Australian Technology News

Jetstar chief information officer (CIO) Stephen Tame believes Apple's iPad tablet may end airlines providing in-flight movies and television to stave off boredom.

Speaking to ZDNet.com.au, Tame said the tablet "may lead in the future the end of airline in-flight entertainment systems".

"A lot of airline customers do this now with iPods [and] MP3 players; however, the usage take-up was limited by size of the screens," he said.

Tame, who would be waiting for mark II of the tablet before he purchased one for himself, said the new platform would move Apple's App Store "from toys to true functional business and consumer applications".

The larger screen size, when compared to the iPhone, would "significantly change the capability of available applications", he said.

The iPad tablet was unveiled in San Francisco yesterday. There are two models, one of which was confirmed to be available in March by an Australian Apple spokesperson.

Only the Wi-Fi version has been confirmed for Australia. The Wi-Fi and 3G iPad would be available in April in the US and could not be confirmed for down under.

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The Great Australian Internet Blackout campaign against mandatory ISP-level filtering has attracted twice as many websites to its cause as had pledged before it began.

A spokesperson for the campaign said today that since the start of the protest on Monday over 1000 sites had joined the protest by blacking out their sites — showing a protest notification that those visiting the site had to close. The protest ends today.

Five hundred sites had said they would carry the JavaScript for displaying the message before the week began, but they didn't all put the message up at the same time, meaning the protest got off to a slow start.

However, gradual growth continued and today over 1000 sites were displaying the anti-filtering message. The pop-up was also viewed half a million times by people visiting the blacked-out websites.

One of the spokespeople for the protest said he was really happy with the numbers, since he thought that of the 500 who'd pledged, not all would go through with it.

A spokesperson for Electronic Frontiers Australia, which has been supporting the protest, said that having the message on so many websites has widened the ring of those aware about the action from the technically gifted into the broader sphere.

It hasn't stopped there, however. The Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesperson said that another campaign website was already in the works, and that the organisation was going to take out advertising on the issue.

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One day after the Federal Government's controversial My School website launched, the authority responsible released a statement saying that it had upgraded the "capacity" of the site.

The organisation hosting the site, the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), said that the site had "over 9 million hits" on the first day. "This was significantly higher than expected," it said.

It had therefore "increased the capacity" of the site to handle the "very high level of interest".

"While no issues were reported overnight some users have reported difficulties this morning," the authority said. "These issues are being addressed."

Asked whether the "capacity" upgrade was in terms of people, server or software, the ACARA said it could not comment other than to say it was not people.

On 2UE's breakfast program yesterday, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that high demand on the website had taken it down.

"It's demand and this website's got the capacity to take 1.7 million hits in 24 hours, that means it can take 2350 hits a second and even in the wee hours of the morning, because the website went up at 1am, there were some times that it appears that more people than 2350 a second were trying to jump on," she said.

"So it's really, it is huge demand. I mean web — this is, you know, backed up by nine servers and on and on the techie talk goes, but you know, 2350 hits a second, that's a lot of people all trying to have a look."

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After laying out plans for its newly completed Sun acquisition to a worldwide audience via webcast, Oracle now intends to hold international tours explaining the integration of the companies to customers and partners.

The sessions, which will talk up Oracle's plans for integrated software and hardware, will start down under in Canberra on 16 April, move to New Zealand, then return to Australia for Melbourne and Sydney on 28 and 30 April respectively.

An Oracle spokesperson could not say who from the global headquarters would make their way down to take part in the discussions.

Oracle announced the completion of its acquisition on 27 January, with CEO Larry Ellison and president Charles Phillips (who has been in the news lately because of a jilted lover who allegedly paid for billboards to publicise their relationship) outlining the company's plans.

These plans included hiring 2000 employees, according to Ellison, although about half that number would be laid off as well. The Australian spokesperson declined to comment on what that meant for the headcount in this country.

Ellison also said that Oracle would start selling directly to certain customers, although which customers that would mean in its international business was unsure.

Phillips said that Oracle wanted to use its newly acquired hardware portfolio to recreate the "reliable environment" IBM provided in the 1960's — when it sold hardware, software and services in packages — but as an open systems platform. With the Sun purchase, Oracle has now become a major competitor to IBM in the hardware market.

Oracle wanted the enlarged portfolio to serve customers looking for complete, integrated and engineered systems, following years of having to build systems "in a very manual, labour-intensive way".

