Should we recreate the award given to Slartibartfast for Norway too?

You are correct that none of the articles provide any evidence that Labour will fragment into separate factions, I simply wanted to point out that the suggestion originated in the broadsheets. It is possible that some Labour MP's will defect to the Liberals if Labour lose at the next general election. Labour defections have happened in the past.

Indeed. With Gordon Brown appearing to be both unpopular and ineffective this is behaviour that all the UK newspapers are indulging in, not just the Daily Mail. I will concede that the Mail is one of the worst at this and should not be considered a quality news source.

Hyperbole, really?. I think I was being quite restrained. Comparing UK government spending levels to other nations is not useful. Others have different population levels, GDP and citizen expectations. What is useful is comparing spending to GDP, the good old fashioned can we afford it metric. Why not take a look at the ever amusing (and full of hyperbole) Buring our Money blog. The articles in the debt category should convey a sense of the debt disaster Labours spending has built up with far more eloquence than I have time for here. In case you were wondering where it all goes here is the handy Guardian (PDF) chart of government spending.

The government could have handled the bank bailouts considerably better. I really liked the good bank idea I read about in the FT. This idea would have left the UK with a much smaller debt problem and several profitable banks to sell off in a few years time.

We are going to have to disagree here, the fastest way back to a healthy economy is to cut tax, regulation and the public sector. The government is now starting to find it difficult to open new lines of credit. We may be close to the time when there are no buyers of government debt. If this happens expect the government to have to go cap in hand to the IMF. It is unlikely that Alistair Darlings spend our way out of the recession plan is going to be an option.

The best way to prevent boom and bust in the future economy as a whole is to prevent future government from increasing taxes and the money supply. We also need to prevent companies from becoming so large that their failure causes issues for the country as a whole.

Smaller government, less tax, less regulation. The old fashioned ways before the cult of Keynes really. Unleashing the banking industry only seemed to be a good thing for society as a whole on upside of the boom. The resulting bust is going to be less fun. It would be nice if lessons really were learned, but I doubt they will be. It would be nice if politicians were really accountable for their actions.

Please provide a link to the poll you refer to.

Thanks for the link. I will watch that when my home BT "business" broadband link decides to give me the bandwidth back.

I go further and view all press reports with scepticism.

Lighten up, hyperbole is fun! Even when reading Daily Mail articles you often find a nugget of truth which can lead on to other more interesting sources. If more than a couple of Labour MPs defect after an election defeat it could be a disaster for Labour. After all the Liberals do not have all the Labour cruft of union support and really left wing members. These possibilities are what make even the Mail article interesting...

Presumably you are referring to this Mail article which is in fact referring to a Daily Telegraph interview with Lord Ashdown the former leader of the Liberal Democrats? This has also been reported by the Times and the Independent, making your comment somewhat disingenuous.

According to the Telegraph article Lord Ashdown is suggesting just that. Of course no one knows just yet how many Labour MP's have discussed this yet, but a huge election defeat may make this happen.

The Labour government has been spending like a drunken sailor in port. This has been widely reported both in the UK and abroad. While the UK may have less government debt than other nations the next UK government is going to have to cut back on spending on a large scale.

Please provide a link to the poll you refer to.

I go further and view all press reports with scepticism.

I prefer Beyerdynamic music and broadcast headphones as they have replaceable leads which are widely available. They are also really comfortable.

Just as Slashdot is full of trolls and OT comments help forums often have people posting unhelpful comments. Just ignore them. Life is too short for arguing with idiots.

I find the Samba help forums are generally excellent if you take the time to ask a sensible question instead of just posting the first problem that comes up. Often the task of formulating a sensible question solves a problem without actually having to ask on the forums at all. I also generally find my query has already been answered in the forum and all I need to do is search.

The Samba documentation is an excellent resource and generally answers most of the questions you may have. Try starting with John Terpstra's Samba 3 by example which is a practical guide to implementing Samba 3. I don't know if John is working on a Samba 4 update to the book, but there is a WIKI, HowTO and a FAQ available. If you are risk averse you may not want to use Samba 4 in production just yet :)

I have foung openLDAP to be reliable, compatible and easy to use. Can you elaborate on why you think it is crap?

And the reasons are?

Nor is openLDAP just a store for Windows user names and passwords. I use an openLDAP server for Windows services as well as providing user configuration for other services such as sendmail. The great advantage of using FOSS is that you are free from vendor lock in and can consider non-proprietary alternatives in other areas of your network.

Nowhere in the article do I see a desire to use FOSS desktop clients. The submitter simply wants to replace AD server with a non MS LDAP based alternative.

This is otherwise known as vendor lock in. Some of use have tried very hard to break free of it to avoid being held to ransom by a vendor.

I have been running what you consider an unrealistic option for the best part of a decade. I have yet to be fired. Sirius the consultancy I recommended have a client list of blue chip companines, local govenment and schools. They are all running some form of FOSS backend. You might like to take a fresh look at FOSS, it really works in the real world.

In my previous post I forgot to mention that OGC/Becta are the government agency's responsible for technology in the UK educational environment. It is considerably easier for a UK school to use a Becta accredited supplier than any other supplier. It is an incredible achievement for Sirius to gain that accreditation as no other FOSS consultancy has managed to cut through government red tape thus far.

I think openLDAP should be one of the first products the submitter tries. In my experience it is reliable scalable and free of proprietary cruft. I have used it for years in a commercial network with Samba. OpenLDAP has allowed my company to drastically cut licensing costs, support costs and lengthen hardware lifecycles. As the submitter is UK based I would recommend they contact Sirius. Sirius are the consulting company I use and they are the only UK OGC/Becta accredited FOSS specialist. Sirius have considerable experience in the UK education market and in the submitters position they would be near the top of the list of people to call. Take a look at their client list to see the kind of pedigree they have.

<disclaimer>

I have worked closely with Mark Taylor the CEO of Sirius for a long time now. Please consider anything I say about them biased, contact them youself and make up your own mind about them.

</disclaimer>

I have been running an openLDAP/GNU Linux production system for the best part of a decade now. I use openLDAP and Samba on Debian. It is my experience that the LDAP implementations from commercial vendors are often proprietary, unreliable and usually do not play nicely with FOSS services that wish to use them. Unless you have a very good reason to use a proprietary implementation might I suggest trialling plain old slapd on one of the free distributions first. You will of course benefit from much lower licensing costs in the long run if this approach works for you.

Documentation is your friend here. When you buy an item of kit create an operating and maintenance manual for it. These can simply be a folder with the hardware manuals and maintenance agreements in them. I also include the emails between management and the IT admins discussing the equipment order rationale as well as the purchase order. Make sure your emails make clear what the kit does not do as well as what it should do in these emails. Ten minutes of printing, hole punching and putting it all into a folder can stop a management witch hunt dead in its tracks for years to come. This is especially true if features have been cut due to management led budget constraints. Adding the relevant CD's/DVD's and build notes can make your life much easier in the future as a bonus.