I had a support call yesterday that I'm filing under the catagory of "Helping a user work around the limitations of the software." Oops, breached the EULA there! A friend wanted to do a presentation at work but was unable to put the required file on a USB drive due to their being a site policy of no USB drives. Because of an IT security policy presumably, i.e. they don’t want a nasty virus. So, my friend had to work around this limitation by burning a CD. Not a very common task for...

Having read this I sent this comment to the Commisioner's Office of the New South Wales police. ...

I’ve noticed a worrying trend recently. People seem to be hell bent on ‘turning off’ prompts for the root password to perform various admin level tasks because it’s ‘annoying’. In a similar way, one of the main criticisms of Vista has been User Access Control and much has been written about turning that off. Indeed, Microsoft seem to have taken this criticism on board and allows users to easily turn UAC off! Great! Just because users are lazy and impatient, turn security off!

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I just read this article and it struck me that, in the last few paragraphs, there's an ever so subtle hint that there may be alternatives to suffering the constant barrage of malware and the resultant rounds of critical updates. It's not often you see that!

There's quite a bit being written at the moment about feminism and sexism in FOSS circles. Here's my thoughts and what may be an example of sexism in IT in general.

Firstly, some people (Men) who are generally highly regarded/respected/visible in FOSS have or have been accused of making misogynistic remarks. This may be true, or they may have been misunderstood either because they were making a weak attempt at a joke or they genuinely didn't mean the words that came out of their...