Obama grasps IT; his vice president clearly doesn’t grasp it. Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, doesn’t either; his ministerial colleague, Tom Watson, does.
Like the public, many politicians seem to be very unfamiliar and uncomfortable with computers. They see computers as some evil, corrupting force, despite the fact they should be using them for a significant amount of their time.
It always scares me when I hear politicians, or senior civil servants, make idiotic remarks about computers or the series of tubes. Why does it scare me? These people are responsible for formulating governmental IT policy, yet they clearly have no knowledge about them. There is a general fear, amongst politicians and the public, of learning new skills. Why else has it taken until 2009 for the UK government to give its blessing to OSS?
In the UK, our National Health Service’s IT programme is years behind deadlines and costs taxpayers billions. I suspect many of the civil servants involved have minimal technical knowledge. In my opinion, governments need to use true technical experts. Not expensive consultants from organisations which just puppet Microsoft!
On the other hand, politicians are beginning to capitalise on the Internet. All major British political parties, for example, have Twitter and Facebook accounts and Twitter and Facebook arguably played an essential role in Obama’s campaign. Some politicians maintain their own website, but I suspect many simply use ghostwriters.
I hope politicians and civil servants become more tech literate. With any luck, billions of pounds of taxpayers money will be saved.
What is public sector IT like for you?
When using Mac or Linux, I often find myself stumbling upon features which I just find ‘nice’.
I love the built-in support for VNC. On Mac, it is as simple as waiting for the remote computer, providing it’s on a local Bonjour one, to appear in Finder. And enabling it is a checking a box in the Sharing preference pane. (connecting to a non-local machine is done through going to Connect to Server in Finder and prefixing the computer’s location with vnc://). Support varies by distro for Linux, but generally the service is pre-installed.
I love how I can mount SFTP and FTP shares in Nautilus under Ubuntu and in Finder on OS X. Unfortunately, support on OS X is read only. Whilst Windows has limited support for FTP and WebDAV etc, I personally find it very cumbersome and not nice to play with at all. I’d happily use Nautilus to put files onto my website; but on Windows I’d have to use Filezilla!
Faces in iLife 09 is great. Whilst there are better commercial (and probably free) options, it is just nice that is there. But it doesn’t intrude, whilst in Windows it no doubt would somehow majestically stand out to make it obvious that such a nice gimmick is included!
Desktop search is nice. I don’t think Windows Search can compare with Spotlight or Beagle. On Windows, I’d probably download Google Desktop Search. But no need on Mac or Ubuntu, as they’re already there.
I also love the simplicity of Linux commands like dd. On Windows, you’d need something like Acronis to do the same job, just much worse!
So, bringing on the flame war. What do you like in your operating system which isn’t in others?
Blogs are generally single author affairs, where the webmaster, marketer, writer and editor are one and the same. Perhaps this is something most associated with blogging, but I’m beginning to question whether it’s a good thing.
Maintaining a blog is a lot of work; you have not only to write but design, market, upgrade software, deal with email and moderate comments. A lot of work, is it not?
Blogging should be about posting; not designing and tiresome maintenance. So I’m finding my spell at gHacks pretty enjoyable; my posts may not be very frequent, but it feels like much less of a chore to write them as I know I don’t have to trawl through pages of maintenance when I open WordPress. I can post without worrying. That’s what blogging’s about.
Whilst creativity may feel somewhat lower, as one is concerned about editorial control, it (in a way) requires much less effort to write on someone else’s blog than your own.
Perhaps some hosted blogging solutions take the hassle out of maintenance, but marketing and negotiating advertising is still up to the blogger. That is not a stressless process, rest assured!
The question is, is it better to have a lesser workload or more control over content?
