Simon Lyall's Blog

An article in the Dominion Post has Southern Cross Cables claiming that a new cable doesn’t need to be built since Southern Cross’ pricing is competitive.

They even say that they will sell a 155Mb/s circuit for just $US 500,000 per year down from 6 times that just 4 years ago. Of course half the problem is that their customers are locked into multi-year contacts so some of them are still paying the old prices.

However even the new prices are still pretty high. The $500,000/year price works out at around $US 268/Month per Mb/s ( 500000/155/12 = 268 ) or almost exactly $NZ1 per Gigabyte downloaded. In contrast pricing to Hong Kong, China or Japan is perhaps a quarter of this ( less in bulk) and trans-Atlantic much less. Within the US I can buy retail bandwidth from Amazon for a 3rd of the quoted price.

That sort of huge margin means that New Zealand is going to be stuck with 30GB/month domestic quotas for a while yet. Even those who use less than that suffer because ISPs have too keep circuits full to save money so download speeds drop during peak times. It costs so much to host locally that almost all sites are overseas and thus slower for domestic users.

It also means that newer applications (especially those involving streaming video, audio or other data) are too expensive for most NZ users ( especially those on mid-range DSL accounts) to regularly use. Things like downloading TV-shows or Movies via pay-services might cost more in bandwidth than subscription (not to mention take forever to download).

In reality $5/month per customer is all ISPs can really afford to pay in International Bandwidth prices for something like a $30/month account. As bandwidth prices drop quotas will go up and perhaps (when bandwidth is cheap enough) go away.

Right now Southern Cross isn’t under a lot of pressure to drops it’s pricing and it would like to keep things that way. The additional bandwidth going into Australia and the proposed Kordia cable will put a downward pressure on prices. A casual drop of 20% in bandwidth prices will pay return the governments investment in a year.

In reality to match other country’s cost, bandwidth prices need to drop by at least 75% and then continue dropping. Allowing them to remain high to protect Sounthern Cross’ profits hurts New Zealand.

I’ll be upfront and say I’m not a big fan of Solaris , sure it was cool back in the 90s but with the exception of a couple of cute features like ZFS and perhaps Solaris Services Manager the whole thing feels like a 1999 Slackware install with a few random multi-gigabyte Java processes using up all the RAM.

The lack of decent package management, old versions of software ( “find -mmin -10″ is something I really like to use), slow booting, different device name for every version ( I don’t care what the hardware type is if it moves packets then ethN is a good enough naming convention) and of course random multi-gigabyte Java processes really put me off.

Today my bit of fun was upgrading a Solaris 10 box that needed zfs but had an early version of Solaris 10 that didn’t have it built in. So with Linux I’d just put the box at a server somewhere and “apt-get update” or “yum update” or something. However with Solaris I get to plug in a DVD, boot via it and go half way towards reinstalling the server before I get to the “actually I just want to upgrade some packages” option. Unfortunately at this point I get a little stuck because the installer seems to think that 4 Gigabytes spare on / and 3G spare on each of /var and /usr isn’t enough to upgrade 1G worth of packages. I’ll look at it tomorrow but I’m not impressed with wasting several hours adding and deleting packages ( With a crappy close of dselect ) in order to try and make it work.

I think Sun’s big problem is that the only people who buy their hardware are either people with large storage requirements who really need ZFS or large companies and government bodies who have been running Sun Boxes for 20 years and like their support for 20 year old apps.

The first market buy the boxes despite the legacy junk that the second group insist on. So Solaris boxes tend to come in two flavours, either they are “vendor shipped” with no Gnutools, no pretty editors and the CDE desktop or they are heavily modified with all of these thing to stop the Linux admins going insane for lack of bash. My last job was close to the first with old Solaris 8 and 9 machines while the current job is closer to the second with Solaris 10 everywhere.

The problem Sun has is that as soon as the feature the first group is after matures enough in Linux then they will drop Sun like a shot and switch over the Linux. With the second group well they aren’t going to Linux as fast but they are like newspaper readers, getting older and not being replaced as fast as they a dieing.

On to more conventional Zombies, here is (most of ) the Australian short film “I love Sarah Jane”:

Also available on slashfilm if the youtube link doesn’t work.

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One of the projects I am involved with is Wikipedia especially WikiProject New Zealand which is attempting to improve New Zealand related articles.

With the General election later this year one thing we would like to do is have photos of all MPs (both current and in the past) and other political figures with articles. However there is still some way to go, for instance the article on John Key ( National Party Leader and potentially the Prime Minister after the election) doesn’t have a photo and neither does Peter Dunne and Rodney Hide (and that is just the party leaders).

I’ve written to a few Political Parties as party of a little subproject but very little luck so far except for the Greens who release their website photos under and open license already.

What is needed is for for the copyright holder of the photos to release them under a license that can be used by Wikipedia and other projects. This page has some details but the big things include:

• Republication and distribution must be allowed
• Publication of derivative work must be allowed
• Commercial use of the work must be allowed

The guidelines I’ve been following are here but I’ve not had much luck. I’m a little stuck really, I thought that the political parties would be happy to ensure their people’s articles were of good quality but they appear to have other priorities.

Other ideas I’ve had include directly contacting the politicians or just going along to their clinics and asking to take the photos. Both will probably take a while though and will leave a lot of gaps especially with people who are no longer MPs.

Anyway ideas and offers welcome, I thought I’d post this so I could point people at something online detailing the problem at least. My contact email address is “simon at darkmere.gen.nz”.

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First up I should mention that with my new job my phone number has changed so if you think my number is still 027 4xx xxxx then you might have problems reaching me ( that phone is actually plugged in and in prepay mode but I don’t carry it around). Email me if you’d like my new number and don’t know it already.

I just spent a couple of hours looking at the Sketch Pad column in the New York Times. The column ( publish about once a month, no obvious RSS feed though) “focuses on an apartment, house, loft or shack now for sale that has unrealized potential. Each month, a different architect or designer is asked to create a vision of what the place might look like. There are no guarantees that the plans would be approved by co-op boards, municipal building departments or planning boards..” . The articles feature commentary, photographs and sometimes plans and sketches of the designs. I particularly like once for small apartments although New York prices are very scary. ( via Signal vs Noise )

Also on the subject of housing there is the article Want to Know When Housing Has Bottomed? Here’s How by Charles Hugh Smith. He roughly says housing is still priced way of it’s rental value and that estate investment pros rules of thumb is that the fair value of a property if between 6 and 10 times the annual gross rent. In this part of the world (where mortgage rates are over 10 percent ) I would guess the average multiplier is more like 20 ( One reason I rent). Of course knowing my luck that just means rentals are going to double over the next few years.

John Allspaw ( operations manager at Flickr ) has posted his slides from his capacity planning talk to the Web 2.0 Expo (PDF) .

In an interesting move a couple of weeks ago Microsoft announced that one floor of their new Chicago datacenter will be container based. Each 40 foot container will house 1,000 to 2,000 systems with between 150 and 220 containers on the first floor. See stories in Data Center Links , Data Center knowledge and James Hamilton’s blog .

Last up Barcamp Auckland 2 is happening on the 12th of July. I had a great time last year and I’ll definitely be going again. END