Data » unsane

How’s that search going for you, LaCie?

Data, Humour, Life, Technical No Responses »

Jan 192012

I’m frequently staggered by the inability of vendors, large and small, to provide decent search capabilities on their websites. This routinely happens across the entire spectrum of vendors, from hardware to OS to application, large and small. Search is not supplied by providing a search field and button somewhere in the header or footer of each generated web page – instead, it’s actually what goes on in the background that’s really important.

You know, the searching bit.

The indexing bit.

The text comparison bit.

This is something that I’m not convinced LaCie have understood:

So I searched for “Thunderbolt” from the main page. Given the huge rotating graphic on the front page twice mentions Thunderbolt (one such mention pictured), there’s going to be some results, surely?

…cue crickets chirping…

Yes, I know I could have actually clicked the Thunderbolt product on the main page; but that’s not necessarily intuitive if you’re a consumer who wants to know about all the Thunderbolt options a company has.

Left hand, meet right hand.

Shake, please.

The sixth sense

Data, Life No Responses »

Nov 182011

There’s a lot of crackpots and charlatans out there that’ll tell you they have extra-sensory perception. What skeptics seem to invariably find with such people is they’re either outright frauds, or they’re just very good at reading people. (As someone such as Derren Brown tries to point out.)

Unlike all those crackpots and charlatans though, I really do have a sixth sense.It’s called the internet.

(Image sourced from Wikipedia.)

Laugh if you want, scoff if you will, but net connectivity does, once you’ve been using it long enough become like another sense. After all, it lets you instantly communicate with people in every corner of the globe; it lets you find out information almost irrespective of whether it’s of immense importance of the tiniest of minutia, and finally, it lets you conduct your business, regardless of where it needs to be done, from wherever else in the world you are at the time.

That sounds like telepathy, omniscience and out of body respectively.

On those grounds, why wouldn’t you call the net a sixth sense?

We’re at an interesting point in time where a vast majority of the sum of human knowledge sits at our fingertips, indexed and ready for us to search. Never has there been so much information so readily available to so many. And, as my colleagues in storage will attest to, that just continues to grow. The amount of data generated and stored yearly increases at rates which are truly staggering, as shown by this infographic.

With that sort of information at our fingertips, you’d be forgiven for briefly indulging in a narcissistic appreciation of Hamlet’s soliloquy:

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in
Reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving
how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel!
in apprehension how like a god!

Now, pulling back from godlike delusions of grandeur, when you think of the interconnectivity offered by the internet, and the vast information potential it offers, that it can become as integrated into the faculties as any of the other senses. Sure, it relies on the other senses, but that’s not unusual though. For instance, taste and smell are inextricably linked; losing your sense of smell, even briefly, significantly impacts your sense of taste.

Never is the gulf between net-as-a-sense and five-senses-only more profound then when talking to someone who doesn’t have internet access at all. To them, breaking news is something they either see on a TV newsflash or radio broadcast. But that can be anywhere from 15 minutes to 8 hours since the news hit Twitter. (A classic example is how Twitter can now spread news of an Earthquake, out from the epicentre, faster than the shock waves.) It’s equally obvious with news surrounding people in the public eye: I got a text message from a relative saying “Did you know Steve Jobs died?” probably 4 hours after his death. That was practically old news by then, since I’d seen the news break on Twitter within minutes of it being announced. I probably would have known sooner but I was between travelling for work at the time.

In the Peter F. Hamilton Commonwealth series, there’s an enhanced version of the net called the unisphere, and everyone has direct neural connectivity to it, allowing extensive access to the sum of human knowledge.

Hamilton may be a science fiction writer, but even I as a humble Gen-Xer who happens to be strongly net-connected can see that the future lays in that direction. However, it’s not scary. It’s a new era for perception and connectivity. For over a decade now even modestly unimaginative people have been predicting a pseudo hive-mind level of connectivity thanks to the net, and with each year that passes, it becomes increasingly impossible to deny.

It’s the sixth sense.

Lion, Spaces, Transparency and Glitching

Data, Technical 5 Responses »

Jul 212011

Honestly, Lion was in beta testing for how many months, and I have to put up with this shit when switching spaces? And no, I’m not the only one – other users are reporting it, and a quick Twitter survey even for me confirmed it.

I switch spaces hundreds of times a day. 10.7.1 better fix this, or I’ll be an angry bear:

How many other people is this driving nuts?

