jamesb

I forsee the hair straighteners melting through the groundsheet at some point. I had something like that, where someone with a new level of genius thought that a safe place to put the recently used (and still very, very hot) cooking pots on the floor of the tent. Melted straight through. The best bit was when they caught the whiff of melting plastic, picked up the pots, moved them, and put them back down to punch another two holes through the groundsheet. Their answer when queried on this? "I didn't think it would happen twice."

Going from De Panne to Sluis myself. And thanks. The charity themselves are sending me some nice, official sponsor forms and a pack, so hopefully that'll make life easier.

I'm not seeing them below the articles on Firefox, but the banner itself seems to be displaced to the right hand side while the text scroller doesn't fill the full page width. The text scroller overlaps the banner as well.

What's wrong with a fire going and a good pair of hot irons? You'll only lose hair to them if you're careless after all.

I'm planning a charity fundraising cycle ride soon, and wondered if anyone had any advice on how to raise sponsorship and funds. Obviously I'll be trying to get people at work on board, as well as family and friends, but I'd like to do more as well. I will be trying to recruit the local paper, though I think it's unlikely they'll pay much attention to an individual when there are much larger groups at the moment. Anyone who wants to help me out is more than welcome, but mainly I'm just looking for advice having never done anything like this before (except as part of a large, organised event).

If you want it to display on multiple screens attached to the same PC (not sure if using an Ethernet to VGA adapter is treated that way by the machine) you can append a number to the command line to select the monitor to display to.

PsExec \\machine1 "C:\Program Files\OfficeOne\PowerViewer.exe" "C:\My Presentations\P1.ppt" PsExec \\machine2 "C:\Program Files\OfficeOne\PowerViewer.exe" "C:\My Presentations\P2.ppt" PsExec \\machine3 "C:\Program Files\OfficeOne\PowerViewer.exe" "C:\My Presentations\P3.ppt" Any help? http://officeone.mvps.org/powerviewer/tips_remote_powerviewer.html

I always understood upskilling to mean learning new skills. So for a non-Linux user learning Linux would be upskilling. For a non-Windows user learning Windows would be upskilling. Maybe my definition is wrong.

Which emerging technologies exactly? There are plenty out there. Should they be expected to constantly update their technical knowledge of all of these disparate areas? When do they do this R&D if they're working? Are they expected to give up their time outside work? Many do, but condemning anyone who doesn't strikes me as somewhat judgmental. No, I mean that your collaboration solution relies entirely on the goodwill of both the employees (who are employees, and should not be expected to give up their free time without reward as it is not part of the job - many do, yes, but that does not mean that they should, or are obliged to do so) and of the volunteers. If someone gets fed up, or finds a more interesting prospect, or decides to stop for any of a host of reasons out of the volunteers you could have major problems. Collaboration does seem to be a big thing, and I agree that it's good. I don't necessarily agree that it is the one and only solution however, unless you're in an ideal world where personal politics, holding back knowledge, and all of the other group dynamics enter into things. Basically while I agree with your ideals, and somewhat with your principles, I don't think you're allowing a safety margin.

School != Business. Ah, so google apps is automatically better. I see. Isn't part of the point to evaluate different options? There are plenty of objections to cloud-sourcing as it is, and I would think that the choice was made after careful consideration, yet you simply ignore it because in your opinion 'google apps is better'. As for older - when did that automatically mean better? It's nice to know that you are the ultimate authority on open source tools, and can tell people what the best is without even knowing the situation and reasoning that led them to make their choice. Your crystal ball must be functioning well. What resource hog over-featured apps? There are other issues involved here which you seem to be ignoring. What happens if the school bully takes their laptop? If the kid sets up a wireless network with another kid, and so a virus spreads, who's responsible for cleaning it up? If something illegal is brought in, who gets to deal with it? What about when the local thief finds out that sixty laptops are left in the PE changing rooms each lesson? What about Bobby having the shiniest, best laptop on the market and Fred having an antique freebie? Most importantly - what about them not password protecting anything so that there's no security on the systems which they are then bringing in to school, so anyone who gets them gets everything, including the kid's facebook and e-mail accounts? Then you're telling them to bring these systems into school, which is not a secure place, and without applying any security policy across them? Good idea, no argument from me, but I'm not a teacher using the resources so wouldn't be my place to judge what's suitable and unsuitable anyway. Wonderful - so why exactly should I stay with your company where I'm getting no training other than informal, and being given more tasks with no obvious advancement path? What about when there's a new task to be taken on and no one has relevant skills, you hire a new person in order to train up the rest? And it might also be something they don't want to spend their evenings and weekends doing. Maybe they'd prefer to play a board game with little Johnny instead?

