Posts by Grant

Microsoft slapped for Windows-only Office patch

@ Game in Excel???

It's there i've seen it but it was only in certain versions, no wonder it was so big.

Dell offers 'Windows Vista Bonus' to frightened customers

@ Jeff Rowse and Alexis Vallance

"it and took nearly ten minutes to get to the point where my nephew could actually get at the game he wanted to show me, and another five minutes to shut down with no User-initiated processes running"

Jeff i'm not a big Vista fan but i'm using it at work i just booted my Vista Sp1 box and timed it (sad i know), it booted then i logged on to the domain then opened IE7 and opened the reg home page all in 1min 14 seconds. The system has one Core 2 Duo processor and 1Gb RAM (yes only 1Gb) and Aero is running.

I have a feeling that there may be something VERY WRONG with your new system and you should have it looked at before blaming Vista.

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@ Alexis Vallance

"They need to start from scratch, but they can't. It's too risky if they get it wrong and businesses don't like big upheavals. I don't know what they can do."

Easy they can wind down Windows development but continue to support it for many years (XP,Vista or Windows 7) say 2015 or longer. In the mean time they can turn their considerable engineering talent to producing a Linux distro that would no doubt work VERY well with all of their customers legacy infrastructure and software.

Cornish lingo gets standard written form

@ waste of money!

I think you'll find that's about 3000 :-) not that it makes any difference.

It is mostly made up now as most of the books were burned a while back for some reason (ahem can't think why that would be) and the rest have perished. Now all you have is a load of old people disputing any remaining written work so they can model the rescued language on 'their version' :-) (or something like that)

Becta asks EC to probe Microsoft school deals

@ John Miles

"If she accidentally saves in ODF format, or there is a conversion limitation, she is stuffed and cannot submit her homework."

We have that issue here but should remedy it soon but TBH on the odd occasion that this is an issue i convert the doc and they hand it in.

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@ Roger de Laborde

"No schools should teach MS Access"

I fully agree, unfortunatly they almost all do.

@ Mark

Spectrum, BBC micros, Commodore 64. I owned and loved them all.

"From the command line all UNIX variants are surprisingly close"

I know i use Linux but i try to ignore CLI when talking about the end user experience.

"KDE looks the same across ANY hosting Linux distribution"

Again i know and so does GNOME, Xfce, Fluxbox ... oh dear. I feel there needs to be a more consistent look if Linux is going to take off in the consumer arena.

Anyway we are deviating from the article here.

@ John Edubuntu

Yes edubuntu looks good but the problem I’ve come across is that almost no education software supports anything other than Windows you’re lucky if you get Mac support.

We are having a play with Ubuntu Studio at the moment which looks interesting. I hope we can make the jump at some point as we’ve decided to postpone Vista as XP support has been extended.

@ Anonymous Coward

One problem is that most of our feeder primaries use OO or Star Office so new students come here and find a different product to what they're used to. It's a pain to decide but Office is expensive and really needs driving down in price.

Of course if OO and MS Office were compatible (both ways) we could run them side by side without issue.

@ Adam Trickett

"Learning how to use Abiword, OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, KOffice, on KDE, GNOME, Linux, Windows, Mac systems makes for flexible people able to adapt and understand principles and not be flummoxed by a slightly different menu layout"

Err while i agree that knowledge of more than one platform and app would be desirable we could replace the entire curriculum with that list. Why insist on another vendor locked platform like a mac. As for Linux when it gets a uniform look we'll be getting somewhere, it's getting better but students need to spend time learning the curriculum not the location of menu features in two or three different FOSS gui's.

@ Schools should use OpenOffice

I agree if only al of the goverment recommended school MIS systems supported it and didn't require Access, this means that all of our admin and teacher classroom PC's 'require' MS Access. We could use it on most class PC's but it creates confusion. Other than that we are primed and ready to go with OO 2.

Microsoft updates squash four critical bugs

@ Roddy MacKenzie

Download the full XP SP3 ISO file and you won't see the AMD issue.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2fcde6ce-b5fb-4488-8c50-fe22559d164e&DisplayLang=en

Shell pulls out of Thames Estuary mega-windfarm

@ Dervheid

GLOBAL WARMING IS A MYTH.

Climate change however is not and this is affected by our activity

School crossing guards join CCTV panlollycon

Recruitment problem

I'm sure this is ongoing as i still see ads for unfilled patrols and it's basically because people aren't willing to work for the peanuts. Why not just take the £1000 and give them a payrise they get about £12 per day so it will go a long way. The camera isn't much protection if there isn't a person there to protect.

AVG revamps free security scanner

@ Peter Ford

It says this for the Windows version and last time i tried it it wasn't a patch on AVG.

"Please note that ClamWin Free Antivirus does not include an on-access real-time scanner. You need to manually scan a file in order to detect a virus or spyware."

Adobe cuddles up to Linux Foundation

@ stizzleswick

I was just having a little dig.

PS runs fine on Crossover office as well but it would be nice to see a version on Linux, it would be nice for media houses to have a Mac alt other than Windows. I just think that it's another of those apps that would make people take a serious look at Linux.

Photoshop for Linux

"Adobe's decision to join the Linux Foundation is a natural extension of its commitment to open standards and open source, which demonstrates its leadership and foresight in the software industry,"

So when will we be getting Photoshop for Linux then?

Cuba, India vote no on OOXML

@ Jamie

Why would you have two fully licensed copies of 2003 and 2007 at home and not use them, do you just enjoy giving hundreds of your hard earned cash to MS for nothing???

Apple unleashes monster patch batch on Mac faithful

@ AC

"Vista SP1 @ 435MB, now THAT'S a monster patch!"

The SP covers every version of Vista so it's quite large but no system should require more than 100Mb of it, so it you download it using Windows Update only the necessary files will be downloaded.

Canonical fires up box Landscaping business

@ Martin Owens

A good point i'd hate Canonical to just become another Red Hat, i know they need to make money but producing closed source software seems to go against their principals.

Google approaching world domination

@ Brent

A very good point just look at the fuss everytime MS look like they might not hit mega $$$ profit increases, the fact that they're still raking in billions of $$$ doesn't seem to factor in.

Paris as she knows what it's like to suddenly have billions slip from her grasp ;-)

Will Microsoft parachute Windows 7 in early?

@ Anonymous Coward

Ha i'd like to see OSX running so well once any old company can build some poor budget hardware and supply some equally bad drivers and lash it all together into a grey box.

@ Don Mitchell

Nice one it's pretty rare that someone knows about the actual development of the NT platform (as a completely new platform), as has been shown here sooo many people think XP is an evolution of the 9x platform.