes Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp.

The project's roadmap outlined several steps that would need to be taken before a full-blown launch in 2030.

Within several years, "a satellite designed to test the transmission by microwave should be put into low orbit with a Japanese rocket," said Tatsuhito Fujita, one of the JAXA researchers heading the project.

The next step, expected around 2020, would be to launch and test a large flexible photovoltaic structure with 10 megawatt power capacity, to be followed by a 250 megawatt prototype.

This would help evaluate the project's financial viability, say officials. The final aim is to produce electricity cheap enough to compete with other alternative energy sources.

JAXA says the transmission technology would be safe but concedes it would have to convince the public, which may harbour images of laser beams shooting down from the sky, roasting birds or slicing up aircraft in mid-air.

According to a 2004 study by JAXA, the words 'laser' and 'microwave' caused the most concern among the 1000 people questioned.

Internet radio

2009-10-27T07:47:00.000+11:00

Crowd-sourced radio show ditches the DJ
ASHER MOSES
October 26, 2009 - 12:39PM

A mock-up of what Austereo's online voting system will look like.

A mock-up of what Austereo's online voting system will look like.

Austereo listeners will be able to control what is being played on air in real time and even nix bad song choices as they are playing in a radical new radio experiment that blends online and traditional broadcasts.

The radio network, in partnership with US internet radio station Jelli, will unveil a new 24-hour national digital radio station, Hot30 Jelli, next month. It will let listeners go online and vote on the music they want to hear on the terrestrial station in real time.

Those without a newfangled digital radio can also take part in the crowd-sourced radio show as Hot30 Jelli will be simulcast on 2Day FM in Sydney from 10pm to midnight four nights a week.

"The next song that is played is decided half a second before the last song finishes," Jaime Chaux, Austereo's digital content director, said.

On the Hot 30 website, listeners will see the live queue of songs to be played on the station and can vote whether each song "rocks" or "sucks". Users also have a limited number of "rockets" and "bombs" they can use to send a song to the top or bottom of the queue, although the songs played will always be the ones with the most votes.

"The order of the songs that get played and what's on the playlist is being constantly decided on by listeners," said Chaux, adding the initiative played on young people's desire for "instant gratification".

"The Hot 30 currently is a show that's built on votes but once that countdown is built you can't change it and if you vote for a particular song at 7pm you might not hear it until 9.30pm."

Jelli began as an internet-only radio station but it is now spreading into traditional media, with the company recently inking a similar deal with Triton Digital Media to provide a user-controlled radio show for 4500 terrestrial FM radio stations across the US.

The show is expected to begin broadcasting early next year.

Since June, Jelli's technology has powered a two-hour Sunday night alternative rock show on a San Francisco radio station, Live 105 KITS.

Parent company CBS told the San Francisco Chronicle that Jelli's system had more than doubled ratings in the 18-49 demographic for the first hour, and increased ratings by 50 per cent over the second hour.

The ability for users to pull a song before it even finishes is particularly radical but Chaux said he expected this would not be common in practice as songs are not played in the first place unless they have a high number of votes.

The list of songs on offer includes anything played on Hot 30 in the past five years, which is far broader than the selection offered on today's music countdown shows.

"There's a window on screen where players can talk to each other and they end up supporting each other on song choices ... so it ends up being an online community," Chaux said.

Source: smh.com.au

Hobsons Bay Libraries now using Eventbrite for Library Bookings

2009-10-21T14:30:00.001+11:00

Check out the link to Eventbrite under WebWillys hit list for all the events @ HBL libraries and book online YAY

Around the bay in a day

2009-10-19T11:03:00.002+11:00

Thousands up bright and early for charity ride
DANIEL ZIFFER
October 19, 2009
More than 15,000 people participated in yesterday's Around the Bay in a Day.

More than 15,000 people participated in yesterday's Around the Bay in a Day. Photo: Penny Stephens

In a blaze of Lycra, Victoria's 17th annual Around the Bay in a Day cycling event put 15,000 people in the saddle, reports Daniel Ziffer.

ENJOYABLE punishment on a glorious scale led thousands of cyclists to saddle up to go Around the Bay in a Day yesterday.

More than 15,000 riders - we counted wheels and divided by two - pedalled around Port Phillip Bay. From 5.30am, riders took off from Alexandra Gardens pursuing goals ranging from 50 kilometres to a punishing 250-kilometre option, circumnavigating the bay.

In its 17th year, Around the Bay burns calories, packs the Sorrento-Queenscliff ferry and raises money for the Smith Family.

Geoff Moore cheered on his business partner Mark Duncan. Their company raised $5000 for charity and their team was called Frosty's Wheels after Mark's father who died last year.

''I completely winged it,'' American student Amanda Devilliers said, laughing. ''Just the 50-kilometre option. I didn't want to hurt myself.''

Melbourne Life has never seen so much Lycra en masse, as riders rolled back into the city. Among the wearers, Naji Aoukar said conditions were ideal for his 100-kilometre jaunt.

''A good day. Not too hot and not too windy,'' he said. ''Headed down to Sorrento and cruised back.''

Oarsome Foursome rower Drew Ginn wasn't weighed down by his three Olympic gold medals, joining V8 driver Cameron McConville and Sydney Swans player Ryan O'Keefe on the 250-kilometre ride, while newsreader Helen Kapalos did the 100-kilometre option.

Blackburn's Georgie Christopher went for the century, praising the organisation of the event. ''No major stacks that I saw. I'll do it again,'' she said, as she prepared to ride home.

The future of books

2009-10-12T08:59:00.002+11:00

One of my favourite whizz-bang gadgets is a thing called the Book. No, not iBook, e-book, m-book or anything like that. Just a handy-sized collection of bound pages and type. It looks and feels good, it responds to touch. I can take it anywhere and be transported in an instant to an astounding virtual world.

Of course the Book has been with us ever since Johannes Gutenberg dreamed up his own revolutionary piece of high tech, the printing press, around 1440. It is not going to disappear – at least, not for a while yet. But if you believe the prophets, it’s going to expand and diversify to a point where it won’t be a book as we know it. And not only the Book, but our fundamental ways of communicating are going to change.

Already we can download and read books, stories and other texts on devices such as laptops, e-readers, mobile phones, iPods and iPhones. Millions of young Japanese women are hooked on romances which they consume on their mobiles. The Age is introducing an m-phone serial story written by Melbourne author Marieke Hardy. But this is only the beginning.

According to Jeff Gomez, US author of Print is Dead, there are two schools of thought on the future of publishing, much like the Big Bang and Steady State theories about the universe. Either nothing much will change, or everything will expand so far that the industry will cease to exist – “except for, probably, Oprah”.
Bob Stein, co-director of the New York-based Institute for the Future of the Book, believes the changes the book is undergoing are much more radical than we think. "We are changing the way that humans communicate with each other," he says. "This profound shift is more significant than the invention of the printing press… A thousand years from now, humanity will look back at the late part of the twentieth century as the time when something big started."
I can’t begin to get my head around what might happen in a thousand years, but I know one thing about now. We human beings are devices wired for story. We love a good narrative and we will take it in whatever form is the most reasonably-priced and reader-friendly. The electronic screen has come to stay, but for the long-haul read, it’s still true that nothing beats the old-fashioned book.
Jane Sullivan is a Melbourne writer and regular contributor to The Age.

Twitter or Facebook?

2009-09-13T07:07:00.000+10:00

Could Twitter be turning us into birdbrains?GORDON FARRER
September 12, 2009
THIS just in from the Department of the Sky is Falling: Twitter makes you dumber. Dr Tracy Alloway, cognitive psychologist and director of the Centre for Memory and Learning in the Lifespan at the University of Stirling, in Scotland, says that the ''instant'' nature of texting, Twitter and YouTube is not healthy for working memory.

In a talk at the British Science Festival last week, she said working memory - the ability to recall and apply information - was the real basis of learning and more important to success and happiness in life than IQ.

''On Twitter you receive an endless stream of information [that is] very succinct,'' said Alloway. ''You don't have to process that information. Your attention span is being reduced and you're not engaging your brain and improving your nerve connections.''

It was a revelation shadow treasurer Joe Hockey might not have wanted to hear. Hockey sent five messages to his followers on the micro-blogging social networking tool during question time this week.

On Tuesday he opened his foray into digital democracy with ''sitting in question time wondering if tanner will actually answer a question''. A minute later he followed up with ''now the pm is coaching tanner with answers … get real guys''.

In her comments about Twitter, Dr Alloway noted evidence suggesting that extensive texting has been associated with low IQ scores. (Whether it causes them or reflects them was not clear.)

She also argued that the ''tyranny of technology'' - with aids such as speed dial meaning we no longer have to remember phone numbers - was generally making us dumber.

On the other hand, keeping up with friends on Facebook, doing Sudoku puzzles and playing video games that involved strategy - she cited the Total War series - might improve working memory.

''I'm not saying they're good for your socialisation skills, but they do make you use your working memory,'' she said.

So, ditch Twitter and jump on to Facebook. Smarten up. Except …

According to Dr Aric Sigman, fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society, the news on Facebook is not good, either. Dr Sigman argues that online social networking may be displacing face-to-face contact and that lack of social connection can be associated with physiological changes, increased illness and higher premature mortality.

And leading neuroscientist Dr Susan Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Oxford University, has made the case that social networking behaviour infantilises the mind, shortens attention spans, makes users susceptible to sensationalism and damages their sense of identity. Shoot-'em-up computer games, she has said, reduce players' ability to empathise.

The technology-is-bad-for-you camp is not new. Experts in brain plasticity have warned for years of the potential detrimental effects of fast-motion electronics and behaviours on brain development and function.

''Any technology that we use rewires our brains - pencil and paper rewire our brains,'' says Norman Doidge, author of The Brain That Changes Itself. ''The problem with electronic technologies,'' he warns, ''is that they're extremely compatible with the brain because the brain uses them as prosthetic extensions very easily and takes on the characteristics of those technologies.''

The result, he says, is that if people aren't inundated with novelty, they get bored and are unable to pay attention.

Putting aside such concerns, technology evangelists suspect there is an element of the Luddite in any knee-jerk reaction that says technology must be bad if it changes the way our brains work.

Could it also be possible, they suggest, that we are at the start of a process in which the human brain will evolve from an organ confused by the cacophony and activity around it into one that is sped up, sharpened, able to multi-task in ways we can't imagine?

There's bad news on that front, too.

Research from Stanford University published last month found that good multi-tasking is a myth; the brain can effectively perform only one task or process one piece of information at a time.

Chronic multi-taskers find it impossible to ignore irrelevant information, reducing their efficiency at completing tasks.

They might appear better at juggling tasks but, the Stanford research showed, their performance is considerably weaker than those who concentrate on a single task.

Which puts the kybosh on Joe Hockey's response to suggestions that tweeting from the frontbench could distract him from debate in the chamber.

''I know it's hard to believe that males can do this,'' said Hockey, ''but we can walk and chew gum at the same time.''

Gordon Farrer is technology editor.

2009-09-03T21:14:00.002+10:00

First Look: The Beatles: Rock Band
September 3, 2009

The Beatles: Rock Band trailer

The trailer for the upcoming release of the much-anticipated game The Beatles: Rock Band.

Sing along with the Liverpool lads, writes Andrew Murfett.

The Beatles: Rock Band, arguably the most anticipated game of the year, should satisfy the diehard gamers and older music fans who do not own a console.

The stakes are high. Harmonix, a music-based gaming group formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by two MIT graduates in the mid-1990s, developed the million-selling Guitar Hero franchise in 2005. The group splintered when the game's publisher sold the Guitar Hero brand to Activision.
Paul McCartney is a playable character in The Beatles: Rock Band.

Paul McCartney is a playable character in The Beatles: Rock Band.

Harmonix was itself bought by MTV in September 2006. It developed the Rock Band game, which added vocals and drums to the Guitar Hero blueprint. The company is now the chief competitor of the game it originally produced.

Rock Band has sold 10.1 million copies, about half of Guitar Hero's sales.

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Do the Beatles remasters capture the Fab Four sound?
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Dhani Harrison, the gaming-fanatic son of late Beatle George Harrison, met Harmonix co-founder and chief executive Alex Rigopulos and convinced Apple Corps, which controls the Beatles' back catalogue, to consider a game based on Beatles music.

Harmonix began developing demos of Beatles songs set to Rock Band and pitched a game chronicling the Beatles' career.

"It was a year-and-a-half before we started working on art," Mr Rigopulos says.

