Posts by barnaclebarnes
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OnPoint: The Source, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
To be fair, their remit runs more to “stop antagonistic powers shutting down our power grid from afar” than “manage every government department’s IT security”. An organization the size of MSD should really have permanent IT security staff. But, hey, that’s probably one of those unimportant “backroom” jobs taking limited resources away from frontline staff.
You're right of course but I could see that setting up a clearing house for security reports and bounties could be part of their remit. If people knew that they could go to one place and report incidents and they would be taken seriously/investigated by professionals then this could go a long way to stopping this kind of media circus. It would mean that there has to be a change in thinking where reporting, fixing and publishing bugs/security issues is seen as a good thing (much like it is in open source). I'm not sure how much of a stomach the government has for that kind of thing though.
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OnPoint: The Source, in reply to Islander,
And I’d far sooner, as a taxpayer, pay you (well, I have) and Ira than KPMG – who seem to have done a lousy boj (botch/op/job)-
Just a thought. What if KPMG had done a good job but after their pen testing MSD had released an update that opened up the computers to man+dog?
It will be an interesting investigation.
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Hard News: And so it begins, in reply to tim kong,
But all the measuring and justifying actually has little to do with learning.
National standards or not, how do we measure that the teaching that you are doing is working? I still haven't seen a satisfactory answer on this. "Just trust us" doesn't cut it.
As an example:
Learning is making connections, struggling with a problem and figuring out how to overcome that problem.
How can we say at the beginning of the year 10 out of 20 students couldn't overcome basic problems but at the end of the year 15 did.? Not only that but the other 5 started at a lower level and progressed further?
I'm not saying that I agree with National Standards (I do think we shouldn't abandon basic skills like math) but don't we want to know that our teaching methods are working and are improving over time?
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Hard News: And so it begins, in reply to Russell Brown,
Any degree of self-interest teachers might have here is utterly dwarfed by that in the attitude of farmers towards, say, environmental regulation.
The perception of the public will be of self interest by teachers.
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Hard News: And so it begins, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Actually I care a great deal. The OIA is tremendously important.
But so is our education system and the publishing of league tables is, based on all the evidence from around the world, going to do tremendous lasting harm to the education of the children of New Zealand.
Fine - But one day there will be something that you care deeply about where the Government won't release information and you will be up in arms. Open Data should be released without caveats on its use. The public need to make up their minds on whether this is 'good' data and if they believe the analysis that Fairfax does on it. And if you want to educate the public then it will require a major PR push to get the message out (not by teachers, in this instance they have too much of a vested instance, much like you never believe Federated Farmers on anything.)
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Great post Russell. I don't have it handy right now but I remember reading about how Mc Donalds changed the whole animal slaughtering business in the US to meet certain standards, something the government had not been able to achieve.
Change will come from the companies like Apple and the others who use those factories demanding higher standards. What we should be questioning is a) Will they go far enough? and b) On what time frame?
The only other way to stop it is for everybody to stop buying any modern equipment manufactured in China and that simply won't happen.
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Of course if you are red/green colourblind then those amazing Pohutakawa trees all look a deep shade of green when you're driving past them on the motorway :-(. On the plus side I'm off to the beach and the trees and house are standing still which gives the eyes a bit of time to adjust so I can at least partially appreciate them!
Merry Xmas all.
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Devour.
I have the domain that I'd be willing to pass on. My original goal for that domain was a food blog but I just suck at writing blog posts! Time to let it go.
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There were a few things wrong with Friday night but mostly it was a pretty awesome evening. The main issues (apart from transport) just seemed to be the utter lack of proper event organisation:
* No urinals for guys so we had to queue up to use the cubicles making the lines twice as long.
* No army of people on cleanup duty keeping things at least partially in order (clearing bottles, sweeping up broken glass emptying bins into skips)
* Lack of 'stewards' or other helpers with radios to help people out, give directions and generally move things along.
* Lack of medical staff/St Johns
* Lack of security where it was needed (keeping lanes clear for the haka procession, entries to the ferries clear, etc.)Even with 1/2 the crowd thee things were just utterly missing from the surrounding streets of Queens Wharf.
As for transport, well I just think they should have relied on what we know works and that was the busses. A 'road train' concept starting at the bottom of Symonds street going straight to the game and one on the other side of town would have easily moved the crowds to the game from town. Also adding a lot more busses on key routes such as the Northern busway would have helped. The bus service to the France vs. Japan game worked a treat and should have been able to scale up easily.
Just my 2 cents.
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I'm still not impressed with the party slug itself (good for a rave, crap building) but what I saw of some of the displays inside was impressive, There are some great NZ companies showing their wares inside. I ended up having a beer with the guy behind the http://www.williamswarn.com/ and what they are doing is truly a new take on home brew. Similarly Phil and Ted's with their carbon fibre, dic braked 'pram', mini surveillance drones from another company and of course the Yike bike.
The proof will be if any of these companies manage to make decent contacts during the cup. It would be good to see some real financial analysis come out of the end of it to see if the money was well spent.