My School site fails on first morning of operation

My School site fails on first morning of operation: "Education Minister Julia Gillard said My School was designed to take 1.7 million hits a day, 2350 hits a second, and that the problems were caused by 'huge demand'.

'The experts at our authority have done everything they can. There are nine servers backing this website up.'"

1.7 million hits per day is actually equivalent to 20 hits per second. I hope they don't think that is all they can get out of nine servers.

HTML5 video and codecs

HTML5 video and codecs: "Recently, Vimeo and YouTube announced that they were moving to support the HTML5 video tag, as DailyMotion did last summer. This is an important step in making video a first-class citizen of the modern web, and that is great news. Unlike DailyMotion, however, Vimeo and YouTube chose to rely on the patented H.264 video encoding, rather than an unencumbered encoding like Ogg Theora. This means that the pages on those sites will not work with Firefox."

There are patent licensing issues for video encoders and distributors that continue to make this area a challenge.

More on video freedom and mozilla.
H.264 Royalties: what you need to know
The H.264 Licensing Labyrinth

Analysis of 32 million breached passwords

Analysis of 32 million breached passwords: "Imperva released a study analyzing 32 million passwords exposed in the Rockyou.com breach. The data provides a unique glimpse into the way that users select passwords and an opportunity to evaluate the true strength of these as a security mechanism."

Run IT as a business -- why that's a train wreck waiting to happen

Run IT as a business -- why that's a train wreck waiting to happen: "When IT runs as a business, it 'sells' software that 'meets requirements' to its 'internal customers.' Because its product is software, it has no choice -- it has to ask the wrong question: 'What do you need the software to do?'

Asking business managers to describe what software is supposed to do is the unavoidable consequence of a relationship in which IT's job ends with delivering software to its internal customers -- in which projects are considered successful when software is installed, users are trained in its operation, and using it to improve the business is someone else's problem.

Companies that have integrated IT and no internal customers define success differently.

Instead of asking what the software should do, they start by asking how their business counterparts run their operations now, what are their biggest problems, and how they want to run things differently and better in the future.

IT's job is to recommend better ways to operate, using technical capabilities business managers might not even know are possible.

These enlightened companies don't have IT projects -- they have business change projects that aren't done until the planned business change has been accomplished, and users are trained, not in how to operate software, but in how to do their redesigned jobs using the new software."