Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The undersea cable that brings the Internet to New Zealand is a long, wet, weak link. Pacific Fibre plan to make sure we keep up with the best in the world.

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New Zealand is a long way from anywhere. It’s 2,000 Km to Australia and 11,000 to California in North America. That’s 2.5 hours flying to Sydney or 12 hours to Los Angeles.

The Pacific – New Zealand is east of Australia.

The Internet though gives us instant access to far away people. I can talk by Skype with friends on the other side of the world, exchange emails in a moment, share a Google Doc.

Twitter tells me within moments about earthquakes in Chile and snowfalls in the South of France.

And for more serious business uses the Internet, and good access to large quantities of high-speed data is crucial.

At the moment our international Internet traffic is served through the Southern Cross undersea cable:

The network is almost 30,500 km in length, including 28,900km of submarine cable incorporating around 500 optical repeaters (placed every 40-70km to boost signals), and 1,600km of terrestrial cable. There are nine cable stations (two each in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and the US mainland, and one in Fiji) and an access point in San Jose, California.

We Kiwis live with data caps. For instance: my Internet plan allows 20Gb of traffic per month. If we exceed 20Gb before the rollover date then every extra Gb costs another $3. We think several times before downloading a full-length video, or a large software update.

Broadband will only ever be as fast as the narrowest point.

But news came this week of a plan for a new, additional undersea cable. Pacific Fibre plan to raise almost 1 billion dollars to lay a new, more direct cable that will give us plenty of bandwidth:

The New Zealand and Australian governments are investing heavily in fibre to the home. Those investments will be futile if our international bandwidth remains the same. Right now 90% of our internet access requires international connections — addressing international bandwidth is paramount.

The prices New Zealanders and Australians pay [for Internet bandwidth] are high compared to international benchmarks.

The face of computing is changing. Next generation devices, like Netbooks and the iPad, are providing cheaper entry points but will consume significantly more bandwidth — data (including photos, movies and emails) is not stored locally, but instead is stored remotely in a ‘cloud’, accessed via international broadband.

Unless we address the international bandwidth issue, New Zealanders will not get affordable access to services and devices increasingly common in the rest of the world.

Pacific Cable plan to have the new capacity in place by 2013. That’s only an ambitious 3 years away. They plan to provide inexpensive, unlimited, ultra-fast broadband for all.

More, cheaper bandwidth and speed make all kinds of applications possible:

• Lightweight fun: watching sports matches, movies or TV.
• Education opportunities: virtual visits from experts, or collaborations with distant learners or colleagues.
• Video consultations with medical experts.
• Sharing huge files, such as scientific data, movies or very high resolution images.

There are already hundreds of possibilities for using highs-peed high-bandwidth applications, and many more will become evident before this cable is in place.

This is an exciting project, with the potential to make a huge difference to the lives of Kiwis. I say: Good on you!

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How embarrassing: Wellington's going to get a rip-off of the Hollywood sign to celebrate our burgeoning film industry. Something original must be too hard for us.

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Apparently Wellington’s going to be burdened with a rip-off of the famous Hollywood sign:

Wellywood — artist’s impression from stuff.co.nz.

A massive Wellywood sign celebrating Wellington’s success in the film industry will greet tourists as they fly into the capital.

But not everyone agrees on the sign, which will sit on a cutting above Miramar wharf in the seaside eastern suburbs. …

Sir Peter Jackson said … “It’s Kiwi tongue-in-cheek humour at its very best, but beneath the leg-pulling is genuine pride. ” …

Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast said the giant sign would capture the essence of the capital.

[Via : A sign of success for Wellywood hills | Stuff.co.nz.]

How embarrassing: here we are a creative people in a centre of arts and innovation, and what we do is make a copycat sign to celebrate success.

I don’t see it as tongue-in-cheek humour at all. Referring to Wellington as ‘Wellywood’ is one thing, but ripping off an iconic sign is quite another. It just seems flat, stale and to suggest a poor imitation, try-hard wannabe.

Our film industry deserves much better.

A better idea is the Pillars of Argonath, as Mike Riversdale explains.

Update 11 March 2010 — there’s hope yet that the sign will be abandoned:

Hollywood Chamber of Commerce president and chief executive Leron Gubler says the staggered Hollywood lettering is trademarked.

“If they do that with the Wellywood sign then I would think that would be a violation of our trademark…I am checking that with our attorney,” he told The Dominion Post.

[Via : Wellywood sign could breach trademark laws | NATIONAL News.]

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Elizabeth Moon offers a darned good read with her sci-fi novels. Her books feature strong, intelligent women.

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For the past week or so I’ve been a bit under the weather with a chest cold. It started with an ‘odd’ throat, then went straight to a deep cough. After a few days of that I also had the ‘fuzzy head’, but am glad to say I missed out on sneezing.

Nevertheless, I haven’t been up to much for most of the past week. Which has meant I’ve been reading more fiction than usual.

