A couple of students, backed with money from a Chinese bank, come up with a distribution mechanism that is so brilliant in its simplicity that it becomes a worldwide hit in everywhere except the US where Congress is so busy farting around trying to please their corporate sponsors that they get left several years behind.
Three years later In America, when congress realises that the rest of the world doesn't give a shit what they think and has progressed onto different and more profitable business model, everyone realises that Ralph Oman had been a complete and utter twat but by then it too late. Well done Ralph Oman, well done......
The only question I really wanted to hear answered is "Do you guarantee that once I've converted all of my servers to your free product, it will still be available further down the line? Or, to put it another way, am I likely to end up having to pay for the binary rpms or do a full re-install of CentOS later because you've changed the licencing and started issuing source rpms only"?
"Paul Kerr, managing director of Clyde-based Photonic Security Systems, which came up with the design, said 'If you can't look at something you can't attack it.'"
Absolutely, said the bloke wearing shades and carrying a mirror.
"Ballmer also suggested that education should be given government stimulus funding to enable young people to gain experience on the computing systems they would meet in the real world."
Seriously Mr B, go fuck yourself. You don't need the money and young people, on the whole, are pretty good at working things out for themselves as they have a "click and see what happens" approach mixed with the ability to ask another kid who knows. Doesn't matter if it's OpenOffice, Office 2007, whatever, if they really want it to do something, they'll find a way. The weak point is quite often the teachers.
Seriously, in the UK you cannot be a teacher without a University degree. A University degree should teach you to analyse a problem, research the problem and apply a solution. In software, this boils down to "I can't do X in program Y", go to Google and type "how do I do X in program Y", click links until you find answer and follow instructions on page. Most of the time they seem incapable of following this simple idea. They'll even come in and as me then watch me hit Google and search for a solution (often the first result returned) but it never dawns on them to do the same themselves next time (and no, support isn't my job). I showed a year 7 how to find something out using the "F1" key and he was amazed, he just didn't know.
The best thing for education, would be for kids to be trained to work stuff out for themselves by teachers who are trained to work stuff out for themselves. This "teaching people to use the software they'll use in the real world" argument is crippling and the seeming inability for people with far higher qualifications than mine to work out even minor problems has seriously dented my faith in the higher education system.
The cost of the competitor is irrelevant. What is relevant is that a company with a stranglehold on the desktop PC market is using that monopoly position and the familiarity with the desktop product to lever its way into the netbook market. The cost of the competition has no bearing on the concept of predatory pricing as it is the act of reducing the cost of Windows, an OEM product that everyone else has to pay $ for to zero with the express intent of levering Linux out of the netbook market.
"They're providing very strict licensing terms for what they can and can't put XP for netbooks on. It's no different from compared Office licence costs for business to the teacher and student edition. One costs about 1/4 of the other."
This I'm afraid is total bollocks. The limit on who can use student and teacher edition is laid down in the licence, i.e. students and teachers. If a competitor emerged in the education market and Microsoft reduced the cost to zero long enough to kill it off and then raised it again, that would be predatory pricing. I
I don't see how this concept is so difficult to grasp. The fact that this free issue of XP is ONLY in the netbook market at a time when every source is saying that Linux threatens Microsoft is in the netbook market is what differentiates it.
'Once again Microsoft's monopoly means Windows is swallowing up another market.'"
Which is why, if the rumours of Microsoft giving XP to netbook manufacturers is true, they are guilty of predatory pricing which is basically summarised as discounting heavily with the intention of forcing a competitor out of the market.
Open and shut case really although it'll probably take the EU stepping in to do something about it.
Better than that. Fine them the average annual wage lost by the builders on their list, say £15,000 a year, times 3213 builders, times the number of years the list operated = £722,925,000 spread evenly across the data company and the customers that used them.
They've already ripped off the look of KDE4, the idea of centralised software repositories so it's only logical that they adopt the random hardware problems that Linux suffers from time to time.
Unless they copy the price and the licence, I'm still sticking with Ubuntu.
The best line though is that old favourite "well they would say that wouldn't they" particularly if you then explain the dependance Microsoft has on business and Office in particular.
On the other hand, you can also find out who the Microsoft vendors are that are making the claims and report them for false advertising or fraud. At best, the current situation i.e. which system is most secure, is debatable and at worst a matter of opinion and it will remain this way until a truly independant analyst manages to definitively show otherwise.
Agreed, monopoly isn't good but if you are a country that doesn't always see eye to eye with the home nation of the world's most widespread software manufacturer then breaking away to a system that allows to not only view the source code but also compile it from scratch into a distro of your own making is an extremely attractive proposition.
