Why is it that most government projects always end up late and over budget? So much for getting the specs right, decent planning and project management, and PRINCE2, etc. And the bit that made me really chuckle, "increase in staffing to manage procurement". For crying out loud. Why not throw out the staff they currently have and get in people who are more efficient. Just throwing more people at the problem is not the solution. Of course, in these economically challenged times, one has to ask whether such gigantic projects are value for money. Why don't they do smaller less ambitious projects, which might actually produce something useful... but I suppose those big white elephants are always a great way of keeping a bunch of people employed.

The military sector is a bit more secure than where I tend to work (in financial services)

Absolutely right. Private keys in tokens are part of the solution. But, I have only ever some across one company who used them... they provided a smart card which you had to use to login to the computer (and provide a password too)... just to make life more fun, the smart card also opened the office doors, so when you want to go for a toilet break or a coffee break you had to remove the card from the computer (which locks it).

Many moons ago when I developed commercial software we either had to put the code into escrow or supply it to our customers... I was working for small software house and our customers wanted the security-blanket that should something happen, they could get at the code and still support the software we developed. Now, the dirty little secret, is that even with the code, it wouldn't have done them much good. Just having the code isn't enough. You also need the knowledge behind the code and how it was constructed. You need to grok the code, otherwise you have no idea how to make changes/improvements. This was borne out when I left the company and a (junior) programmer was assigned to take over my application... sure, he could recompile the code. but he just didn't grok it. Ironically, one of the analyst/programmers who used a different language in a different platform could grok my code, but he was never asked to help. So, its not just the code that matters, but having the right people too.

In theory, if you have an open format, then any app should be able to view/edit it. The issue is that not all open formats are created equally. The OpenOffice format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML, IMHO, is a right mess (as in so complicated to grok). If you want something simple that will last a long time, people need to think more in terms of something like plain ASCII/UNICODE with lighweight markup... see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language

Of course, this assumes that the tender that is written in a fair and unbiased manner. I've looked at picking up some public sector work, and the biggest problem is that tenders can be written in such a way that only one supplier will be able to win it... and they're written in such as way as to also appear totally open and fair.

The problem is that whilst a lot of good ideas, inventions, and designs have come from the UK, the UK Government has failed to exploit them. One could almost take the view the the government has almost gone out of its way to ensure that they failed. The situation is compounded by the lack of entrepreneurial spirit.

I have a feeling that the problem with Betchley is that no MPs really understand its importance... after all, how many MPs have a computing or crypro background?

So in your part of the world you don't have agencies that inspect restaurants and fine them if they're health standards aren't up to scratch?

The format for PDF is an open standard, and anybody can implement it (and it says so in the PDF specs)... so I wonder how Adobe could object legally? I guess they are just afraid of loosing sales of Acrobat Pro, which has been getting prohibitively more expensive with each release (and each release itself hasn't exactly been a compelling upgrade).

When I started programming many, many years ago, it was for teh Acorn Atom, and later the BBC Micro... both of which had a 6502 at their heart. I remember earning assembler for it, and having oodles of fun once I grokked it. Its a shame that the processor didn't go further, but I guess you could say the Acorn ARM was its natural successor, since many people migrated from the BBC MIcro into the Acron Archimedes and its ARM CPU (which then disappeared into the embedded world).

Yeah... but that's not much use when the keys themselves have been engraved with a different layout.

So true, and so annoying.

Where I live, vendors sell computers with AZERTY or QWERTZ keyboards... but I want QWERTY since its a hell of a lot easier to program using a US layout... and don't even get me started about only being able to pick up an OS that is localized into a language NOT of my choice (even though there is no practical reason why the OS can't be supplied with all localized languages. (Note that OS X does come with all localizations as standard, unlike XP, et al)

The problem as I see is it that vendors and retailers still think of the world as individual countries with their own languages and, more importantly price structures... which is a polite way of saying they can and do get away with selling the same stuff in different countries with different prices (using localization as the excuse for different prices)... look at the whole region encoding on DVDs, which attempts to stop you buying DVDs from elsewhere which may be cheaper/better than whats on offer in your own region.

That's how things work in Europe... sales invoices/bill have to show how much VAT has been charged.

Again, that's how things work in Europe. Prices show are always inclusive of VAT, because you, the customer, will be charged VAT (and as you are a consumer you can't claim back this tax because its a consumer-oriented tax). Its only when dealing with b2b that prices shown are net of VAT, because business don't pay VAT (or rather, they claim it back when buying from within their own country or don't have to pay it when buying from another EU country).

Most of that 3% goes to the acquiring bank, rather than the payment system (Visa/MC).

Unless you have a public key for the recipient, you can only send signed mail... when they reply to your signed mail they can then encrypt their response and give you their public key (and from then on you can send encrypted mail to them).