pcstru

We would do this using Google Sites. That would allow the students to build a 'blog' page and for other students and staff to see it but not anyone outside of the organisation. That protects us (from students who (say) publish defamatory statements) and it protects the students from external ... 'feedback'. Sharepoint has a "My Site" feature which could be used similarly.

Better? Better for what and whom? We have three distinct groups of users - possibly more and their needs can be quite different and might be best served by different offerings. For students, the simplicity and availability of Google is good. It's collaboration features are great. The students come with no legacy (1000's of documents in specific formats) so they are not constrained in that way. For Staff, there is that legacy of MS Office documents that has built up over the years and the legacy of shared drives etc. Then there are the skills which might be difficult for some staff who already struggle with what a "file" or "folder" actually is. Then there are us, IT - who while we should be largely agnostic on which technology is 'best', still have to support it so have to acquire the skills and have to have the bandwidth to actually manage the beast. Legacy affects us perhaps the worst (applications like SIMS etc which have to be supported and demand a Windows platform) - we have to make it work for the lowest common denominator so GAFE is unlikely to displace an MS AD infrastructure. So I didn't vote. I think the question is one that can only be answered by looking at the whole organisation and there probably is no "best" even at the level of just one school, just some compromise that is least worst.

I have a Filco Ninja Majestouch-2, cherry brown. Nice positive feel without an actual click, not too loud (YMMV). I've been very pleased with it.

I decided to dip a toe in again last night, just in time to catch the Moirai CG. 138MCr. I missed hitting the next tier by minutes. Will the whole things be some 'mistake'!

Errr ... sort of, although the only "PC" on 24/7 is now a CentOS Asterisk PBX (atom based, but still costs ~£1 a week min). Other than that I have a CNC machine and 3d printer(s) which have their own PC or laptop, a "media server" (seldom used - but stores "all the stuff") and a couple of old retirees which need to visit the tip. Then there is the legion of embedded stuff (Arduino, PicAxe, Microchip) and the other 24/7 machine - a RPi which is sucking up data from all the Arduino's acting as monitoring stations (temp, humidity, electric use, mains voltage, light, soil moisture, air quality etc). I have got a lot better recently! One day though, I will throw it ALL out and take up painting with watercolours and never look back. Maybe.

Finish a game you say? Last games I bought : GTA V, followed a week or two later by Factorio [*1]. Relative scoreline : GTA V - 20 hours. Factorio - err .... 00. I can't remember who here pointed me in the direction of factorio but whoever you are I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU!

Do you need these connections logged by user? If not, I'd look to exclude outgoing POP/IMAP originating from staff machines (based on IP address) from requiring any authentication.

Why scientists are losing the fight to communicate science to the public.. Which touches on some of my concerns with the adversarial approach that seems to prevail. The other thing that has recently surprised me is seeing the likes of Neil Degrasse Tyson trash philosophy (Link to a response to that, as it is more illuminating than the trashing alone)) as a subject while simultaneously admitting to ignorance of the subject. There is an arrogance there that contains the seeds of ... a backlash.

Well, if you want to go and ask him that in the middle of a set, I'd be happy to give you an introduction (probably from a safe distance). You might have to argue with him about the trumpet. The girl can make that thing sound like anything from a fluttering schoolboy heart to someone getting their throat slit in a back alley but she does struggle to get such passion and intensity into her performance quietly. But mid set, you be my guest and go ask them. Many bands are just amateur musicians, some very early on in their playing and they may or may not be able to help out with the overall level of the mix. Even if they are it is just another distraction and most seem to have forgotten it by the second number. Meanwhile someone will be the paying customer and mid set or any other time, they are the only person who I'd risk mucking about with the quality of the sound mid set and even if they did ask, that 3 piece brass section isn't going to give much room to manoeuvre. For those - like me - who find loud music uncomfortable get yourself some ear plugs. That will solve the problem for you without any necessity to change the world when doing so might be anything from very difficult to impossible.

Sure, there are ways that you can mitigate, but many bands struggle to provide a half decent PA that will cope with a small village hall. Asking an engineer to turn it down half way through a show would be a big ask; as I say I'm not a fan of loud music and I have tried to keep levels sane in venues but I'd not go off-piste in the middle of a show and try and re-mix to achieve a lower level. Perhaps a better solution would be to take ear plugs (or venues provide them).

If you were going to meter sound levels, where would you do it and when? It can be tricky to set levels in an empty room that will be OK when the room fills and is full of people who might be trying to make themselves heard over the music. You have to set levels to compete with the loudest peak of that. If you are mixing for a live band as well as balancing the mix you will likely have to balance opinions from the Band who always seem to think their particular instrument should be louder, even though they can't actually hear the mix out front. If you have a band with brass (I used to do sound for a 9 piece motown/soul band with trumpet, sax and trombone), that can set quite a loud minimum level as you need to keep vocals floating above that and even if you don't have brass, say hello to the drummer. Personally, I avoid concerts and cinema because like @nicholab I find them uncomfortably loud. However the engineers are likely to be working within constraints that would make levels I'm comfortable with difficult to achieve.