I'm not saying that Windows contains back doors and switches but once you stir DRM into the equation, a tap of a key in a far off country could cripple your economy, military and/or governmental services in the event of a trade war or other stand off. Once you have a national system, you can then use the "we must train school kids to use the software they'll encounter in the real world" excuse that Microsoft has traded off of for so long.
As Microsoft discovered early on, people will mostly use the same software at home that they have at work so there'll probably be a boom in the Linux userbase.
That this is the best evidence so far that Microsoft's new carey, sharey nice image is basically what many people have assumed it to be, i.e. bullshit.
The scenario is nothing new. Bring in a friendly company, get them to slate the competition and then brag about how an "independent" analyst has found something meaningful. Similarly, as usual, the people who don't care still won't care, the whole thing will be forgotten and FOSS will continue to gain ground as those who know its true value will continue to use and propagate it.
The important thing is to remember that we're still dealing with the same selfish, power hungry, lying, money grabbing, unethical, amoral, shower of shites that we were 5 years ago.
If your running a big company with multiple sites, a flat, uniform, corporate desktop is a good thing as it eases the admins job and makes it easy for staff travelling from one site to another to work without having to get their head around different setups.
Education wise, uniform setup across the whole country, managed from a central location is a truly crap idea. Managing the systems in house allows you to build a setup appropriate to the character of the school. I admin a grammar school and our requirements are totally different to those of an academy in a deprived area. To be honest, I think computers are a waste of space in pretty much every subject other than ICT and film studies, where pupils make their own films. Pen, paper and talented, capable teachers can teach to a higher standard than a poor teacher with an interactive whiteboard in a room full of computers.
League tables and the national curriculum are perfect demonstrations of the appalling effect that central management can have on education. On the other hand, if your happy with turning the subject of ICT into a bland, boring, sterile landscape aimed at the lowest common denominator, that's your choice.
...with one hand the government seeks to lock down the British Internet with an iron fist, while at the same time telling us it is boosting innovation and business online. It is quite clearly blind to the fact that one affects the other.
No shit Sherlock?
Most of the problems in UK governmental IT are down to the fact that while the government wants to be at the cutting edge of digital technology, they have little or no understanding of the things they do.
This leaves them as easy prey to the tens of thousands of consultants, many of whom are probably partners of the service providers, who will happily stand there with a straight face telling ministers that their latest hare-brained scheme is do-able within budget and will of course be delivered on-time despite the fact that such a result is as rare as rocking horse shit.
Ultimately, no matter what half arsed fiasco results, the government will keep praising the scheme and plugging its merits because (a) they don't understand it enough to see how fucked up it all is. (b) An admission reveals the fact that they don't know what they're doing and (c) An admission results in an open declaration of "Whoops, we just pissed £4,000,000,000 of tax-payer's money down the drain.
And at the end of the day, the only people to be affected will be the honest,law abiding types while the terrorists, paedo's and all will just go back to using the memory sticks, dead letter drops and the post.
Yep, I'd go along with that. When I hit secondary school in 1976, the county council had scrapped Grammar Schools and gone comprehensive. Went in at the top and after discovering that being a smartarse was a one way trip to a good kicking gave up on achievement and spent the next 4 years blending in to the background. School was, without a doubt, the most miserable part of my life and those who have have tried to tell me they're the best days of their life generally get told to fuck off.
Funnily enough I now find myself working in a Grammar School, you know, the ones the government are trying to ban because of their divisive nature, and to be quite honest it works, but the current method selection is fundamentally flawed. The 11+ for those who haven't come across it, is a series of tests that are basically IQ tests, pattern recognition etc. . In counties with Grammar systems, parents, usually middle class and fairly well off, see the higher results they attain as being an indication of a "better class of education". These parents then pay to have individual tuition for their offspring aimed purely at passing the 11+, i.e. teaching to the test, and by showing how the tests work via past papers you can push people through the 11+. The problems start when the kid starts in the fast paced, academic grammar school environment but the tuition stops. You can spot these kids. They're the ones standing outside the classroom because, in their frustrated state at not being able to keep up, they make a pain in the arse of themselves in order to gain some peer cred.
So, I still think that Grammars are a good idea but the 11+ is way out of date. What's needed is a method of getting the kid whose nose is always in a book or is pulling things to pieces to find out how they work or is always asking questions.
If you want depression though try the Building Schools for the Future program. The biggest load of PFI based, consultant driven wank ever foisted on the British People. When addressed by the government it's always described as the program to build new school buildings which is undeniably good but they neglect to mention the whole mess behind it.
Sadly, such a blatant attempt to have the Police running around could be construed as wasting Police time which is a an offence in its own right.
