An Anonymous Coward writes:The Australian government's DTA (Digital Transformation Agency) already forked over a large sum of money to have its public servants in Services Australia (nee Centrelink/Medicare) build a front end for Australians to access Government services and payment information. Now it is looking to redo that work by paying a contractor an exorbitant amount of money for yet another government portal website, this time to the tune of an increasing amount of money to Deloitte. Dubbed "Son-of-mygov", the cost has now blown out to 23 million after it previously doubled to 19.5 million from the original contract. This is, of course, business as usual for Deloitte who charge any changes as businesses do. For the Australian tax payers who are funding this project there should be great concern as son-of-mygov has no business case with yet another business being paid to formulate one while Deloitte builds the new system.Do we start building roads before having a plan for why a road is needed?Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
RandomFactor writes:Phys.org reports on researchers creating synthetic Rebuilt Red Blood Cells (RRBCs) that not only match the normal characteristics of natural RBCs, but add new capabilities as well.
[20200604_025249 UTC: The nighttime launch was on time. First stage booster landed on the drone ship Just Read The Instructions making the fifth successful launch and recovery of this booster. (This also marks the second time that a SpaceX booster has had 5 successful launches). Satellite deployment was successful. The satellites will now use their solar arrays and ion thrusters to boost themselves to their intended orbit. The recovery ships Ms Tree and Ms Chief were in position to attempt to capture the payload fairings a few hours after launch. NB: SpaceX had its very first Falcon-9 launch 10 years ago on 2010-06-04. Well done, SpaceX!--martyb]martyb writes:It's been a mixed bag for SpaceX the past few days. They had a successful launch and docking of the Crew Demo 2. They also recovered the booster successfully when it landed on the autonomous drone "Of Course I Still Love You". On the other hand, a test fire of their Starship prototype SN4 (serial number 4) was not so hot. Strike that, it was too hot to handle and experience an extremely Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.So SpaceX is at it again with another launch planned for tonight; exactly one hour from when this story was released. This time sending up another batch of Starlink satellites:
[Speaking as the de-facto leader of SoylentNews, I know this community is very sensitive to self-promotional "Slashvertising" and similar. Since our inception, we've prided ourselves on listening to our community and taking those views into account. I've walked a bit of a fine line with that with my original content articles both recently and in the past. I do not want to be a rule unto myself so if this post ends up crossing that line, mention it in the comments and we'll take those lessons to heart. Also, we haven't had a community roundtable here at SN in quite a long time, so I'm going to schedule one go to live on Monday.][NB: Yes, "original content" articles are welcome here. If anyone is considering it, please try to keep them tech-related and provide supporting links. Also provide contact info (email address) so any issues or questions can be discussed as needed. --martyb]The simple fact is that in the last few weeks, the world, especially in the United States has become a very different place. Here in New York City, there's been constant protests and escalation between the police and protesters. In an era where drones are being used to track and monitor protesters, digital security is more important more than ever. I want to do my bit on trying to help people keep themselves safe and secure in these times.Normally, I try not to push self-promotion here, and I've made sure that my recent original content articles are not pushing that line. I mentioned in my last article that I host a weekly hacking show called HACK-ALT-NCOMMANDER, as part of DEFCON 201, the local DEF CON group for the New Jersey area. Usually, I cover some bit of retro-tech, random reverse engineering, and other random and strange things. Not today.This time, I've decided to cover these topics:
martyb writes:African-American George Floyd's death has led to marches, demonstrations, acts of violence, and looting across the USA and in other parts of the world. Emotions are running high. We will not attempt to accuse or defend anyone here. Just attempt to lay out the information we have and offer it up for the community to discuss. Many comments about this incident have been posted to unrelated stories on this site. This is, therefore, an attempt to provide one place on SoylentNews where people are encouraged to discuss it. So as to not derail other stories on the site, I kindly ask you focus those comments here.Wikipedia has a page about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd (permanent link to the page as it appeared at the time of writing):
SomeGuy writes:Wired is reporting that Walmart employees have serious concerns about the effectiveness of the company's anti-shoplifting "AI" technology (reprint), including unnecessarily breaking COVID-19 related social distancing guidelines.
On what is becoming a running theme here on SoylentNews, we're reliving the early 90s, and picking up right where I left off from Windows for Workgroups, it was time to look at the 800-pound gorilla: Novell NetWare.Unlike early Mac, UNIX and Windows, I didn't actually have any personal experience with NetWare back in the day. Instead, my hands were first guided on a stream of my weekly show, HACK-ALT-NCOMMANDER, hosted as part of DEFCON 201, combined with a binge reading marathon of some very hefty manuals. In that vein, this is more of my impressions of what NetWare user and administration is like, especially compared to the tools of the day.Ultimately, I found NetWare a very strange experience, and there were a lot of pluses and minuses to cover, so as usual, here's the tl;dr video summary, followed by more in-depth write-up.If you haven't ABENDed your copy of server.exe, click below the fold to learn what all the hubbub was about!Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
RandomFactor writes:Cornell professor of food science engineering Syed Rizvi and Michael E. Wagner, Ph.D. have received a patent on a process for producing Ice Cream instantly (within 3 seconds).