54249511
submission
Qedward writes:
Munich's switch to open source software has been successfully completed, with the vast majority of the public administration's users now running its own version of Linux, city officials said today.
In one of the premier open source software deployments in Europe, the city migrated from Windows NT to LiMux, its own Linux distribution. LiMux incorporates a fully open source desktop infrastructure. The city also decided to use the Open Document Format (ODF) as a standard, instead of proprietary options.
Ten years after the decision to switch, the LiMux project will now go into regular operation, the Munich City council said.
53784725
submission
Qedward writes:
Volvo is starting a pilot project that aims to have 100 self-driving cars on Swedish public roads around the city of Gothenburg by 2017.
The project is called "Drive Me" and is a joint initiative between the Volvo Car Group, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park and the City of Gothenburg, Volvo said Monday. Together they will make an effort to eliminate deadly car crashes in Sweden, said Erik Coelingh, technical specialist at Volvo Car Group.
In the next few years, Volvo will develop its Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) in its XC90 model. The goal is to have the first self-driving cars available to 100 consumers by 2017, Coelingh said. They will be able let their cars navigate about 50 typical commuter arteries that include motorway conditions and frequent traffic jams in and around Gothenburg, the country's second largest city.
52951567
submission
Qedward writes:
The problematic US Healthcare.gov website appears to fail the most fundamental of performance optimisation tests, an analysis has found.
Healthcare.gov, a key piece of the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as ‘Obamacare’, is a website from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that allows uninsured US citizens to shop for new health insurance plans. However, the $630 million website has been plagued with problems since its launch on 1 October 2013, including outages, slow page loads and users not being able to complete applications.
Over a month since the website’s launch, an analysis has found that standard website design optimisation practices, that have been around for years, have still not been applied. This leads to too much content being downloaded by the site, which continues to slow it down.
52662519
submission
Qedward writes:
I’m stood in front of a bank of screens loaded with data as a team of professionals huddle around laptops and to my right a whiteboard depicts the storage area network in use. All of a sudden the sound of an explosion bursts around us, a man dives onto the floor, my sphincter clenches and I no doubt tremble a little; the CIO next to me doesn’t flinch. The screens we are looking at run footage from unmanned aircraft and display advanced 3D maps. The laptops are coated with a veneer of gritty dust while the professionals and the CIO are all in battle fatigues. This really is frontline information technology and Brigadier Alan Hill is the British Army’s deputy CIO.
49326241
submission
Qedward writes:
Open enterprise blogger Glyn Moody is on the look-out for signs for the year of open source in China. He looks at the 'Open Source China — Open Source World Summit', the Chinese version of Ubuntu — UbuntuKylin — and why he expects a host of good, open source-based products to come from the country, in both mobile and desktop formats
49144809
submission
Qedward writes:
National Australia Bank (NAB), the banking group that owns Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks in the UK, forgot to renew the domain name on its DNS servers, which took out online banking services for customers this weekend.
Computerworld UK can reveal that although the banks remembered to renew their UK domain names a month ago, the banking group didn’t renew its DNS domain name until after all services were knocked offline.
Nominet confirmed that cbonline.co.uk and ybonline.co.uk – the domain names for Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks – received a request for renewal on June 27 this year, which is reflected in the ‘last updated’ date on a domain registration website (screengrabs supplied).
48695843
submission
Qedward writes:
Technology leaders in UK central government departments have been forced to put their Gartner subscriptions on hold as Whitehall aims to move to share resources centrally.
Sources told Computerworld UK that 54 subscriptions to the powerful IT analyst house, costing £45,000 each, have been blocked. Those spearheading the move said that some government IT organisations are still trying to place orders with Gartner, but these are being blocked by the Cabinet Office.
Each of the subscriptions equates to more than the cost of a child’s education at the prestigious Eton school for a year — a comparison made by those implementing the changes.
Earlier this month, some government CIOs were described as being "facility managers with a Gartner subscription spending billions" by the government CTO.
48461121
submission
FuzzNugget writes:
After the Economic Development Administration (EDA) was alerted by the DHS to a possible malware infection, they took extraordinary measures. Fearing a targeted attack by a nation-state, they shut down their entire IT operations, isolating their network from the outside world, disabling their email services and leaving their regional offices high and dry, unable to access the centrally-stored databases.
A security contractor ultimately declared the systems largely clean, finding only six computers infected with untargeted, garden-variety malware and easily repaired by reimaging. But that wasn't enough for the EDA: taking gross incompetence to a whole new level, they proceeded to physically destroy $170,500 worth of equipment, including uninfected systems, printers, cameras, keyboards and mice.