"You'd select a lot of components from different suppliers, we'd deliver those components to you, then you'd hire a lot of integrators to come in and hopefully get them to work together and find some combination that seems to work," Phillips said, describing that situation as "very unpredictable, very unreliable [and with a] lack of security".

Phillips said "no other company" can offer storage, servers, middleware, database, applications and management tools, as Oracle now can thanks to the Sun merger.

Amongst its strategy announcements Oracle said it will "broaden and accelerate" its Java investment and increase its commitment to the development platform's community. The company said it will spend more than Sun did on the Unix-based Solaris operating system, adding that it remains "fully committed" to the Linux operating system.

Oracle also plans to spend more than Sun did on developing MySQL, which it intends to add to its existing suite of database products.

The Oracle Enterprise Manager and Sun Ops Centre system management products are to be combined, and Oracle will continue to invest in Sun's StorageTek tape portfolio. Investment in the Sparc and x86 architectures will continue.

The company said it plans to continue Sun's "desktop to datacentre virtualisation strategy", and expects to continue Sun's desktop virtualisation products, namely VDI, Secure Global Desktop, Sun Ray and Virtualbox.

Oracle will also continue developing and supporting OpenOffice, and will offer a commercial licence option for the productivity suite. In addition, it will continue Sun's industry-specific offerings for the communications, financial services, government, education, energy, healthcare, life sciences, media and entertainment, retail trade and transportation sectors.

The company said it "plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation of the Java Enterprise Edition specifications", and promised to continue offering NetBeans as a Java developer tool alongside its existing JDeveloper and Enterprise Pack for Eclipse products.

Sun's Identity Management and SOA products are expected to be integrated into the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family, Oracle said.

Stephen Shankland from ZDNet.co.uk contribued to this article. Click here to see his complete article.

Carousel image by Peter Kaminsky, CC2.0.

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in brief The Victorian Government is set to respond next week to a government 2.0-style parliamentary report on improving access to public information.

Released in June of last year, the report by the Economic Development and Infrastructure Committee (EDIC) suggested that the government develop a framework to manage and facilitate access to Victorian public sector information.

EDIC believed that data should by default be open access, unless there was a reason it should not be. The committee also recommended that the government develop a data directory so that everyone could see what information and data existed to improve visibility. It wanted the government to adopt a creative commons licensing model for its information.

The Victorian Government was scheduled to respond to the report six months after it was released in June. "It is a little overdue," EDIC executive officer Vaughn Koop told ZDNet.com.au, but he hoped that the response should arrive by next week. The Victorian Government was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.

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Australia's mobile giants are warming to the idea of being a carrier of Apple's newly released iPad tablet, unveiled yesterday.

Telstra said it was looking forward to discussions with Apple about "the possibility of bringing the iPad to the Next G network".

Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) said it was "very interested" in Apple's iPad. It would be "a welcome addition to our product range", the company said.

An Optus spokesperson also welcomed the iPad and said it was looking forward to its availability locally.

The iPad tablet was unveiled in San Francisco yesterday. There are two models, one of which was confirmed to be available in March by an Australian Apple spokesperson.

Only the Wi-Fi version has been confirmed for Australia. The Wi-Fi and 3G iPad — the one mobile giant's would be most interested in — which would be available in April in the US, could not be confirmed for down under.

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LATEST figures appear to show that Twitter, the internet upstart of last year, may have finally reached its peak.

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ARTIST stopped Google from using Aboriginal flag because they were "disrespectful" to him.

in brief The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said that it had taken the advice of the Federal Government's 2.0 taskforce to heart by appointing former Sydney Morning Herald executive editor Tom Burton to spearhead a new Gov 2.0 and social media strategy.

Inspired by the findings of the taskforce looking into ways the government could use IT and social media to be more open, ACMA's strategy will utilise new media applications such as blogs, wikis, Twitter and Facebook to engage its users and provide access to government processes and information.

"I was particularly impressed by the recent report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce. It provides a comprehensive blueprint for the implementation of Gov 2.0 principles and practices. The Report has been internationally recognised for its holistic and considered approach to the use of new media tools to genuinely engage with users," ACMA chief Chris Chapman said in a statement today.

"For some time I have been conscious of the importance of using the many new applications to improve the ACMA's stakeholder engagement and external communications, both domestically and internationally," said Chapman, drawing importance to new media applications such as YouTube, Flickr and instant messaging in engaging ACMA's stakeholders.

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