When the ABC decided to modernise its ABC Store platform, it failed. Then it decided to bring in reInteractive, a Sydney-based web-design company that moved the public broadcaster from its ASP environment to one using Ruby on Rails.

Luke Hopewell writes on our sister site ZDNet Australia that reInteractive takes an Agile approach to its work, and that this approach rarely survives first contact with the customer.

“When you are your own client, and using Agile internally, you don’t [have] to specify how long something has to take, but when you’re dealing with a customer and everything has a dollar value, the customer wants to know how long it’s going to take.” said Mikel Lindsaar, managing director of reInteractive.

If you were excited by the Kinect for Windows release date announcement from CES yesterday, you may want to think about whether you want to get your hands on one via grey imports, or just re-purpose an Xbox Kinect.

That’s because Australians are set to pay more for Kinect for Windows than our North American counterparts. The Australian price will be $299, whereas the device will retail in the US at US$250.

Kinect for Windows will cost more than a regular Xbox version. The Redmond giant says that this is due to its “fully tested and supported Kinect experience on Windows”, Near Mode, improved USB support across a wider range of PCs, Windows-specific 10-inch acoustic models, and the fact that it is the only sensor optimised for use with the Kinect for Windows SDK.

For enterprise users of Firefox that wish the open-source browser had a longer release cycle than six weeks, your wish has been granted with the creation of the Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release.

This annual release will receive security updates only, and will be supported for 54 weeks. There will be 12 weeks of overlap between releases to allow organisations to certify the upcoming ESR release.

Currently, Firefox 10 is proposed to be the first ESR release, followed by each seventh Firefox release thereafter.

I like the idea of a Firefox ESR, but just when you were starting to get a grip on Firefox release version numbers, now there will be Firefox 10 ESR and Firefox 17 ESR to track, as well.

Is it that hard for Mozilla to use a date-based version-ing convention on Firefox? I’d find Firefox yy.mm — for instance, Firefox 12.01 — a far more informative name than the upcoming Firefox 10.