Telstra Internet

Back in 2010 I reported on the speed of the internet at home in Canberra and from my office on the ANU campus.

I just moved house and because service with iiNet was so bad and getting worse we switched to Telstra internet service. The speed is much, much higher:



The download speed is more than 8 times higher and the upload speed almost 4 times higher when accessing a server in Canberra. Accessing a server in San Jose, California:



downloading is more than 5 times faster and uploading 4 times faster.

Help Fund a Cool Research Project

Pun intended :) A bit off the beaten path for this blog, but I did warn you it would be a random walk. Faruk Kececi is an online friend who unfortunately wasn't in Istanbul the week we visited. You can contribute money on Kickstarter.

... and Now the Old Reader Shuts Down to Most Users...

After Google Reader shut down I migrated to the Old Reader, which offered a similar user interface. But they have been swamped with migrants from Google Reader and suffered a major crash and outage. They have decided to throw out all users who joined since 13th March unless they have donated money. I don't remember seeing a donate button. I would have been happy to pay for the service but the owners aren't interested in making money apparently. Now I have to move again. Seems that inoreader is the next port of call. Wonder how long it will last... Seems that anyone who could sell an application to run on users' machines that would help them access RSS feeds instead of a web-based RSS reader site would be able to make a lot of money.

P.S. 3:23pm In fact there is at least one application based RSS reader for Mac: NetNewsWire. Thanks to Chris Short for the recommendation. For the moment, InoReader is looking good, but if it goes the way of my previous two readers, I will give NetNewsWire a serious look.

Google Scholar Changes Search Page

Google has "updated" the Google Scholar home page. This includes changing the linked to Advanced Search to a tiny arrow inside the search box. You have to hover over it for a while or click on it to realize that it links to Advanced Search. As far as I can see, the new interface does not include the option to only search certain fields such as "business and economics" which the old Google Scholar Advanced Search allowed.

SD Card Speeds Up with More Data on it?

I recently bought an SD card to use to move data between my computers at home and on campus. I was a bit dissapointed at the speed of reading and writing to the memory. It took hours to upload all my data onto the card the first time around. But now I noticed that files seem to copy MUCH faster. I put this down to the data on the card now being organized and, therefore may be more of the faster "sequential" reading and writing was happening. I retested the card now and found it is faster on all functions than it was initially:



Strange, but good news.

Follow Up on SD Cards

After my flash drive died I finally followed up on my idea of using an SD Card instead. The drive died after being knocked one too many times while plugged into my laptop.

I bought a Dick Smith brand card as I wanted to get one right away after the flash drive died. It claims to be a Class 4 card but so far it seems to be extremely slow when writing data from my computer onto the card. This is rather disappointing.

And if you don't push the card into the SD slot fast enough it may not mount. At first I thought the card was a total dud!

Copying from the card to my laptop does appear to be acceptably fast. Here are the stats from XBench:



Comparing the results to those from a Lexar flashdrive and a 2005 vintage Sandisk SD card these stats seem to combine the weaknesses of both those systems.

iPad Pricing

Apple charges AUD 130 more for the 32GB iPad than for the 16GB iPad. Yet a 16GB flash memory card can be bought for as little as AUD45. The premium in the US is USD 100. Interestingly, the premium for a 64GB iPad relative to a 32GB iPad is also AUD 130/USD 100. The lowest price I found for a 32GB flash drive was AUD 89. It looks like Apple makes much more profit off the higher memory versions than the base model and that this is a form of price discrimination which is enabled by it not being possible to add flash memory oneself to the iPad. I think this can be analyzed as a case of "tying". Apple requires that you buy the extra memory from it, much as the movie theatre bans food apart from that they sell themselves. This would be a good case study or exercise for a microeconomics course.

More on iPad pricing from the Economist.

Flash Drives vs. Memory Cards

Since writing my previous post about memory devices I tested a class 2 (probably) Sandisk SD card from a digital camera vs. my Lexar flashdrive using the free XBench software. I was using my MacBook Pro for the tests and just plugging the Sandisk card into the SD slot on the laptop. Here are the results. First the flash drive:



And here is the memory card:



Data can be read faster off this flash drive than off the memory card but writing to the memory card is faster than to the flash drive. This greater uniformity of read-write speeds seems to be a feature of memory cards. These speeds seem to be reflected in real world applications. It takes a lot longer to copy files to the flash drive than vice versa. The MacBook's hard drive is mostly faster than either portable device:

SD Memory Cards

In the last couple of years I have used a USB flash drive like this:

as my primary computer data storage and I've used the hard drive on my laptop and office computer as data back-up and the location for the operating system and applications. This means that I can easily transport all my data from office to home and back without having to copy heaps of files back and forth and remember which ones I've updated and without having a hard drive dangling off my laptop. The applications etc. are the same in both locations and all the data goes with me. The Lexar 16GB hard-drive pictured is fast and almost indestructible. But I'm rapidly running out of space and they don't make a 32GB model. I can't find another small, fast, and robust drive with a 32GB capacity. So I'm thinking of using something like this in future instead:

It's an SD card more commonly used in cameras etc. MacBooks and iMacs both have SD card slots and according to Apple there should be no problems even in installing the operating system on such a card. For computers without a slot card readers can be bought very cheaply.

So are there any drawbacks to this idea?

Turnbull on the NBN

Turnbull argues that the NBN essentially is the re-nationalization of Telstra (link requires registration but is free) just like the original RSPT was the partial nationalization of the mining industry.

ANU Speed Test

Yesterday, I blogged about internet speeds within Australia and between Australia and the US from our home in Canberra. Today, as promised I'm presenting the results of the same test conducted from my office at ANU:






Within Australia, ANU has access to NBN-like speeds (at least before the new 1GBs announcement). Between, Australia and the US the speed is much lower, though much faster than what we have at home. Based on this, we don't really need the NBN but we do need better international links as Gans pointed out. Now I don't know how ANU is connected domestically or internationally and whether other institutions and businesses that need speed can get it. So maybe an argument for the NBN can be made. But not based on the data I presented here anyway unless we think individuals need the kind of speed that ANU has access to and that some market failure is preventing them from getting it.

Internet Connectivity

Joshua Gans has been discussing internet speeds between different parts of the world and running some tests. So I ran my own tests from home and speeds are pretty low just between my home and a server in Canberra:



Our ISP sucks apparently, but most of the time I find our internet service to be adequate. Except when it isn't. Here's the test to San Jose, CA:



Only a bit slower... What I should do next is test these from the ANU campus...

Equations in Microsoft Word 2008

The equation editor in Microsoft Word 2004 was incompatible with the latest Macintosh operating system, rendering some symbols in equations incorrectly. So I "upgraded" to Word 2008. But now when I saved a document in the new .docx format all equations were converted to pictures. Some online research showed that the bug was due to interaction between footnotes and equations. I got around this bug by saving documents in the old .doc format. But I just downloaded the two latest updates to Word 2008 from Microsoft's site and now the problem seems to have been finally solved.

However, I'm still using Excel 2004 because the new version of Excel's chart features are so screwed up in my opinion. I have looked at switching entirely to iLife or OpenOffice. OpenOffice's spreadsheet just looked totally terrible and Numbers and Pages both don't seem to include all the features I want. So I'm still stuck with Microsoft in the meantime.