AngryTechnician

Report on ArsTechnica today about how Oracle is abandoning its commercial development of OpenOffice following its shambolic mishandling of the project that led to the LibreOffice fork. Apparently they are ready to hand over OpenOffice to the community, but by now, the community has left it behind. Oracle gives up on OpenOffice after community forks the project Personally my testing of LibreOffice already pegged it as superior, if not least for the fact that there's no sodding first run wizard to suppress which makes deployment much easier.

That's not IE9, that's IE8.

Haha, nice, consider it stolen!

It's IE9. Looks fine in Firefox, but not in IE9 in standards mode. It's something to do with the JavaScript they've got that is rendering the text using a custom font.

I got my second one direct from Dell as they had a special offer on at the time, but that time is past. AFAIK only O2 sell network locked units, so if you buy one that didn't come from O2, it should be unlocked. They are easy to tell apart when you use them because the O2 ones have a big O2 splash screen when you power them on. If you want anything newer than Froyo you'll want to root it anyway.

Missed this when it happened last week as I was on holiday, but have been catching up today. From what I see, this leaves SIS as the only remaining feature of Windows Storage Server that you can't get with regular Windows Server. It it worth it? Well, here's the stats from my main files shares (size vs. size on disk): Granted, the total data size is not huge, but the percentage is significant. Just over 1/3 of the stored data is using no additional space (I'm not using compression, so SIS is the only thing reducing the size on disk). Scale that up to larger schools and if your usage patterns are similar, that's a significant saving.

Another unlisted improvement is that it now only syncs the password when it actually changes. The previous version would update the password on every user even when there had been no change. This means it no longer lists a change for every user in the log on every run, and probably accounts for some of the speed improvements too.

Personally I'm going to be looking at the Kodak Playsport line to fill the gap left by Flip. Prices on Amazon look good and they are water resistant as a bonus! Anyone have any experience with them yet?

Counterpoint: you do not need to keep a physical DC. Just don't put it in the cluster. I have a DC on every physical host, but none of them are in a clustered disk on the SAN. Their virtual HDs reside on local RAID1 disks on the host. If the SAN fails, they will still work. If a host fails, one of the others will still work. Even if the Hyper-V environment goes pear-shaped on every host, I can simply reinstall Hyper-V from scratch, create a new VM and attach the locally-stored DC disks, and it will boot. You do not need to keep a physical DC. Just keep at least one that isn't in the SAN, and there are no scenarios you can't recover from that you could if it was physical.

I have a crisp £50 that says this company actually has bugger all to with web design, and more to do with other businesses involving women without any clothes on. The Reg have clearly been scammed for some free publicity.

First thing that springs to mind: on your SqlDataSource object, check that the CancelSelectOnNullParameter property is set to False. The default is True.

No, it doesn't have a safe search (at least not that I know of). Even if it did, the biggest problem with YouTube is the foul comments rather than the content. We use quietube whenever YouTube is shown in class for that very reason.

You can balance your arm on your head?

Personally I would swap as many of the brands as possible for more generic things. For example: H = Hard Drive I = Internet (how can we leave Internet out, really?) K = Keyboard N = Network M = Microsoft (Yes, it's a brand but arguably one of the most important, and they make Messenger anyway) O = Open Source P = Printer (I may hate printers but I don't even know anyone who uses Picasa) Q = QWERTY (Possible duplication with K, but I mean, seriously, Quick Heal??) V = Virus (not disputing the fine choice of Virtualisation but I have trouble explaining it to adults let alone small children!) Z = Zip file (I'd never even heard of Zorpia before today) Of course I haven't produced graphics for any of these but I may well put something together for our ICT lab over the break. If I do, I'll share it here.

Correct.

Yesterday I had a backup ADSL line provisioned at the school in a different building to the server room in case something nasty happens to the server room. Today at 6pm I planned to test the automatic failover on the router by pulling the phone cable on our main Zen Internet VDSL connection. Was irritated to find it didn't work. Then I discovered the router did fail over correctly, but the backup line was completely down. Then I found out Plusnet was down for a lot of the area, which I thought was quite an impressive feat for me simulating an outage on site. The initial reports were of fibre damage in Slough at about 5.30pm, though late this evening BT have announced its a core 21CN router issue. However, it seems like it must be a big one, because comments on Twitter report resultant problems further away in Andover, Swindon, and even Purbeck. At least one ISP reports their Ethernet (leased line) services are down in the area too. Talked to some local contacts this evening who are also on Plusnet, and bizarrely, of the two exchanges in town, only one of them is affected. Guessing a few BT engineers are working overtime tonight...

This exact same thing has happened to both my aunt and my stepfather. Not sure if its all sorted yet but I will encourage them to persist if not.

You can configure the SMART Drivers to not use Tablet PC functionality. Try that through the SMART Control Panel and see if it has the desired effect. Bear in mind this does reduce the functionality of the board back to Windows XP levels, so be sure your users are happy with that. It's probably ultimately a registry setting somewhere; if changing the setting in the GUI does what you're after and you can't find it,l post back and I will take a look on one of mine.

Do you have figures on how many of your students have computers suitable for this, and do you plan to set aside funding to provide for those pupils that do not?

Used to be yearly for me until I had laser surgery, now I go every two years as recommended. Now I think about it, I'm probably due.

Indeed - last time I needed to claim on the ProCurve warranty it took them over a month to supply the replacement. Their excuse was that it was an older model (a 2650) and they had trouble finding stock. I would say the 4208vl is also an older model and don't hold out much hope for a quick replacement from HP if I needed it.

I can tell you exactly, since the figures are immediately available in the Zen customer portal. Feb, 2011 - Down: 177.912 GB, Up: 22.241 GB Jan, 2011 - Down:157.794 GB, Up: 20.493 GB Dec, 2010 - Down: 108.023 GB, Up: 13.011 GB Nov, 2010 - down: 175.295 GB, Up: 18.738 GB YMMV. We are a 3-13 school and currently use very little cloud-based services (trialling Google Apps at the moment)

In my last school we actually referred to SQL injection screwups as "Bobby Tables errors" (especially when we found them in our own code). While its highly ironic that this has happened to the MySQL website, it could be worse: at least it's not their own product that was the source of the vulnerability, more their inability to use a third party product to interact with theirs. I'd be more worried if the same thing happened to the php.net site.

They didn't listen to me when we'd paid them 6 grand for a site licence, I doubt they listen to me now.

Again this is probably for the Q&A but I can't make it - can someone ask them about why their testing in enterprise environments is so poor (or "hit and miss" if you're feeling generous)? Bugs like the DFS issue with Reader X and the problems with AppData redirection that affected several of their products (Reader, Acrobat, and Premiere Elements, just to name ones I saw first hand) are problems that simply should not have been in shipped products. They were evident the moment the program was run in an environment that uses these quite common features. If they have made a choice not to do this testing themselves (which seems to be the case given the length of time this has been going on now), they either need to broaden their closed beta test base or even run public betas.