Soulfish

When I started last year all PCs had been self-built. None of them had windows OEM licenses (and so the select upgrade licenses weren't valid!) and cheap components were used. These cheap components have caused us real problems - we run at about a 20% failure rate and with 1yr warranties on most of the components everything is out of warranty. Given the time to build everything, the support costs and the windows licensing costs it;s just cheaper and easier for us to buy pre-built dell/HP machines.

I'd be interested in knowing more about this project as well

Is it actually Ricoh and not just a company masquerading as Ricoh? I'm quite surprised that they'd be mass mailing out about ink/toner - do they even sell direct? As a huge multi-national company it just doesn't seem correct to me? Seems more likely that someone is trying to play off the Ricoh name to get a sale?

Mainly because of the number of times MLS have to remote in to fix things for us . Unfortunately our librarian is very very picky and since we moved to Eclipse.net in September we've had no end of hassle (not MLS's fault I might add!) with Eclipse.net not working as she expected it would. MLS have been great with trying to fix the problems she's had, and implement the functionality she wants but it means every now and then they remote in and do things to the database for us. Easier to just keep it all on one VM so they can do their bits on the one server

I have one under my desk .

Mainly the image colour/quality - but for me it looks as good as our other new projectors.

We have two. I quite like them - I know rh91uk (my assistant) doesn't though

Pro5 is the contract we're on. Interestingly I've managed to end up with two premier accounts (having changed account managers twice), and with one account we get charged £25/item for delivery, the other delivery is free! Other than that the pricing is the same for both accounts - I do occasionally check

Well I phoned up the Dell Secondary Education Sales team (01344 373 716) and asked for one. Of course it took me a while to actually get that number, and I've just found out that my account manager left a few weeks ago but wasn't told until I went to ask where an order was

If your netapp pricing came in like that I can't wait to see ours in a few months time once we tender for our new storage system

Our Dell Direct account manager seems impossible to get hold of since they moved them all to Glasgow

I'd call that a load of crap to be honest. At some point they have to match the print to the student, meaning that somewhere there is a link between the student and their print.

All fingerprint systems "just" maps key points from the fingerprint. This doesn't mean that you can't map backwards, and as has been shown above has already been done. As has also been pointed out you can still take the data and the algorithm and use both to match an existing fingerprint to a person. There are huge privacy implications from storing any form of fingerprint data - processed or not. It's no different in reality to "just" storing a password hash rather than the password in plain text. Just because it's hashed/encrypted doesn't mean it can't be broken.

Hoping we get the OK to get some blackberrys - then I'll finally get the chance to install BES Express!

A child today, but tomorrow who's to say they won't have access to lots of lovely classified material with a fingerprint being one of the factors of authentication that's used? In that sort of case being able to reconstruct a fingerprint from previously held data could be very valuable. From speaking to the data protection officer at our council the recommendation is that you have to have hard copy signed permission slips from both the parent and child to be able to take a childs fingerprint. If either the parent of child refuses permission then you can't take a fingerprint. If the slip isn't returned then you can't take a fingerprint. The permission has to be explicit from both parties. It was also recommended that to be supersafe that permission be sought each and every year the child was at the school. Personally I'm against the use of any form of biometric being used as identification/verification within this sort of environment. At the end of the day a biometric isn't something that you can (easily!) change. If you're giving it up there should be a very good reason for giving it up, and being able to purchase lunch a little quicker/easier isn't one of them.

I'm just glad that we're getting most/all of it redone!

Labelling of network ports? What's that? Yes our network cabling really is that shoddy. For a number of rooms I have no idea which cab the cables run to, and it isn't helped by the fact that when their is numbering of ports it doesn't match up to patch panel numbers (in any cab!). Hopefully replacing all cabling this summer (you might have guessed from the numbering that it's been installed shoddily) so we'll be looking to have everything labelled Cab/Patch Panel/Port Number i.e. A/01/12

Ok ok - it may not be great for image quality, however switching it off and then on should work

That is quite expensive. I know we're paying around 10k for 30mbit up/down. Unfortunately I don't know of any official documents that spells out your obligations.

I've used various laptop chargers over the years with just a UK -> US converter and they've always been fine. But as you say - better to check!

You have to have suitable filtering. This is usually provided by your RBN, and/or running your own inhouse filtering (smoothwall for example). How much are you paying for what speed?

+1 most (and typically all tier 1 vendors) computer power supplies should be 100-240v auto switching capable. Should just need to either use a UK -> US plug adaptor or as FN-GM says get a US flex plug

Out of interest what was your use case, and why didn't Xirrus work? We're considering Ruckus and Xirrus (amongst others) so would be good to know what problems you found with Xirrus

Looking good

Google scholar has been around for a while now - great site that got me through my dissertation Just wish I still had an Athens login so I could read some of the journal articles