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September 27, 2007

Censored by Telstra

Next month, Bleeding Edge expected to be addressing some of our senior citizens on the topic of technology, and why they don’t need to be afraid of it.

We were sought out for the role by a seniors magazine and Web site which organised the keynote seminars at the Victorian Seniors Festival, and we dare to suggest that we would have done a pretty good job. After all, we have a seniors card ourselves, so we would have had no trouble relating to the audience, and we’re pretty sure our ageing peers would have learned a thing or two from the experiences we have recounted over the long life of this column.

Our senior citizens will not, however, be hearing from us. We have been silenced. Forgive us if we take a little pride in this development. It is not every day that this humble column, nattering away in the centre pages of the Green Guide, is judged to be so influential that we have to be censored.

That’s the only conclusion we can draw from the fact that the publisher of the magazine sent us an email a couple of weeks ago, informing us that she had had “a very negative response from Telstra re the speaking engagement for seniors festival”. When we rang her, she informed us that “Telstra isn’t entirely comfortable with having you speak.”

Telstra’s reaction was very much on the mind of the publisher, because it was the sponsor of the event.
We can understand why we’re possibly not Telstra’s favourite column. There are those articles we’ve written recently informing our readers of ways to cut their Telstra MobileNet bills by switching to the Next G network’s capped plans, and our instructive pieces on using Voice over IP technology substantially to prune Telstra’s landline call charges.

We’ve also been guilty of suggesting, from time to time, that Telstra Big Pond charges are a bit steep, what with charging for uploads as well as downloads. And now and again we’ve criticised their billing and customer service.
If we are to believe the publisher, however, those articles had nothing to do with her decision to drop us as a speaker. She was concerned instead, not for Telstra, but for sensitive little us.

She’d been shocked by a single paragraph we’d written on our blog, which linked to an opinion piece in this newspaper by the founder of a media and technology consultancy, Mark Pesce, at tinyurl.com/2zrf6q
Pesce had declared, under the heading “Why We All Hate Telstra”, that he, and the entire Australian Internet industry lacked love for the muscular corporation. Bleeding Edge simply noted, in our one-paragraph, throw-away line, that “apparently Telstra hasn't been able to get away with overcharging its customers, repeatedly denying them services and innovation, bullying them and its competition and then - God help us! - whingeing like a spoiled business brat when it looks like it can't get its way”. It still seems accurate to us as we write this column, with Telstra suing the Government over its failure to win a rural broadband contract which the evidence of Telstra’s internal correspondence seems to suggest it actually didn’t want.

The publisher informed us, having read this inflammatory paragraph, that “It is entirely unreasonable for you to be expected to change your mind, or bury your professional opinion, and share a stage with Telstra personnel who will be highlighting their product.”

How wrong she was. Although we had no idea that Telstra personnel would be sharing the stage with us, highlighting their product – wasn’t this talk supposed to be about helping our senior citizens feel more at ease with technology? - we would have been more than happy to have them up there with us, doing their best to change our mind.

As we pointed out to her, any concern for our peace of mind was entirely mis-directed. We would have had absolutely no problems sharing a stage with anyone from Telstra, including their robust spokesman, Phil Burgess. We might have been able to help the audience evaluate the Telstra products, and debate whether or not Telstra acted like a spoiled business brat etc.

Alas, our senior citizens will have to decide for themselves whether those products Telstra presents – with whoever the magazine chooses to address them – really are good value. More importantly, perhaps, they might ask themselves whether they are likely to learn how to be more comfortable with their computers at an event that seems to be more concerned with allowing Telstra to flog its products to a sector of society that possibly doesn't know what represents good value, than with hearing from a columnist who might not be head over heels in love with Telstra, but prides himself on having an objective view.

Posted by cw at 08:19 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Those new iPods: a Classic stuff-up?

We're not an Apple hater. Honest. But look. About the iPod. We like it, although the Bleeding Edge spouse has just had her fourth 30GB model die on her.

But when that chap whose column appears across the fold from us in the Green Guide, declares today that the new models are "palpably better than their predecessors", and claims that the iPod Classic is "pretty much the big iPod of before, except that its capacity has been raised to 160GB (and 80GB)", we have to suggest - with the greatest possible respect - that possibly he might have been misled, which is not an unknown phenomenon even around here.

