The Australian ISP landscape just gotten a bit smaller; pictures arrive of the $25 computer that could; and now we can have VNC in a browser, thanks to Node.js.
It’s with a touch of sadness that I learned that iiNet intends to acquire fellow ISP Internode for $105 million. Internode founder Simon Hackett said that it was a matter of survival.
“The size of Internode on its own is right on the bottom edge of what we’ve considered viable to be an NBN player. If you’re smaller than that, the economics don’t stack up. It would be a dangerous thing for us to enter the next era being only just quite big enough,” he said.
Direct from the “OMG! I must have this” department comes new pictures of the Raspberry Pi — Raspberry Pi is the $25-$35 computer that comes armed with a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128/256MB of RAM, HDMI, USB ports, an SD card slot, audio jack, and optional 10/100 Ethernet. Intended to teach children programming, at that price point I expect to see the big kids taking it and putting it into all sorts of unintended places and making cool applications.
And those folks over at LinkedIn just can’t get enough JavaScript, and must subscribe to Atwood’s Law that any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript, as one LinkedIn intern and now software engineer decided to build a VNC client to run in the browser. The technology used included Node.js, socket.io, and is rendered using HTML 5 canvas — it’s well worth the read.
Some would say that it is a long way from software engineering to journalism, others would correctly argue that it is a mere 10 metres according to the floor plan. During his first five years with CBS Interactive, Chris started his journalistic adventure in 2006 as the Editor of Builder AU after originally joining the company as a programmer. Leaving CBS Interactive in 2010 to follow his deep desire to study the snowdrifts and culinary delights of Canada, Chris based himself in Vancouver and paid for his new snowboarding and poutine cravings as a programmer for a lifestyle gaming startup. Chris returns to CBS in 2011 as the Editor of TechRepublic Australia determined to meld together his programming and journalistic tendencies once and for all.
