mikes

So it seems this new version does run better on machines with lower amounts of RAM - due to prices etc I bought 8GB laptops hoping RAM might go down and I can buy some DIMMS later; have had some complaints from staff (with 50 tabs open) of poor performance on 8GB 25h2. So good to hear this version helps that. It goes to show how little effort MS has made so far to make a well crafted, usable OS when they had to wait for a global war to work on it, 8GB of RAM being "small" when NT4 did not that much less on almost 1000 times less. But now hopefully with this RAM crisis we will see lean, well optimised software again. not too much notable in this version though I did like how in 25H2 they started adding a little bit of colour back into the UI e.g. the battery icon is now green/orange/red so you notice it a bit more. Why they ever got rid of this (one of those dumb UI fads we see here and there like the skeuomorphoclasm nonsense we had before)

I had a lenovo unit smashed in transit back to us from the repair depot; LCD smashed. They said because it had been accepted at reception too bad for us. So next time the driver can wait until I am ready to come to reception and open and check out the unit. I think companies have now realised that the law is kind of more of a suggestion nowadays and they can do what they want, they will push things as far as they go until they get some pushback from the law. And they have realised they actually get very little pushback.

yeah we had those in our school too! Including the print thing we had that kind of worked sometimes. In practice they were just too awkward to use because you could only see 2 lines of text at a time. Worse even than paper because you can't quickly scan up and down. The optimist in me would see education like those 1960's retrofuture videos; the kid in his bedroom has a big computer console which he answers questions, submits homework etc. With video chat to classmates and a teacher if they want. Then 2 days a week they go in school for a couple hours more for socialisation and catching up. But this required a stay at home parent so we have the technology for this not the society. The realist will be the 40 kids will be crammed in a room being taught by a corporate AI system while an LSA type keep guard. Parent can pay £10 an hour for additional hours before and after upto 6pm if they have to work. And it will be like a pharmacy only 1 registered teacher needs to be on site at any 1 time.

marvin the paranoid android AI

yeah every time I hear the worlds "Alpha", "High Value", it conjures up the thought of a certain type of person... If this is some online course kids are made to complete it'll be the same old, 1 or 2 bright kids figure it out and show the others all the answers. We have been doing a few remote MS Teams due to staffing issues (the only teacher the school could find works at a nearby school so she does an MS teams lesson for our pupils while being on site at the other school, crazy) - the kids don't really like it. Problems are; it is difficult for the remote teacher to see and react to all the remote pupils in the class. If a student needs help they have to shout it across the classroom into the mic then the teacher broadcasts the loud response over the speakers. You also need a teacher in the room to get it set up. And these are high level students willing to learn imagine a class of bottom set year 9's. This is with a local human teacher who has met the kids in person. I can't imagine current AI being anywhere near as good. What this will be is some extra curricular homework for high income students in private schools; they already have extra curricular music, math tutors after school anyway.

Any good 75" or 85" TV's I wonder I have a 55" one at the moment but my eyesight isn't the best esp. for playing RTS and picking out unit types.

Yeah our LEA (not swansea) is similar, as far as they are concerned each comp does its own thing. We have entered into a dialog with our LEA but I think they are only a bit more experienced with the Hwb than I am (and I am not sure if the Hwb give them that much support). If the Hwb really want schools to move over there should be a pre-set up Intune environment with all policies already set (at the moment if a pupil logs into one of my Hwb machines they can install Roblox if they want), groups made, and a selection of education apps pre made for allocation Can't see our LEA having 1 print server for the whole authority? That sounds like a nightmare to me, for them to manage. They would have to get a print contract for the entire county plus get all schools to agree with it ?? The whole point of moving Hwb is serverless but with Papercut I'll need to keep our old domain running. But at least if our SAN fails then we will only lose printing. And also local shares because GameMaker will not run on OneDrive so I'll need a file share for that.

