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Parent Category: Information Technology
Category: Systems
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The issue of online security is never far in the background these days: high-profile TV presenters in court for downloading child pornography [link]; Julian Assange holed-up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London; or attacks by Anonymous on Melbourne IT (AAPT) records that allegedly made some of the ISP's users' private information public. 

While we can all applaud the apprehension of criminals through police monitoring; and we might be swayed by Assange's assertions that corporate and government secrets are forms of conspiracy and that such conspiracy is a bad thing; we may not be so pleased by our browsing history; or worse, our medical history; or our employer's HR records being made available to a cyber bully or blackmailer.  

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Parent Category: Information Technology
Category: Systems
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Thanks to computer and communications technology we live in exciting times. The bounds of technological possibilities seem limitless. The changes decade by decade have already been unprecedented. Where is all this going?

Or see a youthful one from the past [31st October 1986]  here...

 

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Parent Category: Information Technology
Category: Systems
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The first version of this article was written back in 2005 as a contribution to a strategic planning exercise.  I was arguing for putting those things like marketing and so on, that we ultimately wanted to be seen, in the Cloud as this would save money.   But I stressed that the Cloud is not secure so it was imperative that we retained our 'physical corporate information infrastructure'.

I predicted that in future:  'Corporations will need to look to ways in which they can split their computing requirements between the internal systems and the Cloud';  and 'We can expect the development of new software systems to facilitate (e-mail attached) document passing between secure corporate environments and the Cloud';  implicitly, because e-mail is not secure.

The article was slightly updated in 2010, when I opened this website. I added some now outdated and since removed comments on that experience. 

I've left the main content here, essentially unchanged since 2005, because it's still relevant; and it's always good to see one's predictions fulfilled. 

 


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Travel

South Korea & China

March 2016

 

 

South Korea

 

 

I hadn't written up our trip to South Korea (in March 2016) but Google Pictures gratuitously put an album together from my Cloud library so I was motivated to add a few words and put it up on my Website.  Normally I would use selected images to illustrate observations about a place visited.  This is the other way about, with a lot of images that I may not have otherwise chosen.  It requires you to go to the link below if you want to see pictures. You may find some of the images interesting and want to by-pass others quickly. Your choice. In addition to the album, Google generated a short movie in an 8mm style - complete with dust flecks. You can see this by clicking the last frame, at the bottom of the album.

A few days in Seoul were followed by travels around the country, helpfully illustrated in the album by Google generated maps: a picture is worth a thousand words; ending back in Seoul before spending a few days in China on the way home to OZ. 

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Fiction, Recollections & News

DUNE

 

Last week I went to see ‘DUNE’, the movie.

It’s the second big-screen attempt to make a movie of the book, if you don’t count the first ‘Star Wars’, that borrows shamelessly from Frank Herbert’s Si-Fi classic.

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Opinions and Philosophy

Renewable Electricity

 

 

As the energy is essentially free, renewable electricity costs, like those of nuclear electricity, are almost entirely dependent on the up-front construction costs and the method of financing these.  Minimising the initial investment, relative to the expected energy yield, is critical to commercial viability.  But revenue is also dependent on when, and where, the energy can be delivered to meet the demand patterns of energy consumers.

For example, if it requires four times the capital investment in equipment to extract one megawatt hour (1 MWh) of useable electricity from sunlight, as compared to extracting it from wind, engineers need to find ways of quartering the cost of solar capture and conversion equipment; or increasing the energy converted to electricity fourfold; to make solar directly competitive.

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