"Nobody here exhaled until we finished the game."

After several months of negotiations, they cut a deal ensuring "the shareholders" — the Beatles' estates — would be proactive members of the creative process.

Giles Martin, the 39-year-old son of Beatles producer Sir George Martin, was enlisted to administer the painstaking process of separating the instruments on to individual tracks. He was also entrusted to scour the archives for rare audio sources that could also be used.

"My concern was we would provide them with the music and they would just make the game without collaboration," Mr Martin says. "It wasn't like that at all."

Mr Martin had digitised the Beatles' master tapes recently during his work producing the Love project, the group's collaboration with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas.

A list of 45 songs was compiled in consultation with Harmonix and "the shareholders". Giles and his engineer, Paul Hicks, began mixing the multi-tracks.

As Harmonix's sound engineers worked at Abbey Road on audio content for the game, company artists in Cambridge, near Boston, developed a narrative and designed illustrations.

Rock Band is inherently based on simulating live music play.

Long before they finished recording, the Beatles stopped playing live, so the game is broken up chronologically via Beatles live-music high points and "dreamscapes" of the band playing in the famous Abbey Road studios.

The dreamscape sequences, which simulate the chemical influences of the band or images inspired by the lyrics, are arguably the most impressive aspect of the game.

"We'd make a drawing or painting and talk the shareholders through each idea," creative director Josh Randall says.

"They would tell us how each band member moved."

In the past, Harmonix had not attempted to emulate real people. Rock Band simply used generic caricatures.

Not this time.

The game begins with a stunning animated introduction that condenses the Beatles' career into 2 minutes.

The player is then led to a menu offering the choice of an individual song or beginning a Beatles "career".

As each track loads, previously unheard audio clips of in-studio chatter play, delivering a more immersive feel to the game.

As the game progresses, the player unlocks previously photo-based archival material.

In a nod to new players, at its "easy" level, general gameplay is undoubtedly less complex than previous music video games. Still, to pacify hardcore gamers, expert levels have also been retained, as well as familiar Rock Band modes "rock duel" and "tug-of-war".

The writer travelled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a guest of Harmonix.

GPS directs drivers right to the wall

2009-08-30T21:08:00.000+10:00

RACHEL BROWN
August 30, 2009

DASHBOARD satellite navigation systems may have resolved arguments about the best way around town but they are driving us to distraction.

Road safety experts warn that a GPS can increase the risk of having an accident because they distract the driver from the road.

A study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that reaching for an electronic device, such as a GPS, increased the risk of collision about six times. A study by the University of Utah showed that distraction from in-vehicle technology could be the equivalent of driving with a blood alcohol level of .08.

Andry Rakotonirainy, an associate professor at the centre for accident research and road safety at Queensland University of Technology, said accidents happened when drivers took their eyes off the road to look at or adjust their GPS.

''Some GPS devices require lots of visual attention and they are the ones which are potentially dangerous. Any device in your car which requires you to take your eyes off the road to operate it significantly increases your risk of having an accident.''

GPS devices can also distract drivers with alarms, beeps or chimes to signal things such as traffic lights, speed cameras or places of interest.

The impact on the road toll of increasing numbers of electronic distractions - GPS, mobile phones and BlackBerries - in vehicles has prompted the US Transport Secretary, Ray LaHood, to organise a summit of transport safety experts, police and legislators next month.

The RTA advises drivers to always set their GPS before setting off and to pull over if they need to adjust it.

In 2002 about 10,000 portable devices were sold in Australia. Last year this figure grew to more than 1 million.

However, Dr Rakotonirainy said: ''Listening to a GPS is obviously a lot safer than trying to read a street map while driving.''

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

Patients to get self check in

2009-08-29T08:59:00.001+10:00

Patients to get self check-in
Article from: The Advertiser

CALLIE WATSON

August 29, 2009 12:01am

A DO-IT-YOURSELF check-in kiosk for hospitals and doctors' clinics, similar to those used by airline passengers, should be considered, a U.S. expert says.

Dr Erica Drazen, a Massachusetts-based partner at IT services firm CSC, this week spoke to SA Health officials about how technology could further help patients take care of themselves and improve customer service.

She said the kiosk system, first used in U.S. clinics before spreading to hospitals, had been a success.

"It's basically the airline kiosk system translated into health care," Dr Drazen said.

"Patients come up and insert some sort of ID card, for example a driver's licence or credit card, and their appointment details come out. It can even print a map telling them where to go within a building or book their next appointment."

The cost of buying, installing and maintaining an Australian kiosk model was still being developed, Dr Drazen said.

SA Health chief executive Dr Tony Sherbon said the new Royal Adelaide Hospital would provide an opportunity to introduce "21st Century" technology to patient care.

"We are interested in what's going on internationally in electronic health reform," he said.

"However, it is premature at this stage to comment on what that technology might be."

Australian Medical Association state president Dr Andrew Lavender said kiosks should not replace face-to-face interaction.

"I think cutting out that initial interaction . . . is not necessarily the best idea," he said.

Classics of tomorrow

2009-08-24T06:23:00.003+10:00

Adam's Olympus trip: how the iPod got classical
The Sleeping Gamer rests after long day on the Xbox.

The Sleeping Gamer rests after long day on the Xbox.
* Atlas carries the weight of a giant iPod on his shoulders.
* Pan, the Greek god of nature, jives to the tunes of his iPod.
* The king of the gods, Zeus, calls down the thunder using his iPhone.
* The Sleeping Gamer rests after long day on the Xbox.

Asher Moses
August 21, 2009

What if Zeus called down the thunder using his iPhone, or Pan, the Greek god of nature, serenaded his nymphs with an iPod instead of a flute?

These are the questions that inspired Californian sculptor Adam Reeder, whose latest project, Socio-Technic Evolution, puts a high-tech spin on classical sculpture to examine the way technology has changed how Western culture interacts with the world.

The collection of four life-size sculptures - Pan with His iPod, Zeus with His iPhone, Atlas and The Sleeping Gamer - has already won Reeder several awards and helped him graduate with a master of fine arts from San Francisco's Academy of Art University.

Reeder, 33, said he came up with the idea after his daughter turned six and, instead of asking for a Barbie, wanted an iPod.

It highlighted for him how much technology had changed childhood and our lives.

"The Greek sculptures are my symbol for Western culture ... the Greek god Pan, he would've been dancing in the woods playing his flute, so in my sculpture he's still dancing but the music is being created from a different source," he said in a phone interview.

"So the nature of it stays the same but the context changes, and technology is facilitating that change."

One interpretation of the works is that the Greek gods represent rulers from the old world, while the gadgets are our new overlords.

Reeder's Sleeping Gamer work is a play on the Sleeping Satyr, a follower of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine, who represents unrestrained revelry.

By putting a video game controller in the satyr's hand, Reeder makes a value statement, warning people against playing too many video games.

Reeder recently sold the Sleeping Gamer to Cliff Bleszinski, the creator of the Gears of War video game franchise, for $US7900.

In his sculpture of Atlas, the figure is bearing the weight of a giant iPod, not the world, on his shoulders, symbolising how ubiquitous Apple's iconic music player has become.

"Even in 30 years people are going to look at that and say, 'Hey, I remember that iPod, I know that shape - it's almost like an old Coke bottle,' " Reeder said.

He said he was tired of seeing museum and gallery visitors struggling to engage with what he says are boring classical sculptures. By adding modern technology, anyone could immediately connect with his message.

"They'll see it and I can tell they'll be like 'oh great, another Greek sculpture wannabe', and then they see the iPod and something in their eyes just sparkles, and then they smile and nudge their friend next to them and say, 'Hey, look, he's got an iPod,' " he said.

"It just breathes life into something that's been dead for all these years."

Source: smh.com.au

Wikipedia launches iphone application

2009-08-20T12:21:00.001+10:00

August 20, 2009 - 11:25AM

Wikipedia says it has released an iPhone application as part of a drive to open the pages of its revered online encyclopedia to the booming ranks of smart phone users.

Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia, has made free software for iPhones available at Apple's online App Store.

"Everybody recognises with the growth of mobile tools globally that this is how people access information," said foundation spokesman Jay Walsh.

"Our mission is to spread free knowledge; we want to do everything we can to meet and embrace that audience."

Wikimedia foundation is a small operation with a staff of fewer than 30 people, so it contracted a US developer that was already working on Wikipedia software for Apple's coveted iPhones.

"Our intention is to house the source code and continue to update the application through Apple channels with subsequent releases," Walsh said.

"Then, obviously, take it to other platforms like Palm and Android. We want to take the same tool and make it work in other spaces."

Wikipedia can be reached using web browsers in iPhones and other internet-linked mobile devices, but the pages are scaled-down versions of what is accessible using desktop computers.

The Wikipedia application for iPhones is an open-source, first version that the foundation hopes to incrementally upgrade with input from software savants worldwide, according to Walsh.

"In a perfect world you would be able to do everything on a mobile you could do on a personal computer," Walsh said of using Wikipedia on smart phones.

"It is a platform we are going to build on. The sky is the limit; we can do whatever we want."

Wikipedia envisions people eventually being able to use smart phones to edit entries and upload pictures or other digital content to the website.

Trouble with twittering?

2009-08-19T07:42:00.001+10:00

Hackers using Twitter to control infected PCs
August 17, 2009

Twitter's been having a rough couple of weeks.

A researcher looking into the attacks that knocked Twitter offline last week discovered another, unrelated security problem.

At least one criminal was using a Twitter account to control a network of a couple hundred infected personal computers, mostly in Brazil. Networks of infected PCs are referred to as "botnets" and are responsible for so much of the mayhem online, from identity theft to spamming to the types of attacks that crippled Twitter.

Jose Nazario with Arbor Networks said he found a Twitter account that was used to send out what looked like garbled messages. But they were actually commands for computers in a botnet to visit malicious websites, where they download programs that steal banking passwords.

The affected Twitter account was taken down. Twitter didn't immediately respond to e-mails for comment.

Nazario said what appeared to be the same person was doing the same thing on an account with a Google service called Jaiku, which is similar to Twitter.

Google said the affected account was shut down.

The technique Nazario described isn't sophisticated, and a couple hundred infected computers is small when some botnets contain hundreds of thousands of infected PCs.

But it shows how criminals are finding inventive ways to exploit legitimate social networking services to help with their dirty work. One reason social networks are an attractive target for crooks is because their content is hard to monitor, and because people click on lots of links inside their accounts, which is a key way computer infections are spread.

"I wouldn't call it rocket science, but it's effective," Nazario said. "This is the problem with free social media that people need to be aware of."

The revelation comes on the heels of a destructive "denial-of-service" attack that brought down Twitter at stretches last week. Those attacks appear to have targeted a lone blogger in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, but affected the entire Twitter service.