The extra capacity isn't the only thing that's different. The iPod Classic has a new Cirrus Logic audio codec chip, which has apparently replaced a chip from Wolfson Microelectronics which is causing a good deal of angst among the people who have bought it.

And the dud sound is not the only problem. Bob Cringely, among many others, details the following issues:

There's a vast number of complaints about this model, including the suggestion that iTunes will actually "freeze up and stop responding" after that "palpably better" Classic is plugged in. The worrying thing is that Apple's attempts at firmware updates have apparently not remedied the issues.

We wouldn't like any of our readers to go charging out to buy one of these things until Apple decides that it's going to listen to its customers and fix the darned thing. The problem, of course, is that when so many people only ever say nice things about Apple, it tends to take them an awfully long time to admit that the substantial minority who venture the occasional criticism might actually have a point, and possibly it's stuffed things up.

Posted by cw at 02:08 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 22, 2007

The simplified workhorse PC

We know they mean well. We know we ought to be grateful for their intentions. But the recent news that Intel plans to simplify its model range next year had the Bleeding Edge Translation Department convulsing in fits of guffaws.

After a couple of decades tracking the various chipsets and clock speeds and sundry other intricacies of Intel technology, Bleeding Edge long ago reached the conclusion that Intel finds the concept of “simple” beyond its understanding.

No doubt the company has had a team of engineers and marketers working on the project for months now, but as S for Simplification Day looms, around March next year, we expect them to come down with nervous breakdowns.

This, according to the reports we’ve been reading, is what they have come up with so far: the Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Solo brands will adopt a single Core 2 name; the Pentium Dual-Core and Pentium D processor brands will be combined under the Pentium name; the Itanium 2 processor will become Itanium; the Viiv and VPro technologies will become Core 2 Processor with Viiv Technology and Core 2 Processor with vPro Technology respectively. Does that sound simple to you?

Here at the Bleeding Edge Translation Department, we know - having just completed our latest three-monthly exercise of specifying components for the Bleeding Edge workhorse PC - that whatever Intel calls their technologies, their products will continue to be obscured by a series of letters and numbers capable of paralysing the most nimble of minds.

You wouldn’t think, for instance, that there was much to choose between the E6200 CPU we recommended in March this year, and the E6220 Intel came up with for our June selection, but there was. The 6220 had double the Level 2 cache. Against that, however, some of the 6220s had less efficient stepping than the 6200s, which increased power consumption.

Three months later, and we have three more chips in that range, supporting the 1333MHz bus which will provide more memory bandwidth for these multi-core architectures. That means at most a 1 per cent increase in performance, but the 2.33GHz E6550 ($218), 2.66Ghz E6750 ($245) and 3.0Ghz E6850 ($345) chips also have a feature called G0 stepping, which means slightly better power consumption than previous CPUs in the range.

We doubt the average consumer is going to find it any easier to wade through all this stuff next year, which encourages us enormously. The Bleeding Edge Translation Department is probably not going to be put out of business any time soon.

Depending on your budget, you might opt for a faster version of these chips, but we’re settling for the E6550 as perfectly adequate for a workhorse PC. The performance and power consumption are better than the E6320 we recommended last quarter, but the price has come down slightly to $218.

Motherboards have also advanced in, umm, simplicity, with mainstream adoption of Intel’s P35 Express chipset, which replaces the P965 series. Three months ago, the first P35 Express motherboards were new to the market and therefore expensive. We recommended holding off until they’d proved their stability and the prices came down. For those who couldn’t wait – we specified the Gigabyte GA965P-DS3, based on the older P965 chipset at $145, while noting that we would have been tempted to pay $161 for the P version.

We’re happy to report that the Gigabyte GA965P-DS3 line has proved admirably stable. We think the additional features on the P35-DS3P more than justify the additional $20 on that model – and that’s the one we’d opt for - but we’ll exercise restraint on your behalf and specify the $152 DS3 version.

If you wanted support for DDR3 RAM, you’d buy the DS3R ($168), but the DS3P has two PCI Express x16 slots (plus Firewire and eSATA ports), and we suggest that the performance gains from DDR3 are minimal, and simply not worth the additional cost.
Our recommendation is for 2GB kit of 667MHz Corsair DDR2 RAM at $103.
We’ve stepped up our video card specification to the 256MB Gigabyte 8500GT, at $105. It’s a good all-round solution with better gaming capabilities than our previous recommendations.