Particularly if you consider the costs of getting technical staff appropriately skilled up - which will be required. Except that one of the points suggests money is no longer wasted on such things. I guess replacing staff needs to be factored in, instead. Or extra pay and self-development time to skill themselves up, as well as bringing in others to cover time that staff are away. Will it? If your technical staff are skilled up to use open source, and properly configure it, do you not think there's a potential for them to be looking for a better paid position which will appreciate their skills more? And that the demand for people skilled in open-source will increase, meaning that the pay for such positions will have to increase to attract them? I can see some very direct savings from open-source, but there are also added costs involved. Great. So are you available for the working day of schools? Or are the staff at the school expected to sacrifice their time outside of work for this collaboration? No disagreement here, but suggesting that this applies to all schools strikes me as being somewhat naive. A very good team, with a very good set of staff in the school, and the right number of volunteers with knowledge of the individual school as well as many other factors would be required.

11. Replace all staff with highly skilled IT professionals and developers so that most of the other points are actually possible, not to mention tripling the size of the IT support department in order to allow the time and training required. I'm for open source to a point, but many of the suggestions seem a little too drastic and knowledge-intensive for a small department. Particularly empowering your users and getting them to grab open source and develop their own tools.

Sounds like an interesting read Hardcover for £50 new. The book basically covers the history of ties/neckerchiefs, and the mathematical proof that there are only 85 ways to tie them. Only 13 of these actually look any good.

Not to worry - in a couple of weeks Selfridges in London will be setting up their Christmas section. No. Really. I only wish I was joking.

Hero: Go ahead. I'm on facebook. Evil Despot: Curses!

Have a look at their 'Ask the experts' page. Make sure you don't have a mouthful of anything at the time as well.

Seems to in mine - have you switched autocorrect off in Word?

What concerns me is the suggestion that these things are targeted as business users, but they're quite blatantly designed with a 'cutesy' aspect. On the other hand the USB key version is something I might be interested in if they do start getting popular, but I shudder at the thought of waving a little collectable toy at anyone I want to share contact details with. I can see that ending some business relationships before they begin, to say nothing of social ones.

_italic_ is one, then there's "smart quotes", superscript ordinals (1st etc), -- replaced with one long dash, and a few others like autoformatting - list item one - list item two into a proper list. It's actually Word's autocorrect formatting.

Whenever I wear a tie to work people ask if I'm going to an interview. Shame really, as I've got quite a few and hardly ever get to wear them. When I do though, full windsor.

Not storing data on the poken is pretty much irrelevant, when that tag gives you access to all of the information anyway. I suspect there's some way to lock down the default information provided to someone else via the hub, but how many people will really do that? Scenario c) school bully or malicious prankster steals someone else's poken, and goes around handing out their contact details to absolutely everyone that they can, endangering the original owner.

So all you need in order to extract all of the data from one, is another one you know the password of? I think password protecting them is a little pointless.

An old dinosaur who missed out the ever-so-useful method for exchanging contact details which I, and many others, still use? Illegible scribblings on bits of paper - the best bit is you can fake details more easily if you don't actually want to communicate with the person ever again.

Unless they've started producing drinks I think Fairtrade are pretty much safe. If they wanted to be really adventurous they could even come to some sort of deal for Fairtrade to promote Ubuntu (sensible enough in a way), and Ubuntu to sell the cola through their site.

Decoder Ring Theatre - old-style radio shows which are just the right length for my cycle into work. Also tend to grab a few audio books from podiobooks, in particular I recommend The Failed City Monologues for any SF fan.