thricenightly writes "After more than 20 years in IT I've learned that the most valuable people in a team are frequently the old timers. Young pups straight out of college might (think they) know all the latest buzzwords and techniques, but in the real world, where getting working products delivered on time and on budget is of paramount importance, people who have been doing the job for a decade or two tend to be the people I'd rather be working alongside. I've recently been elevated to a position where I get to interview and choose those who get hired in my department. Although I'm very much focused on choosing the right person for the role regardless of age, experience or whatever, it's probably fair to say the more mature applicants will get a more sympathetic hearing from me than they might from most other interviewers for IT roles. The question is, what do I ask older applicants to get them to demonstrate the value of their experience? My current gambit is something like 'IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is 23 years old. What do you know that he doesn't?' This gets responses ranging from the vague to the truly enlightened. All next week I'm interviewing for a number of senior software designer and developer roles. What should I be asking of the more experienced applicants, and what responses should I be looking out for?"

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JTRipper writes "Monty Python seems to have done the right thing. Instead of issuing take down notices of their videos on YouTube, they are doing it better themselves with their own YouTube channel. They are putting all their clips (including snips from their movies) up in a decent resolution, with the only caveat being a link to buying the movies and TV episodes from Amazon."

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Stellian writes "The Federal Communications Commission adopted a Second Report and Order that establishes rules to allow new, sophisticated wireless devices to operate in broadcast television spectrum on a secondary basis at locations where that spectrum is open. It's the first time we have access to clear specifications for these devices, dubbed TVBDs — 'TV band devices' by the FCC. The published guidelines allow manufactures to create protocols and build compatible devices, which could be available in 18 Months, according to Larry Page. The full PDF text of this Second R&O is published on the FCC site."

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An anonymous reader writes "Today, more than 40 percent of all homes in the United States contain at least one video game console. Recognizing that all that gaming could add up to serious demand for electricity, NRDC and Ecos Consulting performed the first ever comprehensive study on the energy use of video game consoles and found that they consumed an estimated 16 billion kilowatt-hours per year — roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego. Through the incorporation of more user-friendly power management features, we could save approximately 11 billion kWh of electricity per year, cut our nation's electricity bill by more than $1 billion per year, and avoid emissions of more than 7 million tons of CO2 each year. In this November 2008 issue paper, NRDC provides recommendations for users, video game console manufacturers, component suppliers and the software companies that design games for improving the efficiency of video game consoles already in homes as well as future generations of machines yet to hit the shelves." The full report is freely downloadable as a PDF.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nk497 writes "Over the summer, the London travelcard ticketing system — called Oyster — fell over twice, forcing the transport authority to offer free travel to the six million Londoners using the system. After that, it cut its contract with the supplier of the system, a consortium called TranSys. But now, Transport for London has signed a new contract to replace the TranSys one — with the same two companies that made up the TranSys consortium. Sure, that should fix everything."

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Merseyside police is investigating whether one of its officers is a current member of the British National Party.

The force acknowledged that a serving policeman appeared to be among the names on the leaked list of BNP members put up on various websites this week.

In a short statement, Merseyside police confirmed that membership of the far right party "was totally incompatible with the duties and values of the police service".

It added: "We will not accept a police officer or police staff being a member of BNP. As a matter of urgency, we have immediately started an investigation into all aspects of this case. We will be keeping an open mind until all of the facts have been established."

The force, which named the officer apparently on the BNP list, said it had yet to establish whether he was genuinely a member of the far-right party.

Merseyside police had initially contacted the Independent Police Complaints Commission about the issue. The IPCC, however, said it was up to the local force to deal with the matter.

"On the basis of an assessment of the documentation referred, the IPCC has decided that it does not need to be involved in an investigation into this matter," the commission said.

Naseem Malik, the IPCC Commissioner for the North West, added: "I have every confidence that Merseyside police will investigate this matter thoroughly. The national policies are clear that membership of the BNP is incompatible with the requirements of the role of a police officer and I know Merseyside Police will act robustly if necessary.

• BNP and the far right
• Freedom of information
• Computer security
• Race issues
• Police

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Microsoft has announced plans to change its strategy on anti-virus software, in an attempt to upgrade PC security, particularly outside the developed countries. It's a tacit admission that its OneCare strategy hasn't worked: it hasn't gained significant market share, and it hasn't impacted the malware industry.