Far better would be to set up a website where people can register an e-mail address or mobile number that others on the site are free to call or send messages to. You can run this under the guise of make new friends by calling a stranger. The fact that you're on the site suggests you have something in common with the others, i.e. you're interested in freedom or alternatively you can just pick up a ã10 pay as you go mobile and leave it switched off so it receives messages.
Enough people sending to and calling others should create a level of fog that would render the whole system ineffective. The content of the e-mails doesn't matter anyway as it's only source and destination that'll be logged.
As usual, the Governement are preparing to spend shed loads of the tax on a flawed concept. Or simpler than all this is don't vote Labour at the next election. Last time they took a kicking and pretended to be humbled by the experience. Don't fall for it again.
The problem with all this is that the government uses fairness in order to justify this kind of system and to a large extent it's correct. Rich and poor alike are caught on camera, booked and fined automatically and without bias but with enough cameras no-one escapes the fair hand of robotic justice.
BUT, and this is a but the size of John Prescott's, I suspect that part of what makes the interface between state and citizen tolerable to the masses is the little victories that you score over the Man once in a while. Ask someone whose served a long prison sentence how they coped with losing the ability to do what they damn well liked when they like and they'll tell you that it's the little successes like getting an extra pack of ciggies smuggled in or pinching food from the kitchen or just taking the piss and getting away with it. In the same way as prisoners surrender their freedom, society puts restrictions on those living in it and on the whole, this is accepted as reasonable, e.g. the English agree not to possess firearms and in exchange the state, via the police, provide protection to ensure you don't need to. However, if you are on an empty motorway doing 85mph in a well maintained, modern car does it really matter? A copper who pulls you up could give you a warning based on his judgement that you were in control of your vehicle and weren't behaving like an arsehole. Equally, does it matter if, on a Sunday morning, you stop outside a newsagents and pop in to get a paper without feeding the meter; not really, yet a camera/computer logs the offence and a fixed fine is produced, packed and posted.
All the time this is going on people drive like complete idiots at below the speed limit and get away with it. Burglars go unchased as the police turn out and issue you a piece of paper to give to the insurance company without really investigating and kids can roam the streets at night behaving like little shits because they know the Police are too rushed off their feet to turn up unless there's a risk to life.
So long as this goes on, and drivers only interaction with the Police is via a brown envelope, the public's appreciation of their efforts on the road will be erroded and as camera based surveillance is increasingly applied to petty infractions of badly drafted and over zealously enforced rules, the publics respect for the law will be similarly damaged.
Up until recently, the man had a face and he could make a reasoned judgement as to whether your actions were deserving of a warning, a caution or arrest. In the UK, the man has become a faceless electronic beaurocrat, a fact alluded to in a DVLA advert where the DVLA's computer apparently takes the form of a 2001 style black monolith which stalks drivers who failed to pay their road tax. The gist of the ad is that a) there's no escape and b) your car can be seized and crushed on the spot, no argument, no reasoning and most importantly, no mercy. Where this leaves us humans is unsure but I've got a horrible feeling that Demolition Man is the template being worked to.
Freedom is the opportunity to take the piss or screw up once in a while as long as it doesn't cause hurt or damage to those around you and if your willing to take the consequences if it does. Take that away and you may as may as well be in prison.
Absolutely. If I recall correctly the security services had, by 1974, infiltrated the IRA to the point where they knew who all the main players were and at one point actually had an informant at the highest level of the IRA council. The decision to "take them down" however was vetoed because they knew it would be a bloodbath with a high possibility of collateral damage, embarrassing for the UK and politically disastrous with the US.
But, what it did prove is that there's no substitute for someone on the inside, which I suspect is what every criminal and real terrorist will be aiming for in the offices that handle the information and ID data of every UK citizen. Besides, all that will happen is that that real terrorists won't use email. phones etc., for planning their terrorising because at the end of the day, planning a terrorist attack is not the sort of thing that requires instantaneous communication. They're in no rush as long as there's a big bang at the end of it.
Personally, as a child of the sixties who lived through the cold war and the IRA terror campaign I still can't reconcile current government behaviour with the idea that we were the good guys because in the eastern bloc, you were watched wherever you went, your phones could be tapped and your personal mail could be intercepted by a government that used the defence of the state from the evil decadent westerners as its justification. At least in East Germany they managed to keep peoples personal records securely locked away in a basement.
At the next election my questions to the doorstep candidate will be "Will you/your party scrap ID cards, the universal snooping database, the retention of innocent people's DNA, PFI and dumbaarse IT projects that will cost 300 new schools worth before it becomes obvious they crap? If the answer is yes they get the vote. The economy isn't too much of a concern as this lot have screwed up so badly it'd take a real dickhead to do any worse. At the last election our Labour MP had a majority of about a 100. I don't think he'll be back next time.
that this government doesn't seem to know when to stop. It's almost as if they want to to lose the next election. Maybe Gordon's tired of all the flak and wants out or maybe the Labour party has decided on a crash and burn exit from government.