Here it is, unfortunately it goes into very basic detail what was involved. From a school in Powys. Unfortunately it doesn't list any issues or snags they came across, which seems par for the course IME. I will hear "it all went well, no problems at all, system is much better". But when I go to see it in person I'll often see kludges, issues, staff dissatisfaction, stuff like that. Reading this document it seems they actually have their old domain still in use for papercut, users have to authenticate against that. There's probably more not mentioned too. I have done some more experimenting; an issue I keep coming across is the reliability. Yesterday and the day before; the functionality to upload computer hashes was broken for EU intune (which allows you to remote build computers), but there is no error message or notification about it. It just silently fails. So I spend a good 5+ hours trying over and over various things to get a hash uploaded until I figure it's an MS issue. Now today I am configuring groups but the settings I chose before are not there, I am getting an error about group settings being unable to load. So I guess I can't experiment with student computer group settings until it suddenly starts to work again? I was getting messages about server requests being throttled so I wonder if they haven't set up routing or IP addresses properly? Onto the positives I have stations hwb users can log into, with Office and Adobe CC installed; Impero works minus the browser plugins, I did get printers showing up using Papercuts cloud script thing, (not the clone tool) but it only worked for the user I ran the script on not for all users of the device. But I have 9 or so months to work on it so there is time yet. Hwb Onboarding Case Study (Report)V1.pdf

We use both here (secondary school LA). Staff can choose to use MS or Google, most still use our legacy on premises MS system (office and file shares), our biggest cloud platform is Google as every staff member uses it for Classroom. Not many staff use the MS cloud platform. Though we are moving over to the Welsh govt Hwb soon, they also offer both so really it is their choice not mine. Both are closed source proprietary platforms so I'm really not that bothered by the choice. I'd have more enthusiasm if we were moving over to an open source solution, perhaps UK or even EU wide (but I'd also like to be an officer onboard a starship so we know how likely both will be!) But Google I think abstracts things a bit too much e.g. it doesn't show where a file is stored. You could be working on a big document unknowingly to you, it was created by a user who has now left, shared to you, and you are editing a file that is actually on their users' documents. It's very easy to end up with these situations on the Google platform

yeah they don't care they just want me here to fix things. Will have to look into any legal requirement of them to offer training but I don't think any exists. Did the school have to pay the £16,000 ?

yeah if software was well written, perhaps a smart fridge wouldn't be so bad. But then this is more points of failure. I want a fridge that will last 10, 20 years. OK it might break due to a compressor, or just getting so old it's kind of manky. But having a fridge fail (and all your food spoil) due to a firmware update, nah that ain't it. And again with my point above, sometimes it is hard not to think that some of these software companies intentionally sabotage their older products as a way to force users to have to pay for the latest version. Or if not intentionally, they are happy to "look the other way" if the servers that these old products rely on, aren't maintained. So having a fridge that a big company can remotely mess with at any time they want, again that isn't for me. Especially now big companies have realised that Governments really don't care what shady things corps do nowadays and are perfectly willing to let them do it. Is this really worth having just to get a fridge that what, notifies you when your food is coming out of date? Do these fridges even do that? (unless you laboriously scan in every single item) Give me a 15 year warranty and I'll consider it

If this goes the way modern enterprise software works, affected customers will have to "purchase an upgrade to the latest version, or purchase a subscription to FridgeCare Monthly to keep your Fridge up to date". More than once have I had perpetually licensed software break and the only solution is to buy a 1 year license for the latest version !

Must you travel / have time off to do it? It would interest me but needing to travel/have time off would be a no go for me at this school (I doubt they'd be willing to give me the time off)

They are allowing plug in solar kits now (for those of us without our own homes), but I'm not sure if they are yet worth their price (£600+ for 200W). If these companies can use any excuse to ream us they will. So will this result in a lower standard of living where people have to make their own energy/heat. My friend lives rural and has a log burner in his house but that wouldn't really work in the average town/city suburb. Heat for free provided you get the wood but it doesn't really heat that well unless you sit by it.

Cached credentials still work so if they are used by the same person you won't see it yet. Was thinking of deploying this the other day but my policy still holds, I'll never deploy a Windows update until at least 2 weeks have passed.