I’m not posting much these days since I’m currently heavily involved in a current development and build effort for a Client. (Solaris platform with Oracle 10g)
All other hours are either commuting, sleeping or playing WoW. Look forward to a number of upcoming posts on Dansguardian SQL logging, OpenBSD and of course Apple and the iPhone.
Zug Zug…. you WC3 fans will know what I mean.
Apple now have links to two of the major carriers in Australia from their Australian iPhone website. Telstra are, not surprisingly, missing from this list.
My preference is Vodafone so I clicked through and pre-registered with them. You can do so too at their pre-registration page - and apparently a sales rep will call you back. I’m currently with them on the $79 cap, so I should be able to carry right on and hopefully get the best data plan possible. More details after a Sales person calls me.
Now that we know the 3G iPhone is coming to Australia in July, I was reading back through the pre-announcment 3G rumours to see what where true. Late last month, Afterdawn wrote that according to an anonymous insider, the iPhone will be faster on Telstra by the end of 2008.
If you follow through and read their referenced article at Electronista then the story changes slightly. They state that the iPhone will allegedly support up to 42Mbps by the end of 2008 in Australia (on NextG is inferred) “according to a senior offical“.
One more click through to the claim at ITNews and the referenced senior official is actually Sol Trujilo the Telstra CEO; and the article doesn’t mention anything about the iPhone. It is about Telstra offering a HSDPA+ service via their NextG by end of 2008.
The 3G iPhone does actually support the NextG frequencies which operate on 850 Mhz. The technical specifications on Apples iPhone page show that the 3G unit works on UMTS/HSDPA frequencies of 850, 1900 and 2100 MHz. This doesn’t mean the 3G chipset actually supports these NextG speeds.
Telstra have not yet announced the iPhone to be available through them despite Optus and Vodafone issuing press releases intending to carry the phone.
And now we come to the price. Stevie J announced in his Keynote Speech that the price of the 8GB model would not exceed USD$199 even in other countries. That comes in at about AUD$210 for an iPhone 3G 8GB at todays exchange rate. Historically there is a severe markup of 30% or more on products sole in Australia out of the USA, made by Apple.
We will see where there goes in the near future when pricing is actually announced. I’ll see you all with your new iPhone in July!
An friend of mine who lives in China recently wrote to me and said “guess what.. the great firewall of China seems to be gone…” My friend advised that you can read anything you like.
An example of this is the UK BBC news site, who a few months ago reported that their English site is available inside China for first time in a decade; but the point of interest is that the BBC Chinese site is also available for use within China.
A quick search, by my friend from within China, for tiananmen, dalai lama and taiwan yields links to articles that seems to make it evident that the so called Red Firewall doesn’t reset connections anymore.
Is this a show to the world that China is no longer the perceived oppressor of their own peoples right to information? A way to “shake-hands” with the world before the upcoming Olympics? This possible change in policy or network filtering may re-enable other people to test the status of the filtering once again.
Whether it will stay that way permanently remains to be seen.
The site has been slow recently. I can put this down to the failure of my DNS server. I used an internal caching DNS server for the intranet (where this site is hosted) and it techdebug.com resolves itself internally to a private IP. Whilst the server was off-line I was using an external DNS server, so for the web-server itself apache was resolving the domain name to the external public facing firewall. This meant time-outs and slow pages.
It is all fixed now, and probably time to rebuilt the DNS server up to the latest OpenBSD (Version 4.3).
