Ok its 2:44 am, and I'm just back from my birthday bash but why do people get hung up about Digiblue?
Its a product designed and engineered for a standalone PC.
It does what is say on the packet very well - its an excellent piece of software.
It is not designed to be deployed automatically over a network.
It doesn't pretend that it should.
Leave it alone
regards
Simon
Don't know about you simon but most of the software I have running on my network didn't come in a network version. Some educational software houses care that the majority of schools want to run their applications across a network and go out of their way to help (Sherston, 2Simple - the latter even produce CC3 msis, how helpful is that!?).
No-one has accused db of claiming to be anything other than a standalone piece of software. I agree the software is very good. It's precisely because the software is well suited to the Primary environment that teachers want to use it and ICT coordinators want to be able to install it quickly and easily on a variety of workstations - and that's where the complaint comes in: it is a total nightmare, has been for years, and db have to my knowledge been of no real help to anyone, despite the thousands of mails they must have received asking for help.
I refuse to run around 50 or 60 machines (or have my tech do it) installing drivers for lovely little cameras that never get used as a result.
ok thenOriginally Posted by ITWombat
Nelson Thorne is utter crap because it doesn't work unless you remove the Flash/IE security and it almost lost me my job as i didn't get it working straight away like all the other software I was presented with.
as for digital blue. why do you need it on more than 1 machine per classroom of the dept using it?
Dance eJay
- Frustrated by this on top of everything else because our Music Dept went it alone and bought 15 standalone copies of this, when the network version is cheaper!
- Very poorly written piece of software...
Uses the windows temp folder to run the program, so if like us, you restrict that to stop kids downloading games using IE and runing them from it, eJay doesn't work.
- Crashes hard and often - Updates actually make this worse.
- Wont play well with Daemon Tools
[This list would be better wikified so that anyone could ammend these descriptions, I know pople will have more complaints about this piece of software!]
I agree with what becktonboy said. Digiblue are determined that there will be no way to deploy it over a network... they are quite happy to leave it that way. But why? I'm sure their biggest customer base is schools, who incidently, tend to run computer networks often with way too many clients to be running around the school installing it on each one manually.Ok its 2:44 am, and I'm just back from my birthday bash but why do people get hung up about Digiblue?
Its a product designed and engineered for a standalone PC.
It does what is say on the packet very well - its an excellent piece of software.
It is not designed to be deployed automatically over a network.
It doesn't pretend that it should.
Leave it alone
regards
Simon
Well in my case, primary schools don't really work like that AND I have to do what I have been asked to do.
In my case, in one school I had to install the software on every teacher laptop (probably around 20+) and on all 30 machines in the ICT suite and then on all 24 computers in the classrooms. In the end I managed to persuade them to drop the classroom PCs (apart from a select few) and I was creating a new image for the ICT Suite PCs, so no trouble there so that just left the laptops.
That's just pointless, will all of those people even use DB on those machines? And why the hell do primary school teachers need laptops?
SpeedStep II.
Horrid piece of software for CNC embroidary. It never liked to behave properly and required one of those rediculous license dongle things being plugged into the appropriate machine via RS232 serial port...and it was a bugger to get working in a stable state from the server.
Brother PE-Design is MUCH MUCH better.
DT Department's choice...nothing to do with me lol.
I had nothign to do with software purchasing anyway....*student tech*
I think they had the machine to go with it or something like that anyway.
you can network this i think, its a pain, but you can, give the tech guys a phone.TextEase Studio CT gets my vote... one PC at a time
i agree about thornes nelson!
I have noticed something that is key to all of this. We are basing our description of 'bad software' on it being a pain to install or update ... not about how much hand holding is needed with staff or students to use it, or whether it is actually any good when they get round to using it.
Just something to think about.
That's a very good point, but unfortunately without knowledge in the field the software is for (or at least the curriculum), it would be difficult to know whether the software is substantial.
Yeah. Wether it's good or not to use isn't my concern - ie i'm not involved in teaching the kids how to use it. We only get told about the problems.
If it crashes a lot, doesn't do what it says on the tin, or needs techs to go show teachers how to use it, then we know.
I know that subject specific knowledge is need to say whether it is useful (and some here do have that knowledge) but talking about how much hand holding is needed is something we can comment on ... after all ... this needs to be factored into the TCO.
Probably not, but it is what I was asked to do.
They plan their lessons on their laptops at home. In my schools, they sometimes also use their laptops for their interactive whiteboards. Why does a secondary school teacher need a laptop any more then a primary school teacher?
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