We’ve decided this quarter to switch to Western Digital hard drives. We wrote recently about the 500GB Western Digital WD500YS, which has a MTTF of 1.2 million hours and a five-year warranty. But it’s more expensive and not necessary for every-day use. Instead, the 320G SATA II (16MB cache) model is good value at $96.

We still regard the Chimei 946D 2ms 19” DVI widescreen monitor as exceptionally good value – the price has come down a few dollars to $232 – but this is an area where personal preferences apply, and you should have a look at competing products before making your choice.

The price of the Asus SATA DVD drive, which ships with LightScribe labeling, has dropped substantially to $49. We’ve continued to specify a slightly higher-end Logitech mouse and keyboard combination, but you could save a little there, as indeed you could also do with a cheaper case than the ThermalTake Soprano VX.

The total of $1227 makes us confident that next year we’ll achieve a sub-$1000 workhorse PC. Which seems a much more achievable target than the one facing Intel.

Prices this quarter:

Posted by cw at 11:40 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 10, 2007

When hard drives die

THERE is a place where older hard drives, like elephants, instinctively direct themselves when they reach a certain age. There they die alone, their remains slowly disintegrating in this hard drive graveyard. That place, we suspect, is inside one of Bleeding Edge's external hard drive cases.

We found ourselves ruminating on this recently when we replaced a hard drive in the external USB 2.0 case used by the Bleeding Edge Ministry of Financial Affairs, due - as you may recall from one of our recent columns - to the noise and the fact that it was full, having been used to back up several copies of the ministry's iTunes music library.
What fascinated us was the fact that when we extracted it from the case, we discovered it was a 40GB Maxtor drive, a D740X-6L.

That drive was a significant milestone when it was first developed by engineers from the now defunct drive manufacturer, Quantum. The new interface it used became the ATA/133 or FastDrive standard.

We found ourselves browsing through the quarterly specifications for the workhorse PC, trying to track when we bought it. It turned out to be just over five years ago. In early 2002 it would have cost about $200, roughly double the price of the hard drive we recommended for our most recent workhorse PC. Its cache buffer and capacity were precisely one-eighth that of the latest drive.

We had obviously retired it from one of our desktop PCs when it reached the limits of its capacity and put it into the external case, where it had been working away doing daily back-ups ever since.

According to the manufacturer's specifications, we probably could have gone on using it for decades. The D740X-6L has a mean time to failure (MTTF) rate of 800,000 hours in the field. Let's see now. There are only 8765.8 hours in a year, which means a whole 81 years or so more of faithful reads and writes.

Except we'd be exceptionally stupid to rely on it lasting anywhere near that long. In our opinion, we'd been lucky to get five years out of that drive and it was time to retire it.

Earlier this year, at a conference on file and storage technologies, researchers Bianca Schroeder and Garth Gibson, of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, delivered a paper called "Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of One Million Hours Mean to You?".

They concluded that the annual disk replacement rates were much higher than the nominal 1 per cent or less predicted by the MTTF figures used by hard disk manufacturers. Failure rates were generally more like 2 to 4 per cent and, at some sites, as high as 13 per cent.

For drives less than five years old, field replacement rates were larger than what the manufacturers' MTTF datasheets suggested by a factor of two to 10. Between five and eight years old, the field replacement rates are a factor of 30 higher.

Just as disturbing were the findings of a group of Google engineers, Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andre Barroso. Google is one of, if not the world's biggest, user of hard drives and the data they collected suggested the range of failure varies from 1.7 per cent for drives in their first year of operation to more than 8.6 per cent in the three-year-old population.

The Google figures also demonstrate that the self-monitoring so-called SMART utilities drive manufacturers release to users on their own are unlikely to be useful in predicting individual drive failures, although drives that throw up a scan error are 39 times more likely than error-free drives to fail within 60 days.

Even operating temperature and activity levels are less reliable indicators, although older drives do have a higher failure rate at higher temperatures.

We suspect a lot of users are relying on older hard drives that are statistically more likely to fail, and that it might be a good idea to check on their age.

And although MTTF figures clearly aren't an accurate measure of longevity, we still regard them as a good comparative measure. So when we decided to install a new drive in the Australian Dragon PC, which we bought recently as our home media centre, we opted for a model with a higher MTTF than the model we recommended for our workhorse PC. It faces a heavy load, constantly writing and wiping very large files.

