Technorama

I'm ready to be impressed. Impress me with your professionalism!

Ask them to answer all the following questions.

0. Tell us the full address, including post code.
1. Tell us about your credibility. I want to work with the best people in the industry.
2. How many deals completed in last 12 months. What percentage BMV.
3. What is the confirmed rental figure (as it exists at the moment, no works completed).
4. What is your fee.
5. What is the sourced price, including your fee!
6. What is the rental yield based on the sourced price.
7. What refurb works are needed, and how much have you specifically costed.
8. How much money is needed to buy, with 25% deposit, B2L Stamp duty, and solicitors fees?
9. What is the year 1, gross ROI based on (3) and (8).
10. What is the sqft.
11. What is the ppsqft based on (5) and (10).
10. If you can't provide any of this information, please do your homework, and then come back to me.

Present all of this clearly in a Word DOC, or PDF. Including photos, floor plan.

The majority of open source/free software is developed by volunteers. Certain portions have contributions by engineers working for companies.
Typically those contributions are made by companies for a specific purpose, in a niche area.

Proprietary software is developed for a product, and may be secure, or may not be. An external audit of the source code would confirm if the software was secure, in the case of proprietary software, the source code is not readily available. There is no legal requirement for software to have such an external audit.

Other professions have external audits of confidential information. For example businesses must pay an external accountants to audit their accounts if they have a turnover exceeding a certain amount.

Software engineering needs to "grow up", and adopt similar best practices. ISO and CERT standards etc.

Open Source software should not be viewed as perfect, its largely made by volunteers. Any company taking it and using it on their server should consider if it has been audited for security - which invariably it has not.

Until all packages that are part of a popular GNU/Linux distribution are audited, and signed off for quality and no bugs, defects, exploits, companies should not believe that it is really secure.

The volunteers maintaining free software are doing a great service, as a hobby, they can't possibly be held responsible when the quality is lacking. Companies should pay or sponsor, to bring up the quality.

Many of the volunteers do not have ISO quality qualifications, have their own opinions, and are simply scratching the itch.

A typical example was OpenSSL and Bash, developed by one or two volunteers. Most of the internet relying upon them! Never audited or stress tested.

Key considerations for Enterprise:

* Who is responsible for the software?
* Who is actively maintaining the software?
* Which of your own software engineers are reviewing the software
quality, and contributing fixes?
* Who has signed off ISO & CERT quality standards for the software?
* Who is reviewing changes that were made software updates?
* Does it need to be secure? If so, needs additional security validation.
* Which version are we using?
* Do we need to have a rolling upgrade program to keep up to date with new releases?

Bit of a missing feature there Google, would you add the recycle bin please?
Devices have plenty of storage, so it doesn't need to be reclaimed immediately.