While things are good, low inflation, house prices rising, government popular etc. people are more likely to ignore things like this. Once the next general election starts rolling and the Tories start drawing up a list of reasons not to vote Labour this'll be another entry handed to them on a plate by a government that's lost touch with the population. Somehow, I doubt there'll be another Labour government for a few years.
It's remarkable that large corporations don't seem to realise that after enough people cave in to their crap, someone, probably poor, with nothing to lose will turn around and deliver a legal kick in the nuts.
Good luck to this person. McDonalds won on technicality but lost massively in PR terms. If the RIAA can make a big enough arse of themselves in public people may start to realise how redundant they actually are.
It's education in general. The problem is that up until the 80's, there was a general understanding that education was above and beyond politics. Overall policy was in the hands of Local Education Authorities and the government pretty much set the funding levels. During the 80's and early 90's however, Margaret Thatcher's conservative government took control of education in the name of "improving" it. Part of this was down to crushing the power of the teacher's unions and a claimed influence of political bias on the behalf of teachers and the other was a pathological hatred of the very left wing Inner London Education Authority (ILEA). One of the signs of the animosity between the government and ILEA was the appearance of anti-Tory Easter Egg type messages in ILEA produced software (I know a teacher that found a few).
Anyway, the conservatives set up OFSTED to monitor schools and started issuing diktats regarding what should be taught and how it should be taught. A whole generation of 80's kids was created that couldn't spell or string a sentence together because someone high up decided that grammar and spelling weren't important as long as people could make themselves understood.
And now we reach the real point which is that education in the UK was truly screwed when Tony Blair made his Education, Education, Education speech. At the moment this statement was made, Blair's was declaring "Judge my government by the success we have in education" and being able to show that standards were improving became more important than improving standards. One prime example of this was the introduction of the GNVQ qualification. Unlike the GCSE, the GNVQ is a quantitative measure so a GNVQ in ICT would be along the lines of:
1/ Open a word processor 2/ enter a block of text 3/ Insert a picture into the document 4/ Add some more text and centre it
As long as you performed those 4 tasks, you got your GNVQ. The content could be utter bollocks but as long as you did it you got the ticket. The GCSE however, included a qualitative component so the effort and skill involved was higher. So why you may ask did David Blunkett declare a GNVQ to be the equivalent of 5 GCSEs? The effect of this was rapid. Schools that were towards the bottom of the performance league tables switched to GNVQs and rapidly shot to the top leaving those teaching the more difficult qualification looking like poor performers.
And this happens with every new scheme the government brings out because they always leave a loophole that can be exploited by school heads desperate to show improvement. It isn't just education either. In hospitals, the government was under pressure to end the situation where patients were left in corridors on trolleys. Quick witted hospital managers saw the loophole, had the wheels removed from the trolleys, called them beds and designated the corridors as wards. Problem solved overnight, performance related bonus secured. Another example was when hospitals were being criticised for having empty wards. The managers worked out that it cost less to decorate a ward than it did to staff it so some wards were being decorated every three months or so.
Make no mistake, it is easier to lower the bar than it is to make people jump higher and so long as league tables and performance related funding and bonuses exist the bar will continue to be lowered. As it is, bosses and university lecturers are complaining that they are getting kids with A* qualifications who are pretty much illiterate, innumerate and have no common sense, with universities spending the first year of a degree course bringing the kids up to a level that they'd have left school at 15 + years ago.
The government has one thing right though and that is that education needs reform, but the reform they are bringing in will only compound the problem as it's purpose is primarily to pass the schools system into private hands. The education I'd like to see would focus on English, Maths and practical subjects with the first two applied to th
It's nice to see that Microsoft have learnt their lesson and will be ensuring it's proven ready for release by a rigorous testing regime instead of rushing it out to meet a deadline to cover up for a previously botched product. Oh wait.......
I seem to remember that along with using an existing monopoly to leverage one of the illegal sides of monopoly is the concept of predatory pricing, i.e. deliberately pricing a product well below it's market value in order to strike down a competitor.
With the cost of Windows as it is, "giving" software to schools along with a condition that they must be using Windows is about as predatory as you can get. What's the EU's phone number again?
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of students, backed with money from a Chinese bank, come up with a distribution mechanism that is so brilliant in its simplicity that it becomes a worldwide hit in everywhere except the US where Congress is so busy farting around trying to please their corporate sponsors that they get left several years behind.