We chose a 500GB Western Digital WD500YS, which has a MTTF of 1.2 million hours and a five-year warranty. It's designed for server operations, which we decided justified the higher price tag - between $225 and $499, according to internet shopping agents that track IT prices.

The other investment we've made in longer hard drive life is the replacement case for the USB 2.0 external hard drive. The Department of Financial Affairs now has a Welland ME-740PS Greenstar enclosure, which is distributed by Melbourne-based Anyware Computer Accessories.

It shuts itself down when it's idle, saving power and (we hope) extending the life of the hard drive. Slip in an IDE drive (an eSATA version is due shortly), plug in three cables and link it to your PC via the supplied USB 2.0 cable and when it's not being accessed, the drive will auto-switch into idle, suspend or shut-down mode, reducing power consumption to 80, 20 or 7 per cent. It indicates its status with three LED lights. It also supports one-touch back-up.
By reducing the load on our hard drives, we hope in future they will have to find a new departure lounge.

Posted by cw at 05:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 07, 2007

Sparring with the SPA3102

We've spent much of today preparing the spouse's new office for VoIP telephony, which including wrestling with a Linksys SPA3102 ATA to accommodate a Mytel service and a Pennytel service, and passthrough to the Telstra line for some calls, and whenever the Internet was out. That reminded us to put up the column we wrote recently on that extraordinarily powerful, but highly complex piece of technology ...

BLEEDING Edge admits to becoming ever so slightly obsessed with internet telephony over the past couple of weeks. Ever since we plugged the Linksys SPA3102 analog phone adapter (ATA) into our home network and signed up to MyNetFone's VoIP service, we've been trying to figure out more ways in which we can use this device to manage our standard analog phone and fax and digital IP phone signals to cut the Telstra landline bill — already on its way to $120 or so, about a third of the May account and roughly half that of June. It turned out to be somewhat more difficult than we expected.

Everything about the SPA3102 suggests simplicity: its price (less than $100) and size and the fact that — if you buy it from a VoIP service provider such as MyNetFone — you can expect to plug it into your network and have it
working within minutes. In fact, it is a highly sophisticated piece of equipment. It can transform the owner from being a passive dialler of numbers to being the manager of his own personal telephone exchange. The only barrier is that you have to learn some relatively complex programming and, unfortunately, the manual is breathtakingly inadequate.

The first problem we encountered was the need to be able to log into the device via a web browser. We couldn't actually do that the way the manual suggested. The tech support people at MyNetFone were keen to help but they turned out to be no wiser than we were. They suggested that we wouldn't be able to use the web admin pages without first unplugging the
SPA3102's internet port, then connecting it directly to a PC via its ethernet port — the sort of tedious procedure that tends to drive Bleeding Edge to distraction.

We did some more searching and discovered that web admin access first had to be enabled on the device. You can do that using the Interactive Voice Response menu, the details of which are appended to the manual as
an apparent afterthought.

In fact, those IVR capabilities are among the most important features of this product. You access them first by pressing the star-key on your attached phone handset four times, then entering the command sequence
from the number pad. The numbers that enable Web admin access are 7932, followed by a hash or pound key (that noughts'n'crosses symbol), then a 1 to enable the feature, another hash, then a final 1. The sequence then is:
****7932#1#1.

We'd suggest that Linksys should give the details of the IVR commands more prominence in the manual, particularly the step that activates the web menu.

Alas, once you do gain access tc the menu, the manual is equally unhelpful in configuring it. Far better is the introduction written by Jason Gorham, of JMGTechnology, which is among the cheapest places to buy theSPA3102. There's some more information in the manufacturer's FAQ.
We used both to refine our -settings, to make our home VoIP service as indistinguishable as possible from the Telstra landline service — in everything but cost, of course.

You can increase your savings substantially with this box's ability to provide "least-cost routing" — a concept that springs from the fact that many VoIP providers offer cheaper rates for certain calls. PennyTel, for instance, has the cheapest rates for calls to Australian mobiles — 12.78 cents a minute.

You can use the SPA3102’s web admin pages to set up different providers under different gateway accounts and then alter your dial plan so that the SPA3102 dials out specific sets of numbers via a particular gateway.
To use Pennytel for mobile calls, you could enter the details of your Pennytel account under Gateway 1, then set up your dial plan so that any number starting with "04" is routed through that gateway.

You can find an explanation of dial plans at the Whirlpool VoIP
Forum. Another good resource is the OzVoip forum on self-contained analog telephone adapters.