Denial-of-service attacks consist of flooding a website with so much traffic that its servers buckle under the strain. That's either done by pounding it with an immense volume of traffic (which can be easy to thwart), or increasingly, hammering a site with lots of harder-to-detect computing-intensive requests, like trying to log in or do searches, which can also bring a site to its knees. Botnets, or networks of zombie computers, are the main weapon in both attacks.

for all dog lovers

2009-08-17T10:23:00.005+10:00

got to love google maps

2009-08-10T18:20:00.002+10:00

Spy tricyles map Paris streets for Google

Arthur Poirier, a French student employed by Google France, rides a tricycle fitted with cameras as part of the Google Street View project. Photo: AFP
August 10, 2009 - 10:06AM
Parisians and tourists, relax. That goofy-looking tricycle equipped with loads of high-tech equipment roaming the streets is not some mad scientist's invention on the rampage.
The three-wheeler is quite a sight with its long pole holding nine cameras, a GPS, a computer and a generator. But the contraption tooling around the French capital needs all that gear to do its job - adding three-dimensional images to Google's Street View Maps.
The U.S. company has hired two young cyclists to ride through gardens, historical sites and other pedestrian-only areas to take thousands of digital photos.
"The idea is to be able to offer 360-degree images of places that were inaccessible before," Google spokesperson Anne-Gabrielle Dauba-Pantanacce said in an interview.
The riders, wearing Google tee-shirts and white helmets, are visiting well-known sites such as the Chateau de Versailles, west of Paris, the Jardin du Luxembourg on the city's Left Bank and Les Halles, in the busy center of the French capital.
Google is to map Paris until Aug. 20, then head to the north of the country. In the fall, the tricycle goes south, Dauba-Pantanacce said.
The company plans to add new photos to their Street View option in all French cities with tourist areas.
Similar tricycles already combed the streets of Britain and Italy in June and July, said Dauba-Pantanacce. Google plans to make 3-D maps of streets in other European countries, but the schedule has not yet been set, she said.
Since its launch in 2007, Google's Street View has expanded to more than 100 cities worldwide, and not everyone is happy about it.
Last month, Greek officials rejected a bid to photograph the nation's streets until more privacy safeguards are provided. In April, residents of one English village formed a human chain to stop a camera van, and in Japan the company agreed to reshoot views taken by a camera high enough to peer over fences.
Google's European Public Policy blog says the company is in contact with a group of representatives from all 27 European Data Protection Authorities. The group has asked, among other things, that Google set a time limit on how long unblurred copies of photos are kept, which it has not yet done.
Google did recently accede to German demands to erase the raw footage of faces, house numbers, license plates and individuals who have told authorities they do not want their information used in the service.
When the camera snaps a photo, everything - faces and license plates included - is in focus. Special software then blurs the picture.
Spotted Friday at La Defense, the tricycle looked decidedly out of place at the modern high-rise business center on Paris' western edge.
A clunky white pole in the back holds an octagonal platform with eight cameras on the sides and one on top. Every minute, the cameras take bursts of high-definition photos to allow online users to get a virtual tour of the area.
"I rode two hours this morning," said 25-year-old Gregory Landais, who was taking a break after cruising through La Defense, France's touch of Manhattan. "For a site like this, it can take up to five hours."
The photos of Paris and other major French cities to follow were expected to be available online by the end of the year.
One curious sightseer was 46-year-old Jose Mountinho of Portugal.
"I've already seen Google Maps but I had no idea how they did it," Mountinho said.
AP
Source: smh.com.au

Clever these smart phones

2009-07-31T08:40:00.001+10:00

Put this one on your Xmas list

2009-07-28T08:59:00.003+10:00

Apple developing touch tablet device
Apple CEO Steve Jobs ... will he be unveiling a tablet device in September?

Now for my next trick .... Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
July 28, 2009 - 6:45AM

Apple is reportedly planning to launch a new tablet-sized device before Christmas in what is a new product category that will fall between its iPhone/iPod Touch and the entry level MacBook laptop.

The company is also working with four record labels on a plan to increase digital sales of albums, according to a report in the Financial Times newspaper.

The project with the record companies - EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Vivendi's Universal Music Group - aims to offer interactive features with music downloads.

"It's all about re-creating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music," one unnamed executive told the paper.

Dubbed project "Cocktail", the Financial Times said book publishers have also been in talks with the computer maker about offering their services on the new device, which could compete with Amazon's Kindle e-book reader.

The AppleInsider blog, which broke the story on Friday, said the device will be feature a 10-inch screen and be "3G-enabled".

However the Financial Times report states that device will "probably [come] without phone capability".

The AppleInsider report puts the launch date as a first quarter 2010, citing "people well-respected by AppleInsider for their striking accuracy in Apple's internal affairs".

Confirmation of the twin projects could come as early as September when Apple traditionally launches its new line-up of iPods for the pre-Christmas shopping seasons.

iPods with cameras?

There has also been speculation that the new generaion iPods - the Nanos and Touches - will retain their current shape but will both come with built-in cameras, similar to those found on iPhones.

The Cult of Mac blog has reported that Chinese companies which make iPod accessories have been showing off new designs and protoypes with space on the back for the new features.

The iPhone 3GS, which was launched last month, comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera.

smh.com.au and agencies

Be thankful for a few good friends

2009-07-27T09:28:00.003+10:00

Swamped with friends, Bill Gates quits Facebook
Bill Gates says he's quitting Facebook because he has too many "friends".

Bill Gates says he's quitting Facebook because he has too many "friends". Photo: AP
July 26, 2009

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says he was forced to abandon Facebook after too many people wanted to be his friend.

Gates, the billionaire computer geek-turned-philanthropist who was honoured on Saturday by India for his charity work, told an audience in New Delhi he had tried out Facebook but ended up with "10,000 people wanting to be my friends".

Gates, who remains Microsoft chairman, said he had trouble figuring out whether he "knew this person, did I not know this person".

"It was just way too much trouble so I gave it up," Gates told the business forum.

Gates was in the Indian capital to receive the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development, awarded by the government for his work for the charitable organisation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The foundation, built by his massive fortune, has committed nearly one billion US dollars to health and development projects in India, targeting especially AIDS and polio.

Gates also confided to the audience that he was "not that big at text messaging" and that "I'm not a 24-hour-a-day tech person".

"I read a lot and some of that reading is not on a computer," he said.

Gates, who sought to drive a vision of a computer on every desk and in every home, said the information technology revolution had been "hugely beneficial" but added: "All these tools of tech waste our time if we're not careful."

2009-07-24T11:15:00.000+10:00

Wanted: women to eat chocolate for a year

2009-07-24T10:26:00.003+10:00

July 24, 2009 - 7:04AM

Scientists in Britain are looking for women willing to eat chocolate every day for a year - all in the name of medical science.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia and a hospital in Norwich, eastern England are trying to find out whether chocolate can cut the risk of heart disease and need 40 women to step forward and help.

Most of the women will have to eat two bars of "super-strength chocolate specially formulated by Belgian chocolatiers" daily for one year and undergo several tests to measure how healthy their hearts are.

The others will have to eat regular chocolate as a placebo.

One possible catch, for chocolate fans spotting an opportunity: volunteers for the research should be menopausal but aged under 75 and have type two diabetes.

Study coordinator Peter Curtis said: "A successful outcome could be the first step in developing new ways to improve the lives of people at increased risk of heart disease."

How much zzzzzzz do you need?

2009-07-18T09:18:00.001+10:00

3 hours' sleep is all he needs

Annabel Crabb

July 18, 2009

THE mystery of Kevin Rudd's impressive work rate has been solved — by his wife, Therese Rein, who reports that the Prime Minister can get by on as little as three hours' sleep a night.

In her first extended interview since the Federal Government's election, Ms Rein — herself a weekly intercity commuter, charity worker, fitness fanatic and global business owner — has described to the The Age how one of the most driven partnerships in politics has adapted to life at the Lodge.

"If he wants to come home and put his tracky daks on and sit in front of the fire and have a chat, that's up to him," she says good-humouredly of her husband.

"I have my own things that I'm doing. I am both continuing to lead the company with the fabulous team of people that I work with, and then I'm doing things like going down to Whittlesea Secondary College, or hosting a UNICEF lunch on women's health. I don't need him to distract me on the ins and outs."

Ms Rein's working schedule involves three days a week spent running her business from Brisbane, with four trips a year to Britain to oversee her company's operations there.

But it is Ms Rein's revelation about her husband's working day that will provoke comment; particularly the news that the Australian Prime Minister's sleep patterns are more Spartan even than those of Napoleon Bonaparte or Margaret Thatcher, both of whom needed only four hours of sleep a night.

Mrs Thatcher trained herself to sleep for only four hours a night, in order to cope with the demands of the British prime ministership.

But Ms Rein says that Mr Rudd has only ever needed short periods of repose — three hours at a minimum — and was like that when she met him at university. "He doesn't need a lot of sleep," she says.

"It's just different."

Re visit the moon walk

2009-07-17T11:17:00.000+10:00

Over the moon: marking Armstrong's momentous walk

July 16, 2009

Buzz Aldrin, as photographed by Neil Armstrong.

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon.

Forty years later, a variety of American museums, space centres and other institutions are marking the anniversary with events, exhibits, concerts and lectures.

Here are a few details on some of the bigger activities and venues.

NASA also has a link to anniversary events from its website at http://www.nasa.gov/ (look for "Apollo 40th Anniversary" on the lower left side of the home page).

Ames Research Centre, Moffett Federal Airfield, near Sunnyvale, California:

July 19, "Moonfest," noon-6pm, featuring scientific talks, rocket launches, kids' activities, music. Free and open to the public. Details at http://moonfest.arc.nasa.gov/.

Armstrong Air and Space Museum, Wapakoneta, Ohio:

July 16-18, "Summer Moon Festival" (Thursday, 4pm-11pm, Friday, 1pm-midnight, Saturday, 7 am-midnight), including rides, games and entertainment, a giant MoonPie and other activities. Details at http://www.summermoonfestival.com.

July 20, noon-5pm, museum open for 40th anniversary celebration, with $4 admission.

For information about visiting this museum in astronaut Neil Armstrong's hometown at other times, visit http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/places/nw01.

Johnson Space Centre, Houston:

July 18, 6 pm-9 pm, "Fly Me to the Moon" picnic, games, activities, stargazing and talks, at University of Houston-Clear Lake's Alumni Plaza and Liberty Park. Free, open to the public.

July 20, 4 pm-9 pm, 40th anniversary event at Discovery Green, the downtown Houston park, with NASA's "Driven To Explore" mobile exhibit, which includes a moon rock you can touch. Free, open to the public.

July 24, 6.30pm-10pm, 40th anniversary "Splashdown Celebration," at Space Centre Houston, which is the Johnson Space Centre's official visitors centre; family event with Apollo-era speakers, MoonPies, hot dogs and music, $US11 ($A14) (free for age four and under).

For details on other Johnson Space Centre events, including some that require tickets, visit www.nasa.gov/centres/johnson/events/apollo40.html.

For details on Space Centre Houston exhibits and the NASA Tram Tour, visit www.spacecenter.org/. Regular admission to the Space Centre is $US20 ($A25.50) (ages 4-11, $US16 ($A20.40)).

Kennedy Centre for Performing Arts, Washington:

July 18, 8pm, "Salute to Apollo: The Kennedy Legacy" concert with National Symphony Orchestra, Chaka Kahn, Denyse Graves and others, including Buzz Aldrin as a narrator. Free and open to the public for the first 1,400 guests. Details at http://www.kennedycentre.com.

Kennedy Space Centre, near Cocoa Beach, Florida:

July 16, 11am, Buzz Aldrin and other astronauts will share stories from underneath a Saturn V rocket at the Apollo/Saturn V Centre. To attend, you must arrive at the Kennedy Space Centre Visitor Complex by 10am and purchase regular admission.

July 16, 12.15pm, opening of Apollo Treasures Gallery at the Apollo/Saturn V Centre, showcasing artifacts from the Apollo moon missions including space suits, a space suit repair kit, and a cuff check list on how to deploy a flag on the moon, along with personal items from astronauts such as Alan Shepard's Corvette.

July 16, 3pm-4.30pm, book-signing in Astronaut Encounter Theatre by astronaut Buzz Aldrin, author of Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home From the Moon.

July 20, 2pm, a huge chocolate-and-marshmallow MoonPie will be unveiled for public consumption.

Other activities at the Kennedy Space Centre, where Apollo 11 was launched on July 16, 1969, include the NASA Up Close tour of space program facilities and artifacts. Admission to the visitor complex is $US38 ($A48.50) plus tax for adults, $US28 ($A35.70) plus tax for ages three-11. More details at www.KennedySpaceCentre.com.

Museum of Flight, Seattle:July 11-12 and 18-19, 11.15 am and 1.15 pm, Apollo Program: Splashdown! for families.

July 18-25, 11am and 1pm (July 19, 11am and 2pm), Tip-to-Tail Tours: Apollo Artifacts, tour of Apollo artifacts including Apollo command module and lunar rover.

July 23-25, 10am-5pm, NASA Vision for Space Exploration Mobile Exhibit, offering a simulated space journey with interactive and hands-on activities; Museum Airpark Parking Lot.

To July 31: Exhibit of astronaut John Young's Apollo 10 spacesuit.

To September 12: Exhibit of Apollo 11 artwork by artist Paul Calle, who was hired by NASA to document the space program. Calle and his son will be at the museum for a lecture, August 29, 2pm

For details on these and other exhibits, visit www.museumofflight.org. The museum is open daily; admission $14 ($US7.50 ($A9.60) for ages five-17.

Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington:

July 16, 10am, opening of exhibit Alan Bean: Painting Apollo, First Artist on Another World, paintings by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean. Open to January 13.

July 16, 10am -3pm, Countdown to the Moon family day, with educational activities led by the museum's space history curators and planetary scientists working on current NASA projects.

July 19, 11am-2 pm, book-signings with three astronauts: Buzz Aldrin, author of Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon; Alan Bean, author of Painting Apollo; and Michael Collins, author of the 40th anniversary edition of Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys.

