Climate change. What is the debate about?

The whole debate on climate change seems strange.

You may find plenty of peer reviewed publications on everything ranging from bleaching of coral, tide measurements, reduction in the polar ice caps, changes in the behaviour of the North Atlantic pump and changes in migratory behaviour of birds and insects. There are plenty of exceptions to; this should help improve the model and hence prove or disprove the hypothesis that climate change is occuring.

I'd say the MAIN issue is whether it is man made or natural.

Irrespective of peoples beliefs regarding climate change, there was a realisation that uncontrolled consumption of the Earth's resources was 'a bad thing'.

We have started on the path of conserving energy, looking at the reduction of waste, and recycling. The perceived threat of climate change through human activity has been another catalyst for us to recognise the effect of humans on the planet, just as the issues of CFCs, overfishing etc.

I'm sure scientists might take liberties with the statistics to make their models fit, so lets hope peer reviews by those in the field, and not skewed, uneducated reviews by journalists, politicians and capitalists, prove or disprove the theory of climate change.

It is very likely that the majority of cynical folk will continue to love their 4.7l V8 Holden, refuse to swap from incandescents to Fluoro or LED, recycle, compost, insulate their homes, drink recycled water, buy biodegradable cleaning products, spend 4 minutes in the shower.

You get the picture. Are you going to join them?

Bing - white out christmas

Article on how Bing is fail. Classic. I don't ever remember ever having a problem with Google, and perhaps that is why I use it. In contrast I don't ever recall hearing anyone recommend Bing. Perhaps that is because the name alone is annoying and sounds like that M$ sound 'ding'. Check C:\WINDOWS\Media\ding.wav for a reminder.

Just because you have good marketing, doesn't mean the thing will fly.

I'm in ur modems steeling ur interwub packs.

Had such fun trying to get my home network sorted. Having just moved house and waiting far too long for Optus and of course Telstra to provide DSL service to my place, I've been disappointed.

Recent issues have included:

• FTP dropping out.
• Quick speeds when tested but web pages taking a long time to load.
• Slow downloads. As in stop watch slow.
• Failure to connect to work VPN
• random outages.
• Slow DNS

The first thing I have done is switch to OpenDNS. This has removed my dependency on crappy Optus DNS, which appears to be built on a single 8086 connected to the interwebs via IP over Morse. That has immediately sped up getting to a site.

Next problem was identified when I was trying transfer a zip file of training material to our downloads.kjross web server, to allow the printers access. Filezilla has always worked for me, the settings were unchanged but it was bombing out after 200k. I had another 8100k to go. After trying Ilisys mirror FTP areas and trying for 2 hours, I gave up and used wireless which worked. That showed me the only difference was the physical connection.

I reckoned it was the POS Sagem modem. I got it free from Optus when I signed up, and I had also found out it doesn't support VPN pass through which is a pain.

I still had a D-Link DSL502T vA kicking around, and so to make sure it worked properly I upgraded the firmware with the modem kicking and screaming for 3 hours, to V2.0oB12. The exe failed miserably numerous times, and the web update failed 9 out of 10 times, then it just worked.

Reconfigured the modem to sit in front of my DI624 wireless router to provide an onion firewall setup, and it all worked. Speed test showed me the speed was slightly slower at 12Mbps down from 14.5Mbps, but that doesn't mean squat as the D-Link is FASTER. I don't get it. Web pages load visibly faster, and I was able to FTP the 8MB file in seconds. No dropouts, no failures mid transfer.

If someone knows why Sagem produces a modem that allows you to perform FTP but only in 3k chunks I'd be all ears. Also seemingly preventing VPN passthrough without providing a config change just doesn't make sense.

While I thought the old 502T was past it, the new firmware and extra configurability has proven it was well worth keeping as a backup modem. Sagem = So gone.