August 2006 Archives

Mike Carlton in today's SMH sums it up nicely ...

So, would you buy the remains of a used telco from this man [the Prime Minister]? Not bleedin' likely. It is a dead dog. Once bitten, your mums and dads won't now touch the corpse with a barge pole. It will end up, mostly likely, buried in the Future Fund, its inevitably shrinking dividends paying off public service superannuation commitments.

For all its vaunted financial and economic expertise, the Government's incompetence has turned the T3 sale into a fiasco, a textbook exercise in how not to privatise a public asset.

IT NEED not have come to this. The sensible thing would have been to split Telstra in two. [my emphasis]

The company's hardware, all the wires and widgets that deliver telecommunications, should have been kept in public ownership, a national network available to any privately owned telco that wanted to pay to use it.

The Telstra retail business - marketing telephones and internet connections and so on - could then have been privatised to buy those hardware services, competing for them on an equal footing with the likes of Optus. Throw in some legislated safeguards to keep the bush connected to developing technology, and away you go.

My thoughts exactly.

In an example of ideology over common sense, the government has decided to sell $8 billion worth of Telstra stock.

The shares are trading at a historic low. Dumping the shares on the market at this time is hardly likely to improve the company's value.

I'm keen to see how they're going to promote this to the public, some of whom have seen the value of their shares fall from $7 to around $3.50 each this week. A sweetener for those who hold T2 stock is a strong possibility.

Mr Howard says the Government's shares would have been sold earlier at a higher price if opposition parties had not blocked the legislation.

Yes, and ripped off a greater number of the gullible public. Let's be thankful that the Senators held off the sale for as long as they did.

And I'm not talking about that C word, you silly bunt!*

With the Prime Minister talking about expanding the army by another 2600 personnel, the word in question is "Conscription."

Enticing another 2600 army recruits will be an uphill task in an era of low unemployment, particularly as the armed forces haven't met previous years' recruitment requirements. It's hard to see how the numbers will be raised by relaxing the standards, ie, letting in people sporting tats or a previous drug conviction, or enticing them through school cadet corps.

It won't be long before some wally, probably from the RSL, raises the prospect of using conscription to get the numbers.

No government, not even the miserable conservative example we're lumbered with at the moment, will seriously consider conscription in peace time, but it won't prevent a few loonies from floating the possibility.

*You probably need to be over 35 to appreciate this.

“...digital information lasts forever or five years, whichever comes first.” Jeff Rothenberg, Scientific American, Jan 1995.

Do you leave photos on your digital camera's memory or on your PC's hard drive, and never get round to printing them?

Have you data created using programs and / or file formats that are no longer in current use?

Do you have data on your PC's hard drive that isn't backed up? Or stored on 3.5" floppy disks? Or worse, 5.5" floppies?

If so, you may be unwittingly contributing to the loss of your family's history. It's a consequence of the digital age, where technology changes quickly and today's data formats and hardware are obsolete within a few years.

This doesn't only apply to pictures of your kids' birthday parties. It effects government and company records, and the recordings of historic events.

The issue of obsolete media was addressed by a speaker during a recent conference on Open Source technologies. Working with the National Archives of Australia, he explained in some detail the problems of digitally storing important documents, photographs and recordings created on closed source formats and / or obsolete media. In may cases, data is reformatted into "Open Document Format" files (the format that Microsoft is reluctantly implementing in it's Office software suite), and permanently stored on hard drive arrays.

The government is acting on the problem, but many industries are not. Recently, when asking an overseas manufacturer for information on some faulty equipment, I was informed that the drawings were stored on microfiche and they didn't have a working reader. In the end, they found a reader, but it highlights the problem of not updating data formats so that the information remains accessible.

Future retrieval of information stored on obsolete media will be expensive and may well be impossible if organisations don't implement a program of transferring data to modern, and preferably 'open,' media formats.

As for your family snaps, print them out and store them in a box in a cupboard. Your grand-kids will appreciate seeing their family history in years to come.