Two Scottish councils are planning to share front-line service management, as far as I can tell.
Archive for June, 2006
One to remember: observe, orient, decide, act. Neat. And explains JRobb’s “skating to where the puck is going to be”.
Not good to be selling your tunes on iTunes, apparently. It could be as high as an 85% difference, sometimes.
Summary Computer Weekly article on shared services across the public sector.
Some e-gov related things:
- Social exclusion is clearly in Cabinet Office.
- Council FDs should be responsible for the council and community. A tricky ask, you’d have thought they have enough to do sorting the council out.
- Good financial management is the only option for successful public sector reform. But she would say that, wouldn’t she?
- LAs are to deliver £1.3bn in efficiencies in 2006/07 (as their forward look says) which is ahead of target. I haven’t done the comparison of forward and backward looks, now they are available.
- Whitehall could save £500m a year doing HR and Finance properly. In the launch event, the Scottish Executive suggested that their shared services strategy was looking for £750m savings on £26bn total spend. Pro-rataed, this gives on £14bn saving on £500bn spend for England. We thought £40bn. Who can say?
Nice fake-3D presentation of spherical things (like the earth).
I want!
Six lovely factoids from Charles Arthur - here is a cut-down summary of the ones I liked. Why not read them all:
- Knife deaths are falling; surgeons treat attacks more effectively
- Motorola got its country name field length wrong and ended up publicising Palestine and not Israel. Death threats ensued.
- “News is stuff that I care about, and stuff that I want to pass on.” Thought provoking. Does that include objects as well as information?
Not unusual, but there’s a very good video showing quite how rapid the hits are.
Nice display of who’s reading what on the BBC News site. I guess this is potentially hoist by the idea that the top 10 become even more the top 10 through being listed as such.
More genius small child action: A short story about Poo. Can you call a child\’s bluff? You have to learn how at some stage.
Music fans can copy own tracks has this long-awaited quote from the head of the BPI, who wanted to:
make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format, we will not pursue them
This is excellent news - let\’s get ripping. And hopefully open up the closed formats (such as iTunes) to greater competition.
Funny that we’ll end up with exams being the prevalent mode of testing students, once internet cheating makes it impossible not to. Lock people in a Faraday cage with a paper pad or a thin-client controlled terminal. Job done.
Interesting online Times magazine. Nowhere near print. Not even in the same game.
Classic conversation: While showing off our new hoodie-proof web cam to a geeky PwC
partner on the train up to Wakefield on Friday 9th, the following conversation
took place:
“Do you have pampas grass in your front garden?”
“Yes we do - can you see it in the camera?”
“Hmm. Do you know what it means?”
“No, what?”
“Swingers”
TCS Director then chips in with “What’s all this code - what do you mean by swingers?”
Thankfully, our garden design technician tells me that it isn’t Pampas grass after all. Also, surfing the net on a train is great - more types of travel should offer this - why not in-car for the passenger?
Two brilliant shots on APOD. Firstly, a quiet day on the surface of the sun. Doesn’t look quiet to me!
Secondly, a sideways galaxy - you can only just make out the orangey bit at the centre.
Lala is an interesting idea - making it easier to buy and sell used CDs and rewarding those who participate more fully. It’s legal, and donates to artists, so you feel that something “good” is going on. I wonder when it’ll reach the UK? As El Reg says, maybe you are better off taking them down to the local used record store, but who gets round to doing that?
Walking World looks exactly what I’ve been wanting to help us do more walks around London. Prints out good guides, linked to OS maps with pictures for the tricky bits. And only £18 a year. Huzzah.
Given that I can’t plug HD tv and the Mac in simultaneously, I couldn’t disconnect Caroline’s iPod safely. To add to the fun its screen resolution was off kilter, so I couldn’t VNC to it.
So, log in to the mac remotely using SSH. Use Curl to download a command line screen resolution utility (curl URL -o “file”) and then mount the image (hdutil attach “file”) run the utility (cscreen -d 32 -x 1024 -y 768 -r 60) and you’re sorted for VNC. Neat.