The museum's collection includes the Apollo 11 Command Module in its Milestones of Flight gallery and Buzz Aldrin's space suit in the Apollo to the Moon gallery. Admission to the museum is free. For details on other events at the museum, visit www.nasm.si.edu/events/apollo11/apollo11events.cfm.

US Space and Rocket Centre and Davidson Centre for Space Exploration, Hunstville, Alabama:

July 20: First Footprint Celebration, 1-5 pm, with NASA-sponsored exhibit of space program artifacts. Event is open to the public with space centre admission ($US25 ($A32) or $US19 ($A24.25) for children, free for ages six and under).

Crowds are expected for the July 20 event. The Davidson Centre is open daily, with permanent exhibits including the Saturn V rocket and other space program artifacts. Details at www.spacecamp.com.

Ever wondered how GPS works?

2009-07-16T11:56:00.000+10:00

Beginners guide to GPS

Claire Mcentee

July 16, 2009 - 12:01AM

GPS stands for Global Positioning System and refers to a satellite-based navigational system developed by the United States Department of Defence and operated by the US Air Force.

Officially called NAVSTAR GPS, it was made it available for civilian use in the 1990s.

GPS technology has multiple applications but is perhaps best known for its use in car navigation units, such as those sold by TomTom and Navman.

The units use GPS to help drivers navigate unfamiliar roads or find certain locations and can also tell them how fast they're driving and warn of speed cameras ahead.

Most new smartphones have GPS receivers and with the right software can be used to navigate and even find the location of others - with their permission.

Google's Latitude software and Yahoo!'s FireEagle software use GPS to track people's cellphones and display their location on online maps such as Google Maps.

Users need to download the software to a GPS phone and must ask permission before they can view a friend's location.

Star Droid is another GPS software product developed by Google for mobile phones.

Users with GPS phones can point the phone's camera to the night-sky and read the names of the stars and planets captured through its viewfinder. The software uses GPS to identify the location of a person and compares it with maps of space.

How it works

Twenty-four satellites circle the Earth twice a day in precise orbits, transmitting signals that are picked up by GPS receivers - such as those in car navigation units.

The receivers use signals from different satellites to determine how far away the satellites are and then calculate where they are on earth. GPS receivers must lock on to the signal of at least two satellites to pinpoint someone's latitude and longitude, and four or more to determine someone's latitude, longitude and altitude.

Once a GPS unit knows where you are, it can then calculate other factors such as your speed and direction.

In GPS devices, location information is commonly used with mapping software to give directions.

Most GPS receivers are accurate but atmospheric conditions and things such as tall buildings and tunnels can cause inaccuracies or prevent the satellite signal reaching the receiver.

Russia, China and the European Union are launching satellites to create their own satellite navigation systems.

R u a news addict like Webwilly?

2009-07-13T10:48:00.001+10:00

About Crikey

Crikey is Australian for independent journalism.

There are two arms to Crikey: our website and the Crikey Daily Mail, a daily subscription email service.

The website: This is where we present a selection of Crikey’s original content along with links to stories from all corners of the web. Crikey editors are across thousands of online sources, from the most earnest to the most eclectic. If it’s interesting and newsworthy, chances are it’ll be on crikey.com.au.

Crikey Daily Mail: Around lunchtime every weekday, the Crikey Daily Mail hits the inboxes of thousands of subscribers. This email edition of 25 or more original stories is crammed with news, analysis, insider gossip, reviews and prescient tips about politics, media, business, the law, culture and national and international affairs. All Crikey Daily Mail articles are also posted on this website, but most of them are locked - you’ll need to register for a free trial or sign up for a subscription if you want to read them.

The Crikey mission

Crikey’s aim is very simple: to bring its readers the inside word on what’s really going on in politics, government, media, business, the arts, sport and other aspects of public life in Australia. Crikey reveals how the powerful operate behind the scenes, and it tackles the stories insiders are talking about but other media can’t or won’t cover.

Crikey sees its role as part of the so-called fourth estate that acts as a vital check and balance on the activities of government, the political system and the judiciary. In addition, Crikey believes the performance and activities of business, the media, PR and other important sectors are worthy of public scrutiny.

Crikey is a showcase for information that might otherwise remain suppressed. It’s a place where people can go - anonymously or not - with information they believe is in the public interest. If Crikey publishes such information, its status is identified. Crikey aims for full transparency in what it publishes, but we recognise that unconfirmed reports can often be the starting point for the disclosure of important information. Where published material cannot be 100% confirmed, Crikey aims to ensure its readers know it is unconfirmed or uncorroborated.

Crikey aims to be fair and open in its journalism. It does not seek to be malicious, prurient or invade an individual’s privacy unless the information is relevant to an individual’s public or corporate duties.

In order to achieve its editorial aspirations, Crikey must also operate as a business. Its primary sources of revenue are subscriptions and advertising. Crikey aims to be open and honest in all its commercial activities, and reserves the right to reject any advertising it regards as unethical or in any other way unsuitable.

Most importantly, Crikey is independent and is not part of a media empire.

I do like lots of tech stuff but also love Melways

2009-07-11T13:43:00.000+10:00

Is this the end of the road for sat nav?

TomTom's new navigation app for the iPhone.

Louisa Hearn

July 9, 2009

They might have dominated Christmas wish lists for half a decade, but portable satellite navigation devices (PNDs) for the mass market might be about to join the endangered species list.

Smartphones with sophisticated navigation functions are storming the shelves with bigger screens, longer battery life, turn-by-turn voice prompts and consumers are lapping them up.

While sales of PND units are on the wane, the smartphone market has remained on a growth trajectory in spite of the choppy economic climate.

"A key reason for this is that the majority of the Australian market are on two-year contracts and with mobile penetration well over 100 per cent we can't see people abandoning their mobiles," said Mark Novosel, mobile analyst at market researcher IDC.

While he says economic factors might determine which contract a customer chooses, navigation is being increasingly rolled into lower cost phone plans.

"It wasn't really until the Nokia 6110 Navigator came along that GPS in converged mobile devices really took off. The primary driver for the success of the 6110 Navigator was that the maps and voice navigation software were included with the device, with nothing more to pay," he said.

While personal navigation market leaders such as TomTom and Garmin are unlikely to turn their backs on their core PND business in the near future, neither are they ignoring the smartphone revolution.

TomTom recently announced an app for the iPhone that will turn the popular smartphone into a fully featured car navigation device complete with maps, windscreen cradle, and turn-by-turn voice commands when it launches later this year.

Garmin has gone further with plans to release a smartphone in some markets this year. The Garmin Nuvifone has suffered delays amid speculation that it is struggling to compete with the slew of new smartphones on the market, however Garmin remains confident its phone will stand out.

"I think there is a place for an all-in-one phone designed by a manufacturer of a personal navigation device. It will be marketed as the navigation smartphone," said Matthew DeMoss, national sales and marketing manager of Garmin Australasia.

Novosel says that, because professional GPS software from the likes of TomTom could now be downloaded onto smartphones, many devices were able to provide similar functionality to a dedicated PND.

This has resulted in a flurry of innovations designed to keep PNDs ahead of the field, including lane guidance systems, rush-hour traffic and road speed information, text-to-speech capabilities for street names and 3D landmarks.

Kirk Mitchell, director of business development at mapping specialist Navteq said that a few years ago screen size, Bluetooth and MP3 functionality were killer features that people were prepared to pay for.

"Research proves that people are now finding value in creating a safer navigation environment," he says.

To satisfy this demand, the company is in the process of rolling out innovations such as a phonetic device called Navteq Voice to ensure the correct pronunciation of road names, helping to keep eyes on the road, and a feature that assists safe navigation of motorway lanes.

Matthew DeMoss, national sales and marketing manager at Garmin Australasia says the typical navigation application on a mobile is generally inferior to PNDs in terms of ease-of-use, screen size, voice directions and map display as well as having notably fewer features.

"I think that there is always going to be a customer who wants that all-in-one device - but there is also that customer that wants the very best device for that purpose. A lot of devices that have an MP3 player and camera as well as GPS functionality are a jack-of-all trades and master of none."

Novosel said another disadvantage was that many GPS-enabled smartphones still did not come bundled with GPS software of any sort.

"The GPS capability in these devices often remains unused as consumers can be unaware of its existence. In other cases, such as most Nokia devices, Nokia maps are provided to users at no cost. However, in order to activate navigation, including voice prompts, users must pay additional subscription fees."

Emile Baak, managing director at Nokia Australia said the company had sold 10 million GPS integrated smartphones, boasting "a very healthy activation rate".

He cites the convenience of carrying a single device and the opportunity for more "context aware" services that match a user's location with entertainment and service listings as key benefits of smartphone navigation products. But he concedes the platform is, for the time being, limited by size.

"The challenge is that we always have to fit all this technology into a very small package that should not consume too much energy," he said.

Novosel said that, in spite of their limitations, smartphones could take the place of PNDs for those who only need the device occasionally and don't mind smaller screen and keys, leaving PNDs with a niche market for those who do a lot of driving, such as couriers, taxi drivers and truckies.

"For many people, the convenience of an all-in-one device that can easily slip into the pocket is unbeatable, rather than having to hide their PND in the car or carry it with them when leaving their vehicle," he said.

Source: smh.com.au

iPod modder makes a case for going retro

2009-07-08T07:31:00.000+10:00

Josh Darrah's wooden iPod case. Photo: Josh Darrah

Asher Moses

July 7, 2009 - 11:59AM

After reigning for years as a symbol of contemporary design, with its minimalist white finish and chrome accents, the iPod is going retro.

For most the iconic music player's white earbuds are a fashion statement enough, but Brisbane graphics designer Josh Darrah has always thought modern stylings were crass compared to old fashioned wood.

So he took matters into his own hands, gutting the electronic innards of his iPod mini, iTrip FM radio accessory and iPod dock and putting them into his own chassis, handmade from Australian red cedar.

The reaction from friends has been so positive that he is now investigating how he could mass produce the wooden casings and sell them online as part of a do-it-yourself kit.

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Photo gallery: The iPod goes retro
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Darrah said he was even researching whether he could create a wooden iPhone, but would first try to master the craft with the regular, simpler iPod range.

"I'm working out how to streamline the process of making it using routers and a bit of program machinery to carve the wood, so I don't have to do them by hand," he said in a phone interview.

Darrah, 29, who works as a graphics designer for the University of Queensland, said the whole process took him about four weekends and cost about $16.

He simply carved out and hollowed front and back plates for the iPod and separately created a thin wooden click wheel, which replaced the original plastic version without issue.

Darrah also carved and shaped brass end plates, and opted for screws instead of glue to hold everything together.

"Some people have thought it's ironic and harking back to the old days but I guess I just like wood," said Darrah.

"It wasn't a big social comment on my part."

Source: smh.com.au

Love real estate try this new one from Google Maps

2009-07-07T09:23:00.000+10:00

Google wants a bigger slice of the real-estate search business

An example of a property search in the US version of Google Maps.

Stephen Hutcheon

July 6, 2009 - 8:52PM

In a move that has raised eyebrows among established players in the classified real-estate business, Google Australia has unveiled a new tool on its mapping service that will directly link buyers and renters to available property.

The Google Maps feature, which launched today in Australia and New Zealand, will host free listings supplied by real-estate agents and publishers.

Although many existing publishers and real-estate agents offer map-based searching, the maps on Google's new service will reflect real-time changes in search criteria and location.

The technology behind this enhancement was developed by engineers at Google's Sydney office and is also being rolled out on the company's existing property search service in the United States.

Google's offering is open to all comers, potentially giving renters and buyers a much bigger choice.

But this development is likely to be viewed by existing publishers as a grab for their business at a time when margins are under pressure and paid listings are being affected by the prevailing economic climate.

The service is launching with listings provided by the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia and homehound.com.au, the free property listing service owned by Michael Hannan's Independent Print Media Group.

The two leading Australian online advertising portals are realestate.com.au, which is 60 per cent owned by News Corp, and domain.com.au, which is owned by Fairfax Media, publisher of this website.

John Brand, general manager, key categories, at Fairfax Media said domain.com.au would not at this stage be taking up the Google offer to contribute listings to the new service.

"We are quite confident that we provide a better service than Google is offering," he said in a telephone interview. "We are a specialist property portal and we think this will stand us in good stead going forward."

Google product manager Andrew Foster said the decision to launch the new service was driven in part by research showing that, increasingly, more people were using the internet to search for a home to buy or rent.