10.7, MacPro3,1 with NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT card. Nothing out of the ordinary!

(NB: If video doesn’t load, either reload the page or view the original here on YouTube.)

10 tips to keeping your data safe

Data, Technical 1 Response »

May 232011

My career centres around enterprise level data protection, to the point that I wrote a book about it, and maintain a blog about it. I’m not talking security and anti-virus, though I have a typical paranoid IT person’s awareness of these items – I’m talking backing up and (if necessary) recovering your data.

Sometimes, once people find out what I do (“backup and recovery”) they ask me how they can best backup at home. This is something that I sometimes struggle to advise in, simply because I tend to take an enterprise approach even to home data protection. So, I’m not going to make my tips about “You should use program X” or “You should use cloud provider Y” – choosing what to use is different from knowing how to do it.

So, that being said, I can give you 10 key tips to keeping your home data safe:

Keep yourself organised.Honestly, this is the most important thing you can do – have a logical and consistent layout to where you store your data. Don’t just dump things on your desktop and hope to sort them out later, or save files to whatever random folder a File|Save dialog box offers. Have a directory/folder structure that is organised enough to make sense to you, without being so anal retentive that it drives you nuts and you start to disregard it.
Know how much you’re backing up. You need to get an understanding of how much data you’ll be backing up. Are you just going to be backing up your email and documents, or your iTunes library all the videos you’ve taken, all the photos you’ve taken, etc.? You can’t make a decision about what backup product to use if you don’t know how much data you’ll be backing up.
Know how much it’ll cost. Classic example – some people just blithely back up to the ‘cloud’ – i.e., over the internet, to something like Mozy or Crashplan. This might be OK for you if you’ve got a small amount of data, but if you’ve got a lot, then bear in mind that you may blow out your upload limits, or take months to complete. When it comes to backup, cost appears in at least two ways: literal dollar value, and amount of time taken. Be aware of both.
Some apps require special backups. For instance, if you’re using Microsoft Outlook or something like that, you can’t backup your mail while your mail program is active. Ask around, or touch base with IT people who use the same platform as you, and find out whether it’s safe to back your application data up while the apps are running.
It’s not a backup if it’s not tested. Don’t just run whatever backup process or program you choose to use and blindly trust that it’ll recover the data when you need. Do some test recoveries when you’re first setting up to reassure yourself it can be done, and then try to remember every now and then to do a test recovery to make sure it’s still looking OK.
It’s better to backup a little bit more than not quite enough. This is typically the very first thing we learn in data protection. Don’t go crazy and backup stuff you know you’d never recover, but on the other hand, if you’re not 100% sure of something, err on the side of caution. It’s better to use a few extra GB of backup space than to find out later you really, really needed something that you’ve now lost.
Backups should be automated. As a backup consultant, the best thing I think Apple ever introduced into their operating system was Time Machine. It allows for fully automated backups to run every hour, with an easy to use recovery interface. One of the first things we learn in backups is that if you have to manually run a backup, it won’t get run. You don’t use your computer to back it up – you use it for the web, or photos, or social networking, etc. Make sure whatever backup option you come up with runs automatically. You should be able to see when it’s active, or easily check that it’s happened/have it report to you when it’s complete. If you can manually run a backup too – e.g., after you’ve just say, imported 30GB of photos – that’s good, but you need it to run automatically 99.9% of the time.
Remember: Backup is Insurance. Doing a backup is like taking an insurance policy. You don’t get to the end of the year and think “damn, that was a waste of money, I never made a claim!” when you take out home and contents insurance. You think “Another good year”. Consider backup the same way.
Is your backup safe? Safe has dual meanings here: is it safe from something that might take out your actual data? Do you for instance, store it right next to your computer? If so, then it’s safe from the hard drive in your computer failing, but it’s not safe from something affecting your house. Consider this when deciding how you’ll store your backup. The second meaning of safe is this: what if someone steals your backup, or it gets lost? (E.g., if your data is small enough that you’re just backing up to a portable hard drive.) If that backup contains your bank account details, etc., then you’re practically giving away information, unless you do some form of encryption.
If you change backups, make sure to safely and securely dispose of the previous ones. You may even want to consider this in advance when choosing what sort of media you’re going to backup to. For instance, I made the mistake for a while of doing archival backup to DVD. When I was no longer doing this and needed to get rid of the DVDs, I had to scratch/destroy the surfaces of each one. With 800+ discs, that took a while:

The egregious incapacity of Telstra

Data, Telcos No Responses »

Apr 022011

Telstra, Australia’s number one phone/internet company in terms of market share, certainly has excellent signal strength, data speed (particularly for mobile broadband) and coverage. For those reasons, much as periodically they figuratively bugger me, I keep coming back. OK, so maybe I’m slightly masochistic, but when their shit works, it really really works.

