mikes

Nice, it only took them 20 years.

Is this still worth installing as of May 2016? I notice that all of the required fixes (the main one and the two hotfixes, 2732673 and 2728738 ) are now in the WSUS catalog making it easy to import at least I would have thought that MS would have fixed these issues in mainline Windows Update by now?

I can't believe people are fine with MS arbitrarily upgrading people's OS's... we've all seen the havoc it caused with that weather station video, the gamer streaming videos... I also can't believe that people use Microsoft software for important things such as TV weather reports. My advice to inexperienced users at work is to keep in mind that you cannot rely on Microsoft software for anything important. Expect it to go wrong.

Hi I have had a few questions from my staff about the new Google User Agreement they need to abide by - it pops up a big chunk of Google Legaleze and says you must agree to this in order to continue using Google services. A few staff have phoned up refusing to agree to it, they say we should have agreed as a school. Has anyone else seen this? is there a cookie or something that can be set? at the moment I have said the users can decline if they no longer wish to use Youtube/Google etc, it is up to them.

what does this "signed their life's away" mean exactly? signed the form allowing HTTPS snooping? we allow facebook for all staff for CP but ban facebook for kids. staff are pretty much open apart from pr0n, piratebay, online gambling. students we ban facebook, twatter, all these anonchat sites; youtube is allowed; teachers actively use it as a teaching aid in computer rooms. all the ISIS nasheeds etc are in arabic and we don't have a single muslim student here (rural school in the boonies).. I know it is no excuse for no extremism filter but I will wait until they actually work before I implement one. English filters seem to make no sense as surely they can set the language to arabic and type in arabic? الشهادة

We are thinking about this too, let us know if you come up with a solution. Ours is this - a lot of stuff is cloud - it is Office 365 and Google Apps (mixed across depts) - however our county broadband is less than reliable. Our Country broadband is our primary and only provider. We wished to swap over to BT infinity and ditch the council entirely (due to budget) but apparently our money for the LEA internet is budgeted strictly for the Internet - so we will have to pay again for a BT infinity line, so essentially we will be paying twice. I thought (and hoped) that the money we paid for our LEA internet was for JANET external access only - we could stop paying that, keep our internal LEA link, and go with a BT infinity dual line in. but we are being told - get rid of LEA internet and we will not keep the money that paid for it. Is this normal? Our council are dead against us moving away from them; you would think they would prefer it as it is less work for them? I would rather keep it in house but our IT/DT staff are very cloud enthusiastic so I don't mind letting them have a punt with it, see how it pans out. If the LEA link goes down for a few days they can send the students home and have them work from there

won't they be searching for arabic terms not english terms? I have watched Jihadology videos and listened to ISIS nasheeds so I am expecting a knock on the door very soon... scary stuff (I am a white british athiest who likes to get my news from the source rather than the MSM)

Hi just a quick question on which DNS domain registrars people use - our LEA used to host our domain name (ourschool.org.uk) - so if we needed a subdomain we just mailed them and hoped for the best - but Nominet have now said our LEA can no longer manage DNS records apparently, so we will have to move ours over to a private provider. We were thinking Godaddy - £7.50 a year - but I wasn't sure how many subdomains it allows (or even about the entire process tbh) I was wondering what other schools do with their external DNS?

did you fix this issue? I am testing windows 10 and office 2016 on my office desktop, I have this same missing profile info when trying to use Outlook 2016 to connect to my Exchange 2010 mailbox. We don't have autodiscover configured but have never needed it and have never had any problems with e-mail access before, both internally and externally using activesync. My experience of the new software has on the whole been negative. Why can't MS finish software before they release it?