Three years later In America, when congress realises that the rest of the world doesn't give a shit what they think and has progressed onto different and more profitable business model, everyone realises that Ralph Oman had been a complete and utter twat but by then it too late. Well done Ralph Oman, well done......
The only question I really wanted to hear answered is "Do you guarantee that once I've converted all of my servers to your free product, it will still be available further down the line? Or, to put it another way, am I likely to end up having to pay for the binary rpms or do a full re-install of CentOS later because you've changed the licencing and started issuing source rpms only"?
"Paul Kerr, managing director of Clyde-based Photonic Security Systems, which came up with the design, said 'If you can't look at something you can't attack it.'"
Absolutely, said the bloke wearing shades and carrying a mirror.
Good to see no hypocrisy here then:
http://www.skuggen.com/2010/03/apple-ceo-steve-jobs-we-steal-great-ideas-shamelessly/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/08/apple_copies_rejected_app/
"Ballmer also suggested that education should be given government stimulus funding to enable young people to gain experience on the computing systems they would meet in the real world."
Seriously Mr B, go fuck yourself. You don't need the money and young people, on the whole, are pretty good at working things out for themselves as they have a "click and see what happens" approach mixed with the ability to ask another kid who knows. Doesn't matter if it's OpenOffice, Office 2007, whatever, if they really want it to do something, they'll find a way. The weak point is quite often the teachers.
Seriously, in the UK you cannot be a teacher without a University degree. A University degree should teach you to analyse a problem, research the problem and apply a solution. In software, this boils down to "I can't do X in program Y", go to Google and type "how do I do X in program Y", click links until you find answer and follow instructions on page. Most of the time they seem incapable of following this simple idea. They'll even come in and as me then watch me hit Google and search for a solution (often the first result returned) but it never dawns on them to do the same themselves next time (and no, support isn't my job). I showed a year 7 how to find something out using the "F1" key and he was amazed, he just didn't know.
The best thing for education, would be for kids to be trained to work stuff out for themselves by teachers who are trained to work stuff out for themselves. This "teaching people to use the software they'll use in the real world" argument is crippling and the seeming inability for people with far higher qualifications than mine to work out even minor problems has seriously dented my faith in the higher education system.
The cost of the competitor is irrelevant. What is relevant is that a company with a stranglehold on the desktop PC market is using that monopoly position and the familiarity with the desktop product to lever its way into the netbook market. The cost of the competition has no bearing on the concept of predatory pricing as it is the act of reducing the cost of Windows, an OEM product that everyone else has to pay $ for to zero with the express intent of levering Linux out of the netbook market.
"They're providing very strict licensing terms for what they can and can't put XP for netbooks on. It's no different from compared Office licence costs for business to the teacher and student edition. One costs about 1/4 of the other."
This I'm afraid is total bollocks. The limit on who can use student and teacher edition is laid down in the licence, i.e. students and teachers. If a competitor emerged in the education market and Microsoft reduced the cost to zero long enough to kill it off and then raised it again, that would be predatory pricing. I
I don't see how this concept is so difficult to grasp. The fact that this free issue of XP is ONLY in the netbook market at a time when every source is saying that Linux threatens Microsoft is in the netbook market is what differentiates it.
'Once again Microsoft's monopoly means Windows is swallowing up another market.'"
Which is why, if the rumours of Microsoft giving XP to netbook manufacturers is true, they are guilty of predatory pricing which is basically summarised as discounting heavily with the intention of forcing a competitor out of the market.
Open and shut case really although it'll probably take the EU stepping in to do something about it.
Who watches the watchers?
Err... no-one
"A spokesman for Mr Straw said the 'strength of feeling' against the plans had persuaded him to rethink"
Means:
Oh shit. Only one year to the election deadline...
Nuff said really
Better than that. Fine them the average annual wage lost by the builders on their list, say £15,000 a year, times 3213 builders, times the number of years the list operated = £722,925,000 spread evenly across the data company and the customers that used them.
They've already ripped off the look of KDE4, the idea of centralised software repositories so it's only logical that they adopt the random hardware problems that Linux suffers from time to time.
Unless they copy the price and the licence, I'm still sticking with Ubuntu.
OK you can say that the authour's background may bias him somewhat but then Microsoft's claims are open to the same criticism.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/22/security_report_windows_vs_linux/
The best line though is that old favourite "well they would say that wouldn't they" particularly if you then explain the dependance Microsoft has on business and Office in particular.
On the other hand, you can also find out who the Microsoft vendors are that are making the claims and report them for false advertising or fraud. At best, the current situation i.e. which system is most secure, is debatable and at worst a matter of opinion and it will remain this way until a truly independant analyst manages to definitively show otherwise.