"And there's also been a 35 per cent growth in real-estate-related queries on Google in the year to Febraury 2009," he said.

Its all Greek to me

2009-07-07T09:04:00.000+10:00

World’s Oldest Christian Bible Goes Digital

Jeff Bertolucci, PC World

Jul 7, 2009 7:28 am

Time is never kind to paper manuscripts, particular those written over 1600 years ago. Some 800 pages remain of the Codex Sinaiticus, a version of the Christian Bible written in the fourth century, and the original text is thought to be nearly twice as long. Historians believe the book may be world's oldest Christian Bible. Studying the original text has proven challenging, however, as sections of the work are scattered in four locations around the globe.

But thanks to today's online publication of the Codex Sinaiticus, scholars can examine the entire book from the comfort of their desks. Curious? You can explore the document yourself. Stephen Bates of The Guardian explains the significance of the online edition:

"...so sophisticated is modern technology that scholars will not only be able to read the document on their screens using a standard light setting, but also separately by a raking illumination that highlights the texture and features of the very parchment on which the 800 surviving pages of text were written."

It's fair to say the online edition of Codex Sinaiticus won't have mainstream appeal. But the project does illustrate the power of the Internet to advance educational pursuits. We'll likely see similar efforts in the future for other historical documents.

See more like this:
e-books

How to tie a hijab

2009-07-06T09:42:00.001+10:00

An interesting read

2009-07-06T09:32:00.004+10:00

The fuss over the burqa is out of kilter

Irfan Yusuf
July 6, 2009

IN ABOUT six months, a cross-party French parliamentary committee of 32 MPs will prepare a report examining whether the wearing of the burqa (an outfit, usually black, that covers a woman's full body, including her face) in public represents a threat to French secularism. They'll also determine whether to ban it being worn in France.

The committee was formed after French President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the French Parliament on June 22 and described the burqa as "a problem of liberty and women's dignity" and "not welcome in France".

Sarkozy further claimed that the burqa was not a religious symbol at all, but rather "a sign of subservience and debasement", which created "women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity".

Of course, even if Sarkozy regarded the burqa as a religious symbol, he might still ban it. In the past, he hasn't been averse to banning the open display of religious symbols in French state schools.

Sarkozy was originally behind the push to proscribe the hijab (headscarf) from state schools, only to subsequently oppose specific legislation, introduced in 2004, which saw the wearing of all religious symbols in state schools prohibited.

Many French, and indeed many Australians, find the various shades of religious head covering adopted by Muslim women somewhat troublesome. Women draped in black represent one of the most potent stereotypes of Islam in the West, one reinforced by media images. When one Sydney Muslim man called for polygamy to be legalised, the Herald Sun website carried a photo of two burqa-clad women crossing the street. The website of its Sydney equivalent regularly carries photos of burqa-clad women in any story even mildly related to Muslims. On August 8, 2007, in a story on an investigation into a refugee housing project run by a main Muslim body, The Daily Telegraph showed the image of the top half of a fully veiled woman's face.

It's unclear exactly what proportion of Muslim women wear any sort of head covering when in public, though anecdotal evidence suggests only a minority do. Among those who cover, the vast majority seem to follow the religious consensus and restrict themselves to merely covering all or part of their hair. This can take the form of a more fixed hijab (as commonly worn in the Arab world and South-East Asia) or a loose shawl draped over the head (common in Iran and South Asia).

The vast majority of Muslims in France are from North Africa where the face veil is rarely worn. This naturally raises the question: with such a tiny minority wearing such a veil, why is Sarkozy using his precious time talking about this issue?

Sarkozy's remarks are reminiscent of former prime minister John Howard's frequent references to alleged non-integration of Muslim Australians. Yet in one radio interview Howard declared 99.9 per cent of Muslims were perfectly integrated. I wondered at the time whether his repeated emphasis on the 0.01 per cent non-integrated was little more than an attempt to create an environment where the 99.9 per cent were made to feel uncomfortable.

No women in my family cover their hair. However, my maternal grandfather, who lectured at the relatively liberal Aligarh Muslim University in India, insisted the women of his household practise a form of traditional aristocratic seclusion known as purdah. Though associated with Indian Islamic culture, purdah was also practised in many upper-class north Indian Hindu and Sikh households.

It was common in those days for wealthy women to go out shopping while seated in a special palanquin (called a dholi). This was basically a large, comfortable, box-like structure with plenty of cushions for aristocratic women to laze on while their male servants (or even male relatives) would carry them. The curtains around the box had a screen through which the women could peek and decide which shop they would visit.

Women's quarters in 1950s Aligarh homes were places where women enjoyed themselves, freed of any domestic duties, their husbands or fathers employing servants to perform all cooking and other chores. Men were expected to lavish gifts on their female relatives (and in-laws) using the household income, which women were usually responsible for managing (I'm sure to their own advantage). Men were also expected to do all the shopping for food and other household needs. Women only shopped to buy clothes, jewellery and other luxury items for themselves.

Of course, the situation for the aristocratic Indian woman in purdah was a far cry from impoverished women living in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Purdah did not stop my mother from completing high school and a bachelor's degree. The idea of banning women from education or work would be anathema to most Muslims, including the one in four of South Asian heritage.

France has the largest Muslim population of any country in Western Europe.

By focusing on a tiny minority of Muslim women, Sarkozy risks alienating the majority of French Muslims, including those who agree with his basic proposition that the burqa is offensive and degrading to women.

Irfan Yusuf is author of Once Were Radicals: My Years as a Teenage Islamo-Fascist, published byAllen & Unwin.

Can u remember when?

2009-07-02T15:34:00.001+10:00

The Sony Walkman at 30

The first Sony Walkman, the WalkmanTPS-L2.

Daniel Rook

July 1, 2009 - 4:50PM

Thirty years ago Sony launched the Walkman, a gadget which revolutionised the way people around the world listened to music but has since been overtaken by an icon of the digital age - the iPod.

The July 1, 1979 rollout of the portable cassette player helped transform the Japanese company into a global electronics powerhouse.

Sony sold 30,000 Walkmans in the first two months after its launch, and 50 million within a decade.

Three decades on, however, Sony is struggling against rivals such as Apple, which has enjoyed immense success with its iPod music player.

Times have changed since Sony engineer Nobutoshi Kihara sketched out designs for the Walkman by hand.

"Back in my days, we had to draw product designs on paper," Kihara told AFP in an interview in 2006 after his retirement.

"I would close my eyes and imagine our products. I would imagine joggers with Walkmans to see how the hinges should move or how the products fit into the lives of the users."

Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka came up with the idea for the gadget on one of his overseas trips, during which he used to listen to music on existing tape recorders that were too heavy to be considered truly portable.

The initial reaction to the Walkman was poor. Many retailers thought that a cassette player without a recording mechanism had little chance of success.

That changed, and today total sales of the Walkman have reached 385 million around the world, including newer digital models that use flash memory.

Sony says it chose the name "Walkman" partly because of the popularity of Superman at the time and the fact it was based on an existing audio recorder called the "Pressman."

It initially planned to call the machine "Soundabout" in the United States and "Stowaway" in Britain, but changed its mind after hearing that children in Europe were already asking their parents for a "Walkman".

The name stuck, and in 1986 it was included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

For people who have grown up with iPods, Sony's original gadget can leave something to be desired. They include 13-year-old Scott Campbell who was asked by the BBC to swap his Apple gadget for a vintage Walkman for a week.

His friends, he said, "couldn't imagine their parents using this monstrous box."

It also took him three days "to figure out that there was another side to the tape."

"I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette," he added.

Sony has tried to repackage the Walkman in recent years with new versions, including one that looked like a jelly bean, with some success.

It sold seven million Walkmans in the year to March, up from 5.8 million the previous business year, a company spokeswoman said.

But it has failed to pose a serious challenge to Apple, which sold 100 million iPods in less than six years after its launch in 2001, making it the fastest selling music player in history. Sales have since topped 200 million.

Sony is hoping its new touch-screen X-series Walkman will revive sales of the gadget.

For many observers, the success of the iPod illustrates the way Sony has lost its golden touch in recent years, failing fully to exploit the opportunities of the Internet and the digital age.

As well as losing its lead in portable music players, Sony's PlayStation 3 has been trumped by Nintendo's Wii as the top-selling home video game console.

Sony announced in May its first annual loss in 14 years and warned it would stay in the red this year.

Chief executive Howard Stringer has vowed to meld the company's strength in electronics with its games and movies. He is also slashing 16,000 jobs and axing about 10 percent of Sony's manufacturing plants.

Jackson queries cause Google meltdown

2009-06-29T07:35:00.004+10:00

June 27, 2009

A deluge of search queries for Michael Jackson led Google News, the news aggregator of web search engine Google, to initially believe it was under attack, the internet giant said.

Google, in a blog post on the company website on Friday, said that "millions and millions" of people around the world begin searching for news about the pop star on Thursday as reports emerged about his hospitalisation and death.

It rated the "hotness" of Jackson-related searches as "volcanic".

"The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack," Google said.

"As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a 'We're sorry' page before finding the articles they were looking for," it said.

The "We're sorry" page tells users their query "looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application" and forces them to type in a series of squiggly characters before it will process their request.

Popular micro-blogging service Twitter also suffered a slowdown in performance on Thursday as users exchanged thousands of messages per minute about Jackson's death at the age of 50.

Web portal AOL said its AIM instant messaging service was down for about 40 minutes.

Yahoo! said the news area on its front page received five times its normal traffic and its front page story "Michael Jackson rushed to hospital" was its "highest clicking story" ever with 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes.

AFP

Source: smh.com.au

Going digital: Is your TV ready?

2009-06-24T21:05:00.000+10:00

The analogue signal will be switched off in some regions next year.

Louisa Hearn

June 23, 2009

The world's gaze was trained on the US last week after it became the first country to switch off the old analogue television system in favour of digital. So how will Australians fare when we take our first solo steps with the new broadcast technology next year?

Although the impact of the US switchover is still being reviewed, sales of digital set-top box and televisions reportedly skyrocketed in the days leading up to it, and many viewers are thought to have lost their TV service because they were ill-informed or lacked the technical know-how to bridge the gap alone.

The Australian Digital Switchover Taskforce is banking on $140 million of extra funding and a national advertising campaign to smooth the way for our national switch-off, which will be phased in over the next four years. But the latest digital survey data indicates that over 50 per cent of households have not yet upgraded to digital, even though analogue television signals will cease in some regions in the first half of next year.

The Victorian region of Mildura - where seven out of 10 households have made the switch to digital - will be the first to lose its analogue signal. Broken Hill residents will follow in the second half of the year, and other regional centres over the next two years. Major cities will wait until 2013, allowing more time to iron out the reception issues associated with high density residential dwellings.

Although a recent survey suggested that 64 per cent of households believed they knew how to convert a TV to receive digital signals, Andy Townend, executive director of the Digital Switchover Taskforce, said there were still a large number of people who thought they needed to splash out on expensive equipment.

"One of biggest misconceptions is that people think they need to replace their TV. You don't need to buy a new television but if you do decide to change your television, then it is important ensure it is digital," he said.

Another murky area for many is digital television reception. Although you may need to upgrade an ageing aerial when you switch to digital, it is not necessary unless you are unable to get an adequate signal from your existing equipment.

"One big myth is that you need a digital aerial. An aerial is an aerial," said Mr Townend.

According to Choice magazine, consumers also need to be on their guard against retailers upselling equipment above and beyond their requirements.

"There is a lot of confusion about digital technology for many consumers. The early adopters are already there but a lot of sections of the community are very confused about what they need," said Choice spokeswoman Elise Davidson.

"A lot of people that are not fluent in electronics get totally overwhelmed. We are running a campaign to try to help people distinguish between different types of equipment."

To clear up some of the misinformation in the community, the Digital Switchover Taskforce is planning to supplement the information on its website with two-minute instructional videos.

It has also established a national helpline and appointed community liaison officers to assist vulnerable groups such as the elderly. Financial and technical support will also be offered directly to disadvantaged groups meeting certain criteria.

So what are your options for going digital?

Set top box
This is the cheapest method of converting to digital. A digital set top box will cost from about $40 and enables any traditional analogue TV to pick up digital signals. (Owners of much older televisions without sockets for a set top box cable may need to buy an additional component called an RF modulator to connect them).

Set top boxes come in a range of models. The most basic convert the signal to a standard definition picture while high definition (HD) units have been developed for LCD and plasma televisions with inbuilt high-definition tuners. Some set top boxes also include electronic program guides.

