Tag Archives: Microsoft

UK government buys last-minute lifeline with £5.5m Windows XP support deal- The Inquirer

THE UK GOVERNMENT has bought a lifeline for Windows XP ahead of the software’s 8 April cut-off date, handing Microsoft £5.5m to continue supporting the operating system for an additional year.
The government’s £5.48m will ensure that Microsoft continues to provide critical and important security updates for Windows XP, Microsoft Office 2003 and Exchange 2003, and comes just five days ahead of the operating system’s End of Life.

UK government buys last-minute lifeline with £5.5m Windows XP support deal- The Inquirer.

Swiss City Mandates Use Of Open Source, Banishes Microsoft Officially

jamesgoode98's avatarLinux News

In an overwhelming majority vote, the city council in Bern, Switzerland has moved to implement all future infrastructure with open source technologies.  The “Party Motion”, as it is called in Switzerland, was submitted over a year ago, and has finally been realized.  Plans to move forward with open source design, strategy and implementation should begin immediately.

The party motion called for the following bullet-points.  These have been translated via Google Translate from German, so please consider that as you read them.

  • Development of an open source development strategy provides for that as a rule in all future procurements operating system and browser-independent solutions are chosen, will be announced in public tenders as product and vendor neutral and explicitly open source solutions are accepted with equivalent functional properties and similar cost structures, the open source version is preferred and specially developed software or on a contract code under an open source…

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‘Like driving a Ferrari at 20mph’: Why one region ditched Microsoft Office for LibreOffice

jamesgoode98's avatarLinux News

If you’re up for a visit to the beautiful Italian region of Umbria, better make sure your laptop is running some open source software — chances are you’ll feel more at home there.

This small area in the middle of the Boot, known for its centuries-old monasteries and for being the birthplace of St Francis of Assisi, is in fact quickly becoming a mecca of free software.

Thanks to a project called LibreUmbria, the biggest local government bodies are migrating to LibreOffice in what’s thought to be the most carefully-designed transition away from proprietary software ever undertaken. Though not as big as other international migration initiatives, the Umbrian project has been praised for its attention it pays to every aspect of the transition, not just the technical ones.

And if money is the primary motive, cultural and ethical reasons also play a prominent role. “Right now, along with Munich…

View original post 189 more words

Microsoft and Google lead coalition demanding limits on government surveillance

In October, the tech industry’s biggest companies petitioned congress to reform the US Government’s surveillance policies. Now, the firms are taking their pleas global. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo and AOL (Engadget’s parent company) have banded together to ask the world’s governments to reassess its intelligence practices. This time, however, the firms are presenting more than a strongly worded letter – they’ve laid out five core reform principals, detailed both on an official website and in full-page ads in national publications.
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Memory

Had a very eventful weekend, and my entire Sunday was taking up trying to figure out a weird symptom on my linux installation.

In the weeks leading up to today, I used to get strange behaviour from my Fedora box. The behaviour resulting in an error being detected by the ABRT tool, regarding a null reference. Sunday, my laptop conked out and refused to startup. I tried reinstalling Fedora, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, and even OpenMandriva — none of them could complete the installation. They either failed with error part way through, or hung completely.

I decided to try installing Windows XP over everything. That failed with an IRQ LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO blue screen. Then I tried Windows 7. That installation succeeded, and I started running updates. Then it blue screened me again. This time MEMORY_MANAGEMENT was the message. Hmmm. So, could it be that one of my memory chips was dodgy? That would account for why it was intermittent. I have 2x 2GB chips in my laptop, so I took both out and rebooted. No splash screen. Good. That’s expected.

Put in one of the chips. Booted, BIOS showed 2GB. Good, that’s OK.

Took it out and put in the other 2GB. No splash screen. Looks like that’s the dodgy one. I dug out my 1GB from when I got my laptop originally, and put that back into the other slot, so I get a 3GB installation. Checked boot. Splash screen displayed. Good. So I then ran a BIOS memory check, and all 3GB passed.

So then I decided, maybe I should try doing a restore, in case the dodgy memory was the cause of my failure to restore previously. It worked fine, so now I’m back up with my previous setup. :D

Cause: Faulty 2GB memory

LastPass Passwords Exposed for Some Internet Explorer Users

Internet Explorer, a malicious hacker’s dream. Am I the only one to think that as long as you have it installed, you’ve got a hole in your system?

LastPass Passwords Exposed for Some Internet Explorer Users.

Linux Training

In between my running, I am now going to start seeking profession certification in linux. It’ll give me something to get a leg up back into the software world, plus let me use something I care about, rather than the very frustrating (and annoying) Windows 7.

11 Hidden Windows Secrets and Tricks

Whilst primarily for Windows 7, there’s plenty of tricks hidden under the Aero hood.

11 Hidden Windows Secrets and Tricks.

Snippet: Chromium Snapshot Download (Cygwin) (Updated 3rd April)

A snippet to download and run the latest build of the Chromium browser. Meant for Cygwin/Windows but can be adapted if needed.

If you need to use a proxy, set your http_proxy and https_proxy variables before using this.

Now updated to kill running Chrome/Chromium processes before running the installer (in case of locking issues). Also created a Bitbucket repo here for this script

if [ -f ./mini_installer.exe ]; then
  echo "WARNING: Previous script run did not clean up"
  rm ./mini_installer.exe
fi

if [ ! -f prev ]; then
  echo "No previous build logged"
  echo "-1" >prev
fi

if [[ `wget -q http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Win/LAST_CHANGE -O-` == `cat prev` ]]; then
  echo "No build change (`wget -q http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Win/LAST_CHANGE -O-` = `cat prev`)"
  exit 1
else
  echo "New build (previous: `cat prev`, new: `wget -q http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Win/LAST_CHANGE -O-`)"
fi
echo Downloading http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/`wget -q http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Win/LAST_CHANGE -O-`/mini_installer.exe
wget http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Win/`wget -q http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Win/LAST_CHANGE -O-`/mini_installer.exe

if [[ `ps -W | grep chrome | wc -l` != 0 ]]; then
  echo "`ps -W | grep chrome | wc -l` Chrome Processes Running. Attempting to Kill"
  for a in `ps -W | grep chrome | awk '{ print $1}'`
    do
      echo Killing PID $a
      /bin/kill -f $a #This is the cygwin kill, not the bash kill
    done
else
  echo "No Chrome Processes Running"
fiecho "Running installer"
chmod +x ./mini_installer.exe
./mini_installer.exe
echo Done
wget -q http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Win/LAST_CHANGE -O prev
echo "New build recorded (`cat prev`)"
rm ./mini_installer.exe