Agreed, monopoly isn't good but if you are a country that doesn't always see eye to eye with the home nation of the world's most widespread software manufacturer then breaking away to a system that allows to not only view the source code but also compile it from scratch into a distro of your own making is an extremely attractive proposition.
I'm not saying that Windows contains back doors and switches but once you stir DRM into the equation, a tap of a key in a far off country could cripple your economy, military and/or governmental services in the event of a trade war or other stand off. Once you have a national system, you can then use the "we must train school kids to use the software they'll encounter in the real world" excuse that Microsoft has traded off of for so long.
As Microsoft discovered early on, people will mostly use the same software at home that they have at work so there'll probably be a boom in the Linux userbase.
That this is the best evidence so far that Microsoft's new carey, sharey nice image is basically what many people have assumed it to be, i.e. bullshit.
The scenario is nothing new. Bring in a friendly company, get them to slate the competition and then brag about how an "independent" analyst has found something meaningful. Similarly, as usual, the people who don't care still won't care, the whole thing will be forgotten and FOSS will continue to gain ground as those who know its true value will continue to use and propagate it.
The important thing is to remember that we're still dealing with the same selfish, power hungry, lying, money grabbing, unethical, amoral, shower of shites that we were 5 years ago.
Wrong attiude.
If your running a big company with multiple sites, a flat, uniform, corporate desktop is a good thing as it eases the admins job and makes it easy for staff travelling from one site to another to work without having to get their head around different setups.
Education wise, uniform setup across the whole country, managed from a central location is a truly crap idea. Managing the systems in house allows you to build a setup appropriate to the character of the school. I admin a grammar school and our requirements are totally different to those of an academy in a deprived area. To be honest, I think computers are a waste of space in pretty much every subject other than ICT and film studies, where pupils make their own films. Pen, paper and talented, capable teachers can teach to a higher standard than a poor teacher with an interactive whiteboard in a room full of computers.
League tables and the national curriculum are perfect demonstrations of the appalling effect that central management can have on education. On the other hand, if your happy with turning the subject of ICT into a bland, boring, sterile landscape aimed at the lowest common denominator, that's your choice.
...with one hand the government seeks to lock down the British Internet with an iron fist, while at the same time telling us it is boosting innovation and business online. It is quite clearly blind to the fact that one affects the other.
No shit Sherlock?
Most of the problems in UK governmental IT are down to the fact that while the government wants to be at the cutting edge of digital technology, they have little or no understanding of the things they do.
This leaves them as easy prey to the tens of thousands of consultants, many of whom are probably partners of the service providers, who will happily stand there with a straight face telling ministers that their latest hare-brained scheme is do-able within budget and will of course be delivered on-time despite the fact that such a result is as rare as rocking horse shit.
Ultimately, no matter what half arsed fiasco results, the government will keep praising the scheme and plugging its merits because (a) they don't understand it enough to see how fucked up it all is. (b) An admission reveals the fact that they don't know what they're doing and (c) An admission results in an open declaration of "Whoops, we just pissed £4,000,000,000 of tax-payer's money down the drain.
And at the end of the day, the only people to be affected will be the honest,law abiding types while the terrorists, paedo's and all will just go back to using the memory sticks, dead letter drops and the post.
Tragic, truly tragic.
Yep, I'd go along with that. When I hit secondary school in 1976, the county council had scrapped Grammar Schools and gone comprehensive. Went in at the top and after discovering that being a smartarse was a one way trip to a good kicking gave up on achievement and spent the next 4 years blending in to the background. School was, without a doubt, the most miserable part of my life and those who have have tried to tell me they're the best days of their life generally get told to fuck off.
Funnily enough I now find myself working in a Grammar School, you know, the ones the government are trying to ban because of their divisive nature, and to be quite honest it works, but the current method selection is fundamentally flawed. The 11+ for those who haven't come across it, is a series of tests that are basically IQ tests, pattern recognition etc. . In counties with Grammar systems, parents, usually middle class and fairly well off, see the higher results they attain as being an indication of a "better class of education". These parents then pay to have individual tuition for their offspring aimed purely at passing the 11+, i.e. teaching to the test, and by showing how the tests work via past papers you can push people through the 11+. The problems start when the kid starts in the fast paced, academic grammar school environment but the tuition stops. You can spot these kids. They're the ones standing outside the classroom because, in their frustrated state at not being able to keep up, they make a pain in the arse of themselves in order to gain some peer cred.
So, I still think that Grammars are a good idea but the 11+ is way out of date. What's needed is a method of getting the kid whose nose is always in a book or is pulling things to pieces to find out how they work or is always asking questions.
If you want depression though try the Building Schools for the Future program. The biggest load of PFI based, consultant driven wank ever foisted on the British People. When addressed by the government it's always described as the program to build new school buildings which is undeniably good but they neglect to mention the whole mess behind it.