Exploring the SPA31O2's more powerful features requires a degree of enthusiasm for tech¬nology beyond that of most people, including Bleeding Edge's spouse and, for that matter, the vast majority of people.
The best way to set up her office phone system is via a VoIP service provider specialising in business applications. We're starting with the Melbourne-based provider Mytel, which services companies
ranging from tiny operations to large enterprises with big call centres.

She'll be paying $12.95 a month for the IP Office plan, which includes an in-dial number, with local and national calls at 10 cents, untimed. Later she'll probably move to a hosted system with an auto-attendant or virtual receptionist for an extra $25 a month. To give her the sort of features you can expect from a good business handset, we’re getting her a Polycom IP320 SNOM 320 business phone she won't have to program. It seems a more realistic alternative for the professional and the non-obsessive.

Posted by cw at 06:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 06, 2007

New chapter for the e-book?

Regular readers of this column may be aware of the pummelling our reputation as an industry oracle has taken over the years, as a result of our enthusiasm for the electronic book. For four years, starting in 2000, following our $500 investment in a Rocket eBook - one of the first dedicated ebook readers on the market, and in our view, still one of the best - we predicted that ebook sales were about to take off.

We couldn’t see how they could fail to explode, given the sheer pleasure of reading novels on that particular platform. We were completely wrong, principally because we had failed to calculate that the average reader was irresistibly attached to the idea of books being constructed out of paper, and couldn’t see the point of investing several hundred dollars in something that would force him or her to read them on a screen.

There were a couple of other factors. Readers might have been more interested if ebooks were cheaper and easier to obtain than paper books, but publishers - ignoring the fact that they were much cheaper to produce - actually charged more for them, and couldn’t seem to agree on a common format for them.

And there was that chap Henry C. Yuen, chief executive of a corporation called Gemstar. Henry tried to capture the ebook market by buying out manufacturers of devices like the Rocket eBook, and locking customers into lucrative content subscription deals. He “upgraded” ebook readers by reducing their memory, reducing screen contrast and increasing the price tag, while stripping them of the ability to download free content. Henry subsequently pleaded guilty to massive accounting fraud, but by then he’d almost single-handedly destroyed the ebook.

The result of all that was that there never was a boom in ebooks to rival the MP3 phenomenon, and now the online video phenomenon. The initial enthusiasm of the publishing industry for the modern medium rapidly deflated, to the point that we can no longer buy current electronic books for our Rocket eBook.

Every time we fire it up –perhaps to re-read one of the ebooks we bought between 2000 and 2003, or one of the Web pages and other documents we can still, fortunately, save to it – we can feel our self-respect shrinking. Is it surprising, then, that we’ve scarcely mentioned electronic books since then?

Given our aversion to pain and humilation, we thought we’d never write about the things again, but a couple of weeks ago, at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, we felt our spirits lifting again, like a giant balloon, dragging all our common sense and caution off the ground.

All it took was for a Sydney literary agent and former US publishing executive, Mary Cunnane, to assure the audience at one event that ebooks were about to re-shape the publishing industry.

Mary had just returned from New York, where she encountered several publishers who convinced her that electronic books were about to reshape the publishing industry in much the same way as the invention of the paperback.

According to Mary, the enthusiasm has been whipped up by the Sony Reader, an e-ink device that has not yet been released in Australia, and judging by our efforts to get any information on them from Sony Australia, is probably not going to hit these shores any time soon.

Bleeding Edge is more interested in a device called the Quokkapad, which has just come out of pre-production. Built by an Adelaide company called Ubiq Technologies Pty Ltd, with the input of an American academic, Professor Richard Bellaver of Ball State University, who has been conducting extensive research on ebooks.

The Quokkapad has an eight-inch colour touch screen with 800x600 resolution that should make ebook experience at least as enjoyable as the paper equivalent. What makes it more attractive than the Sony Reader is that it’s not just an ebook reader.

Powered by a 400MHz MIPS processor with 64MB of ROM and 128MB of flash memory, which can be expanded up to 500MB internally, the Quokkapad is a Linux tablet PC, running version 2.7 of GPE Linux. That means it ships with Web browsing and email, calendar, to do, contact management and notetaking capabilities, in addition to audio playback and image viewing.

The Quokkapad will cost around $500. It’s aimed at the corporate, education and government marketplace, rather than consumers, to take advantage of the fact that large organisation can save millions of dollars a year by distributing their documents on electronic devices, rather than printing them.

