pcstru

I've never used cloth. I scrape paste off with the edge of a Stanley knife blade and then if necessary clear the final residue off with some kitchen roll dampened with Isopropyl alcohol.

Yes, you would need to make an enclosure. I'd not be particularly comfortable leaving any FDM machine alone printing in a classroom of kids because they are a bit of a fire risk. I think there should be also be some concern around ventilation too (the enclosure should be vented to the outside) as the plastics when heated are known to produce noxious gas and particulates (ABS is worse than PLA but PLA is not free from the problem).

It depends. It can be very little if you are just printing a shell much more if it is solid. Filament is around £30 per Kg so just try and estimate how much a bit of plastic that size would weigh given how string you need it. Depends again. IMO cheap 3d FDM printers are unlikely to be maintenance free in the medium or long term, so it depends how confident you are getting your hands dirty doing a teardown. Self build machines are perhaps a better bet and something like the Prusa i3 Mk2 Kit is well supported with build instructions and if you have done the build, you will have no problem when it comes to maintenance. Doing the build can also be helpful in just recognising what is going wrong.

I would throw it upstairs (ask my boss). I'm not sure how I could tell the difference between them deliberately trying to access a page and an 'app' phoning home. My concern would be that while this might not be serious in and of itself, there may be issues I am unaware of which in context could make this more serious. At the end of the day none of that is my call so inform and escalate.

Apparently the espresso machine was invented in Italy for just that reason (management thought coffee was taking too long to make - proper espresso takes 25 seconds.)

I'm on my second Aeropress and I'd not buy another one. After a while the polycarb seems to start to crack up and it gets worse and worse until the plunger won't seal it effectively. My next for work will be a metal Cafetiere which genuinely do last for many many years. At home I have a nice little Rancillio Rocky/Sylvia combo and a hottop roaster but I'm not sure that lot can survive in my choice to live with a postage-stamp sized kitchen. Hasbean are great however, you should allegedly give freshly roast coffee 3-5 days to degas but it may be moot if you buy pre-ground.

For your application I would use 10 and I would avoid RAID 5 like the plague. The issue with RAID 5 aside from the possibility of a rebuild failing (which should be important too!), is the degradation of performance if a disc goes bad and you need to backup and then rebuild.

One big bar to an Open Source MIS is the commitment required to provide statutory functions like the Schools Census (varies from locale to locale), CTF etc. This isn't just a one off production but requires substantial resources year on year as changes are driven by DfE (or other bodies in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales). All these require domain knowledge in depth (time consuming to acquire) but at the same time they are somewhat unsexy and unappealing for developers. Also, from a schools perspective, the MIS is (and services around it are) critical to the school. When looking for an MIS, good quality support and continuity are extremely important. With Open Source, good quality support can be readily available when products are mature, early on the quality of the support might be good but it won't scale and continuity is quite risky as developers grow bored and move onto more interesting things.

It's quite hard with a stateless browser based view which shows multiple posts on the same page. It also involves a lot more data. Here the software can just record a high watermark for each user for each thread. To properly maintain read/unread status on a truly threaded discussion, you need to record the status of each read post for each user, which involves a lot more data. With usenet the processing and data used to reside on the client but that wouldn't work at all well with web sites.

I agree. When discussion descends into ad hominem personal attacks, the message should be stark and uncompromising because that kind of behaviour is not acceptable anywhere in here. IMO over the last 3-4 years the quality of the more contentious discussion here has been raised largely because the moderation has been spot on in that area.

I don't think threading makes much difference to on-topic. Usenet used to be replete with arguments about off-topic posting, sometimes erupting into a kind of warfare between groups when cross posting exacerbated the issue of what is on topic within multiple groups. For an example of a modern threaded browser based forum, probably better to look at reddit. The assessment of on-topicness will always be a somewhat arbitrary and a largely subjective decision - which means that wherever you draw the line, there will be mistakes. That is important because people post for a reason. They are motivated to spend time writing and they have a personal investment in it. Even when the decision is right to encourage a focus on the agreed subject, it can be easy to take a stark and public "keep on topic" as a personal admonishment; as "shut up, we don't want to hear your point of view", rather than as it is intended. So IMO it is worth looking for a positive way to guide content because then, even when the decision is 'wrong', the reaction is less likely to be charged with personal slight if the message was positive. Of course, that depends what you are looking for. Reddit's "Ask Historians" is exceptionally good quality and the rather harsh, no quarter given moderation is essential to that. But ask historians does not rely on building community in the way that (IMO) this place does and it is less clear from the context here, especially in the 'recreational' threads, exactly what constitutes being off-topic when the subjects themselves have an extremely wide gamut. IMO the mods here do a very good job and that quite obviously takes a lot of their time and effort, all of which they give for free (as i understand it). It is not an easy thing and the personal investment applies as much to them as anyone. I think just being positive about requests for being on-topic and facilitating the discussion wherever it is going (i.e. encourage a thread split or even set it up) would be even better.