Microsoft says it will keep OneCare going until it releases new software code-named Morro in the second half of 2009. This "will provide comprehensive protection from malware including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans. This new solution, to be offered at no charge to consumers, will be architected for a smaller footprint that will use fewer computing resources, making it ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs."

Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management for the Online Services and Windows Division at Microsoft, says in a press release:

"This new, no-cost offering will give us the ability to protect an even greater number of consumers, especially in markets where the growth of new PC purchases is outpaced only by the growth of malware."

The market isn't working particularly well at the moment. Most of the money in the anti-malware business goes to Symantec and McAfee, who pay PC manufacturers to have their products pre-installed on new PCs. Some users resent it as crapware, and some are unwilling to pay when the trial version runs out. Unless they make a significant effort to uninstall it and replace it with one of the many free alternatives, they may end up with less protection than they need.

The situation is worse in developing countries where users may not be able to afford commercial offerings or may not have credit cards to pay for them.

As a result, less than half the world's billion or so Windows PCs have up-to-date anti-malware protection. In other words, the whole industry is failing.

It would be much better for users if Microsoft shipped Windows with anti-malware software built in, but anti-trust authorities would presumably prevent that. (The European Commission is so anti-Microsoft it made the company offer Windows without a media player, even though media players are standard issue on computers, smartphones and other devices.) Also, Symantec and McAfee already have a track record of complaining to the EC, having made misleading complaints about the much-improved security in Vista.

Built-in anti-malware software would ultimately reduce the impact that criminal gangs are having on individual users, which should lead to a reduction in spam and identity theft, and greater confidence in ecommerce. This would reduce costs for the whole industry, including ISPs, and improve life for Mac and Linux users as well as Windows users. But I guess that's much less important than Symantec's profits….

• Microsoft
• Computer security

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mblase writes "Wolfram Research has released the seventh version of Mathematica, and it does a lot more than symbolic algebra. New features range from things as simple as cut-and-paste integration with Microsoft Word's Equation Editor to instant 3D models of mathematical objects to the most expensive clone of Photoshop ever. Full suites of genome, chemical, weather, astronomical, financial, and geodesic data (or support for same) is designed to make Mathematica as invaluable for scientific research as it is for mathematics."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

savuporo writes "NASA and its industry partners organized a two-week lunar in-situ resource utilization field test in Hawaii. The tested machines included a few different rovers and prototype plants for generating oxygen and water from lunar regolith. Astrotoday has a picture gallery and a video report. This follows on the heels of the recent ESA lunar robotics challenge event held on Tenerife, which tasked student teams to build a lunar robot that would be able to search for water ice in lunar polar craters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The LG Prada II packs a punch with new features like a pull-out QWERTY keyboard and ingenious watch accessory, but it looks too much like its predecessor, writes Abhinav Ramnarayan

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CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer sifted through many threads of e-mails released under the 'Vista Capable' lawsuit to dig up this jewel...More than a year before Windows Vista's release — and long before Apple started poking fun at the OS — Microsoft officials were already worried about comparisons between Mac OS X and Vista. An e-mail thread from October 2005 showed that an article in the Wall Street Journal by Walt Mossberg grabbed the attention of managers at Microsoft. In a column headlined What PC to Buy If You Are Planning On a Vista Upgrade, Mossberg alarmed one Windows manager who forwarded a bit from the column.... 'You won't have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer's Macintosh computers, which don't run Windows,' Mossberg had written. 'Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac. Its operating system, called Tiger, is better and more secure than Windows XP, and already contains most of the key features promised for Vista.' Warrier added a comment of his own: 'A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address [the column].'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Say you work in a local authority. Being helpful, you want people to be able to find the public toilets in your area via an online map. So you look on your in-house mapping system for the locations of those toilets (which your council built, maintains and cleans, and whose location you originally fed into the in-house map), and begin feeding their positions on to Google Maps, Microsoft Live and Yahoo's Maps.

According to Ordnance Survey, the government's mapping agency, you've just broken its copyright, because the map you checked is licensed from it. And your council licence, like most OS licences, doesn't allow you to put data derived from an OS map on to the world-visible Google Maps - even though Google's maps are also licensed from OS.

In short, you're not allowed to put data you created (the toilets' locations), and then provided to OS, on to a different map - even though that new map is licensed from OS. You, or the council, could be sued. Last month OS sent a two-page letter reiterating its licensing restrictions, ostensibly as "guidance" to help councils considering using Google Maps. Though it might just seem like a licensing quirk, the re-assertion by OS of its rights is a high-stakes political move whose effects could be far-reaching.

