Robert Ward, the branch chairman, opened the formal part of the AGM including a presentation of the branch accounts given by the treasurer Tony Cox.

In a twenty minute presentation Robert ran through some of the branch highlights of the year including the Oxfordshire schools' Web site competition and the group trip to the Science Museum's large storage facility at Wroughton. Wroughton was a big success: to use Robert's words "If you have not yet been to Wroughton, "just go and see it!"

You can read the Chairman's letter online or as a PDF, which includes the summary of branch accounts. The chairman's slides are also available.

The rest of the evening was given over to Charles Hughes BCS Deputy President and President Elect who kicked off a lively debate with a talk on the future of professional recognition in the IT industry.

Charles presented the BCS strategy to promote and establish professionalism in our industry. He explained the BCS is working closely with government and industry bodies to enhance the standing of professionals and the image of the industry. An example given was the BCS involvement in developing the Intellect IT Supplier code of Best Practise.

Intellect is the trade body for the UK based information technology, telecommunications and electronics industry.

Charles noted that the Public Sector now has established for the first time an IT professional career route.

You can download the slides (108KB) used by Charles here or from our download page.

Visit the main BCS Web site for more details of this important initiative being spearheaded by the BCS.

Jennifer Pierce, a partner at Charles Russell, who is a contributing author to the new BCS book "A Manager's Guide to IT Law", gave a very lucid description of the ways of protecting software:

1. Copyright
2. Patents
3. confidentiality

and the ways that these could be used together or separately.

This was one of our shorter talks - just as well because the lively question and answer session more than filled the time until the end of the meeting.

Jennifer's slides are reproduced on the download page, with her permission.
She also supplied this written explanation in response to a question about criminal prosecutions in cases of copyright infringement.

This year's annual visit was a trip to the Science Museum's Large Objects Storage facility at Wroughton, near Swindon. Our guide, Keith Brown, seen here on the right of the photo in conversation with visit organiser Keith Diment, was a mine of interesting information about what he irreverently called "the largest junkyard in the UK".

The large objects on display in several hangars scattered around this old airfield included a Lockheed Constellation, whose wing and engine can be seen in the photo above the yellow Rolls-Royce, a Boeing 247 parked next to the Douglas DC3 which obsoleted it, a Trident and a Comet; and the heaviest item in any museum in the UK which turned out to be a printing press rescued from the basement of Northcliffe House.
The historic computer collection included a KDF9 and Russian equipment used in the Soviet space programme.
Keith showed us one of the American Polaris missiles which had been purchased at taxpayers' expense from the US, and explained how they had had to be improved by British scientists to make a more credible deterrent.
Keith also gave us a whirlwind tour of the development of the bicycle, illustrated by the collection of historic two-wheelers, including those for ladies to ride side-saddle (not easy to propel!).

Peter Goodearl's site has many more, and better, photos of exhibits at Wroughton.

The Wroughton Events Diary gives details of their calendar of special events, lectures, exhibitions and guided tours.

Roger Willison-Gray of Steria UK treated us to a fascinating and sometimes worrying view of how RFID is being used now and how it might be exploited in the future.

Roger's full slides are on our download page, but here are a few notes jotted down during his talk.

The use of wireless-based Auto-id tags, assigning a unique id to individual objects, is revolutionising the supply chain.
This is creating 'the internet of things'. For more details visit the Cambridge Auto-id site.

• Walmart is forcing its top 100 suppliers to use autoid by 2005.
• Early adopters will spend a lot of money and see profits decline but big increase in market share;
• Smaller players won't be able to afford to compete.
• Shrinkage will reduce: for example the US Army currently loses 40000 weapons a year
• This is a huge business: Accenture's latest win is allegedly worth $10bn (homeland security)
• This is happening already: Croydon council are autoid tagging wheelie bins and the US state of Virginia is mandating rfid tags on drivers' licenses.
• RFID security is better than chip and pin for credit cards.

But if, for example, your suit is auto-id tagged, your movements could be tracked, perhaps without your knowledge.

With this in mind, an international group of consumer organisations has put together this RFID Position Statement of Consumer Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations

Our two speakers, Bob Day and Tim Kidd, respectively Network Development Director and Production Services Director for UKERNA, seen here answering questions after their session, gave a fascinating report of the history of JANET, the Joint Academic Network.

JANET is currently providing a network built around a 10GB core to about 1000 academic sites in the UK.

The talk was enlivened by stories of the challenges of leaky roofs and changing network suppliers over the Jubilee Bank Holiday weekend.

They ended by describing the plans for the next generation, SuperJANET5, which should start rolling out in 2006.

For more details, see the slides on our download page.

This was the first of what we hope will be many joint meetings between the Oxfordshire branch of the BCS and the Oxford University Computer Society.

The 120-seat lecture theatre in the Wolfson building was packed almost to capacity for the debate on the motion that This house believes that the enthusiasm for Linux and Open Source is a triumph of hope over reality.

The debate was chaired by Joseph Mathewson, President of the Oxford University Computer Society.

The wording of the motion had been deliberately controversial to stimulate discussion, and the chair had his hands full ensuring that the speakers had a relatively uninterrupted hearing.

Speaking for the motion, Paul Wood-Robinson, Technology Strategist from Microsoft, and Nick Manning from HP stressed the merits of Windows and Linux in the "commercial space", and as such saw the benefits of the non-open source approach being a consistent, integrated environment with one "throat to choke".

Against the motion, Paul Tempest-Mitchell, Data Centre Practice Manager from Sun, and Malcolm Yates, formerly of SuSE and Novell, emphasised the innovation being generated by the Open Source movement, backed by commercial vendors providing a support environment.

Each speaker came up with a well thought out and argued case, and we hope to invite them back for individual talks in the future.

During the question session (and during the speakers' slot) a lot of heat was generated over intellectual property rights (IPR) and copyright. We will return to the topic of Intellectual Property for our April 2005 meeting.

On a show of hands, the motion was defeated by a clear majority.

We would like to thank the speakers for all the hard work and thought they put into the evening and our chair for keeping order in what was a very lively debate.

Any ideas for meeting topics for future years would be very welcome. Please use our Contact Us Form with your suggestions.

Dave Frame from the University of Oxford described the climateprediction.net project, which is looking at ways to understand climate change over the coming decades. Like SETI, climateprediction.net uses spare capacity on distributed PCs to run calculations for the model. Unlike SETI, the data volumes are huge, which means that ideally the worked PCs need to be on a high speed network such as JANET (the subject of our January 2005 meeting)

Keith Norman from Tessella spoke about other experiences with distributed computing, and the future of the Grid.

Dave and Keith's slides are on the download page.

Our programme got off to a cracking start with a talk from Prof. Neil Barrett, on "Computer Forensics: The Role of the Expert Witness".

His talk covered the evolution of the laws covering computers, issues of evidence, and the role played by the expert witness.

Neil is both Visiting Professor of Computer Crime at Cranfield University, and Technical Director of IRM plc. As an accomplished author, speaker and authority on Computer Crime, this session was both fascinating and informative. Neil's slides are on our download page.