This is from the latest issue of IPJ (Internet Protocol Journal). It pretty much describes my first job (and how the cabling gets in our test lab where I am now).

Just found this in Bob Cringely's latest column:

First, the part about government. To better understand how out of touch with reality U.S. government is, let's hear from someone who has worked in Federal government IT for more than two decades:

"As an executive branch employee for the last 24 years, I can assure you that there is no such thing as 'the government.' The phrase suggests a monolithic entity with a single purpose. In fact there are three branches that were deliberately designed to be at odds with each other. Even limiting the discussion to the executive branch - the one that comes under the 'Executive Office of the President' - there are a multitude of departments and agencies pulling in many different directions. If you are speaking of the current administration, I can't tell that it matters to them. As long as large corporations and wealthy individuals continue to contribute as much as they can, any way they can, the administration will continue to reward them. In theory Congress, especially the House, should be more concerned about the effects on their constituents. If you ask any one of them about it, s/he will say the right thing. But as can be seen from their inability to pass a budget on time (once in the past 10 years, I believe), the only thing they are effective at is delivering pork to the folks at home. Again, as long as the contributions keep rolling in, the bills and votes will favor the contributor. Money buys access - period!"

That's very worrying.

Stephen

The Inquirer tells that that "Top vendors fail on top Linux notebook support ". It seems that for many of the top vendors, the people big business go to for their hardware, are giving a firm "No!" or are unresponsive when asked about Linux support on their Notebook computers.

With mobile computing becoming more important and the need to save costs (whilst improving security) through the use of open source software how long can we put up with lack of support for the penguin on notebooks and laptops? I am currently involved in a project to evaluate the possibility of a roll out of Linux to 24,000 desktops and a few hundred small servers in the largest unitary public sector authority in Europe (make Munich look like small beer), I'd like to get the laptops and notebooks on the same OS as the desktops.

I was chatting with one of my collegues who also uses slashdot today and mentioned that it's been months since I last had mod points. Prior to that I'd been getting mod points about once a week. He commented that he'd noticed the same thing with his usage. It's not like I haven't been posting or have but am getting frequently modded down, I'm posting a lot and often get modded up. The only cause I can see is that I started metamodding, I haven't had modpoints since then. At first I thought it might be a case of you can either mod or metamod, so I stopped metamodding, but still no mod points to be seen.

Stephen

Just found this in a post to the Alumni chat mailing list for my university:

I notice that some of the earlier alumni messages discuss the vocational aspect of a university education and the difference between an engineer and a scientist. The distinction was certainly blurred by Harry Greenwood's method of introducing students to programming. More or less by chance I accompanied a friend into her "terminal" course on computing. Harry sat each of us in front of a teletype (you won't see one these days except in an old film, or maybe a long-mothballed nuclear bunker), showed us how to print out and re-edit the Basic code for a noughts-and crosses game, and then told us to tinker with the code to see the effect. Specification? Fagan inspection? OO, patterns, safe subsets, metrics? Formal language theory, compiler operation, verification? Nah! Just hack it and see what happens! That ended my ambition to study chemistry, and it's been downhill ever since.

Gave me a bit of a laugh.

A researcher in New Zealand has been investigating the electronic voting and vote counting systems in the US. Apparently not only are they very insecure but also there appears to be evidence that election fraud may have occoured.

According to Netcraft Microsoft are using Linux for their network edge web cache servers. What I find particularly interesting is the maximum uptime comparison between the Linux and Win2000 servers. Several of the Linux servers have uptimes over 400 days, and most seem to be over 200, where as the best Win2000 can do seems to be 123 days. I know that uptime is an inexact measure but it does give some indication whent he difference is that large.

The BBC is reporting that a school in Sunderland, UK, has introduced biometric scanning (an iris scanner) for use in the cashless system for pupils to pay for lunch. Apparently it is to eliminate the problem of lunch money being stolen from pupils.