But it already includes the ability to handle Mobipocket ebooks, and with Adobe expected to release a Linux version of its Digital Editions ebook software by the end of the year, the Quokkapad looks like a solid contender for something that could justify the enthusiasm of those New York publishers: an affordable, flexible, ebook reader/PDA.

We expect to get hold of one for a review in a couple of weeks. We’re trying very hard not to be enthusiastic.

Posted by cw at 11:01 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

A little history

It's not all that long ago that getting a .com.au domain was by no means easy. As it happens, Bleeding Edge played a small part in changing that. We were reminded of that by this new Wikipedia entry on the history of Melbourne IT. This is the story that article refers to that "drew attention to the parlous state of commercial domain name registration in Australia". It ran on the front page of the Financial Review way back in June 1996, under our byline, headed Business Tackles the Net Keeper. We copped quite a bit of abuse from supporters of Robert - for whom, by the way, we have a good deal of respect. But we still hold the view we had then, that if Australian business was going to have a future in the emerging electronic world, something had to be done ...

Australian companies are hoping to break the control of the one man who holds ultimate power over their ability to connect to the Internet.
That electronic gatekeeper is a bearded, 42-year-old bachelor, Robert Elz , a computer systems administrator at Melbourne University. He holds the sole right to dispense the crucial "domain names" which allow companies to hang out their shingle on the Internet.
Companies, frustrated by long delays and by the way Elz assigns the names which give them a place on the global network, are trying to persuade the Internet Industry Association to get Elz to change his mind on his rules at a meeting in Sydney next month.
They have already crossed the first significant hurdle - actually getting Elz to attend. He is not an easy man to move.
As the commercial world contemplates the promise of a vast new electronic marketplace, it is rubbing against the altruistic anarchy that underpins the complex technology.
Elz spends his nights and weekends - without pay - considering the applications of companies who might be investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in an Internet presence.
The voluntary nature of the work means that companies are having to wait at least three, and in a few cases six to 12, weeks to gain the "company.com.au" structure - a unique name followed by a full stop and the suffix "com", for commercial, and "au", for Australia - which will allow customers and suppliers to track them down in cyberspace.
The number of Australian commercial domain names, such as "bhp.com.au", has ballooned in the past two years from a comparative handful to more than 6,500, and is growing by between 600 and 700 a month.
Even more vexing for companies whose registered business names are words in common usage is that Elz - unlike the professional organisation that does his job in the US - is virtually guaranteed to reject listings that are perfectly acceptable to corporate regulators and telephone directories.

