There are alternatives if you look

Most users never take advantage of all the balls and Whistles of Full Blown Office so you are paying needlessly. there are robust Exchnage replacements such as Zarafa http://www.zarafa.com/ but as mentioned peeps are too scared to dare to think of a non M$ world. Come on IT Manglers think out of the box.

OXFORD .. no service

although if I cover my phone with tin foil and press send just as I throw it up in the air I can get some strange looks

FREE for all though?

PAF is useless and not accurate - all of the government address database is maintained and checked by councils you you have paid for the integrety with your council tax. So it should be free yeah?? arse my

your avin a larf

My kindle crashes regular as clockwork when using the browser function. It is a fabulous ebook but as a web interface or even games interface it is sadly lacking.

Reality Check

err lets not forget how we got into this mess ...it wasn't the public sector!! Also don't go on about slacking government workers I admit to have come over some of them in my 20 years working with Governments (local and central) but come across just as much if not more over paid and under skilled private sector consultants and had to clear up their messes.

The private sector is not better than public sector, there's good and bad in both wake up and smell the shit

oh well no Android for me

Just the right to install what I want on the phone I bought with MY money!

what a safe and sterile world we would have if these corporate nob-odies got their way

Disgusting!

I pay nothing for this service and rely on it to provide mindless pointless disinformation.

great savings guys

and how is all this going to be paid for?? diverting money away from services to make it easier for all our uni friends to get a slice of the gravy train

get real... all this data is accessible via FOI (except all the central gov stuff) this is going to cost thousands to manage.

this comes from MP's who wouldn't publish their own expenses without blanking out.

don't know her and don't want to

you are nobody and trying to become somebody.

do the world a favour and go play on facebook

ohh... I hear she intends to sue those damn nigerians who haven't sent her money back!

OSS can work but it requires effort

and in my experience most ICT departments cannot be arsed to migrate away from the likes of windows or office even though usage does not warrant the constant upgrade path.

In one site we audited the use of office and found only 40% of users used word within 1 month and apart from some prolific excel users the remaining software was unused. One could also argue that those using the software rarely got close to the potential supplied by the package. I have no beef with Microsoft (other than they are greedy and unimaginative) but their software can be very functional. most users never use that function yet are happy to re-buy the product every few years,

I have used Open Office for over 6 years for tender documents, advanced budgeting, presentations etc and all have been without issue. How many companies have support contracts for MS Office and if they spent some time getting use to alternative they may be surprised. Lets face a lot of SANs and old VMWARE all use *nix platforms!

The twits can't twitter then

if it is illegal to tweet anything that will be seen as "grossly offensive, indecent, obscene, menacing, annoying, inconveniencing or causing needless anxiety" then pretty much anything an MP or other politician says falls foul of this!!

Makes a change then given all the freedoms signed away by the last government....

who is the gmail user

I am not going to tell them,.,,,oops

Long term commitment?

why would I buy a phone from a company that brought out Axim handhelds and dropped them. I suspect Dell will try this and if doesn't make them a packet quietly discontinue them leaving a bunch of users with unsupported outdated expensive MP3 player.

The iphone may be the 80's Red Sports Car signifies something of the decade but at least they invest in it (and backwardly for old generation users) This is one for the must avoids

Windows 7 key

Why would I want one I use linux???

Just goes to show..

No matter how clever you think you are Web Programmers no SH@t about security!

HP drops Linux

And we dropped HP!!

Where now?

With Windows 3 MS had a new product (let's not get into the fight as to where the ideas came from) and as with Windows 95 and XP real improvement in ease of use and access to a miriad of devices. Where do you go as Vista basically offered nothing more than pretty windows and slowing your investment requiring you to upgrade for little real prodcutivity return. What are they going to do in Windows 7 that will make those who didn't upgrade to Vista cough up?

MS has clung on to the idea that PC's will be around for a while but they won't and as previously mentioned the new markets are a struggle. They lack real innovation (other than buying in someone elses ideas) and this is showing. Cutting on R&D will further impeded on their ability to come up with new technologies. Bill G one said in 100 years MS will no longer exist, I am sure he is right. The current financial crisis has made people question the value of their investments in new PC's and Windows Vista. The increased sale in Netbooks running Linux and XP has shown how out of touch and behind they are given that XP should not be available.

They were late on the Internet, Late on Virtualisation they have become a catch up Corporation and now the moneys drying up this will get harder and harder. I am not an MS basher but I see less and less VFM (Value From Microsoft)

of course the important data was encrypted and backed up

start as you mean to go on!!

I would have shot it

It's a sheep! I think running it down with a mudless 4x$ would have been a tad more painful. We have people being tortured and murdered, stabbed and shot and all we give a monkeys about is a fluffy sheep we temporarily spark. Get a life!!

God I am turning onto Clarkson!

Using you phone whilst driving is a crime

all we need now is a copper on the street to nick you when you do. ah... here lies the flaw in our plan!