But when their shit doesn’t work … well, let’s just say that they seem to have a customer call process that destroys a little more of your soul with each transfer.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent 2.5 hours on the phone to Telstra to find out one simple thing: what my current data usage was. The chunk of my soul lost in the experience was not insubstantial.

On the positive side, it did allow me to reverse engineer their flowchart for handling customer calls, and I present my observational findings below for your benefit:

To make matters more fun, their “complaints” line now (“Call 132200, say ‘complaints’”) just simply takes you back through to billing and accounts, where they insist they will need to go through the entire process again before they can log a formal complaint. Hmmm, there’s no exit strategy. Yes, you’re fucked.

I currently have a formal complaint lodged with Telstra – and annoyingly, stupidly, moronically, the only way I could get such a complaint lodged with them was to actually lodge it with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO).

NB: I will happily alter the above image when it no longer reflects the significantly higher percentage of times when I have called Telstra for an issue.

Apple won. Get with the programme.

Data, Technical 3 Responses »

Mar 082011

It’s time for the PC folk of the world to understand that Apple has won the computer war. It didn’t win by becoming the dominant computer manufacturer – there’s a big difference between winning a battle and winning a war. It won the war through the simplest of strategies: understanding what the war was actually about.

The first step to winning is understanding what you’re competing about. For years, Apple misunderstood this, and almost destroyed itself in the process. However, in 1996, when they reacquired Steve Jobs and acquired NeXT, they not only rediscovered their why, but they also discovered the fundamental problem in computing: that the natural evolution of the industry was not towards more complex systems, but to simpler systems.

Consumers want simplicity, not complexity. They want a system they can power on and know it will work, regardless of when they last used it, or what it looks like ‘under the hood’.

But hang on, I hear some people say say – I want to fiddle with the inner workings, or I want to see what it looks like under the hood. For those people, that may very well be right.

But those people are not all people – and whether those people want to admit it or not, they’re in an ever shrinking minority.

It didn’t start that way – not by a long shot. Back in the day when Apple was just starting, people built their own computers; I’m not talking buying a case, some cards, drives, CPU and memory and plugging them all together – I’m talking about something much lower level – buying the individual chips and attaching them to the circuit board, etc. A computer was built one small, fiddly component at a time.

As such, this only attracted what we’d these days describe as hard-core geeks. Enter Apple – already at that point, its focus, it’s why was to make computers that would enable users. So at a time when people were manually soldering bits and pieces, Apple started with something much closer to a conventional computer – and since then it’s just kept on going down that path.

Fast forward to 2011, and Apple has proven that consumers want simplicity. It’s not about sacrificing performance, or “dumbing” things down, it’s about ease of use.

Think about it: almost everything we do and all technology we evolve, we evolve it to be simpler and easier to use. I’ve watched “historical” dramas that saw women ironing by putting hot charcoals in an iron to keep it hot. I’ve used toasters that required you to pull down the cover, put the bread in at the risk of burning yourself against the element, and toast one side at a time.

All technology used by humans seem to share two evolutionary traits:

They get more powerful/more efficient
They get easier for regular people to use

At the same time, there’s a lot of technology which, regardless of how consumer-oriented it’s got, you’ll have some people who want to tweak it and make it work faster. That’s why, for instance, despite the long history of advances in things even as simple as say, cooking meat in the open, you get people who feel that it could be done faster by doing something like using liquid oxygen to get the BBQ hot faster. Or to put it another way – some people are computer overclockers, and others are BBQ overclockers. But neither the average computer user, nor the average BBQ user, are interested in overclocking their tools.

Look at cars as a perfect example. These days, cars are at the point where the average person wants to get in, turn a key (or press a button), have the car start, and then drive off. Automatic transmissions were introduced long ago, but there are still cars which have manual transmissions. But even cars that have manual transmissions are more advanced than cars from a decade ago. Most cars now have power steering. Many cars have advanced brake systems. We’re starting to see cars with collision avoidance systems, with the ability to park themselves – and so on. In ten years time this won’t be just in the top of the line cars – it’ll be appearing in the standard cars that the average person buys.