Trading names or family surnames that are not registered companies or registered business names are also out.
His attitude is that the US system, where whoever registers the name first gets it - unless a major company with a recognised trading name objects - "is a real mess, and causes too many arguments".
The News Corp oration may well agree, having been beaten to the highly prized "news.com" domain name in the US by a tiny start-up called C/Net News.
Elz has also disappointed two gentlemen whose surnames, and company names, are Said and Moon. They wanted to obtain the domain names "said.com.au" and "moon.com.au"
Although he may choose to relent in some cases, Elz is highly unlikely to approve as a domain name any word that appears in the dictionary.
Elz's position as "top-level domain administrator" - which gives him authority over the assignment of all domain names under the ".au" suffix -arises largely from the fact that in June 1985 he plugged a cable into a computer at Melbourne University.
That cable connected through the University of Hawaii to a network of US universities and research establishments. At the time, nobody knew that that network would grow into the Internet, or that the ability to "own" a domain name might have considerable value.
In an experience that typifies life on the Internet, Elz found, immediately after he plugged it in, that the cable didn't work. When he pulled it out, he discovered two wires had been connected to the same terminator. He had to rewire the cable, and plug it in again.
After spending an honours year of an arts/law degree at Melbourne University studying computer science, Elz has spent his entire career writing complex programming code, administering university networks and exploring the intricacies of hubs, routers and the TCP/IP communications protocols on which the Internet is based. He therefore believes he knows better than most how the Internet ought to work.
And because the rare disputes that have arisen over the control of national Internet domain names have in the past been settled simply by the US-based Internet Assigned Numbers Authority - another volunteer, not unlike Elz, called John Postel - cutting an entire country off until the disputing parties settled their differences, next month's meeting is likely to be a particularly courteous one.
Elz lives in a rented house in the outer Melbourne suburb of McLeod and drives a rusting 1980 Pulsar. When companies like News Interactive, a News Limited subsidiary, are reported in the computer press to be considering suing him, Telstra, and/or Melbourne University over domain names - a report News Corporation denies - his response is mild amusement.
"I've got no money, and no assets," he laughs, "so that doesn't worry me a bit. I've no interest in money."
But News Interactive's editor, Alan Farrelly, voices the feelings of many businesses seeking a home on the Internet when he declares: "We have urged that the present system be changed to take commercial realities more into account. We support a proper registration system such as now operates in the US and the UK. It is our hope this can be achieved, rapidly, without any recourse to legal threats or action."
Aside from the typical programmer's passion for Coke and steak and chips (interchangeable with pizza), Elz seems interested in little other than the Internet, and the programming of networked computers, possibly because he has little time for much else. He was certainly not interested, for instance, in posing for a photograph for this article.
When the rush for commercial domain names first overwhelmed the system just over a year ago, causing one of Elz's helpers to abandon his unpaid task, a temporary replacement with differing, but equally vehement ideas, comprehensively ignored Elz's guidelines.
For some months, practically any application was approved, including, for instance, news.com.au (happily for The News Corporation, actually registered to them).
Less happily for a company called Employment Pty Ltd , the name "employment.com.au" was granted to a specialist recruitment advertising agency called Adcorp Australia , which had registered the business name Employment Opportunities Australia.
Steven Tintor, a Wollongong resident whose association with a Sydney Internet service provider, Ausnet Services , gave him an early view of the Internet's potential, had established several companies, hoping to obtain domain names. They included Classifieds Pty Ltd, Science Pty Ltd, and Medical Pty Ltd. They were intended, say colleagues, as the foundation for businesses on the Web. Although Tintor was lucky enough to get those approved, "employment.com.au" was employed elsewhere.
This week, Tintor told the AFR that he intended to "take that to court one day". He also indicated that he might take the AFR to court one day, too, if it printed any of his comments, and followed up with a fax pointing out: "I hereby give no expressed consent to this article or any other articles you may wish to write in any of your of your (sic) publications."
Since Elz has taken back direct responsibility for the .COM domain, he has been far more diligent. When Email Metals tried to register two of its trading companies, Pipeline Supplies and Union Steel, using the same ACN number as the parent, he picked it up. Email Metals is still awaiting a resolution.
In the US, a company called Network Solutions has been assigning and administering domain names since 1993, under a contract with the National Science Foundation. It charges a registration fee for the first two years, and $50 for each subsequent years. This week, it announced that 25,000 domain names which had not been paid for - roughly half the total US complement -were about to be erased.
In late 1994, three prominent local Internet identities tried to establish a private company called Australian Internet Registry, to take over the registration of domain names. Following speculation in the computer press that AIR might "lease" addresses for an annual fee of about $1, the move was abandoned. At the time, Elz weighed in with a public Internet message that described most other messages as "unbelievably cretinous and obnoxious", and observed that it was beyond belief that "anyone, under any circumstances at all, would treat anything written in the computing press in Australia (or probably elsewhere) as if it had even a grain of truth".
In an interview with the AFR, Elz said that he was prepared to consider suggestions to improve the registration process. "It absolutely has to be made faster," he said. One reason it isn't, he suggests, is that applicants frequently misread the application form, available on the World Wide Web at http://www.aunic.net/aunic
One suggestion from within the industry is that the ASC should take over administration of the .COM domain, and issue companies with an Internet address as part of the registration process. Another is that a not-for-profit organisation administer it.
One thing that seems certain is that in future, Australian domain names will carry a registration fee. "Eventually there will be fees," Elz said. "I'm thinking of $20 a year for a company's first name, $200 for the second, $2,000 for the third, etc, so that businesses who need a name would probably get them."
In the meantime, a Norfolk Island entrepreneur, Rob Ryan, has established a completely new domain for the Australian territory, and hopes to woo Australian companies with far less rigid rules, albeit with the final initials "nf", rather than "au".
To obtain the name employment.com.nf, for example, would cost a company $250, with no requirement for a registered business name. Ryan's company, Norfolk Island Data Services, which is working with a Sydney-based Internet service provider, RealNet Access , also plans to auction the rights to personal domain names - smith.nf for instance. The bidding will start at $1,000.

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