Video/DVD players that do not have an inbuilt digital tuner will require their own separate set top box if the user wants to record one channel while watching another - even if there is already a digital tuner or set top box for the television. (For simple recording of the channel you are watching, an additional set top box would not be necessary.)

Personal video recorder
A PVR with a digital tuner can also convert an analogue television to digital. These include electronic program guides and allow viewers to pause, replay and record live TV.

Digital TV
If you're ready to splash out on a new digital television then there is a huge range of devices on the market, with the cheapest costing around $350. You can buy either a standard definition television which is broadcast at the same resolution as analogue, or high-definition television, depending on your budget.

High definition officially broadcasts at 576p, 720p, 1080i and 1080p - although some countries consider 576p standard definition. (A high definition "tick" logo introduced by The Australian Digital Suppliers Industry Forum can only be added to televisions with 720 active vertical scanning lines (720p) or better.)

To be fully compatible with a Blu-ray high-definition DVD player, you need a television with 1080p high definition.

TV Aerials
The benefits of switching to digital include a wider range of TV channels and vastly improved images and sound, with ghosting and snowy pictures becoming a thing of the past. It can also deliver better reception in areas where analogue performance is patchy. But digital broadcast signals are not without their issues. Some older aerials will not pick up a strong enough signal, and with digital technology a poor signal can cause heavy onscreen pixelation or no picture at all.

One consumer reported to Choice that every time a bus went past their house they lost their digital signal and so ended up jumping back and forth between analogue and digital.

Living in a multi-level buildings with a shared antenna can also spell trouble for digital broadcasting. If the building is unable to pick up an adequate digital signal, then residents may be left without television altogether when the analogue network is switched off. Electronic devices can also interfere with digital signals, which may compound reception problems in high-density areas.

The Digital Switchover Taskforce says it is working with the building sector to ensure appropriate action is taken prior to the move to digital, especially for city-dwellers. It will offer technical advice to consumers with reception problems via its helpline on 1800 201 013.

Theres some twister in us all

2009-06-22T09:04:00.003+10:00

Telling a story in 140 characters or less

Agence France-Presse

Created 06/19/2009 - 22:58

Telling a story in 140 characters or less

Agence France-Presse | 06/19/2009 10:58 PM

NEW YORK – Arjun Basu writes short stories. Very short stories.

"I'm doing 140-character stories on Twitter," said Basu, one of scores of authors, poets and other creative types who are downsizing their literary talents to the limited format of the hot micro-blogging service.

"I call them Twisters because everything on Twitter has a stupid name," the 42-year-old Basu told AFP at the 140 Characters Conference, a two-day talkfest devoted to all things Twitter held in New York this week.

"Each story has a beginning, a middle and an end," said Basu, a Canadian, who readily acknowledges that he has developed a greater following on Twitter than for his more traditionally published works.

"I'm now at over 6,000 followers on Twitter," the Montreal-based Basu said. "I published a book of short stories last year and that was with a small press so maybe 2,000 people bought the book.

"So I have more readers now than I used to."

Basu, whose Twitter handle is @arjunbasu, said he began writing the Twisters last year.

"I started with one story. I had an image in my head and I just did it," he said. "And I slowly built up a following."

"They went out hunting. They killed some large mammals. Later they saw the animals butchered. And one by one they ordered salads that evening," reads one of Basu's Twisters.

"The marriage didn't survive the honeymoon. They acknowledged the majesty of their mistake. But they remained together. Because of the gifts," goes another.

Haiku, which lends itself to the 140-character format, is another popular literary form on Twitter and the search term #haiku occasionally rises into Twitter's list of "Trending Topics," the 10 most popular topics on the site.

"And in the middle / of the rising city heat / the fountain is dry," reads a Haiku from a Twitter user and poet with more than 3,800 followers who goes by the handle of @LadyParadis.

Websites have also popped up collecting the best of Twitter Haiku -- known variously as Twaiku or TwiHaiku -- and many users take part weekly in what is called Haiku Thursday.

Basu, who works in the magazine industry, said he has been surprised at the reception his byte-sized stories have received. "Things that I couldn't have imagined," he said.

"Some people have been using my stories in classes -- English as a second language, creative writing," he said. "There's one guy who's translated a bunch of them into Portuguese. Another guy who's translated them into Italian."

"I did find an agent and we're trying to figure out what to do with this," Basu said. "Publishers are trying to wrap their heads around it. They're having a hard time with Twitter in general I think."

Basu said he had also been contacted by Filminute, the international film festival dedicated to the best one-minute films.

"They've been putting me in touch with some directors," he said. "My Twisters may become the source for some really short movies."

Basu said one of the most satisfying things about Twitter was that it was a "great connector."

"As a writer you get instant feedback which for a writer is like catnip," he said. "You get this feedback immediately after you've sent something out.

"It makes the whole process a lot less lonely in a way."

We watched Southern Star go up now we watch it come down

2009-06-16T13:41:00.001+10:00

Cabins removed from troubled Southern Star wheel

June 16, 2009 - 10:59AM

The cabins on Melbourne's giant ferris wheel will be removed as work continues to fix structural problems. Photo: Sebastian Costanzo

The cabins on Melbourne's giant ferris wheel will be removed as work continues to fix structural problems caused by a heatwave.

The 120-metre high tourist attraction in the Docklands precinct closed in January after a three-day hot spell caused buckling and cracks in support structures.

It will take a couple of weeks to remove the 21 cabins that carry riders on the Southern Star wheel.

Work will then begin to disassemble the outer structure, including the rim and spokes, a Southern Star spokesman said.

The work is being carried out by the manufacturers of the Southern Star Japan's Sanoyas Hishino Meisho Corporation.

The wheel is expected to be out of commission for at least 12 months.

Old curios of Melbourne town

2009-06-15T08:09:00.001+10:00

Hidden places' open day

June 15, 2009

A GHOSTLY librarian and small child are said to haunt the oldest part of the State Library of Victoria, Queens Hall.

The story is not so hard to believe considering the dust and cobwebs that have settled on its giant columns and ornate ceilings in the six years since it was closed to the public.

But visitors will be allowed to visit the 153-year-old hall for one day next month as part of Melbourne Open House Day.

On July 19, the curious can explore hidden corridors beneath Federation Square, the Gothic glamour of Collins Street's Manchester Unity building's boardroom and the concrete catacombs of Melbourne's first electricity substation.

The event, based on popular open days in New York and London, attracted 30,000 visits to eight of Melbourne's hidden places in its inaugural year last year.

R we paying for info on the net with advertising or not?

2009-06-13T09:50:00.002+10:00

Internet free ride soon over

Gordon Farrer

June 13, 2009

WITHIN five years internet users will have to pay to access content now free, according to Barry Diller, chief executive of InterActiveCorp in the United States, which runs about 30 websites and turns over $US1.5 billion ($A1.8 billion) each year.

"I absolutely believe the internet is passing from its free days into a paid system," he told the Advertising 2.0 conference in New York this week.

Mr Diller said the paid model would include subscriptions, one-time purchases for access to sites and micro-payments.

But not all agree. "That's quite a prediction," said Neil Ackland, managing director of the Sound Alliance Group, the largest independent online publisher in Australia. Its niche music and lifestyle sites — such as FasterLouder, SameSame and Mess+Noise — attract 500,000 unique hits a month.

"We've been doing that for more than 10 years and manage to make a profit out of advertising as our model — why would we want to change that?"

Mr Ackland said people would be willing to pay for some content "but I think people are already paying for that content: finance, investment, dating, real estate information, high-end information. People already recognise that value.

"But a news story that is on 600 websites around the world simultaneously doesn't have any value to the end user. It doesn't have any exclusive value they can't get elsewhere."

Andrew Sims, general manager of marketing and products for Melbourne-based internet service provider iPrimus agrees: "If one of the big newspapers today wanted to make everyone pay for content, people would go elsewhere … there'll be another two, three maybe five sites out there that'll provide the services (free)."

The demise of respect for copyright on the internet plays a role. Canny consumers can find their way around information toll booths; once someone has access to content they can put it out there for others to access.

"We see that with all types of things," said Mr Sims, "(such as) illegal downloads of video content and music."

Companies must learn to survive on revenue via advertising on their sites, he said.

"Advertising companies are moving away from traditional media — print and TV — and putting their money online because they feel they get better bang for their buck. As that trend continues you'll see more and more people spending online, which will certainly help websites whose ultimate goal is to deliver quality content."

The shift in how young people, especially, found information was also a factor, said Mr Ackland.

"A lot of people now already get a lot of their news and information from forums and blogs — when they happen to stumble across news that's been posted in forum threads …

"Twenty years ago there was a limited number of places where information could get published and distributed. Now there's an infinite number … The idea of putting information behind a walled garden? I just don't see it happening."

Lonely Planet snaps up Microsofts sci fi computer

2009-06-11T18:04:00.002+10:00

The Lonely Planet application being demonstrated on Microsoft's Surface coffee table computer.

Lonely Planet gets touchy feelyLonely Planet is the latest high profile company to utilise Microsoft's newest interactive computer, 'Surface'.
Asher MosesJune 11, 2009 - 1:29PM

Lonely Planet in Australia has become the first local company to harness Microsoft's radical new Surface coffee table computer that responds to natural hand gestures and real-world objects.
The travel publishing company, which is opening up its first brick-and-mortar store in Sydney Airport next month, gave Microsoft license to develop a proof-of-concept application for Surface with a view to installing the state-of-the-art computers in its stores in future.
First unveiled last year, the $US12,500 ($15,400) machines have already been introduced into some US restaurants and hotels - such as the Sheraton, Starwood and Harrah's chains - letting customers order food directly, book entertainment and play music and games.
The computers, which feature a 30-inch touchscreen panel, are controlled by hand gestures similar to those found in the science fiction movie Minority Report. They can also interact with non-digital objects placed on top of them.
With the Lonely Planet application, shown off today at Microsoft's REMIX 09 conference in Sydney, customers can pick up any of the Lonely Planet guidebooks in the store, place it on the table, and they are then presented with an array of rich content about that destination including videos, maps, images and, down the track, live weather details and relevant posts on the Lonely Planet forums.
All of the content can be resized and moved around the table using hand gestures. The customer can then pick up a mini cardboard "passport", place it on the table and then drag over any content they would like to revisit on to the passport.
Each passport has a URL and a unique code, so when the user gets to their destination, they can log on to the internet at an internet cafe, enter the code, and then retrieve all of the content they saved using Surface.
"Lonely Planet is the first Australian brand to start seriously exploring what you can do with Surface," said Microsoft Australia's user experience evangelist, Shane Morris.
"They saw this as the way to bridge their physical product with their virtual product. Every year they make less money from guidebooks, they know that their future is online."
At Starwood Hotels in the US, customers can pay for items by dropping a credit card on to the touchscreen, while those visiting stores of US telco AT&T can compare phone features and plans by placing two different phones on the table.
Casino giant Harrah's has introduced Surface computers at the Rio, which let patrons order drinks, make dinner reservations, book shows, watch YouTube videos, play touchscreen games and even flirt with people sitting at other tables.

At some hotels and restaurants, bills can be split by placing two cards on the table and dragging menu items onto the card.
Surface has yet to officially launch in Australia, and Morris would not say when companies here would be able to buy them. But the tables have already launched in the US, Canada, the Middle East and 15 countries in Europe, so an Australian launch does not appear to be far away.
Three of the tables have made their way to Australia, one located at Microsoft's headquarters and two located at the Microsoft-owned Australian marketing company Amnesia, which developed the Lonely Planet application.
Amnesia's founder, Iain McDonald, said he had four staff developing concept applications for the machines, some of which can be viewed here. But the company was not yet officially developing applications for other Australian companies.
Lonely Planet, whose headquarters is in Victoria but acquired by the BBC in 2007, said there were as yet no specific plans to deploy the Surface computers in its Sydney store.
"Nevertheless, Lonely Planet and Lagardere Services Asia Pacific (who are collaborating on the store) are both very excited by the possibilities, and are very open to the possibility of deploying offerings like this one in the future," the company said.