And yet, "science" seems absent of such absolute certainties. IMO according to science the correct answers are more probably, 1. Probably not. 2. It is likely it is a significant risk factor. I appreciate "anti science nitwits" exploit doubt and uncertainty in scientific endeavours - "hey, Anthropogenic Global Warming, it's ONLY a theory", but the driving force of science is essentially doubt. Was it you who claimed Economics was not a Science? If so, I'm curious as to what you think "Science" actually is?

If that was all there was to it then it would be a worry. The fact is that it is the courts who didn't like what it said. Theil does of course enjoy an advantage in not having to worry that costs will exceed his ability to pay. It could be said that Gawker would publish things they knew to be breaches of privacy and did so in the expectation of being able to settle any claim out of court for less than the story was worth to them in terms of it's ability to generate traffic. To me, that is cynical bullying behaviour; so at worst IMO, Gawker just came up against another kind of bully and one with deeper pockets.

Really? I'd think those who compile dictionaries would be expert at diving deep and, well - the meanings they find are well documented. Outside of that there may well be a few more which might, with common usage make it into future revisions or perhaps just die out; but the depth is finite and actually quite limited. I think that is part of the relative values that people have (and is an aspect which makes it difficult (for me) to grapple with the idea that "respect has to be won"). Values can be different between people but they can also be different at different times in the same people. Things that I used to respect I no longer do because my values have changed. However, IMO the meaning of words is fairly persistent even with those changes. The problem with "they have to win my respect" the is that no one can actually know what actions might cause a gain or loss of respect (at least outside of any shared cultural context). That seems to result in someone expecting others to respect their value system (because otherwise an 'innocent' action might cause a loss of respect) while they are saying they will not respect other values system until they prove worthy of respect. That is asymmetrical and as such seems flawed.

Most 'arguments' are just a process of agreeing what words actually mean. Respect, which defines three meanings, (1) Admiration, (2) Honour, and/or (3) a Feature. So there is perhaps some conflation here between 1&2; Admiration is generally 'earned' in the sense of you admire someone because of something you know about/of them (the information is external to you). Can you have a baseline for "Admiration" - not really IMO, or at least I struggle to see how it would have any meaning. However, Honour - politeness, deference, care in avoiding offence; that has a natural baseline in the sense of "do unto others", i.e. you don't need to know anything about the other person rather, your sense of respect comes from yourself.

We use the same cards for Paxton, NRS and print release, BUT they are Mifare cards with a magnetic stripe and NRS and Print release just reads the magnetic strip while Paxton uses the NFC hardware on the card. We are looking at a sign in system which will be able deal with both the mag stripe and the NFC device.

Really nice. Great job!

If you are confident it is not your router, why not take their router plug it in, get them to fix the problem and then swap it back out? Also, while a second access point on 100Mbs might be a bottleneck if you are running internal services, if mostly the WAP services internet connections, then your bottleneck is not the WAP.

Some info : Reddit - UK Schools user posts info. Pro pricing.

If you fight insanity with insanity then, from the outside, people just see ... nutters fighting. In my world, I respect people by default; I'll assume they are honest and act and say as they do because they believe that to be correct or acceptable. That default respect means I treat people as I would like to be treated, even when (perhaps especially when) I am wrong.

Right. And if wi-fi 'radiation' is absolutely "safe", then those that say so might reflect on my question earlier the the thread : "To to try and illustrate that, we have a 5Ghz transmitter situated 1 meter from your head and we will vary the output power starting from 0.001W to 1,000,000W (9 orders of magnitude). At what point would you start to feel uncomfortable with this arrangement and why?" Again, that's not arguing it is dangerous in a school, but the ridicule here seems perhaps ... poorly informed.

Probably not locked out of their cars. In terms of insurance, you should be covered, unless it is explicitly excluded. It has always been the case that locks can be picked or locking mechanisms circumvented. Nothing new here really.

Glad to be of help. A couple of thoughts : It's generally easier in excel to start a new workbook and then import each CSV into separate sheets - so each system's data is kept separate. You can sometimes make use of multiple matching criteria in different columns, so perhaps some of your AD accounts are A.Smith, but the lock system records it as Andrew Smith, so you would add another column and build a key using a substring on the full forename then do that as a lookup. You might end up with multiple lookups from one system to the other at which point it can be useful to translate the success of failure of the lookup as a value and then use weighting and a total to allow you to sort by the overall quality of the match. It can also be worth trying to match both ways - something which is not necessarily obvious as a possibility when the key you need suggests you must look up records in the lock system from the AD data. Warning : Much of that would make no sense to do on very small datasets!

The technique I describe should result in the second column having the correct door ID ... IF the data on on name matches up. If you do not have data that allows that match between the records in the different systems, then you have no basis for the process to work and if you cannot find any commonality, then you will need to do the match as a manual exercise. You can and should restrict the export Get-ADUsers to enabled accounts although inevitably in these exercises, there need to be manual interventions to deal with typo's, poor quality data etc.

Insert a new blank column before C, call it ExtKey and enter a formula to concatenate the firstname and surname attributes in what will now be columns D&E (so C2=D2&E2). Now in B2 you can use VLOOKUP(A2, C$2:C$1000, 4, false). Copy those down the columns and you should be good.