Teknovis

If you are one of the many hard working private sector employees in Ireland that earns the average industrial wage, and you are facing the prospect of paying substantially higher taxes in 2012, then you may be wondering what is the Irish Government doing with your money.

You might find the answer, or at least part of it, in the following article: Most public servants on under €60,000.

Almost 20,000 public servants earn €20,000 or less per annum; more than a third are paid €40,000 or less and another third get between €40,000 and €60,000.

So two thirds of Irish public servants earn more than 40,000€ per annum. As far as I remember, the average industrial wage in Ireland is approximately 40,000€. So this means that two thirds of public servants earn more than the average industrial wage!

The fact that so many private sector employees are supporting the privileged positions (inflated salaries, guaranteed job security, and defined benefit pensions to mention a few privileges) of their public sector counterparts needs to be considered in the context of a government that is only surviving due to a financial bailout.

Again this highlights one of major problems we have in this country, and it really cries out for reform!

Tags: Ireland

Happy New Year everybody! I hope that it will be a good one for you! I thought that I would start the year with something light-hearted :)

I have not been following the recent Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) arguments, but I know enough about it to know that I am against it :) Anyway, I came across the following humorous comment by Dave Piscitello:

If #SOPA passes, supporters will seek to change Internet’s TCP/IP to Trademark Copyright Patent/Intellectual Property

Enjoy!

I finished reading “The Shadow Factory” by James Bamford today. (Amazon link to book.)

"The Shadow Factory" by James Bamford

It was an interesting read, but I felt that it lost its sense of direction somewhere in the middle :( In the beginning it read very like a novel describing the events leading to the 9/11 attacks. This was very gripping! However, the writing style then became more factual, and it seemed to randomly jump from topic to topic.

It was an interesting time to finish reading this book, because I see that part of its subject matter is in the media: Telecom Immunity Ruling Upheld by U.S. Appeals Court.

It is election time in Ireland at the moment, but I am not going to discuss politics. However, I can still write about the political manifestos as long as they relate to technology. The policies that caught my attention today come from the Irish Green Party, and they are contained in We will recover if we play to our strengths.

The first interesting policy is:

Transfer all public services to cloud computing

This really makes me wonder if the author understands what cloud computing means! “Public Services” in the election context generally means tangible services that are available to the public, such as policing, health, and education. I am unclear how health care will be provided by cloud computing :D

Seriously, is it meant that all government computing will be performed in the cloud? This raises many interesting questions:

• Will it be hosted in a single cloud (with potential vendor lock-in)? Or will it be distributed across several clouds (and potentially loose economies of scale)?
• Will it be a public cloud (and hence how will security concerns be addressed)? Or will it be a private cloud (and will this still deliver environmental benefits as new infrastructure is used)?
• Where will the cloud be hosed (in order to protect citizen’s privacy rights)?
• Would it be more beneficial to focus on delivering better eServices, instead of changing the backend infrastructure?

If I was a cloud provider, I would probably be very excited about the opportunities here (as long as I ignore the political opinion polls).

Another policy that caught my attention is:

Invest €70m in web training for 20,000 unemployed people who can then work to web-enable Irish business

Hmmm… I think that I would instead focus on improving the take-up of science and computing for those already in education at all levels.

Provide access for the private sector to Government data

Interesting… Was the Green Party not involved in curtailing Freedom of Information rights during the last few years?

Finally, the last policy that caught my attention is:

Roll out ultra fast broadband Exemplar network nationwide

The Exemplar network is very exciting (see Exemplar Network), but I do not think that it is ready for a nation-wide commercial deployment yet. Also, I do not think that this would be the best usage of this technology.

I think that the cynics will wonder why the Green Party did not do these wonderful things during its time in power :|

Tags: Exemplar Network, Ireland

Oh dear – it has been a really bad few days for the recently launched new Fine Gael website: finegael2011.com

Indeed, things have been going from bad (Hackers deface Fine Gael website) to worse (Thousands of users’ data stolen in Fine Gael site hack)!

I wonder will there be many more security breaches as the political parties try to use the Internet more in the coming months in preparation for the general election this year.

Interesting reading reading about the spending habits of Enterprise Ireland, but I am not sure how expected this is – Enterprise Ireland spent most of funding on itself.

Tags: Enterprise Ireland

I read this fascinating article during the week: 100 ways to spend the Anglo €25,000,000,000.

It is really sad and depressing to see how the Irish Government decided to spend all this money, when they could have used it to make us become the world leader in almost any area of science and technology :(

What a waste!

Tags: Ireland

The Irish Prime Minister is to start using Twitter according to Ireland’s first Twittering Taoiseach to tweet to the nation.

I think that many people would argue that using alternative forms of communication is pointless when you do not have a message to communicate :(

Tags: Twitter

I have been very busy recently, so I did not have enough time to blog regularly :( One of the reasons I was busy was that I had to appear in court :o (Luckily I was a witness, and not a defendant! Ultimately, I did not have to testify, because the defendant pleaded guilty :o)

I found the whole experience fascinating on many levels, and not something that I would like to experience regularly!

I was also struck by the complete lack of technology! This manifested itself in two ways:

• Every solicitor carried between 2cm and 20cm of stacked A4 pages!
• The majority of the questions that the judge asked were very simple, and if he had access to electronic versions of the solicitors’ documents he would not have needed to ask! This would have saved everybody a lot of time!

I wonder will this be any different in 100 years!

Tags: Ireland

I read an interesting article about the Irish Government attempting to indirectly tax all computers with Internet access earlier this week. If this is true, I think that it would be a disastrous decision for Ireland!

The full article is New Irish Internet Tax?, and there is more discussion in New Irish Internet Tax?.

Tags: Ireland, Tax