The council I used to work for had access to identify the owners of abandoned cars. We didn't have access to identify fly-tippers or people who might be disposing of trade waste at household sites which I understood would have made that job easier or indeed possible so some of the violations could have been through this kind of temptation or ignorance about the limitations.

Technically it was quite a secure system - access was done from a private, locked room via a dedicated ISDN line whose number was registered with them and then several levels of authentication by users who had had to sign an agreement. They were very strict about the paperwork being up to date so I can believe the comments in the article about some having lost their access temporarily due to not getting the renewal forms back in time.

In the UK there's been a growing number of businesses doing Black Friday sales, either by name or coincidentally on the same date. It's all very crass as Thanksgiving isn't celebrated here - yet anyway.

It would be worth thinking about how secure you need your code to be before you entrust it to a 3rd party. The services should be secure but it is an additional risk.

What I have in mind here is not so much the actual code but hard coded passwords or even data that might have found its way in amongst the code.

If it hasn't been mentioned elsewhere you can use SVN without a server but with a repository created on a shared file share which might be an option and at least if all the data is staying on the same share you can't be making things less secure than they are now.

A SharePoint versioned document library handles this quite well for Word documents and can also be used as a basic version control system for other things if you can't install additional software.

Kaspersky are surprisingly uncompetitive when it comes to selling their own products, including via in-application upgrade 'offers'.

If you're otherwise happy with the product have a look on Amazon instead. I do this and pay less than £20 for a 3-user licence each year.

Hopefully this isn't the future of the NHS...

The problem with a lot of file duplication tools is that they only consider files individually and not their location or the type of file. Often we have a lot of rules about what we'd like to keep and delete - such as keeping an mp3 in an album folder but deleting the one from the 'random mp3s' folder, or always keeping duplicate DLL files to avoid breaking backups of certain programs.

With a large and varied enough collection of files it would take more time to automate that than you would want to spend. There are a couple of options though:

You could get some software to replace duplicate files with hard links. This will save you space but not make things any neater - DupeMerge looks like it would do it on NTFS but I haven't tried it myself.

Another alternative would be to move your data to a file system that has built in de-duplication such as ZFS and let that handle everything.

Finally when I was looking at this myself what I found was that the problem was not individual duplicate files but that certain trees of files occurred identically in multiple places (adhoc backups of systems were a big culprit here). What you could do with but which I couldn't find and didn't get round to finishing writing was something that would CRC not individual files but entire trees of files/folders and report back the matches. If something does already exist to do that I'd be quite interested myself.

I'm with El Reg on this one...

Silicon Roundabout

I'd suggest it's more likely that it's because Apple has an interest in the continued and increased use of a device (through itunes, the app store, search revenues etc.) so the updates make sense.

And to give you a reason why I think they should plan for it: Windows XP SP1 is what they not only use on their own systems but also set as a requirement for developers to use with their SDK's (together with some custom packages and Visual Studio 6).

From my experience this is because the changes to DCOM security in SP2 break how they've written their applications. You can get it to work by fiddling in dcomcnfg yourself but this didn't seem to be something the Siemens guys had tried.

It's only temporary until you learn to make it say to give you a pay increase...

This sounds very similar to the cattle passport system that was setup in the UK after the BSE outbreak, if taken a stage further. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Cattle_Movement_Service/

Joel has a interesting article on this.

PowerShell is nice but it's a single purpose tool. Arguably this is a good thing but as you can do the same things with Python (including working with WMI etc.) I prefer to use that instead.

Since Rob Grant ceased to be involved with the writing (after series 6) the quality of the episodes has been generally poor. As it's now been over 10 years since the series was on (Dave specials excluded) they would likely have to assume viewers weren't familiar with the characters and do a lot of work setting up their personas which might bore fans of the existing episodes. The writers may also struggle to come up with anything new to write about after 8 series as they can't cover "relationship humour" without adding a woman and breaking the "blokes in spaaaaaaaace" thing.

I also think they'd need a new Cat, unfortunately Danny John-Jules is getting a bit too old now to be convincing in the "Cool" role.