Sadly, such a blatant attempt to have the Police running around could be construed as wasting Police time which is a an offence in its own right.
Far better would be to set up a website where people can register an e-mail address or mobile number that others on the site are free to call or send messages to. You can run this under the guise of make new friends by calling a stranger. The fact that you're on the site suggests you have something in common with the others, i.e. you're interested in freedom or alternatively you can just pick up a ã10 pay as you go mobile and leave it switched off so it receives messages.
Enough people sending to and calling others should create a level of fog that would render the whole system ineffective. The content of the e-mails doesn't matter anyway as it's only source and destination that'll be logged.
As usual, the Governement are preparing to spend shed loads of the tax on a flawed concept. Or simpler than all this is don't vote Labour at the next election. Last time they took a kicking and pretended to be humbled by the experience. Don't fall for it again.
The problem with all this is that the government uses fairness in order to justify this kind of system and to a large extent it's correct. Rich and poor alike are caught on camera, booked and fined automatically and without bias but with enough cameras no-one escapes the fair hand of robotic justice.
BUT, and this is a but the size of John Prescott's, I suspect that part of what makes the interface between state and citizen tolerable to the masses is the little victories that you score over the Man once in a while. Ask someone whose served a long prison sentence how they coped with losing the ability to do what they damn well liked when they like and they'll tell you that it's the little successes like getting an extra pack of ciggies smuggled in or pinching food from the kitchen or just taking the piss and getting away with it. In the same way as prisoners surrender their freedom, society puts restrictions on those living in it and on the whole, this is accepted as reasonable, e.g. the English agree not to possess firearms and in exchange the state, via the police, provide protection to ensure you don't need to. However, if you are on an empty motorway doing 85mph in a well maintained, modern car does it really matter? A copper who pulls you up could give you a warning based on his judgement that you were in control of your vehicle and weren't behaving like an arsehole. Equally, does it matter if, on a Sunday morning, you stop outside a newsagents and pop in to get a paper without feeding the meter; not really, yet a camera/computer logs the offence and a fixed fine is produced, packed and posted.
All the time this is going on people drive like complete idiots at below the speed limit and get away with it. Burglars go unchased as the police turn out and issue you a piece of paper to give to the insurance company without really investigating and kids can roam the streets at night behaving like little shits because they know the Police are too rushed off their feet to turn up unless there's a risk to life.
So long as this goes on, and drivers only interaction with the Police is via a brown envelope, the public's appreciation of their efforts on the road will be erroded and as camera based surveillance is increasingly applied to petty infractions of badly drafted and over zealously enforced rules, the publics respect for the law will be similarly damaged.
Up until recently, the man had a face and he could make a reasoned judgement as to whether your actions were deserving of a warning, a caution or arrest. In the UK, the man has become a faceless electronic beaurocrat, a fact alluded to in a DVLA advert where the DVLA's computer apparently takes the form of a 2001 style black monolith which stalks drivers who failed to pay their road tax. The gist of the ad is that a) there's no escape and b) your car can be seized and crushed on the spot, no argument, no reasoning and most importantly, no mercy. Where this leaves us humans is unsure but I've got a horrible feeling that Demolition Man is the template being worked to.
Freedom is the opportunity to take the piss or screw up once in a while as long as it doesn't cause hurt or damage to those around you and if your willing to take the consequences if it does. Take that away and you may as may as well be in prison.
Absolutely. If I recall correctly the security services had, by 1974, infiltrated the IRA to the point where they knew who all the main players were and at one point actually had an informant at the highest level of the IRA council. The decision to "take them down" however was vetoed because they knew it would be a bloodbath with a high possibility of collateral damage, embarrassing for the UK and politically disastrous with the US.
But, what it did prove is that there's no substitute for someone on the inside, which I suspect is what every criminal and real terrorist will be aiming for in the offices that handle the information and ID data of every UK citizen. Besides, all that will happen is that that real terrorists won't use email. phones etc., for planning their terrorising because at the end of the day, planning a terrorist attack is not the sort of thing that requires instantaneous communication. They're in no rush as long as there's a big bang at the end of it.
Personally, as a child of the sixties who lived through the cold war and the IRA terror campaign I still can't reconcile current government behaviour with the idea that we were the good guys because in the eastern bloc, you were watched wherever you went, your phones could be tapped and your personal mail could be intercepted by a government that used the defence of the state from the evil decadent westerners as its justification. At least in East Germany they managed to keep peoples personal records securely locked away in a basement.