There are still car owners who want to push their vehicle to its limits and beyond. You start with the basics – like people who are “petrol heads” – enthusiasts who want a hotted up car. Above and beyond that though, you get the car owners who are into high performance engine tuning, people who not only want to get every ounce they can out of their car, but will frequently do as much as they can to increase what the car can give beyond what any normal driver would consider. They’re car overclockers.

There’s a place for overclockers in the world, regardless of the technology that’s being overclocked. But the simple fact remains that the average consumer does not want to overclock their device. When the average person goes to buy a kettle, it’s not on the basis of seeing how extensible it is so that maybe, say, an extra 4 elements can be put in it to boil the water really fast. It’s bought to boil water.

I think Apple almost inherently offends a lot of overclockers because it creates a much more closed in system. That closed in system means they can’t tweak components, performance, etc., to their hearts’ desire: from the most basic (theming the OS) through to the most complex (hacking it to run on any hardware), Apple sacrifice non-consumer extensibility at the expense of making it more accessible to an increasing number of consumers. Nothing demonstrated this more than iOS – be it on the iPad or iPhone, or even the iPod Touch. Both for the consumers, and for the overclockers.

It’s the natural evolution of technology.

Apple won: those computer and computing devices companies out there that are smart will at some point realise how Apple won and start to deliver similar products aimed at consumers, leaving the overclockers to continue to do their own pursuits the same way they have done in every technology area.

Then everyone will win.

The end of the IT department … my arse

Data, Humour, Technical 3 Responses »

Mar 012011

Over at 37 Signals, David writes about how a growing generation of computer savvy users, and along side it, the cloud, spell the end of the IT department. This is a riveting story of unreality that starts with this corker paragraph:

When people talk about their IT departments, they always talk about the things they’re not allowed to do, the applications they can’t run, and the long time it takes to get anything done. Rigid and inflexible policies that fill the air with animosity. Not to mention the frustrations of speaking different languages. None of this is a good foundation for a sustainable relationship.

Blah blah blah blah blah!

Dear David, let’s see some facts and figures on those people who talk about their IT departments thusly, shall we? Some actual studies showing a high percentage of staff in a high percentage of businesses feeling that IT act that way towards them. I’m waiting – your article referenced none. I’ll return the favour with this one, but I’ll throw in a bit of bonus logic though.

The post runs along the lines of:

Internal IT within a company is a monopoly.
Monopolies are abusive.
Therefore, internal IT is abusive.
Reciprocating, business doesn’t respect IT and just treats it as a cost centre, exacerbating the issue.
Computer users are getting smarter. They don’t need servers any more.
If you don’t need servers, you don’t need IT.

This, dear reader, is a fetid pile of dead donkey’s entrails left in the Australian summer sun. Let me summarise how I read this:

Some IT departments have a poor attitude towards the business. Some businesses have a poor attitude towards the IT department. Ergo, cloud based computing will see IT killed off.

This is a terrible argument. Basically the premise is that some companies have unhealthy relationships with their internal IT departments, and therefore all IT departments are a bad idea given the new cloud paradigm and more technically savvy users. Well, maybe here’s the alternative: IT departments exist to facilitate the business, and any IT department that fails to do so is failing the business. But that doesn’t tar all IT departments with the same brush. And any business that fails to use the tools at its disposal equally is a failure.

What’s more, David insists that IT departments have their own best interests (i.e., self preservation) at heart in trying to push back against cloud based computing, using the example:

At the same time, IT job security is often dependent on making things hard, slow, and complex. If the Exchange Server didn’t require two people to babysit it at all times, that would mean two friends out of work. Of course using hosted Gmail is a bad idea!

No, it’s perfectly fine to fire IT staff and have the email outsourced to the cloud and Google! What could possibly go wrong? Hmmm? How about:

Gmail History Of Up To 150,000 Users VANISHES

No, see, it’s perfectly safe! That only happened February 2011! Cloud has learnt since then, hasn’t it? What? Oh, that’s right, it’s March 1, 2011. This shit still happens. Putting your stuff in the cloud doesn’t make it über secure. We’re now being told by all sorts of pundits that even though our stuff is in the cloud, and we can’t see, touch or feel the storage, we should be responsible for the backups of said material.