One of my work collegues (the one who originally asked me to look into finding something to replace MS Project that would run on Linux) mentioned a product called "MrProject". Trying to download it but keep getting a bad gateway error. Maybe our firewall just doesn't like ftp.

I was just thinking, it'd be really useful if, when you submit a story and it get's rejected, there was some reason given. Just something picked from a drop down box to give you an indication of why they didn't accept it. Maybe just some choices like:

• Duplicate of recent story
• Broken links
• Bad spelling/grammar
• Editor only posts submissions by close friends
• Editor doesn't like you
• Not "News for Nerds" or "Stuff that Matters" (i.e. Editor wouldn't recognise either if they jumped up and bit said editor)

Yeah, I just had an item rejected (I now copy all story submissions I make as Journal entries, it's the one about replacing MS Project) and can't see why. It certainly seems to be in the same vein as other 'Ask Slashdot' items. I know there's all that stuff about 'The Omlette', but I gotta say that the omlette has been a lot less appetising of late.

I would have throught that any Slashdot editor worth their salt would jump at the chance to help the largest unitary public sector authority in Europe get Microsoft off their 24,000 desktops.

Where I'm working right now we're involved in a large number of projects which are managed using Microsoft Project 2000 running, obviously, on Microsoft Windows. One of the projects we have currently at the concept/pre-mandate stage is to replace our Windows desktops with Linux. We've found Linuix equivalents for most of our common apps (e.g. replace Microsoft Office with StarOffice) but Project is a bit of a sticking point.

Is anyone aware of a product (ideally OSS but if we have to go proprietary then so be it) that runs on Linux and will perform the same tasks as Microsoft Project?

One possible solution that has been suggested is to run Project on a Citrix server and have users access it via a browser. This is a possibility but we would prefer something that would run natively on Linux.

In all the commentating that's been going on about how Weapons of Mass Destruction have not been found yet, a number of people seem to think that this means there are none to be found and never were. One commentator I heard even likened them to UFOs.

This bothers me.

We know that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in the past. We saw film of him using them. We saw film of the after effects of him using them. Inspectors found them and evidence of industrial scale production. Just because a few weeks of searching doesn't turn them up doesn't mean they don't exist. Iraq's a big country with a lot of ground to cover and lots of desert.

And then, what's to say that Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction are even still in Iraq? He could very easily have shipped the weapons to a friendly neighbouring state and be hiding them there.

It bothers me that people are so quick to run a finger quickly through the haystack and report 'No Needle!'

I'm not a fan of Bush, personally I think he's a bit of an idiot. OK, a lot of an idiot. And I'm really not comfortable having an alcoholic cocaine fiend (recovered or not) with the authority to blow the earth into a smoking cinder. I just think that if you want to argue a point you should at least try to have a rational basis for that arguement. I'm not saying that there definately are weapons of mass destruction to be found, just that there's a plausable, rational explanation for them not having been found yet.

The Register is reporting that copyright holders, such as MPAA, can force websites to be shutdown without proving that they contain infringing material. The decision was made in the District Court for the District of Hawaii in response to a request by InternetMovies.Com that copyright holders be required to demonstrate that a site did actually contain infringing material before they could demand it's removal.

The Register reports that as of next Monday rules about ownership of media outlets will be relaxed. Currently regulations limit the ownership of news and entertainment media to prevent a small group of cartels from dominating to the exclusion of all others. As of next Monday these regulations are to be relaxed possibly sounding a death knell for many independant commentators, broadcasters and publishers.

Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC and architect of this plan, feels that the internet and cable TV will suffice to maintain editorial diversity. This however ignores the fact that many of the major news portals on the web and much of the cable TV presence are owned by the same mediacorps as broadcast TV and print media. He justifies this action by saying that current regulations stifle broadcast networks and may spell the end for Free TV channels.

According to this article Columbia University have developed a software agent that will trawl certain web sites locating news stories which they then group and summarise onto a web page. By using natural language processing it should provide readers with an overview of the big stories of the day without them having to visit many sites themselves.