Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Harradence started taking an interest in technology when he was working for an investment/insurance company that centralised operations in the early 1990s.
"They closed all typing pools and left us with PCs and word processing packages (Windows 3.0 and MS Works, from recollection)," he said.
"There was no resident techie, and it became apparent that getting things done was much easier if you could fix things yourself."
After reading about the licence refund, "I asked myself 'why would someone do that?'. I did some research and got interested in linux and FOSS generally."
Harradence said budgetary planning was done by using numbers from the previous year. "Use numbers from last year and build in expected changes. That covers off the 'numbers' but there was a great benefit in the special meeting in March called "Ghosts" where the experience of organising the conference was passed on from previous conferences. This has been a major help to us," he said.
The cost of attendance was fixed using the previous year's costs, "plus allowances for local costs that vary from previous years."
Harradence said his use of Linux at home did not generate any undue curiosity on the part of his spouse. Both his daughters have grown up and recently left home.
"My wife is a music teacher. I don't think my wife thinks I am crazy to be involved in this 'Linux thing' (although she might for other reasons)," he said. "She says she is more concerned about my bagpipe playing in the house.
"We both like using my new ASUS 13" laptop which runs Ubuntu and Fedora and she doesn't mind using it all, although the Adobe Flash player in the 64-bit Firefox browser is a bit 'flaky' for important things like Scrabble and Scramble.
"Given the lousy experience of her work-issued XP laptop (flaky wireless connectivity and poor performance), I think she finds it trouble free and easy to use."
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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