I personally think said pundits are definitely touching and feeling something, but it’s not the storage. Yeah, I love backup, I leave breathe and eat it every single day of my life – but it’s complete and utter bullshit that any cloud provider or pundit should think that it’s acceptable for users to still somehow be responsible for the backups of their data in that situation. They fail backup #101 by requiring a decentralised backup process. Hell, they fail ethics #101.

But users are getting smarter at computers! Well, sure – we’re also getting smarter at a bunch of things. The average person now probably knows more about medicine than the some doctors did 200 years ago. But that doesn’t mean we got rid of doctors. This harks to something I constantly get told by proud parents: “My X is so smart with computers. He/she uses them all the time!” When questioned, X plays World of Warcraft, or uses Facebook, etc. OK, so the average person is more proficient at using the tools to do what they want. That does not imply they’re more proficient at creating new tools.

So, let’s come back to 37 Signals, which ends on this real beauty:

The transition won’t happen over night, but it’s long since begun. The companies who feel they can do without an official IT department are growing in number and size. It’s entirely possible to run a 20-man office without ever even considering the need for a computer called “server” somewhere.

Oh really – “It’s entirely impossible to run a 20-man office without ever considering the need for a computer called ‘server’ somewhere.” Honestly, where do they get this shit from? No, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to run a 20-person business without a server. What’s bullshit is that they would have the audacity to claim that this is because of cloud. There’s plenty of 20-person businesses that have existed without servers or dedicated IT staff for decades. It isn’t rocket science. 20 people is easy to do without servers/IT staff.

50?

100?

1,000?

10,000?

100,000?

500,000?

37 Signals needs to get some real world experience rather than spouting this stuff. It’s the sort of bad science fiction that makes Skyline look like a fascinating and deeply plotted movie.

A cell tower in every street!

Data, Phones, Technical, Telcos 1 Response »

Feb 172011

Those funny folks over in the Coalition are continuing their “we hate NBN” rhetoric, with the alternative, you know, being a fully wireless network.

(A wireless network aiming for 10Mbit peak connectivity, that is.)

As I said, every time I hear them blathering on about the wonders of wireless technology, I’m reminded of John Malkovich’s line in “Burn After Reading”: “You’re part of a league of morons“.

Amazingly, they’ve now descended into full force farce. Even our communications minister, (aka “Minister for Censoring the Internet”), who … let’s face it, struggles with technology concepts at the best of times – even he understands the inherent limitations of trying to get everyone onto wireless:

STEPHEN CONROY: This claim this wireless is going to replace fixed fibre networks and destroy the business case of the National Broadband Network is simply a misleading campaign by Tony Abbott because he doesn’t understand that wireless networks, the more people that use them, the slower they get and the further you stand from the tower, the slower the broadband gets.

(7.30 report, 15/02/2011).

The coalition solution? Oh, that’s easy:

MALCOLM TURNBULL: But of course you can install more base stations and you can supplement it with, you know, extra cells, wifi cells, if you like. So, there are many techniques for increasing the capacity of wireless networks.

(Ibid.)

What an amazing idea – if you don’t have enough cells, just build more of them!

Except … just how many cells are we talking about, Malcolm?

“In order to get those 100 megabit speeds and beyond you’d need to be installing a base station around about on every suburban block,” she said. “At the end of every street there’d need to be a base station.”

(Crikey: Coalition Broadband: a wireless tower in every street)

Just think of that! A cell tower in every street! Near every school – hell, there’d probably be one on each corner of the school. There’ll be cell towers near cancer patients and pregnant mothers, near old people and babies and school kids, and there’d be no escape – because there’d be one on every street.

Now, at the current levels of exposure, I’m not convinced cell towers pose a problem – I’m yet to see conclusive evidence either way. When those cell towers increase by several orders of magnitude to provide that level of coverage? That’s going to get a lot of people worried.

A lot of those people who are going to worry about cell tower radiation are those who are also thinking along the lines of “NBN bad. Wireless good.”

Let’s keep them appraised of the consequences of a wireless “high speed” internet for Australia, shall we?

8 months with the iPad

Data, Life, Technical 1 Response »

Jan 212011

Darren and I both got our iPads on May 28, and I’ve been asked by a friend to give a review of what I think of the iPad now. In the past I’ve said that it’s effectively a new computing platform paradigm – neither desktop nor smartphone, but somewhere inbetween. And it’s a paradigm that’s going to have a big impact on business.