No. The MIS is too critical day to day and cloud hosting presents a number of issues that I'm still not comfortable with for critical systems (and we seem to do better anyway on the basics - day to day availability!). An important one of those is being in control of change and I don't believe suppliers have recognised or addressed that problem (so for instance, the last major overhaul of the Bromcom UI was released to the cloud without enough notice of the change for us to be able to fit training and awareness into scheduled training days. I just don't want to be in a position where 200 users log on and wonder where everything is, so I like to be able to anticipate change and schedule some activities to raise awareness and if necessary train people). Not being in control of updates and upgrades with cloud systems can cripple an organisations ability to plan and manage delivery of change. They often end up just throwing the change at people and letting them sink or swim (and the business along with it!).

I can see a need to be on-topic in threads that deal with technical and professional matters. Much less so the recreational stuff especially when there is a natural link between the issues or exploration drilling down into specific details/aspects of it. I think Mods could make the message more positive : "great discussion, it would be really good in it's own thread" rather than the bald "back on topic you lot" - which to me appears quite negative and confrontational.

It serves one site - although we are quite large. It's not that unusual as a server spec (although IMO companies often drastically over spec to try and avoid issues). The underlying host hardware is a Dell poweredge R730xd with ~160GB RAM, two Xeon 8 core processors and 8Gb of network bandwidth split 4/4 between our the main and storage networks. It's also running our production Sharepoint server and the head of our main file server. If there are bottlenecks they relate to the number of spindles at the back end, not RAM or CPU. Server hardware was, ISTR around ~£4K maybe a couple of years ago.

No. Nor did it include DB licensing etc. We allocate 16 cores on a 32GB server which is running both the DB and the web services. Performance is adequate for our demand of ~200 users (max concurrent). I run some SQL directly against the DB and it seems to hold up well even at busy times.

It was significant enough for us! More in up-front cost (~£10K on purchase) than year on year support & updates (~£2K) but it affects both. It is still competitive with the competition in terms of self hosting. Your costs will be different; only way to know is to get a cost from them (perhaps you can negotiate them down a bit given the reliability issues with the cloud product!).

We self host our Bromcom MIS, a choice that Bromcom isn't very keen on but which seems to pay for itself in a number of ways. In general our users really like the system so it is a bit of a worry if they have hosting problem and are not addressing them competently as in the end that risks the business and consequently a risk to us as a customer (even if we aren't experiencing the problems!).

There are various approaches and they can depend on the choice of RF module. The two basic approaches are to have a communications loop running full time and dispatch control from there OR use the RX to drive an interrupt pin which will then call the communications processing routine. Which approach is best depends on what else the system will be doing and how much communication is going on at what speed. It sounds like you have a very simple requirement which can be easily met by the first (simplest) approach. An alternative would be to use a bluetooth module and build a little app to act as the TX. There are some good examples out there on exactly how to do that (there probably are for all the other RF modules now days).

Not very difficult. There are various RF modules though and they vary in functionality and out of the box reliability (the cheapest 433Mhz Rx/txt pairs (these types leave all the error detection/correction etc to you, whereas something like the zigbee modules pretty much take care of all that and just let you get on with sending data. The NRF24L01's and RFM12B's are somewhere in between but well documented and supported (plenty of example code and schematics out there as well as good library's ).

This is quite a claim. Do you have/can you point to any evidence for this please? A modern HD consists of magnetic platters, a RW head and a quite sophisticated controller. An HD does change during it's lifetime - sectors might become unreliable and be marked as unavailable. That information is stored on the controller so from the other side of the interface, no one should notice. Other than that, the platters spin at the same speed, the heads move at the same rate and the cache will be the same size so there is really nothing to slow it down over time and it should be no different to new.

"Keylogging" is a reasonable description of that and sufficiently informs the non-technical reader what is going on (i.e. what you type in is logged (recorded and available for later analysis)).

So the report contains data submitted by schools but you don't like that data so you are going to discard it on the basis that it does not conform to your view. Ever heard of confirmation bias?

The report is 18 pages of explanation and data from their research. Your critique of it fails to address ANY of the points they raise in detail. I know which one I would rate as higher quality.

Page 7 provides sourced quotes from teachers and teaching unions. from the report : Classroom Management Software has been installed on: 821,386 devices; computers, laptops, tablets or mobile phones 819,970 (99.8%) school owned devices 1416 (0.2%) pupil owned devices The intention is to promote debate, not offer solutions.

Does the freeze function work with them? If so, can you link to the product.