Mapping crime is a crime

First, it will stymie plans to introduce crime mapping by police forces. That would provoke a row between the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, who made a high-profile announcement in July saying that police forces would all offer crime maps by the end of the year, and Iain Wright, the minister in charge of OS at the Department of Communities and Local Government. If Smith's pledge is derailed by OS - which would lead to Smith facing embarrassing questions in Parliament - Wright would have to explain why to her.

OS is unrepentant. "If the police data used ward or boundary data from OS maps, it would be covered by our licence," it says. "There would be a problem if they wanted to put that data on Google maps." But crime data is collected by ward; so the Metropolitan Police crime map uses Google maps and shows those boundaries - clearly breaching the OS licence. (OS confirms this.)

The move also seems to block most of the winners of Cabinet Office's recently completed £80,000 Show Us A Better Way competition to find innovative ways to use government-held data. The winner of that competition, a site called Can I Recycle It?, would rely on locating local recycling centres - which OS could argue has been derived from its maps if a council keeps them with any sort of geographical referencing. The same would be true of another winner, Loofinder, which aims to make locations of public toilets available in a map online, just as described above.

Although OS issued a press release congratulating the competition winners and offering them "full access" to its Google Maps-like OpenSpace system - which has similar programmability - the OpenSpace licence limits the number of viewings allowed per day, and bans any use by business, central or local government. Furthermore, OS claims ownership of any data plotted on an OpenSpace-derived map. And the use of derived data would break its licence with authorities.

This would mean OS has made an enemy of Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office minister who set up the competition, as well as Michael Wills, the justice minister whose office provided £20,000 of prize funding. That could be costly in political capital at a time when senior government figures are considering whether to force OS to make some of its digital mapping products available for free without copyright restrictions.

Though government-owned, OS functions as an arm's-length trading fund, responsible for its own profit and loss account. It receives no direct government funding, but roughly half of its annual £118m revenues come from local and central government licences; the rest is from the sale of licences to the private sector.

Threat to revenue

Shifting to a free data model would cut OS's licensing revenues - but a study by a team of Cambridge academics earlier this year suggests it would also stimulate the public and private sector. That is the argument the Free Our Data campaign has made since March 2006: that restrictive licensing of government data holds back public and private projects, and that making them available for free would stimulate businesses and generate taxable activity that would more than offset revenues lost from direct licensing.

OS's letter to councils has provoked a furious row: some local authorities now say they will collect data on their own using satellite navigation systems and enter it into the wiki-style OpenStreetMap project to avoid OS.

Still not happy

One council, Surrey Heath, has already started: one employee, James Rutter, commented on the Free Our Data blog that: "OpenStreetmap provides us with a very flexible platform to put 'stuff' on to that we are interested in ... with the added bonus that everyone can benefit from it. Rather than sitting back waiting for things to change regarding OS licensing, we're doing something about it."

Another commenter, Dane Wright of the London borough of Brent, suggested that the long-term solution is to change the Mapping Services Agreement, under which local government in effect bulk-buys licences to OS data. It expires next March - and is being renegotiated now. Wright argues that the agreement should be rewritten to let authorities share data more freely and ensure that basic democratic boundaries such as boroughs, parishes and wards can be freely reproduced without OS licensing issues. Wright added: "The short-term solution is to generate location data for public mapping and reuse using non-OS sources such as OpenStreetMap or Google/Microsoft maps. This is a practical way forward for relatively small volumes of data such as school catchment areas, libraries, public toilets etc, but it obviously requires local authorities to duplicate work. As for the OS OpenSpace API - one can only laugh when reading OS FAQ 6.7, which specifically prohibits its use by local or central government because they are commercial organisations."

Google even changed the terms of its mapping licence last week in an attempt to clarify that it is not claiming ownership of data. But OS said it is still unhappy with the terms and that it is "working with" Google to "redefine" the clauses. OS says: "We don't feel the revised terms and conditions resolves the issue."

