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Education

Submission + - Building Schools for Future cut, IT loses £3 (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: A group of IT suppliers is set to lose as much as £3.7 billion in potential revenues, after the UK government cans the Building Schools for the Future programme. The programme, worth £45 billion overall with about one tenth allocated to IT, aimed to overhaul and modernise school buildings across England.
Government

Submission + - DAB radio has been a shambles in UK (techworld.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: Let's just say it out loud and stop kidding ourselves. The UK's digital radio — DAB radio to be precise — is about as bad as new technology gets. The good news is that the coalition government could be about to admit as much.
Open Source

Submission + - Open Source: The capitalists' choice (computerworlduk.com) 1

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: People often think open source is a socialist concept. But Ben Bell argues that Open Source is actually more true to capitalist principles than traditional proprietary software practices. It all comes down to the principle of efficient markets.
United Kingdom

Submission + - Copyright economics and the law (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: One of the problems with the debate around copyright is that it is often fuelled more by feelings than facts. What is sorely lacking is a hard-nosed look at key areas like the economics of copyright. Enter 'The Economics of Copyright and Digitisation: A Report on the Literature and the Need for Further Research'. I do think it represents an important statement about the need for basing copyright law on empirical evidence.
Businesses

Submission + - Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies? (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by superapecommando
superapecommando writes: Glyn Moody says:

Last week, I met up with Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO. He gave a very fluent presentation to a group of journalists that ran through Red Hat's business model, and explained why – unsurprisingly – he was optimistic about his company's future growth.
Somewhat unkindly, I reminded him of an interview he gave a couple of years ago, in which he said:
When I look at the quality of our existing technology, and the incredible brand that we have and the markets we play in, we should be a $5 billion company or more. If you just look at operating systems and middleware--that's nearly a $100 billion business. We're a $500 million business. We have barely scratched the surface.
Well, today Red Hat is a $750 million business according to Whitehurst. But when, I wanted to know, would Red Hat reach that $5 billion turnover – and why was it taking so long?

Pretty interesting analysis, although it rapidly strays from the original thesis into a discussion of the relative local benefits of proprietary vs open source software companies.
Businesses

Submission + - 7 government IT chiefs paid more than PM (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: Joe Harley, IT director general and CIO of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) earns almost double the salary of the prime minister, a list published by the Cabinet Office shows. As part of the new government's efforts to be more transparent, the Cabinet Office released a list of the senior civil servants across government who earned salaries of more than £150,000. A total 172 civil servants were revealed in the list to earn more than the prime minister.
Security

Submission + - Big IT failures behind BP oil spill (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: An internal investigation at BP has revealed serious IT failures played a part in the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. BP has said the accident “was brought about by the failure of a number of processes, systems and equipment”. It added: “There were multiple control mechanisms— procedures and equipment—in place that should have prevented this accident or reduced the impact of the spill.” These did not succeed.
Privacy

Submission + - Facebook privacy and empty platitudes (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: There is a lot that Facebook needs to do to clean up its act. Just switching to an opt-in, rather than opt-out, model would be a start. An opt-out model forces Facebook users to turn these new features off instead of letting them decide whether or not they want to use the new feature in the first place. But there are degrees of culpability here. Some Facebook users have no idea that Facebook is not private. The golden rule should be that you should only post what you would want appearing on the public web. If you don’t want a status update or a photo to live forever in some Google index, then don't put it on Facebook.
Microsoft

Submission + - Linux system saves London Stock Exchange £10 (computerworlduk.com) 1

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: The London Stock Exchange has said its new open source-based trading system will save it at least £10 million annually, as well as driving new business. Millennium Exchange, a Linux and Sun Solaris Unix-based platform, which uses Oracle databases, is being rolled out across all of the LSE’s electronic trading systems, replacing the slower TradElect platform, which is Microsoft .Net based. TradElect had suffered a series of high-profile outages and will be replaced by Millennium Exchange in stages from September.
Patents

Submission + - Are Trade Secrets and Trademarks the Future? (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody writes: The Internet's perfect copying machine makes the ideas behind copyright — now in its 301st year — largely irrelevant today: once a copy is online somewhere, it's impossible to take it down everywhere. Could the arrival of low-cost, high-quality desktop 3D printers do the same for patents, by enabling anyone to download and print off analogue objects? With copyright and patents nullified, what might manufacturing companies turn to in order to fight back against these perfect counterfeit versions? How about trade secrets and trademarks?
The Internet

Submission + - Digital Economy Act: Some unfinished business (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: Remember the Digital Economy Act? Yes, I thought you might. It's still there, hanging like a proverbial sword of Damocles over our digital heads. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum, er, Houses of Parliament: that nice Mr Clegg found himself catapulted to a position of some power. Now, what was it he said a month ago?

Submission + - Scientists: Size of Oil Spill Underestimated (nytimes.com)

Submitted by cyclocommuter
cyclocommuter writes: From the NYT article: Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who is an expert in the analysis of oil slicks, said he had made his own rough calculations using satellite imagery. They suggested that the leak could “easily be four or five times” the government estimate, he said.
Oracle

Submission + - SAP Buying Sybase (forbes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: SAP is buying Sybase as a response to Oracle's encroachment into the ERP market. While Sybase probably only holds 3-4 percent of the enterprise data base market, SAP integration may make it the preferred solution for many SAP customers, who will only have to hear music on hold from one vendor.

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