Or should it be "Age checks put on hold until after May local elections?".
Posts by Julian 16
8 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jul 2009
Age checks for UK pr0n site visitors on ice as regulator cobbles together some guidance
DVLA denies driving licence processing site is a security 'car crash'
Munich council: To hell with Linux, we're going full Windows in 2020
Re: Not sure about Office?
"It's gotten SO BAD with Linux and C/C++ our company said screw this and went ahead and developed it's own Windows 10-like OS shell and remade the command line interface of Linux to PROPER ENGLISH! We remade LAMP into custom Windows 2016 server-like environment with a decent Active Directory WAN/ALN management system analogue!"
Mate, if you were capable of doing this, you'd have no problem using Linux. I smell the whiff of bullshit in the air.
This local council paid HOW MUCH for an SD card?!
I'm in my 12th year of working in a UK school and we've average a budget of about £32,000 a year over that time. When I started here, the first thing I did was stopped using the council's hardware provision service and set up accounts with a multitude of vendors. Dropped Windows on servers and started using Linux until the OVS agreement came in and the price dropped and at the first opportunity we dropped the council's broadband provision of 10Mb/s fibre for £18,000 a year, negotiating our own agreement with BT for an unmanaged 100Mb/s line for £8,000 a year.
BSF came and went with us being quoted £150,000 pa for no on-sight network management and a single tech who wouldn't be allowed to touch anything without permission from head office.
Thank a convenient deity that that crock was killed off. We have two people permanently on site for £60,000 less than a private contractor would charge and >99.9% uptimes, expanding as we go by using refurbs.
Doing everything in-house keeps the costs right down.
Oh dear, Microsoft: UK.gov signs deal with LibreOffice
Re: Hotel California
In 2004, I started working in a Kent based Grammar school and the state of the IT was not good. There was a single server for the network, an RM box running the admin side, another box running exchange on NT4 and a CD server that was on its last legs and would cost £1800 to replace for some reason. Our total budget for all IT, desktops, servers, printing, software and anything else computer linked was £30,000 a year. Since then, it's been £30,000 a year bar two years when we got 40,000 and 50,000. We run 500 machines for 1000 users.
Within a year of joining, the CD server had been replaced with a Mandriva Linux box, the old NT DC had been migrated to Samba 3 and Exchange was booted and replaced with Postfix and Squirrelmail as no-one was using the additional features of Exchange anyway. Printing was through Samba with Pykota for management. All web based activities were pulled into the school and rather than pay external providers, we put everything on Apache/PHP with Wordpress/Joomla and Moodle for the VLE. As you say, you still need Windows for some things and for us it was SIMS and the FMS financial management package so we had server 2003 on one box for that.
When the new licencing came in the cost of deploying Windows and Office dropped for £25,000 a year to £3,000 and we switched to domain control Server 2008R2 but with Linux fileservers and Synology NAS boxes and all of our web servers run Ubuntu/LAMP. For a short period of time, we tried LibreOffice but whining teachers killed that off. For a group of people who are supposed to be teaching people the joy of learning, that joy doesn't seem to stretch to some of them.
To defend against future price rises, we are keeping out of the cloud bar running Owncloud and our our own mail/groupware from our server room. Microsoft have tried talking us into taking up the crippleware free version of Office 365 and we have decided against because there's no guarantee that it's going to stay free beyond the end of the annual licence. You never own licenced proprietary software so we won't switch fully to Google either as whatever they say, we have no way of knowing whether the free services may disappear in the future leaving us the hassle of migration or coughing up.
A further guarantee is that all of our DCs have been set up at a level that means we can switch to Samba 4 if Microsoft decide to up the licence in future and Kolab or Egroupware provide enough to provide for calendaring and note sharing so exchange is still off the cards. If MS Office goes up to the old pricing again. LibreOffice will get another look in and if any department insists on MS Office, they can pay for it out of their budget. As for desktop licences, we use refurbs that all have Win 7 licences so were fine until that becomes obsolete.
The mistake made during the new labour years was that people used threats of dropping Microsoft as a crowbar to drop licencing costs and in the end, that was all it became and MS knew it.
Apple changed shape of Galaxy Tab in court filing
By your logic, LG should be suing
For the startling physical similarity between the iPad and the LG DP391B tablet DVD player.
Icons on a desktop have been around so long that really is stretching it. However, the LG DP391B waqs released 2 years before the iPad, has a rectangular screen that's bordered in black in similar proportions, rounded corners and a button located at one end to switch it on.
It's a bit thicker than an iPad as it has a DVD reader built into it but the layout is, by Apples actions, close enough to be evidence that they are being dishonest regarding the originality of their design. I could go on about the video doing the rounds of Job's telling how Apple shamelessly steal and the alleged unauthorised integration of a rejected app into iOS but I can't be bothered.
Innovators innovate. Only when you've truly run out of ideas do you need to start throwing flaky law suits at people.
Brown offers free laptops to deprived UK schoolkids
How is 'poor' defined?
Simple. If can't afford technology because you piss all your money away on fags, alcohol, the bookies etc., you are poor. This is because despite having been given the same education as most other people, coming from a family with a tradition for pissing your life away and not caring means you need a hug and a huge handout of public funds.
If your parents give a shit and they happen to have fallen into debt for whatever reason, negative equity, business debts etc., but still happen to have a gross income greater than some arbitary figure picked out of the air by Alistair Darling, you can go fuck yourself as despite the fact you have insufficient money to obtain a laptop for your self, you obviously don't deserve one.
NHS hospitals struggle to hold back the malware tide
And it's set to continue
" The NHS used to have some great IT staff. They worked directly for the NHS for quite low pay but loved the job. Then they were seconded to one of the outsourcers took even greater pay cuts, and had to cope with more paperwork and insane PHB.s Many quit for better paid jobs - such as street cleaning or even took jobs as porters in the same hospital!
Only the PFY "monkeys" are left trying to manage computer systems they officially have no control over but have responsibility for. If they try and fix the problems they get fired, so infections are inevitable and the IT staff get the blame.
"
Schools are next. Building schools for the future will bring the same standards to IT in schools and all because the country's run by gullible idiots who beleive everything their consultants tell them.