• Join the debate at the Free Our Data blog

• Free our data
• Google
• Yahoo
• Microsoft
• Crime

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Not safe for work: Even with Jerry Yang gone, Yahoo's position remains much like that of the bus at the end of The Italian Job, says Paul Carr

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Adam Jenkins writes "This book seemed to have potential, particularly since the image of nerds has changed in recent times. Once objects of derision and schoolyard bullying, nerds are now acknowledged as having a place in society. The Lord of the Rings became a multi-million dollar movie trilogy, the internet is now used by an incredible number of people, and computer games are no longer seen as being 'just for kids.' Around the years of the dot-com boom, successful nerds were driving Ferraris and going to cool parties. So it's not so surprising that the definition of a nerd has changed over time, nor that a society which has generally become better at accepting people who are different, has accepted nerds." Read below for the rest of Adam's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tpheiska writes "NASA press release states that 'At approx. 3:33 p.m. EST, Piper reported that one of the Braycote lubrication guns had released grease into her toolbag. As she was cleaning the bag and wiping the tools and equipment inside, the bag floated away. Another bag carrying identical equipment is now being shared by Piper and Bowen.' Luckily they had a spare."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Celery writes "There's an interview with Ray Kurzweil on silicon.com talking up the prospects of gene therapy as a means to reverse human aging, discussing different approaches to developing artificial intelligence, and giving his take on whether super intelligent machines could ever have souls. From the interview: 'The soul is a synonym for consciousness ... and if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property. Brain science is instructive there as we look inside the brain, and we've now looked at it in exquisite detail, you don't see anything that can be identified as a soul — there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen. Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Angelica Mari, Computing, Wednesday 19 November 2008 at 13:25:00

EDS and Cubic to remain key suppliers for smartcard scheme until 2015

Transport for London (TfL) is to retain the Oyster name and branding following the completion of a new deal with EDS and Cubic for the future management and development of the smartcard.

The five-year agreement replaces the current public finance initiative (PFI) between TfL and TranSys, a consortium whose principal partners are EDS and Cubic and include Fujitsu Services and WS Atkins Consultants.

The PFI is being terminated in 2010 via the exercising of a break option in the 17-year contract that started in 1998.

The news mean that Oyster will still be in circulation for the 2012 Games. TfL is currently replacing its readers to accept the government-mandated ITSO standard to accept cards issued by other smartcard schemes in time for the event, despite the associated integration issues.

Renegotiating the Oyster contract is part of TfL's efforts to save up to £2.4bn over its 10-year business plan, which will be re-invested in the transport network, according to Shashi Verma, TfL's director of fares and ticketing.

"The new contracts will deliver better value for money and improvements to Oyster for passengers across London," he said.

Microsoft has announced it will offer a free anti-virus and security software suite and will discontinue its OneCare service.

Repair kit floats away during repairs on the international space station

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When Dan Lyons joined Newsweek, it appears he had to give up his popular Fake Steve Jobs persona*, and in July, Fake Steve started blogging at Real Dan instead. This has included some pretty pungent stuff, but recently the pungent stuff has started vanishing. And according to The Industry Standard -- The Real Dan Lyons bails on blogging -- he may have stopped altogether.

One post referred to Jerry Yang's decision to step down as boss of Yahoo. Lyons had been assured that Yang wasn't stepping down and that the Google deal was "a sure thing" but neither turned out to be the case. On his blog, he intemperately referred to Yahoo's "PR operators" as "really an unsavory bunch" and a "crack team of lying sacks of shit". (Come on, Dan: PRs just tell you what the company tells them to tell you. That's their job.) Not surprisingly, this post has now been withdrawn.

Another post railed at Kara Swisher from the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog for puffing her "EXCLUSIVE SCOOP" on Yang's announcement: she sent Dan a note chiding him for not crediting her. That post -- Kara Swisher: Everybody look at me! Not at Jerry! At me! At me! At me! -- has also disappeared. (Sure, All Things D isn't very good and it's insufferably smug, but if you trash publications on those grounds you'll soon be reduced to reading cereal boxes.)

The Industry Standard has republished the texts of the deleted posts.

But it must be tough for Dan Lyons. He could say more or less what he liked as Fake Steve because it was satirical (many a true word spoken in jest, as they say), and that brought him a big audience. He can't say the same sort of things as Real Dan and a Newsweek employee, so he doesn't have a big audience. And there certainly isn't enough money in blogging for him to give up the day job.

* Take your pick:

"I hear that I've been blacklisted, and that Apple reached out directly to Newsweek to complain about my hiring" Dan tells us. Seriously.
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/fake-steve-jobs-r-i-p-

"Mr Lyons said that he had grown tired of his fictional creation, but mainly he was worried about making fun of a real person whose health has been a recent topic of speculation."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/technology/10blog.html

• Yahoo
• Blogging

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