I’ve just scrubbed out a lengthy commentary – I pretty much stand by everything I’ve previously said, and was just repeating myself anyway. So instead I’ll cite just a few tidbits with the caveat I’d still get one today if they were only just coming out, even knowing what I’m about to say.

Software is everything. I had my first experience with that when my original iPhone 3G was replaced. It had developed a small crack in the case, the Apple Genius wasn’t happy with it, and so I had a new one whipped out and provided. When I got home I restored from my previous iPhone backup, and suddenly I had exactly the same phone again. So the period between when I got the iPhone 4 running iOS 4 and when iOS4.2.1 came out for the iPad was extremely frustrating. That was the only period where I limited my use of the iPad to just essentials.
Hardware is everything. It’s amusing watching all the Android tablets hitting the market. They fall into one of two categories: cheap and not too cheerful, or expensive. The cheap and nasty tablets are just a repeat of netbooks, with a different set of deleterious effects. The expensive ones are usually still 7″ form factor and cost more than the iPad, just because they say, come with a camera. That’s bullshit.
Apps are everything. As I type this the 10 billionth app download is soon to come. And there are some brilliant apps on the app store for both the iPhone/iPod Touch as well as the iPad. I love Pages, Numbers, Keynote, AirVideo, Parallels, iSSH, etc. On such a screen the app becomes fully immersive – you’re not using a device, you’re using an application.

A few things that do annoy me though:

Document syncing is … average. I’d like to see a better solution than this. It’s not as bad as descriptions I’ve seen for syncing music to an Android device, but it’s not much better.
Publishers need to remember they have a back catalogue. I don’t see this as a problem with Apple, Android, Kobo, Nook, Kindle, etc., but simply a big problem in the publishing industry. I’m not just interested in the latest books, I want entire back catalogues. Over the course of say, the next 10 years, I want to replace my physical book library. I want to be able to spot an old M. K. Wren book at buy it for $2.99. I want to buy the Milieu Series and Saga of the Exiles by Julian May for $3.99 a pop. At the moment the eBook market is like iTunes in its first year – limited, and frustrating. When a favoured author does appear on an eBook store (regardless of which one), I’ll invariably find that 3 out of 4 books in a series will be there. That’s just crap.
Wireless sync my arse – I run a LAN at home. I have ethernet. I have a Mac Pro. Darren has a Mac Pro. I’ve been sucked in a few times to buying apps that offer iPad/iPhone <-> Desktop sync, and the buggers normally insist on it being over a WiFi link. And if you don’t have WiFi? Well sometimes it’s a case of “screw you”. Developers need to take a leaf out of the book of Things. Sure, they’ve been promising cloud sync for like, 7 billion years now (or so it seems) and not delivering, but at least they’ll sync based on any network.

There you have it. Sure, the iPad has a few niggles – I’m not a fanboy – but it offers a portable, immersive app experience you just won’t find in a desktop or laptop system.

"You're part of a league of morons"

Data, Life, Technical, Telcos 2 Responses »

Jan 202011

There’s a memorable quote in “Burn after Reading”, where John Malkovich’s character, Osborne, says to another, “You’re part of a league of morons.”

I think this, with some exasperation, every time I hear Tony Abbott finding another reason to demand the immediate cessation of the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) programme.

I’m starting to gather the impression that it’s a conspiracy theory; not one formed from malice, but from … well, let’s be honest: stark raving stupidity.

The anti-NBN approach espoused by the coalition is fundamentally wrapped up in their overall inability to consider that climate change is:

happening;
contributed to by human activities;
something we have to deal with in this generation rather than putting it off.

John Howard started this trend, I think, by refusing to have Australia ratify the Kyoto accord all those years ago. But what did it matter? He was already counting down the years in life rather than counting up, so it wasn’t as if he was going to have to live in the world he was helping to create.

What, might you be asking, does climate change have to do with a national broadband network infrastructure roll-out? Well, oddly enough, there’s a big relevant comparison: telecommuting.

I’ve worked from home now since 2006, and I can honestly say that existing ADSL and ADSL2 infrastructure run over copper just doesn’t cut it. You can get by on the performance it gives, but unless you’re damn close to an exchange and have a really good incoming copper connection (neither of which I have), you have to structure your work around four fundamental considerations:

Scheduling downloads to not impact with interactive sessions;
Being prepared to kick-off larger work-related downloads overnight;
Keeping a lot of local replicas;
Keeping enough bandwidth available for VOIP/etc.