Create your own user name on Facebook this Saturday from 2pm

2009-06-10T21:59:00.002+10:00

200m members ready for Facebook name grab

Asher MosesJune 10, 2009 - 3:28PM
Get ready for the great Facebook land grab - at 2pm on Saturday, the social networking site will allow members to register their own user names to make it easier for others to find their pages.
The new system - already offered by MySpace and Twitter - will give people a simple, unique address, such as http://www.facebook.com/joebloggs, instead of the current system whereby profile pages have a URL with a randomly assigned number such as "www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789".
But Facebook designer Blaise DiPersia said the user names would be handed out on a "first-come, first-serve basis", a move that is sure to spark a land rush as the site's 200 million members race to register their favourite names first.
The social networking site has created a special page for people to go to to choose their user names on the day.
"This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you," DiPersia wrote on a blog post.
"We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook user name in the future."
But only existing members who had signed up before the usernames announcement will be eligible on Saturday in order to "prevent people from creating new accounts just to take advantage of reserving a username".
New Facebook users will be able to claim their username on June 28.
Unlike MySpace, Facebook has a strict rule forcing people to use their real names when signing up to the site, and has even banned people with unusual names after suspecting they were fake.
But, for the user names, it appears any name is fine as long as it is at least five alphanumeric characters. Facebook said it "prevents certain words from being included in usernames", which most likely refers to swear words.
Having a unique username will be particularly useful for those with common names such as "John Smith", as these people are often difficult to find using the search feature on the Facebook site since there are hundreds of John Smith profiles to sift through.
Facebook users should think carefully about the username they choose, as, once it's been selected, they will not be able to change or transfer it, DiPersia said. This is probably to prevent people from selling popular usernames on sites such as eBay.
Members should also be aware that Facebook can remove or reclaim "any username at any time for any reason".

Travelling overseas soon... some good tips here to remind you to take care

2009-06-05T08:00:00.001+10:00

Dirty dozen: top 12 travel scams and cons

June 5, 2009

Travellers beware ... tourists lose billions each year to scams and con artists. Illustration: John Shakespeare

Travellers lose billions each year to series of scams, cons and tricks - the majority of which occur in foreign destinations when people are at their most vulnerable. Here are 12 to look out for:

The journey:

Tyres and fliers

You are driving along the motorway when a driver draws alongside you, pointing to one of your tyres and gesturing to you to pull over. You stop on the hard shoulder and the other driver kindly pulls over to help. While you inspect the tyre, he lifts all your valuables from the front seat. A new version on this is when you return to your parked car and get in, only to see a flier stuck under the rear window wiper obscuring your view. So you jump out to remove it, thieves nip in and drive off in the car - more than likely taking your bag/shopping with it.

Tip: If you fear you have a flat tyre, try to continue until the next service station. If you do have to remove the flier, ensure your valuables are hidden. In both cases, always keep the car locked.

Metal detector

You place your laptop on the airport security scanner while waiting for a couple of people to pass through the metal detector. The first passes, but the second person triggers the alarm and laboriously takes out coins, jewellery and mobile phone from his pockets. By the time you go through, the first person has long gone, as has your laptop. Most prevalent in countries where you can go in and out of the departure area, such as the United States.

Tip: Never put your belongings on the conveyor belt unless the metal detector is clear.

Currency cons

Unscrupulous cashiers in banks or bureaus de change adopt suspect counting methods when handing over money to foreigners. With irregular pauses they miss out numbers in the countback in the hope that the tourist is not concentrating or does not understand. Another scam is to give someone the wrong currency when exchanging money for example, Czech koruna (50 to 1) instead of Polish zloty (six to 1) - or confuse them with one zero too few (think Turkish lira). More often than not, the tourist will fail to notice.

Tip: Find out about the currency and exchange rate before leaving (www.xe.com), pay attention to those zeros and insist on counting back your money in front of the cashier.

Hire or liar

It's the end of your holiday, you are in a rush to catch your flights, so you hurriedly hand back the keys to the hire car representative who gives you a nod and sends you on your way. Only when you arrive back home do you find your credit card has been charged for damage you never inflicted. This is increasingly prevalent in Europe.

Tip: Make sure you mark any damage before you hire the car and ensure you get a signature for the "all clear", a copy of the paperwork before departing.

By day:

Travelling light

Crowded streets, malls, markets and railway stations are the obvious spots. While moving through the crowds you bump into a passer-by: you apologise and move on. It is only later that you notice you are travelling light - your keys, wallet or phone has gone.

Tip: Make sure your bag is zipped up. Never leave your wallet in a back pocket. Take what you need in a money belt and leave the rest in your hotel safe.

Compensation claim

Someone will bump into you in a crowded place, drop a pair of spectacles or a precious ornament (always previously broken), feign horror and claim to the world and his wife that you have to pay up for the damage. In some African countries, this scam extends to pedestrians bumping into your car and then writhing around on the ground while a hostile crowd asks for compensation.

Tip: Ask to resolve the situation at a police station or hotel reception the crook is more likely to give up the ruse.

Mess take

You are admiring the sights when you feel the unmistakable splat of bird droppings on your shoulder or perhaps you have something spilt on you by a clumsy passer-by. As you stop to examine the damage, an amiable local helps you clean off the mess, while cleaning out your wallet.

Tip: You could chain your wallet to your belt, but a money belt is the safest option.

Unfair cop

A man approaches you to ask for directions or to offer you a currency exchange or even drugs. Then two men appear, flashing badges and claiming to be police. They demand to see your passport and check your wallet for "counterfeit money". When you hand them over the men either disappear into the crowd or one distracts you while the other relieves you of your cash. If you have been duped into changing money they may confiscate it, claiming that it is "counterfeit".

Tip: If approached by police, insist on checking their photographic identification and accompanying them to the police station before handing anything over.

Snooze and lose

You are waiting for a train, plane or bus, with your bags by your side, and a passer-by "accidentally" drops a wallet, money or keys from his pocket. Being honest, you grab them and run after him to return it. Your bags, meanwhile, are long gone.

Tip: If you are alone, err on the side of caution, even if this means appearing rude.

By night:

Unlicensed taxis

It is late, you have had a few drinks and it is a long walk home there are no licensed taxis at the rank and a man is offers you a lift. The fare seems reasonable but you could pay a much heavier price. The consequences can range from simple muggings to murder.

Tip: Never, however tempting, get in an unlicensed taxi in a foreign city that you don't know well, particularly if you are alone.

Bitter pill

While enjoying a few drinks in a bar, you nip to the lavatory and return to finish your drink or perhaps you have just accepted a drink from a friendly stranger. Either way, that will be the last thing you remember: your drink has been spiked. Hours later you wake up to find your wallet has gone, or far worse.

Tip: Never leave your drink unguarded or accept a drink from a stranger unless you see it served by the barman.

Unwelcome reception

You're settling down for an early night when your hotel room phone rings. It's the receptionist apologising for the late hour but asking you to verify your credit-card details. You read them out and drift back to sleep. The caller, of course, was not the receptionist and your credit card is taking a pounding. A variation on this is someone approaching you in what appears to be hotel uniform, saying that he needs to make a photocopy of your passport for hotel records. You hand it over and he disappears.

Tip: Only give out your card number or passport in person at reception, never over the phone.

The Telegraph, London

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Recently cancelled our home delivery but soon we will pay for on line newspapers?!

2009-06-01T09:26:00.003+10:00

Future of newspapers is digital: Murdoch

News Corp chairman Rupert MurdochPhoto: Reuters
May 29, 2009 - 11:36AM
News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch says that the future of newspapers is digital, but it may be 10 to 15 years before readers go fully electronic.
Murdoch, in an interview with the News Corp-owned Fox Business Network, also said that newspapers, faced with eroding print advertising revenue and circulation, are going to have to start charging readers on the web.
The News Corp chief said newspapers in the future will continue to make money "from our readers, from our advertisers (but) the newspapers may look very different.
"Instead of an analogue paper printed on paper you may get it on a panel which would be mobile, which will receive the whole newspaper over the air, (and) be updated every hour or two," he said.
"You'll be able to get the guts or the main headlines and alerts and everything on your Blackberry, on your Palm or whatever, all day long.
"All these things are possible. Some of the greatest electronics companies in the world are working on this very hard," Murdoch said.
"I think it's two or three years away before they get introduced in a big way and then it will probably take 10 years or 15 years for the public to swing over."
Murdoch, who has announced plans to charge readers of his publications online, also said "you're going to have to pay for your favourite newspaper on the web".
The days of free news online were "going to stop," he said.
"I believe newspapers will be selling subscriptions on the web," he said.
"A (newspaper) website will be vastly improved, much more in them and you'll pay for them.
"There's a case that newspapers rushing on to the web to try and get a bigger audience and get more attention for themselves have damaged themselves," he said.
"Now they're going to have to pull back from that and say 'Hey, we're going to charge for this'."
Asked by Fox about a government bailout for newspapers, Murdoch said News Corp would never take government money.
"We'd give up our freedoms and everything else to criticise or to play our full role in the community," he said.
"Nothing that News owns will ever take money from the government and I don't believe even The New York Times would."
The 78-year-old Murdoch announced this month that he planned to begin charging readers of the websites of News Corp newspapers "within the next 12 months".
Murdoch's holdings include The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times of London, the Sun and The Australian, among others. The Wall Street Journal online already requires a subscription fee for access to all of its content.
Murdoch's comments came as The Atlantic magazine reported that top US newspaper executives held a "discreet" meeting in Chicago on Thursday to discuss the future of the troubled industry.

On your bike?

2009-05-30T19:37:00.000+10:00

One student fights back with a design for rail commuters

Robert Dumaresq nabs the gold in the Australian Design Award - James Dyson Award for his foldable "switch commuter bike". Photo: John Woudstra

Daniella Miletic

May 30, 2009

ABOUT the time Robert Dumaresq was choosing his project for the final year of his industrial design degree, Melbourne commuters were being banned from carrying bikes on trains during rush hours.

The controversial ban was reversed but the issue inspired the then 22-year-old Monash University student to create what he now calls the "switch commuter bike" — a high-performance bike that folds into the footprint of just one wheel.

"The trains are there for everyone and to just kick bikes off I thought was a bit unfair," said Mr Dumaresq, now 23.

He said it was clear to him that carrying bikes on transport would continue to be a problem as the city's train network got busier and more people started to use a train and bike combination to get to work. This, plus the glares he received from travellers when he took his bike on crowded trains, meant he quickly set about making a bike that would fold and be easy to handle on board.

"There was nothing on the market that fulfilled what I wanted," he said. "I wanted to try and avoid relying on a big block that can be a weak part of the frame and also having to take parts off the bike to actually fold it."

First, Mr Dumaresq used a full-size cardboard cut-out to work through the initial stages of his design. Later, he started "body storming" — brainstorming with bike pieces.

"Then I started developing it through sketching and 3D modelling and prototyping to a point at the end of first semester where I had a rough mock-up to prove the concept."

Mr Dumaresq was last night awarded the coveted 2009 gold Australian Design Award — James Dyson Award for his prototype. "I am still blown away by people's reactions to it and the amount of attention it has got," he said. "It's something I have been so close to for a long time now that it is really satisfying that people can get into it and see the demand out there for it."

Mr Dumaresq, of Armadale, and the 12 other finalists will be entered into the James Dyson Award international competition, where they will vie with students from more than 20 countries for a $20,000 prize.

Mr Dumaresq said he always wanted to design and showed early signs of having a technical mind. He loved Lego as a child and said he can think "a lot better three-dimensionally".

It is his dream to design for the cycling industry, a combination of two passions. He is looking for an investor for his bike and for a full-time job. "We are trying to encourage a greener lifestyle and get more people using environmentally friendly transport — and cycling is the best way," he said. "The more we can do to encourage people to cycle, the better."

