News

With the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) now certain to be abolished in name, politicians intent on dismembering the agency have run into an unexpected hurdle: how to carve-up NOIE’s more useful coordinating functions with departments such as the Attorney Generals and Defence.

Linux received a vote of support as a platform for corporate business applications this week as Oracle announced that seven of its new customers in India have chosen to run the company's technology and applications software on the open-source operating system, and that it has emerged as the second most popular operating system among the Oracle developers in the country.

Telecommunications giant, Telstra, has reported a $2.3 billion half-year profit - up 93.7 per cent on the same period last year.

The French government will install open source software on the desktop as part of Project ADELE, a plan to computerize much of the country's administration by 2007, a government official said Wednesday.

As misgivings about online voting systems grow in the US, New Zealand’s chief electoral office intends pressing ahead with an e-voting pilot in one electorate for the 2008 general election.

Geoscience Australia will transfer its 400 terabyte vault of seismic data to new media as part of a $25 million, three-year project to be announced today.

Hitachi Data Systems is in the final stages of implementing a $1.7 million dollar storage network for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Governments around the world were urged to cooperate more in their fight against the proliferation of spam, or unsolicited e-mail, at a conference Monday organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) is calling for the federal government and the opposition to put in place policies that support open source software in an effort to boost the creation of local IT jobs in Australia and reduce what it estimates as a $14 billion ICT trade deficit.

If images of picturesque rural settings and grazing sheep come to mind when you think of farming today then think again. IT has revolutionised this industry in regional Victoria where dairy farmers are using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, handheld devices and robots.

Information technology policy has sunk into pre-budget and pre-election paralysis at government and opposition levels. Communications and IT Minister Daryl Williams is refusing to guarantee any future funding for the National Office of the Information Economy (NOIE) - at exactly the same time as the opposition revealed plans to abolish NOIE altogether.

Leading the trend to combine both IT and physical security the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) has rolled out a million-dollar smartcard solution to more than 2000 employees.

Miami-Dade County's government operations have around 15,000 users, and the county's IT officials would love nothing more than to cut licensing costs by adopting a Linux desktop strategy.

Governments in countries without strong IT infrastructure or skills are utilising free and open source software as part of a comprehensive plan to “boot strap” the populace into technology, a leading Linux representative has claimed.

The federal treasurer Peter Costello has fired a shot across Telstra's bows over the redeployment of 450 IBM code-cutting positions at Telstra to India, urging Telstra (and presumably IBM) to examine all options very carefully before axing the positions.

With Linux and open source software, CSIRO’s mathematical and information sciences division is now able to model information for business benefit without relying on proprietary software, according to principal computer scientist for enterprise data mining Dr Graham Willliams.

A move to open source and away from proprietary information management systems will help government departments avoid steep maintenance fees and increase the longevity of data, members of the ACT and South Australian parliaments said at the Linux open source in government conference in Adelaide.

Microsoft Corp. is continuing efforts to sell software upgrades to the Israeli government, despite its recent decision to stop buying Microsoft applications in protest over the Redmond, Washington, company's sales policies.

Two years in the making, rego.act, Canberra's $6 million vehicle registration and driver licensing project, scales to 600 concurrent users and gives the public 24x7 access to the ACT's Road Transport Authority's business transaction processing.

The Australian Capital Territory has become the first Australian jurisdiction to mandate the consideration of open source software for government entities after a bill proposed by ACT Democrats leader Roslyn Dundas was passed into law overnight.