After the destruction was halted — only because they ran out of money to continue smashing up perfectly good hardware — they had racked up a total of $2.3 million in service costs, temporary infrastructure acquisitions and equipment destruction.
47545757
submission
Qedward writes:
Project Cauã, the Free and Open Source Software and Hardware (FOSSH) project conceived by Linux International executive director Jon “Maddog” Hall to make it possible for people to make a living as a systems administrator, is set to launch in Brazil next month.
The vision of Project Cauã is to promote more efficient computing following the thin client/server model, while creating up to two million privately-funded high-tech jobs in Brazil, and another three to four million in the rest of Latin America.
Hall explained that Sao Paolo in Brazil is the second largest city in the Western Hemisphere and has about twelve times the population density of New York City. As a result, there are a lot of people living and working in very tall buildings.
Project Cauã will aim to put a server system in the basement of all of these tall buildings and thin clients throughout the building, so that residents and businesses can run all of their data and applications remotely.
“In effect it’s kind of like creating a private cloud for every building,” Hall told Techworld.
47407933
submission
Qedward writes:
Berlin will not migrate to open source software, but instead the parliament of the German city-state decided in principle to choose workplace IT based on open standards.
Berlin's Green party had proposed to have 25% of its standardised IT workplaces running open source software by 2018, according to the proposal that was voted down by the state parliament earlier this week.
It is the second time the opposition Greens had proposed switching Berlin's 68,000 workstations to open source software, and the second time they failed, said Thomas Birk, the party's spokesman for government modernization, on Wednesday. The earlier effort was in 2007.
Switching to open source can work, said Birk. By switching over 80% of its 15,500 desktops from Windows to its own Linux distribution, LiMux, and OpenOffice.org software, the city of Munich said it had saved over €11 million by November last year.
"Munich's example proves it is not witchcraft," to switch to open source, said Birk.
46086943
submission
sweetpea86 writes:
A student at the University of Central Lancashire has created a telepresence robot which mimics human behaviour. Known as MAKIIS, the robot is inspired by the Sheldonbot from US comedy 'The Big Bang Theory'. Moving on wheels and projecting a live video of the user's face via an iPad, MAKIIS can allow an office worker in London to chat with a colleague in Paris as if they were in the same room.
45834389
submission
Qedward writes:
European Union politicians are at loggerheads following a vote in the European Parliament yesterday that rejected proposals to store and share information on airline passengers.
The Parliament's civil liberties committee voted against plans to share between EU countries the PNR (passenger name register) data of airline passengers, including their name, contact details, payment data, itinerary, email and phone numbers.
PNR data is collected by airlines and a current agreement with the US uses information on passengers traveling between Europe and the US to target, identify and prevent potential terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the US. The European Commission had proposed a similar scheme for passengers traveling within the EU.
45518925
submission
Qedward writes:
Computerworld UK blogger John Spencer looks at computer science and IT in the UK education system, whose UK-centric approach came to an abrupt end in 1990 when Britain's only ever science-educated prime minister Maggie Thatcher lost power, coinciding with Microsoft's foray into UK schools with Windows 3.0. Microsoft then began its stranglehold, which was cemented under Tony Blair with the 1997 Memorandum of Understanding with MS.
43877587
submission
Qedward writes:
"Digital discrimination" pervades the UK workplace, with senior management and higher social grades given more flexible working privileges and benefits in the workplace, provoking feelings of resentment and jealousy.
Following Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's decision, for whatever reason, to ban flexible working, new research of 2,000 UK office workers found that 59% of the most senior management (social grade A) are allowed to work from home at least once a month, but the figure drops to 43% for middle management (social grade B), and only 26% for administrative staff and low-ranking professionals (C1).
The research found that 22% of administrative and lower-ranking professionals "felt jealous" about the situation, 16% were "resentful" and 16% were "annoyed".
43845585
submission
Qedward writes:
Virgin Atlantic is preparing for a significant increase in data as it embraces the Internet of Things, with a new fleet of highly connected planes each expected to create over half a terabyte of data per flight.
IT director David Bulman said: "The latest planes we are getting, the Boeing 787s, are incredibly connected. Literally every piece of that plane has an internet connection, from the engines, to the flaps, to the landing gear.
"If there is a problem with one of the engines we will know before it lands to make sure that we have the parts there. It is getting to the point where each different part of the plane is telling us what it is doing as the flight is going on.
"We can get upwards of half a terabyte of data from a single flight from all of the different devices which are internet connected."