Google wave is coming to swamp you

2009-05-29T07:59:00.001+10:00

Look out Outlook, Google's Wave is coming to swamp you

Google engineer Lars Rasmussen.Photo: Tamara Voninski
Stephen Hutcheon in San Francisco May 29, 2009 - 6:01AM

A team of Google engineers from Australia has unveiled a prototype replacement for standard email that abandons the reliance on the chronological sorting and stacking of messages which has been the hallmark of one of the internet's first and still most popular applications.
Christened Google Wave, the new feature was given its first public viewing in San Francisco earlier this morning Australian time at Google's annual developers' conference.
"I think you will see a form of interaction that you would not have previously imagined," Google co-found Sergey Brin told a post-launch press conference.
Wave - which began life as a project codenamed Walkabout - is a combination of email and instant messaging and document-, maps- image- and video-sharing all housed under one roof.
Much like a conference call, it also allows for conversations between more than two people to happen simultaneous.
And because it all happens inside a web browser, there is no special software to download or plug-in - which means it can be used from any computer or internet-enabled mobile phone.
"Our communication space is very fragmented today. We have a million different tools for different things with lots of different kinds of overlaps," said Lars Rassmussen, a senior software engineer with Google Australia
"The most natural way to try and solve that problem is to take all those different tools and try to make them smaller and fit into a single package and maybe integrate them across the boundaries."
Wave is being released so that the developers - independent software creators - can help iron out the remaining bugs and cook-up a swag of new uses for the service and the platform upon which it is based ahead of a public release later this year.
But Wave is more than just another of Google's ubiquitous free web services. It's also a protocol - meaning that it is going after email's mantle as the predominant internet communications tool.
And despite the recent growth of web-based email services like Hotmail and Gmail, most of the world's email runs through Microsoft's Outlook client.
And to encourage organisations to catch the Wave, Google is offering it up as an open source protocol, meaning that anyone - even a competitor - can box it up and host it on their servers.
Wave is the creation of Danish brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who together with Australian Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma - founded and later sold what became known as Google Maps to Google for an undisclosed sum in 2005.
Lars has worked for Google and lived in Australia since the sale and enticed Jens to leave Google's headquarters near join him in 2007.
The pair and the Wave team - who have been given the full backing of Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page - have been working on the project out of Google's offices in Sydney.
Stephen Hutcheon is attending the San Francisco conference as a guest of Google.

The Slap gets nod for small screen

2009-05-28T10:27:00.002+10:00

Nicole BradyMay 28, 2009

Latest related coverage
'Blown away' Tsiolkas takes prize
CHRISTOS Tsiolkas' acclaimed novel The Slap is to be made into a television series.
Matchbox Pictures yesterday announced that after a competitive bidding process it had purchased the rights to produce a television adaptation of the novel, which is set in Melbourne.
Tony Ayres, one of five partners at Matchbox, said he hoped the series would be able to unfold over eight episodes just as the novel was told through eight chapters, each from the perspective of a different character.
"We'd like to honour that in terms of our realisation," Mr Ayres said. "We're very keen for Christos to be involved in the making of the show."
Matchbox is now talking to local television networks about investing in the series. The program seems a likely fit for the ABC, which in the recent federal budget received a $70 million funding increase for local drama production.
ABC TV's head of arts and entertainment, Courtney Gibson, could not be reached for comment. The ABC has won good ratings for its screenings of BBC adaptations of tales by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Alan Hollinghurst.
The Slap is mostly set in Northcote and Fitzroy, where Mr Ayres said the series would be shot. Script development was likely to begin soon with production starting early next year, meaning the earliest the series could go to air would be the second half of 2010.
Mr Ayres said the book lent itself to television rather than film.
"The Slap is about intimate human relationships and television is such a fantastic medium for that," he said.
"There is a breadth to the way television drama can cover a topic and bring you intimacy and connection to a whole world, which is much harder to do in a feature film in 90 minutes."
In making the series, Mr Ayres said he would be drawing inspiration from top-shelf American productions such as The Sopranos, The Wire and Mad Men.
"People are talking about television in the way they used to talk about movies and books, it's what seems to be the cultural capital of our age," he said.
Matchbox Pictures is currently filming a feature film Lou, starring John Hurt. Its production Saved recently screened on SBS.
The Slap will be produced by Mr Ayres, Helen Bowden and Michael McMahon, with Penny Chapman as executive producer.

How to (responsibly) dump your old TV

2009-05-25T14:27:00.001+10:00

With two million old TVs estimated to be offloaded annually to make room for these, how can the proud owner of a new plasma display ensure their old CRT doesn't join the toxic swamp at the local tip?

Louisa Hearn
May 25, 2009

Carrying a poisonous cargo of almost 2kgs of lead and other heavy metals, millions of old televisions are finding their way into Australian landfills each year, rather than being recycled.

Around three million new televisions hit our shores last year as the popularity of flat screen technology and the looming 2010 switchover from analogue to digital drove a blistering pace of consumption.

With two million old TVs estimated to be offloaded annually to make room for these, how can the proud owner of a new plasma display ensure their old CRT doesn't join the toxic swamp at the local tip?

In the absence of a unified television recycling program, options for conscientious consumers are little more than a patchwork of local government initiatives, says Fraser Brindley, production and consumption campaigner at Environment Victoria.

"I get so many calls per week from people saying 'I have got all these TVs to get rid of'. If there does happen to be a recycling collection point near them they generally have to pay to offload them".

On Friday, Australia's state and federal environment ministers agreed to set up a national electronic waste recycling scheme.

Details of the scheme won't be in place for another six months but it is expected to involved a levy of about $35 on new TVs to help pay for the cost of collecting and recycling the old ones.

Product Stewardship Australia, an organisation representing TV manufacturers, has been working with Government to develop the framework for such a scheme since 2006.

Executive officer John Gertsakis, says: "Australia is a laggard in the area of television recycling.

"In spite of the whole switch over to digital there seems to be this resistance and indifference to deal with a recycling scheme that would support it".

Instead of the cost of recycling falling to the television manufacturers as it does in other countries, the financial and logistical burden rests largely on local governments who must either transport the thousands of discarded or dumped televisions to landfill or, in rare cases, take matters into their own hands by establishing expensive recycling schemes.

Melbourne's Boroondara council has recycled 19 tonnes of electronic waste for local residents since establishing a central drop-off point, and a spokesman says residents now demand the service.

The City of Sydney council recently set up its own quarterly e-waste collection day where 95-98 per cent of the raw material in electronic items are recovered and reused in manufacturing.

But such initiatives are still thin on the ground, especially in regional areas where there are no electronics recycling companies nearby to deal with collected waste.

"There are only a handful of councils running recycling programs and it is a hell of an operation for any individual organisation to get up and going. What we need is a Federal scheme that funds local collection points across the country or at the point of sale," says Mr Brindley.

To lessen the burden on the environment, the City of Sydney recommends looking at other options before throwing equipment away such as passing it on to friends or family, or hosting a garage sale.

"There are also a range of reuse organisations such as The Bower Bird and Reverse Garbage and charity organisations who accept second hand goods," a spokesman says.

Both the Salvation Army and St Vincent de Paul say they will accept used televisions which are working and meet certain criteria, and a number of websites such as freecycle.org and ozrecycle.com have also sprung up in recent years for passing unwanted household items to others who desire them.

Consumers also have the option of taking old equipment to e-waste recycling operations such as SIMS and MRI, however these centres are only based in larger metropolitan areas, and will charge a small fee for recycling old CRT televisions.

What you can do:

:: Pass on old equipment on to family or friends, or even strangers through an online recycling group such as http://www.freecycle.org.

:: Give old equipment to a charity shop or host a garage sale.

:: Check out whether your local council is running an e-waste recycling program at: http://www.recyclingnearyou.com.au/

:: Take your computer directly to an e-waste recycling depot such as SIMS, MRI or TIC Group for a small fee

:: Ask the Federal Government to set up a national TV recycling scheme at http://www.reborn.org.au

You tube gets 20 hours of video added per minute

2009-05-22T22:30:00.001+10:00

Twenty hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every minute.Illustration: Jo Gay
May 22, 2009 - 3:30PM
YouTube just keeps getting bigger.
The Google-owned video-sharing site said in a blog post that 20 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every minute.
It said that in mid-2007, six hours of video were being uploaded to the site every minute. It grew to 15 hours in January of this year and now stands at 20 hours a minute, YouTube said.
"Let's see if we can get to 24 hours - a full day's worth of video uploaded every minute," wrote Ryan Junee, a YouTube product manager.
Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $US1.65 billion but the California-based internet search and advertising giant has not yet managed to turn a profit with the site despite its massive global popularity.
YouTube has been gradually adding professional content such as full-length television shows and movies to its vast trove of amateur video offerings in a bid to attract advertisers.
It recently announced partnerships with Sony Pictures and other Hollywood studios and rolled out new platforms for watching television shows and movies.

Mozilla'd out

2009-05-22T21:43:00.004+10:00

So, working under stress here, using w's laptop as since a Mozilla /Firefox update last week on webwillys pc it has spat the dummy,crashing continually and not being user friendly @ all. So the IT help desk, W, has copied all my stuff, to 4 discs, my life reduced to 4 discs and is wiping the slate clean, formatting the hard drive, and reinstalling xp, watch this space.

Newspapers online a fast track to history

2009-05-21T16:27:00.002+10:00

The National Library of Australia aims to collate 4 million regional and metropolitan newspaper pages into a single searchable internet portal by 2011.

Louisa HearnMay 21, 2009 - 10:08AM

The Hawkesbury river boatmen who ferried wheat into Sydney in the early 1800s hold a unique place in Australian history.
Complaints of their "vexacious conduct" which caused untold damage to grain stocks leads the front page of Australia's first newspaper, and is now among millions of articles from our pioneering past available at the click of a button.
The National Library of Australia is the driver of this ambitious project, which aims to collate 4 million regional and metropolitan newspaper pages into a single searchable internet portal by 2011.
With 3.5 million news stories already live in the system, historians are hailing the Australian Newspapers beta search service as a fast track into our heritage.
"Newspapers were not inaccessible before but often you would have to travel from state to state for newspapers from capital city or rural areas," said Richard Waterhouse, professor of Australian History at the University of Sydney.
"This is not only going to make sources more accessible to academic historians but also for family historians who will be able to flesh out the story of their own family by finding references in local newspapers."
The process of transferring news from old-world library microfilm into digital format was no simple undertaking, said Cathy Pilgrim, NLA's director of Australian Newspapers Digitisation.
Firstly, the microfilm had to be scanned and sent overseas where optical character recognition software converted the image to text - essential for enabling keyword searches, she said.
With the NLA's core focus on material that is out of copyright, newspaper print quality can vary dramatically, often yielding less-than accurate results from character recognition software.
To complete the editing process, Ms Pilgrim said the NLA had leaned heavily on public goodwill, with users of its digital newspaper service already correcting more than 2 million lines of text in more than 100,000 articles and adding tens of thousands of tags.
"The human eye is much better than a machine and some of our correctors have been doing an amazing amount of work. Some find the work addictive or compulsive, and they are enhancing and enriching the service for future users," she said.
The public is also proving integral to search and rescue campaigns to find newspaper issues missing from the national archives. The NLA makes regular appeals to the public to check under their floor boards or sift through their attics for issues of newspapers missing from collections in libraries around the country.
Ms Pilgrim said that a user of the beta search service recently found reference in the Brisbane Courier to a newspaper called the Braidwood Liberal that was not even previously known to exist.
As it continues to grapple with the challenge of capturing the past, the NLA is also looking into the future in a separate project called Pandora, which seeks to capture a permanent record of significant digital publications and websites that are no longer publicly available.
"More publishing is being done online and less in traditional hard copy so the National Library really wants to be preserving online publishing as well. It's important to be storing and maintaining it so we can provide access to it in the future.
"The Sydney 2000 Olympics website was decommissioned a few weeks after the Games and is no longer available publicly, but through Pandora we managed to archive it," she said.

Have a go @ Wolfram and get addicted

2009-05-18T12:55:00.003+10:00

Is Google afraid of the big, bad Wolfram?
Conrad Walters
May 18, 2009
HOW long would it take an auctioneer to speak 6000 words? What was the weather in Beijing on the day Kevin Rudd was born? How many Americans are named Andrew?
Google and Wikipedia flounder with such questions, but an ambitious new search engine called Wolfram Alpha has the tech world abuzz with the promise of being able to do more than link to countless web pages or canvass a broad topic.
Named after its creator, British physicist and mathematician Stephen Wolfram, the free site went public over the weekend and officially launches tonight amid high expectations.
What separates it from everything else is an ability to interpret complex questions in everyday language and then answer those questions by consulting disparate pieces of information.
For example, Google can identify the nearest place for pizza; Wolfram Alpha is designed to tell you where to get the best pizza, explains Sydney technology author and futurist Mark Pesce.
While it may be some time before wolframalpha.com tackles culinary debates, the example does reflect the site's ability to interpret data from unrelated sources.
"It's going to have enough natural language guts to be able to look at a whole bunch of articles and judge them," Mr Pesce said.
The fledgling site is heavily biased towards the sciences, but its ability to infer conclusions from its data is where the potential lies.
For the record, Wolfram Alpha's answers to the questions posed above are: 24 minutes; 21 degrees and clear skies; and 1.06 million Americans.