Maybe my comment here was a bit out of order. My car just broke down and I had no phone, so I ran/jogged/wheezed 7 miles home. Never felt so ill in my life. The cold air in the lungs.... I Won't be giving any largies any grief about not doing any exercise now. Perhaps sitting on your backside eating jaffa cakes and drinking cola doesn't do you any good even if you only weigh 9 stone It took me I'd say an hour and a half, but I stopped for rests and to go to a corner shop, so it is cheating really. And do you know what? I still got home quicker than what it would have taken me on the busses round here.

tempted to do a CBT mate. a few of my mates are bikers. One thing it could be a nice little summer ridearound, another, it could be an emergency form of transport that won't end up getting me stuck on a train to Swansea

Luckily my friend had a decent 2005 Skoda Fabia 1.2 for sale for £1500. OK so the ladies won't get charmed by it but if I wanted something to attract girls I'd buy a nose job. The bus timetables are a nightmare. Some of the buses have the same number but a different colour code, but nowhere does it explain the colour code! - so, if I get on the 96 to Cardiff, is it going to take me past the route I want to go, Barry Hospital, or is it going to go in the opposite direction towards Cardiff Centre! I ended up saying "this is just a joke" and ran home. I feel now why the police feel so bad taking driving licenses away from OAPs who are obvious past driving. Taking heavy shopping on those buses must be a nightmare. I live in Barry and my work is in Llantwit Major - it is an narrow NSL A road the whole way there, cycling the 10 miles of it with 60mph lorries and school buses going by (as if they stick to 50), don't fancy my chances with that! Taking public transport to work for me adds an additional 2 hours travel time to my day. I actually have a free travel card provided by the NHS (I had some neurological issues that are cleared up now with meds) - the card still lasts until 2020 - but I still prefer to pay to drive.

yeah I'll hire a taxi. never hired one before in my life, being so used to having a car. about time i woke up to the real world. cheers

Hi, say you have a job in a rural location that isn;t too far away by car (20 minutes), yet by bus it can take over 2 hours (once you consider the considerable waiting time due to silly timetables, weird route it takes, etc) My hours are 8-4. My car has just died and now I will have to get up at 6am and get home at 6pm. This is a big problem as all the car dealerships in my area seem to close at 6pm. What do people do in this situation? Note I am not advocating pulling a sicky to go out and buy a car, but is there a better way than sucking this up for a week? I am seriously tempted to get a 125cc bike for fun summer riding and for situations like this. As much as public transport is pushed by the government, it still seems an absolute joke. I saw a pensioner wait 30 minutes at a bus stop carrying heavy shopping, waiting for her bus; that cannot be good for her health.

Moving from full fat coke to diet coke changed me from 11 and a half stone to 9 stone, which is what I am now (I am 5'8" btw) Maybe give that a punt? I know they say the diet stuff is bad for you but it seems to work for me! Running around this place helps a little too

We have a local police officer who often comes round our school and chats with students; he also delivers assemblies - he has done a good one on knife crime, and another on naked selfies - basically showing the students that ANY naked selfie can be saved permanently - just like any DRM can always be defeated - I find the kids seem to listen a lot more to a speaker wearing a full police uniform than to just a regular teacher

Thanks for your info everyone. I spoke to my manager who has forwarded me a copy of our Esafety policy (it seems to be a South Wales/SWGfl collaboration) - It's a hefty document, I am going to read through it tomorrow, as well as some of the other links like the blog posted above. I am just an ICT technician so normally our Network Manager dealt with this kind of thing, but he has left and they are not replacing him, so it is falling on me now to learn this stuff. (with no increase in pay... but I don't want to rock the boat incase they outsource entirely) I could tell the girl felt a bit creeped out by me going through her phone (I plugged it in via USB and set the explorer view to list mode - she gave me the dates the pictures were taken on and I copied them that way - but she was doing this as a favour for the school to provide evidence against ebullying - if any serious allegations occur I would have to do a proper examination, which is why I wanted this advice; and I have gotten some good information here, so again thanks everyone I hope I'm not overstaying my welcome on this post, but what is the preferred method for getting data off of student phones? I used the USB lead and browsed to the DCIM folder, but I know that Apple are pushing for global encryption, and if a student refuses to give the passkey there will be no way I will be able to get any data off the device (even the US FBI are kicking up a fuss over it). I have told staff this but I don't think they fully appreciate what I am trying to say.

haha, perhaps I should invest in one myself. People seem to take IT people more seriously when they are bearded (or bald). When I was unemployed I used to do the occasional IT housecall, and when I showed up, I could sense the "Is this a joke? has your daddy sent his son?" thoughts. But then, if beardliness denoted wisdom, the philosopher would have to give way to the goat as the wisest of the creatures.

