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The
weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames EARTHDATE: February 26, 2006 OFFICIAL
NEWS |
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The
weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames EARTHDATE: February 26, 2006 OFFICIAL
NEWS |
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 WINDING DOWN An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news by Alan Lenton Here we are at the end of another month. The weather's cold, miserable, and wet - but not wet enough, it seems, to break the drought affecting the south-east of England. On the other hand some very clever scientists have persuaded their quantum computer to solve a problem without actually running the computer (See scanner for the URL). Fortunately, as far as I can tell you still have to program the computer first, so my profession isn't about to become yet another victim of quantum uncertainty. This new computer should be ideal for EDS. I can't think of a company better suited to writing programs for computers that aren't going to run! Oh, and I did learn one thing this month. If I ever get stranded in Sweden, I know how to say the Monty Python phrase 'My hovercraft is full of eels' in the local lingo. ('Min svavere ar ful med al', for those of you who have a need for the phrase, or are just plain curious.) Anyway...
I was looking at a story about the UK's Project Semaphore the other day and thinking about value for money. Let me explain. The project is a pilot scheme for the British Government's much vaunted eBorders scheme, which, it is claimed, will enable us to spot baddies trying to get into the country. The pilot project has just finished, and the politicians were boasting about how successful it was - six million passengers screened and 140 arrests. The report was fairly straightforward, talking about how the main eBorders program would now go forward and tenders were out for the contract. The main thrust of the article was about whether in the light of all the other major IT projects going on, there would be enough skilled developers. But that wasn't what caught my attention. It was the 140 baddies caught that I wondered about. Unfortunately, I couldn't find out any information about what they were arrested for, but I guess it would be reasonable to assume that had any of them been known terrorists the politicians would have been trumpeting the success of the scheme across the national newspapers. So my betting was that quite a number of the arrests were for relatively minor infringements of the immigration rules. I was intrigued enough to search for material from when the scheme was started to discover that it was budgeted at 15 million UK pounds (about US$25.5 million). I couldn't find anything about cost overruns - suspicious in itself, but we will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it did only cost 15 m UKP. So, 15 m UKP for 140 arrests. I make that just under 110,000 UKP per arrest (about US$180,000). That's an awful lot of money to pay to track and arrest someone. In fact it's the sort of Return on Investment (RoI) that would result in mass sackings in most big corporations. And remember that's only apprehending the person, not prosecuting or anything like that. Significantly, figures don't exist for conviction rates, or what sort of sentences were given, or whether those involved were just refused entry, because their papers weren't in order. And lest my US readers are feeling smug about the UK wasting money, let me mention that a few days after reading about Project Semaphore, I came across a piece about the US government's US-VISIT program in security wiz Bruce Schneier's newsletter. According to Schneier, since January 2004, US-VISIT has processed more than 44 million visitors. It has spotted and apprehended nearly 1,000 people with criminal or immigration violations. The budget for that phase of US-VISIT was US$15 billion - we'll assume, as with Semaphore, that it didn't overrun on costs - a very dubious assumption, but we will be generous. That makes the cost of catching each baddie a cool US$15 million. Wow! Maybe we Brits are, in fact, doing really well. Interesting to know what the government is doing with your tax dollars, isn't it? By the way have you noticed that politicians never apply value for money criteria to their pet projects, only to ones they want to close down? (Based on reports in 'Computing' print magazine 23 Feb 2006 and Bruce Schneier's newsletter 'Cryptogram' http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0602.html)
Sometimes I wonder if the US Patent and Trade Mark Office (USPTO) live in the same world as the rest of us. You would think that with the growing barrage of criticism of their decisions, they would be a little more careful about what they are doing. But no, they've just awarded a West Coast company, Balthaser Online, a fabulously broad patent covering, 'methods, systems and processes for the design and creation of rich-media applications on the Internet.' WoooHooo! Move over or pay up, Flash, Java, XAML, and all the authoring systems for games consoles, to name but a few. To quote Balthaser, the patent 'provides significant licensing opportunities'. You bet! Watch for a major punch up over this one, folks. http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/02/23/balthaser_rich_media_patent/ We're starting to see articles about IT delays caused by shortages of power over here in the UK. The press is moaning about how no one could have predicted it, and how major expansions in computing capacity are being held up for months on end because they can't get enough power to meet their requirements. Wrong. It was totally foreseeable, not only that, it already happened before - about six years ago, when many co-location facilities in the US were unable to expand because of their inability to get sufficient power. Yes, it's true that the issue has now been exacerbated since blade servers started to take off, increasing the number of servers in a given space by an order of magnitude, but that's no excuse for the pitiful incompetence of those involved. Clearly the old saying that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it applies just as much to IT as it does to politics! http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2150433/power-shortage-hits Typical Microsoft - they wait till I've done a round up of Microsoft news, and then have someone else sue them! I think it's a plot to get mentioned every week :) This week they are being sued by Tangent Computer in a Northern Californian court. At issue is the thorny question of Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. Microsoft is accused of failing to provide adequate information to allow documents produced by its Office software suite to be converted to other formats. This is going to be fascinating. Especially as Tangent also makes the claim that Microsoft's new and as yet unreleased version of Windows, Vista, 'promises more bundling, tying and undocumented interfaces'. I had no idea you could sue over something that vague. I could almost feel sorry for Microsoft, if I didn't think they had brought it on themselves by weaseling over producing usable documentation. More about his case as the trial proceeds... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/22/microsoft_sued_again/ Finally, here's an interesting story about free (as in free beer) software... Mozilla Foundation's representative Gervase Markham received an e-mail from a lady in the trading standards department of a town in the North of England. Apparently the department had 'caught' a number of companies making copies of the Firefox browser and selling them. The department wanted to confirm that it was against the licensing conditions to do this, so it could prosecute the traders. Firefox is, for those who haven't heard of it, both open source and free! Gervase wrote back to the lady explaining the principles of copyleft, and asking her to return the confiscated copies of Firefox to the traders. The reply was a classic, so I'll quote it verbatim. 'I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?' 'If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.' Finally, just finally, I'm starting to get an inkling as to what is meant by 'the digital divide'! http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2051196,00.html
RIM lauds latest NTP
patent rejection Microsoft looks for
'protection' money Dell seeks damages from
man called Dell Quantum computer solves
problem, without running Microsoft exposes
itself in bid to embarrass Europeans Will the software
salesperson role become extinct?
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan. Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html. |
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