Asus on self destruct

Someone stick a pin in the dilbert at Asus who is trying to make the eeepc less and less like a usable mini notebook! add a useless battery giving you 1½ hours, stick in a slow energy hungry crashable hard drive and you have just exactly what you didn't want to buy. They will be badging them up as sports cars and overcharging for poor laptops next! ...ooops

oops

perhaps Google can publish the car crashes as nerds take a picture of a car with a 1930's camera stuck on top. DON'T USE YOUR PHONE WHEN DRIVING OR YOU WILL BE PROSECUTED!!

when fat chance of that unless you speed past a camera!

Responsible Disclosure?

Yeah right here you go - I have identified a flaw in security access to a type of entry system based on RFID cards. I go to the supplier who slaps a court gagging order on me and sues me to death to keep it quiet, they fix it (eventually) and no-one is the wiser. That is what will happen, all that has happened here is the notice was so short they couldn't react without publicly displaying their panic.

If Companies release insecure products or don't test them (including ongoing) then the "public" in the guise of MIT, Hackers, whomever will. Don't get a girly toot when they then publish a flaw you can't be arsed to fix in advance!

Cake and eat it pops to mind. If you are in the security business then you must be secure!

Blame Microsoft they introduced the strategy of public beta testing of their products! you break it we fix it! ...every Wednesday (ish)

Impossible Dream

You ask for the impossible and they can't deliver it what is the surprise here? Most of the other players AQA et all won't touch it with a barge pole because they new it couldn't be done. The first thing the Govt needs to do for education is to get their meddling sticky fingers off and leave it to the people who know what they are talking about. Targets is not the way but reality doesn't win you votes!

rights or wrongs?

Am I the only one wondering if the Country is sleeping through further erosion of our rights in the name of "Security" ???

Government Control in the name of the terrible acts of few have done more to reduce our democracy than any Facist Leader would have hoped. I despair at the ingnorance of our society and wonder when I shall get a call for daring to think for myself!

The very core of our justice system "innocent until proven guilty" fades with every hacker and book that has to prove they are not evil or terrorists. I shall get rid of all my cutlery as that scould be used to take over a plane much as it was in 911 oh and my shoes.

Sorry no Sale

This whole farce has left such a bad taste in my mouth. I take some solace in the fact that I procure over £50k's worth of laptops each year and this year I will not buy any ASUS. The measure of a good company is how is manages failure. In this case Asus have treated paying customers with contempt and as such have lost my business.

Er... nothing new here move along

The security of RFID and in particular commercial offerings (and warnings) have been around for some time. Some individuals have raised the issues and the companies concerned (you know who you are!) have gone out of their way to discredit and poo poo the evidence. It is now coming home to roost and full disclosure is the only way.

Security by obscurity has been shown to fail.

Henry and your WEP

How do you know nobody has hacked your network??

Feedback to Asus

I love my 900 it's great ( with eeeXubuntu) but I too was shafted with a useless 4400 battery. I have complained to Asus who are reviewing the possibility of replacing them. Come on Register get behind this and make them do the right thing and give me a laptop that lasts longer than a Xmas episode of Eastenders!!!!!

Somewhere.....

In whitehall there is a monkey and a typewriter with a queue of cabinets members lining up for the next big policy.

This just goes further to show how out of touch with reality our Government is.

When you say ship?

As it is pretty impossible to get the Asus eepc without having to wait 6 months it is likely if you want one of these by the time you get it Acer will be on the market. Asus have been unable to keep up with the limited demand of the 700/701, they should stick to cheap motherboards.

Vote with your feet

As an organisation we have many broadband circuits with BT which we will be migrating away from them over the next few months directly as a result of this action and loss of trust.

The supplier we move to will provide a written undertaking not to do this type of interception without prior permission.

Public Sector

Can we stop using the term public sector as it suggests Local Councils are as good as loosing vast sums of money on ICT Projects as Central Government when in fact most ( except Birmingham) see reasonable returns on their investments and actually benefit Council Tax payers.

Government Intelligence

"According to court papers, federal agents investigating the men were tipped off by a seller of the counterfeit goods in China." what they couldn't tell the kit was fake?

An open and shut case

arf arf

Self Service

seeing as this guy has clearly got as many brain cells as pints he had drunk I would have let him take himself out of the gene pool.

irony is womens work

if they don't write the scripts and BBC cut all the funding for anything worth watching we will have a world of **** TV which gets over the DRM issue. Who want's to steal that?

ahh.. my plans falls at the first hurdle it is ALREADY **** !!!!

Identity Tax

How are we going to pay for this? probably with Private partnerships sharing data for a fee... or will they just cross reference data from Facebook?

This is a massively expensive system which nobody (publically) will know the cost of. We are more at threat from a mugging than a terrorist bombing but who cares this gives us control.

When you are lying in the street, mugged and waiting for an ambulance to be sent from the centralised hospital 30 miles away sleep ( or die) knowing that they will positively identify you so they can tax you inheitance!