According to the International Herald Tribune (and the New York Times too, according to Bernie who refers to Tim O’Reilly’s short comment) Ireland is the second-richest country in Europe. That’s great, but there are some provisos to the story.
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Pimp my laptop
So I got tired of the old grey look of my Toshiba laptop and I decided to give it a bit of a revamp. This is what it looks like now.
OpenOffice.org’s a pretty decent package
So I was reading Mark O’Sullivan’s comment on my post about Beaumont Hospital where he mentions that Openoffice.org is as good as Microsoft Office. Good enough? Sure, I thought, almost as good, maybe, but as good – really, hard to believe. Anyway, I went and took a look and I’m happy to say, I was surprised by what I found.
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I saw a cheater: the Irish moral zeitgeist
This thread on boards.ie gives an insight into the minds of students sitting Irish state exams at the moment.
I can see that the Internet and availability of information about how to cheat and the likelihood of not getting caught is going to mean that state examining boards will have to be seen to come down a lot more heavily with the rules in future.
Linux in crisis at Beaumont Hospital
There is a story in today’s Irish Times about a dispute between the IT directorand the CEO at Beaumont Hospital over the use of Linux.
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Why banking costs so much
A lot of people wonder, particularly in Ireland: how come the banks make so much money. The question really should be asked: why don’t the banks make far more money than they do? After all, they’re collecting a spread on the interest for all the borrowing in the economy and they’re collecting some sort of transaction fee on every transaction larger than a few hundred euros? Anyway, on to my tale of woe.
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Some phones are just too smart for their own good.
Bernie Goldbach writes about how mobile operators try to keep a lid on phone models that are designed to suit the operator, not the user. Just goes to show, what is good for the operator is not necessarily good for the customer.
Defeat in France: Europe needs to speak for itself
The sovereign French people have rejected the European constitution. The constitution was supposed to form the bedrock of future European development. I don’t think many people in Europe appreciate what a big hiccup this has caused.
In fact, it turns out that not many people in Europe appreciate much about what is going on with the European Project, or even care about it. That is the core of the problem the European Union has to deal with, and the European Institutions themselves have to shoulder most of the blame for the mess they’ve gotten themselves into.
Now the European institutions have to pick up the pieces and figure out how to communicate their message directly to the people of Europe. The Internet and technologies like weblogs will be critical to doing this.
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Unions weigh in on postcodes
The An Post (National Post Company) group of unions have come out with a report today which is strongly in favour of introducing a postcode system in Ireland. I happened to be at the press conference to launch the report today. It contains some interesting information about the company’s situation.
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Irish Government moves forward on Postcodes
The government has issued its proposal for moving forward on postcodes. The report that has been prepared covers most of the bases on the issue and puts forward the different types of solution that might be possible. Michael Everson and I have been working on this area for some time, as part of our work with NSAI/ICTSCC/SC4, and we made a short submission to the working group. See also my previous blog trilogy, ‘Coding the Post‘, ‘More benefits of postcodes‘ and the culmination in ‘Regulator publishes Postcodes report‘.
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