At the next election my questions to the doorstep candidate will be "Will you/your party scrap ID cards, the universal snooping database, the retention of innocent people's DNA, PFI and dumbaarse IT projects that will cost 300 new schools worth before it becomes obvious they crap? If the answer is yes they get the vote. The economy isn't too much of a concern as this lot have screwed up so badly it'd take a real dickhead to do any worse. At the last election our Labour MP had a majority of about a 100. I don't think he'll be back next time.
that this government doesn't seem to know when to stop. It's almost as if they want to to lose the next election. Maybe Gordon's tired of all the flak and wants out or maybe the Labour party has decided on a crash and burn exit from government.
While things are good, low inflation, house prices rising, government popular etc. people are more likely to ignore things like this. Once the next general election starts rolling and the Tories start drawing up a list of reasons not to vote Labour this'll be another entry handed to them on a plate by a government that's lost touch with the population. Somehow, I doubt there'll be another Labour government for a few years.
from this lot:
http://www.mcspotlight.org/
It's remarkable that large corporations don't seem to realise that after enough people cave in to their crap, someone, probably poor, with nothing to lose will turn around and deliver a legal kick in the nuts.
Good luck to this person. McDonalds won on technicality but lost massively in PR terms. If the RIAA can make a big enough arse of themselves in public people may start to realise how redundant they actually are.
It's education in general. The problem is that up until the 80's, there was a general understanding that education was above and beyond politics. Overall policy was in the hands of Local Education Authorities and the government pretty much set the funding levels. During the 80's and early 90's however, Margaret Thatcher's conservative government took control of education in the name of "improving" it. Part of this was down to crushing the power of the teacher's unions and a claimed influence of political bias on the behalf of teachers and the other was a pathological hatred of the very left wing Inner London Education Authority (ILEA). One of the signs of the animosity between the government and ILEA was the appearance of anti-Tory Easter Egg type messages in ILEA produced software (I know a teacher that found a few).
Anyway, the conservatives set up OFSTED to monitor schools and started issuing diktats regarding what should be taught and how it should be taught. A whole generation of 80's kids was created that couldn't spell or string a sentence together because someone high up decided that grammar and spelling weren't important as long as people could make themselves understood.
And now we reach the real point which is that education in the UK was truly screwed when Tony Blair made his Education, Education, Education speech. At the moment this statement was made, Blair's was declaring "Judge my government by the success we have in education" and being able to show that standards were improving became more important than improving standards. One prime example of this was the introduction of the GNVQ qualification. Unlike the GCSE, the GNVQ is a quantitative measure so a GNVQ in ICT would be along the lines of:
1/ Open a word processor
2/ enter a block of text
3/ Insert a picture into the document
4/ Add some more text and centre it
As long as you performed those 4 tasks, you got your GNVQ. The content could be utter bollocks but as long as you did it you got the ticket. The GCSE however, included a qualitative component so the effort and skill involved was higher. So why you may ask did David Blunkett declare a GNVQ to be the equivalent of 5 GCSEs? The effect of this was rapid. Schools that were towards the bottom of the performance league tables switched to GNVQs and rapidly shot to the top leaving those teaching the more difficult qualification looking like poor performers.
And this happens with every new scheme the government brings out because they always leave a loophole that can be exploited by school heads desperate to show improvement. It isn't just education either. In hospitals, the government was under pressure to end the situation where patients were left in corridors on trolleys. Quick witted hospital managers saw the loophole, had the wheels removed from the trolleys, called them beds and designated the corridors as wards. Problem solved overnight, performance related bonus secured. Another example was when hospitals were being criticised for having empty wards. The managers worked out that it cost less to decorate a ward than it did to staff it so some wards were being decorated every three months or so.
Make no mistake, it is easier to lower the bar than it is to make people jump higher and so long as league tables and performance related funding and bonuses exist the bar will continue to be lowered. As it is, bosses and university lecturers are complaining that they are getting kids with A* qualifications who are pretty much illiterate, innumerate and have no common sense, with universities spending the first year of a degree course bringing the kids up to a level that they'd have left school at 15 + years ago.
The government has one thing right though and that is that education needs reform, but the reform they are bringing in will only compound the problem as it's purpose is primarily to pass the schools system into private hands. The education I'd like to see would focus on English, Maths and practical subjects with the first two applied to th
It's nice to see that Microsoft have learnt their lesson and will be ensuring it's proven ready for release by a rigorous testing regime instead of rushing it out to meet a deadline to cover up for a previously botched product. Oh wait.......
I seem to remember that along with using an existing monopoly to leverage one of the illegal sides of monopoly is the concept of predatory pricing, i.e. deliberately pricing a product well below it's market value in order to strike down a competitor.
With the cost of Windows as it is, "giving" software to schools along with a condition that they must be using Windows is about as predatory as you can get. What's the EU's phone number again?