None of those are insurmountable, but they do require you to have different work processes to everyone else in the office.

Here’s where I think there’s a triumvirate of stupid ideas, creating a perfect storm in the heads of certain politicians (well, nature abhors a vacuum, after all):

Traditional business is mistrustful of staff working from home … they might be unproductive! (Or, you can’t trust staff you can’t see!)
Climate change isn’t happening!
Governments spending money on infrastructure is bad!

The traditional, 19th century business approach is that employees should be at their desks from 9am to 5pm, possibly with overtime, and if they’re not at their desks they’re not working. (That approach is still followed today in some companies – e.g., where people are required to clock in and out when they go to the toilet, and make up time.)

Now I could play “studies at 40 paces” … there’s a multitude of studies out there that say that working from home is evil, and there’s an equal multitude that says that it’s fantastic. Instead it’s probably best to read this wikipedia article about telecommuting, as it mentions the positives and negatives. The reality is that working from home is a sliding scale where:

It doesn’t suit at at all for some people;
It suits exceedingly well than working in an office for others;
A mix of at-desk and from-home suits others.

Obviously here I’m talking about office jobs. (There’s not much point sullying the argument with interjections about say, whether brickies labourers can work from home.)

However, I would like to see the federal government set a goal of encouraging office-based businesses to get a percentage of staff telecommuting as a result of the NBN. Maybe 25% of the traditional-offie workforce telecommuting at all times within 5 years of NBN being completed? Imagine the difference this would make to the roads and public transport infrastructure.

One of the inevitable consequences of accepting that climate change is a real issue – or as a side line, accepting that the decline of fossil fuels is a real issue – is that we can’t afford to continue the ancient business practice of everyone sitting within line-of-sight of their manager. Not only that, as cities continue to grow, we’re not really seeing any improvements any longer in commute times. A vast number of workers will regularly travel at least an hour each way each day to get to work. Those who use public transport can make some use of that time, but those who have to drive are stuck doing exactly that.

When people travel to work, they do it on their own time. If it’s a five minute walk, that’s fine. If it’s a ten minute drive – OK, that’s not too bad. When it’s an hour drive? A two hour public transport trip? A three hour public transport trip?

When I worked in Sydney, I commuted from Gosford, and didn’t drive to work. So I caught the train, which was a 5 minute drive to the station, a 5-10 minute wait for the train, a 1 hour 20 minute trip, then a 5 minute walk to the office. So on the best of days office work would cost me 2 hours 10 minutes of my personal time. Not so bad. But public transport frequently doesn’t run on time (well, in countries like Australia, anyway). So it was not unusual for that to become a 2 hour trip each way. Maybe 3 hours sometimes. I was lucky: the worst trip I had was a 6 hour trip in one direction. At least 4-5 times a year though I’d have a 4 hour trip. Overtime would then come into play, since public transport outside of business hours runs less frequently.

Traditional business doesn’t give a flying fuck about how long their employees take to get to work: it’s not as if they’re having to pay them for it. What they don’t realise though is they do. Australia has one of the highest rates of unpaid overtime in in the world for a modern democracy/economy. Unremarkably, it also has a strong tradition of the “sickie” … or as I like to call them, mental health days. Ultimately, businesses that don’t care how much personal time a staff member sacrifices to get to and from work reap their rewards through staff burn out.

Quite frankly, the conventional business practice of requiring all personnel to work in the office is:

Destructive to the environment;
Destructive to the personal life of the staff.

Many companies at least have started to realise this and offered telecommuting options for staff.

The coalition of morons in Australia, by demanding so frequently the end of NBN, are showing a complete lack of understanding for or appreciation of:

The environment;
Workers rights;
Families.

In fact, not only are Tony Abbot and his accomplices wrong on the NBN, the environment and workers rights, they’re working their damnedest to drag Australian business practices back to the 19th century. Unless they’ve got a secret plan for instantaneous teleportation and zero point energy up their sleeves, they’re suffering a reality dysfunction.

As an alternate to NBN, the coalition continues to offer a mentally deficient IT strategy based on wireless networking in most places and a peak speed of about 1.2MB/s. Apparently though, if you don’t pirate movies, that’s more than enough for you for the next 10+ years. The coalition see the internet as some great big play pen for games, multimedia downloads and pornography.

Productivity? You can only do that in a bricks and mortar office!

Well, if you’re part of a league of morons, that is.

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