Luckily I had quite a good stock of Elizabeth Moon (affiliate link) novels to keep me very well entertained.

I’ve been reading 2 series: Vatta’s War and the Serrano series.

Military in space

Moon’s novels feature strong and interesting women, in space, with a strong military influence.

The Vatta’s War series begins with the Vatta trading family, and moves into the formation of a quasi-military fleet whose role is to counter pirates. The lead character is Kylara Vatta, who at the start of the series has been thrown out of Space Academy for a rather trivial seeming wrongdoing.

It turns out that Ky develops into a cunning and strategic leader who deals to well-organised pirates, even though outmatched.

I haven’t yet finished the Serrano series, and have unfortunately missed the 3rd book altogether. It’s an entertaining and solid read though, like the Vatta series. The lead characters, again, are military women who prove to be excellent leaders.

Careful and interesting writing

I must commend Moon and her editors on a job well done. The novels hang together well, with good pacing and nicely drawn characters.

On top of that, I’ve noticed only 2 or 3 typos total in the 10 or so books. The editors have been paying attention. It makes for a feeling of quality where it counts.

The stories are engaging and immersive too. I haven’t been too thrilled to be feeling unwell the past week, but it’s been a great pleasure to spend time reading some very fine sci-fi. My only regret is that with one and a half books to go I’ve pretty much run out of the sci-fi this author has to offer.

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Helen Sharman was the first British person to go into space. Her autobiographical account of that time is very interesting reading.

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After I wrote Noooo! Sci-fi keeps women out of computing…, one of my very generous readers sent me a book. I’ve just finished reading that book: Seize the Moment: Autobiography of Helen Sharman (affiliate link).

Seize the Moment.

It tells the story of British astronaut Helen Sharman’s trip into space in May 1991, and what led up to it.

One of the things I loved was how Sharman made it clear that she was an ‘ordinary’ person, rather than ‘astronaut stuff’, from an ordinary town and family, with good but not medal-winning school scores.

In fact, she hadn’t ever dreamed or thought of space or being an astronaut, until one day when she heard an advertisement for the job.

My family background was stable and secure … At school … I won no coveted scholarships … I broke no school athletic records …In every street in every British town and village you will find someone like me.

— Page 48.

That’s the kind of thing that holds out hope for others who may one day find themselves in position to take on something remarkable.

Sharman also adds perspective on the job of astronaut:

What I learnt was that although the job can certainly be dangerous, and sometimes exciting, it is not at all glamorous.

— Page 49.

The chapters are nicely interleaved — a handy technique for maintaining interest. The book starts on launch day, and Chapter 1 takes Sharman into space. Then the next chapter describes her childhood (briefly) and how she came to sign on as an astronaut.

After that alternate chapters describe events of her time in space and return to Earth, or the selection process and her training.

I enjoyed reading the details of her time in space. Some descriptions particularly caught my interest, such as a reference to the size of the Pacific Ocean:

It would take us about five minutes to travel from Belfast to Hanover … twenty minutes to cross Africa; when we crossed the Pacific it often took more than forty minutes before we were over landmass again.

— Page 132.

She even mentioned New Zealand:

Vast areas [of the Earth's land-surface] are the reddish-brown of desert … Agriculture tends to look a dark grey, or a dull sage-green, whereas bare earth is fawn or brown, or a brick-red colour. When I was in space only two places looked green: Ireland, and the South Island of New Zealand.

— Page 133.

One other quirky thing really stood out for me: the foreword by Sir Arthur C. Clarke. He seemed to be missing something major when he wrote about the role of satellites in transforming our world:

… applications in meteorology, communications, position finding, resource management — and, not least, peace-keeping …

— Page 12.

That drove me to check the publication date: 1993. Of course, just before the Internet started to take hold in our global society. I know the Internet doesn’t rely on satellites, probably mainly using cables, but in my mind, at least, they are inextricably bound together.

This book was a good, easy and enjoyable read. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in space and astronauts.

Now I’ve finished it I’d love to pass it on to another reader. If you’d like it, email me with your shipping address. First in will receive it.

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Here are some sites with live coverage of Apple's tablet event:

Engadget
Gizmodo
gdgt
CrunchGear

- They're calling it iPad!

• 9.7 inch IPS Display
• 0.5 inch thin, 1.5 pounds
• 16-64GB
• 1 GHz Apple A4 chip
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, WiFi 802.11n
• Accelerometer, Compass, Speaker, Microphone, 30-pin connector
• 10 Hour battery life
• Runs almost all iPhone apps
• iBooks app and iBookStore
• iWork apps $10 each
• 3G version
• 16GB/32/64 : $499/599/699 WiFi, $629/729/829 WiFi +3G
• AT&T 3G service for U.S. : No Contract, $15 upto 256MB/month, $30 unlimited; International deals coming this summer
• All 3G models are unlocked, use with any GSM carrier with microSIMs
• WiFi version to ship in 60 days, WiFi + 3G 90 days

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