News (44)

Data breach laws years away

The Australian Law Reform Commission yesterday released a report recommending Australia introduce data breach disclosure laws — but Senator John Faulkner said that bridge would not be crossed by government at least for the next 18 months. Read more »

Lundy: Time is right for open source in government

Open source might get a better look-in within government, says Senator Kate Lundy, if those responsible for purchasing decisions were forced by policy to evaluate all the options on the market. Read more »

Broadband network big ticket item in budget

Senator Conroy says the proposed national broadband network will rival the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme in terms of scale and significance. Read more »

Sydney's free Wi-Fi plans scrapped

The NSW government has scrapped plans to offer free Wi-Fi in Sydney, citing spiralling costs and overseas failures for killing the project. Read more »

Microsoft DRM U-turn 'a betrayal'

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says that Microsoft has "betrayed" MSN Music customers and wants the company to make things right by issuing an apology, refunds, and eliminate digital rights management technology from the Zune music player. Read more »

Hans Reiser guilty of first-degree murder

A jury has found Linux programmer Hans Reiser guilty of first-degree murder in the 2006 killing of his estranged wife, Nina Reiser. Read more »

Bosses can snoop on staff e-mails 'to fight terror'

The Greens and privacy advocates have hit back against proposed laws to allow companies to snoop on their workers' e-mails, but Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has said the laws are needed to protect vital electronic infrastructure from terrorist attacks. Read more »

Labor pledges to fix Howard 'broadband trainwreck'

The federal government's investment in a high speed national broadband network is as important as the development of the rail network in the late nineteenth century, Labor says. Read more »

AIIA's Moon presses Conroy for broadband timetable

Australian Information Industry Association CEO Sheryle Moon has called upon the new Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, to outline a schedule for rolling out a national broadband network. Read more »

Labor, Coalition looking at powerline broadband

With the election looming, there does appear to be one issue that both Liberal and Labor can agree on: broadband over powerline could one day be used to get Internet access to Australia's remotest regions. Read more »

Features (24)

Aussie IT unions rise from the dead

Australia's creaky technology unions have finally awoken from their long slumber and have started to throw their weight around. Read more »

Local game studios face skill shortage

The Australian game development industry is now worth $130 million, employs around 2000 people -- and there has never been a better time to break into it. Read more »

Labor should promise the kids XO, not XP

Should Labor get into power at the federal election next month, its promised "education revolution" rebate would be better spent on the world's largest single order for Negroponte's XO laptop instead of being a boon for traditional PC retailers and a certain software vendor from Redmond. Read more »

Starting with Spry

Spry is intended to be a way of easily implementing Ajax; designers with entry level HTML, CSS and JavaScript experience should find Spry an easy way to integrate content. Read more »

Understanding the pros and cons of the Waterfall Model of software development

Waterfall development is a software development model involving a phased progression of activities, marked by feedback loops, leading to the release of a software product. This article provides a quick and dirty introduction to the model, explaining what it is, how it's supposed to work, describing the six phases, and why the model can fail. Read more »

Project management: Plan ahead for critical resource contingencies

Your risk management process allows you to evaluate and respond to high-level project risks. Some of these risks involve project resources and require that you consider ahead of time how you will respond if you need to replace or add resources. In fact, in some cases, you must actually plan ahead to understand what the contingency resources look like and how you'll get them if they're needed. Here are some examples of where you should plan ahead. Read more »

The secrets of open source security

The Linux vs. Windows security debate is a contest of examples, which stand in place of the concepts that comprise a larger, more fundamental question of what the security benefits and detriments are for the open source and closed source development models. Read more »

IBM's service science

For years, IBM has been one of the world's leading research bodies when it comes to semiconductors, databases, electron microscopes and other "hard" sciences. Now, Big Blue is getting into social sciences. Read more »

Australia: A country in denial

IT Minister Daryl Williams claims Australia is the "No.1 outsourcing destination and the best place in the developed world to base software development operations." Williams failed to look under the hood before making those statements, writes Fran Foo. Read more »

Six "must haves" for the creation of highly productive software teams

An Inc. 500 profile from the SoftwareCEO Web site: Performance Software CEO Tim Bigelow shares his six "must-haves" for the creation of highly productive software teams. Read more »

Blog (1)

Unlocking the Wii's hidden potential

Staff [blogs:syslog] -- In a collection of videos, notable for their lucid explanations, Johnny Lee, a Ph.D. graduate student from CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute shows exactly how versatile the "Wiimote" system can be Read more »

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  • Staff Shadow chasing in browsers

    The punching and counterpunching continued in the ongoing web browser development bout. Each time one browser closes a feature gap, a new feature appears in one of the others -- how we ever put up with the years of browser stagnation, I'll never know. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

  • Chris Duckett Safari gets Gears

    Since its release in May last year, Gears has supported only Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. With the addition of Safari into the Gears fold, it closes the loop of major browsers to support Gears Read more »

    -- posted by Chris Duckett

  • Renai LeMay MyPerfect.com.au has potential

    Victorian Web start-up My Perfect has a strong story and rationale for why it will succeed. But it has to overcome some challenges and design flaws first. Read more »

    -- posted by Renai LeMay

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