U.K. businesses waste billions a year on tech investment
According to new research, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the U.K. habitually waste money on IT products and services they don’t need.
IT software provider SolarWinds released a new study today which examines what challenges IT staff face in small and medium businesses this year. Reaching out to 500 firms in the U.K. and Germany, the study found that although IT budgets have remained the same or increased over the last five years in 93 percent of SMEs, over 75 percent of firms are wasting money.
On average, IT employees said that roughly 12 percent of software, once purchased, remained in its box gathering dust. However, in 87 percent of businesses, this figure reached 50 percent. The researchers note that on average, £11,962 is spent on IT management software annually by 4.8 billion U.K. SMEs, and so this can translate into £6.89 billion a year being wasted.
Very interesting analysis, it makes a lot of sense for the BRICS nations to develop an alternative to the corrupt IMF / World Bank. The dollar is surely doomed.
An unstoppable sequence of events has been put into motion finally. The pressure has been building for months. Some themes are plainly evident, except to those who wear rose colored glasses in the US Dome of Perception. The USTreasury Bond will be brought home to the US and British banks, where it will choke its bankers, then be devalued for survival reasons, after a painful isolation. The Chinese and Russians will conspire to finance the Eurasian Trade Zone corridor foundation with USTBonds, held in reserve, put to usage. The British will play a very unusual role, selling out the United States in order to be squires to the Eastern Duo. The process has begun; it cannot be stopped.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The events are already being grossly misinterpreted and minimized in the US press, where devoted lapdogs, artistic swindlers, and creative writers prevail. The Paradigm Shift eastward is showing its next face, with a truly massive trade zone for cooperation and reduced cost overhead as the giant foundation. The Untied States for all of its past hegemony and devious manipulations and vicious attacks, will be excluded. The British will assist in the exclusion in order to avoid the Third World themselves. The following blueprint is the result of years of planning, with steady information and hints and confirmations by at least two Hat Trick Letter sources. The sunset of the USDollar has a blueprint. As a personal embroidery, let me state that this article is the most important the Jackass has ever written. Let it be taken seriously for its grave somber message.
Last week, GAO defended itself, as it should have, at the Foreign Policy website against my criticisms of its latest F-35 report. This week I responded, also at Foreign Policy. In sum, GAO's retort to my article makes me even more concerned about the state of affairs at GAO than I was before. Find my original article, GAO's retort, and my response all at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/03/error_report_ii and below.
Foreign Policy
GAO's defense of its F-35 investigation worries me even more.
BY WINSLOW WHEELER | APRIL 3, 2013
It is important and proper that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) responded tomy criticisms of its March 2013 report on the Defense Department's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Any watchdog agency should jealously defend its competence and independence, especially when the foundations of its oversight come under attack from those with experience, and sources, inside the agency.
The GAO took issue with my article, titled “Error Report,” on three matters.
Bradley Manning & The Deepwater Horizon By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Wednesday, 3. April 2013
Three years ago this month, on the 20th of April, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.
Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office's chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, Central Asia.
The source was in mortal fear he’d be identified – and with good reason. Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this: 17 months before BP’s DeepwaterHorizon blew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.
Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause: the failure of the cement “plug”.
To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas – the same stuff used in laughing gas – because it speeds up drying.
Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.
However, because BP’s penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, they are nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.
The reason: nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas – and boom, you’re dead.
So, when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.
Our investigators discovered that the company hid the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US Securities Exchange Commission. The Vice-President of BP USA, David Rainey, withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths. (Rainey was later charged with obstruction of justice on a spill-related matter.)
Britain's Channel 4 agreed to send me to the benighted nation of Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting “disappeared”. (They didn’t talk, but they still disappeared.)
And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry (the official name of the Department of Torture here in this Islamic Republic of BP). I knew I’d get out quick, because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty’s Empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.
The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn’t overly concerned: Before I left London, Badpenny handed me one of those Austin Powers camera-in-pens, on which I’d loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan – and for my source in a tiger cage in the USA: Pvt Bradley Manning.
Manning could have saved their lives
Only after I dove into deep water in Baku did I discover, trolling through the so-called “WikiLeaks” documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning. The information was stunning: the US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.
North Korea-US: Warning. Today's General Staff statement and the detection of an intermediate-range ballistic missile at an east coast site indicate the North Koreans are ready to launch a missile without additional warning. Miscalculation and misperception could lead to a missile firing.
The statement contains language in the official English translation that announces North Korea will take actual (also translated, practical) military measures to counter a list of US military deployments. It lacks the conditional language characteristic of prior statements. It also says North Korea has sent a strong message to the South Korean authorities, apparently a warning.
The detection of a single Musudan intermediate range ballistic missile at an east coast launch site, as reported by South Korea's Yonhap news agency, adds support to the statement about taking actual military countermeasures. The location of the missile on the east coast and the repeated mention of bombers from Guam provide some basis for concern that Guam could be a target. Guam is the closest US territory in range.
This is a new graduate course I will be teaching for King’s College War Studies Department beginning autumn, 2013. The course is called Intelligence & National Security in the Undiscovered Country . It will be a 20 credit Master’s Degree course on the future of intelligence and national security. The course description is DRAFT.
Module Description:
Consider for a moment the words of William Shakespeare who characterized our fear of the future in Hamlet. “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of” Hamlet tells us that it is better to suffer the ills of the day than to travel to the Undiscovered Country. What will the future bring for intelligence and national security and are we prepared for it?
The concept of a nation state is changing. Globalization, regional alliances, global and regional environmental and economic issues, telecommunications, changing demographics, and integrating social value systems are altering the nation state. The idea of what it means to “defend ourselves” decades from now will be dramatically different from what it is today. New constructs for national security necessitate new intelligence and military capabilities. Defending a nation may become an exercise in cyber warfare, global policing functions, nation building and support, small unit combat operations, and exerting diplomatic, political, and economic influence. As the emphasis in national security capabilities changes so too will the intelligence functions supporting them.
TED Fellow Eddie Huang was kicked out of the organization for refusing to follow its cult-like orders. WARNING – explicit language.
“I just went through a whole week of people telling me what to do, where to be, and it was like being at a fucking scientology summer camp,” he said. “It was horrible.”
Includes mandated 40-year old roommates, ban on all outside activities including girlfriends, low-rent accommodations. Not allowed to pay for your own private room.
U.K. businesses waste billions a year on tech investment