We are using an Aruba distributed wireless N setup - it is controlled by our LEA so I can't do anything with it - I can't even locate a client like I could on our old Cisco setup. I think we have too few AP's perhaps? We have a wide open site and we have problems with mapped drives dropping out when staff walk from one room to another - only a reboot will bring the share back. Very annoying for staff who like to have all of their ppt's, websites etc open ready for their lessons.

haha... I had better make sure my mother hasn't visited any of his shows!

Not sure if this is the right forum for this, but recently I have been asked to get pictures off of students mobile phones (with their consent - they were photos the students had taken of nasty messages students had been posting on facebook) This wasn't a problem but it got me thinking about the legal side and other things. In my old school (I was there in 1997 - 2002) - any nasty pictures or texts were the students own fault - the school didn't get involved and the result was usually an ass whooping, but things are very different now. recently, kids have taken photos of teachers in class, and I have been asked to delete the pictures off of the students mobile phones. I was wondering about the legal right for me to do this - do I even have any legal right to plug in the USB device and delete said picture? Could a student tell me to spin on it and I guess get a suspension? I was asked to make sure the picture was removed from the phone - I deleted the picture from the SD card and did a search to locate any other copies, but I have tried explaining that I cannot prove 100% that the photo is gone - if she had a 4g contract for example, she could have uploaded it anywhere and I'd have no way to trace it. She could also take the SD card out at home and run data recovery - in order to stop that, I'd have to take her SD card and random wipe it, destroying all data on it, which I wouldn't really be willing to do. As you can probably gather I'm not that familiar with modern smartphones (hard to buy one on an IT tech salary) so I was just wondering what other people do in these situations and what advice they give staff? Students aren't allowed to play with their phones during lesson but of course it's impossible to stop unless you spent 20 minutes per lesson taking them and giving them back at the end...

it's wireless that sucks. I used an N laptop right next to an N router and it was still terrible - slow, converting videos over a file share was impossible as one little dropout would stop the conversion and you would have to start again, it just isn't suitable for serious work. Our pupils do a lot of MoviePlus etc on laptops and we have them ethernetted in (we had to disable the NIC as even with a network cable plugged in, Windows will still use the wireless adapter over the NIC - it seems it uses whichever one comes up latest - yet another thing Microsoft didn't fully think through... I am still holding out hope for AC or WiMax or whatever the latest one will be. I have heard great things about 4G but of course there are mobile phone charges and I don't trust mobile phone provders at all

I am 30 years old this may and can only grow pubic fluff My profile picture is a current one. I wonder if a pharmacist will be willing to sell me some rogaine for my face

if I was setting something like this up, I'd write a small utility in VB6 that runs on each client, on a timer set at 10 seconds; if the timer.tick detects a certain file (warning.jpg) exists it will display it full screen over everything else. Set it to read from a specific folder in a staff accessible share and any member of staff could put any image there (provided they had the appropriate permissions for the folder) I know it might not be "enterprisey" enough for some but all the enterprise software we have tried has just been too complicated for our staff to grasp, especially when it is used infrequently. The only caveat the staff had to remember was they needed to save their PPT's as PNG as I never learned the VB powerpoint controls. I ended up using a solution like this for our TV virtual signage as the commercial software we used had difficulties converting from PPTs, and sometimes didn't display updated new images for hours. Also do your phones not have broadcast functionality? We find the best way to send a message globally is to use our phones broadcast functionality (not sure if IP phones have this however...)

Why are so many IT people fatties?