Friez

...How?

Well this is it: Why are the poorest paid people having to take the cut so that the richer bunch can continue getting richer? Why don't the rich people take cut after cut each year? Why are we suffering for their decent pay packet? No, we need to be paid more fairly we shouldn't have to take the fall time and time again. Why do we put up and shut up? Teachers are screaming every five minutes about their pay, yet we're not? Doesn't make sense to me.

Can't do that, redundancy costs too much. Let's outsource them and let the private companies do it instead.

While I think it's not really fair to students (although they would say otherwise!) I think a strike action is right. Afterall, the government seem pretty hell bent on driving local government staff into poverty, it's about time such staff remind the government just how important they are and that they are really worth more. At any rate, if prices keep rising as they do and wages do not, people will be forced to do jobs that are not in local government (i.e. leave for a private company) and that will be far more damaging for schools than a mere 2 days off.

Very sad, the man was a legend.

It's all true!

You'dd effectively have to re-build a network to run alongside their managed service network crap. Not an easy task let alone a financially sound one. While the situation is possible it's really unlikely and having all this extra network manager/it team and equipment to pay for as well as the managed service makes it realistically unfeasable. This also screws up schools vastly in the future. Because, if the managed service contract ends and they get the option to drop it they will have to effectively start from ground-up again. Wasted money all around!

If anyones curious on a PHP function to validate a user/login combo against LDAP (slightly modified to give you clues as to what variables to change/protect the innocent): /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // LDAPfunctions.php // Date: 26/11/2007 // Author: Friez // // Contains functions for use with LDAP. /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////////////////////////////////////////// // verifyLDAPUser // // Verifies the username and password with // LDAP and returns a 1 on success or 0 on // failure. /////////////////////////////////////////// function verifyLDAPUser($user,$pass) { if($user == "" || $pass == "") // blank return "0"; $ad = ldap_connect("yourlogonserver"); // throw in your logon server here ldap_set_option($ad, LDAP_OPT_PROTOCOL_VERSION, 3); ldap_set_option($ad, LDAP_OPT_REFERRALS, 0); $fqname = $user . "@yourdomain.local"; // tap in your domain malarky here $ret = "-1"; // if we end up returning -1 something REALLY insane happened $bd = ldap_bind($ad,$fqname,$pass); if($bd == false) { $ret = "0"; } else { $ret = "1"; } ldap_unbind($bd); //unbind before exiting the function! return $ret; } ?> Easy!

Also consider you might not *GET* a mortgage since the banks are being pretty tight with their lending now.

Finances. I mean yes, this is possible. Your current employer (the school) can quite happily keep you on for whatever reason AND take the managed service (afterall, if they can hire someone with a job title of 'chief of paperclips' they can hire you for whatever capacity they wish, provided it fits in the budget). But then the school still have to pay for the managed service (that they won't use) AND you. This is quite a lot of wasted cash, it makes far better financial sense to TUPE you over to the managed service (i.e. letting you go) and just take the blasted thing. Or, the school could simply not go over with BSF full stop, which means they get no rebuild and whatever additional lures they may be offering to head teachers are forefit too. Even if the school could afford you and the crappy managed service, you will also get additional pressure from annoying things like council job evaluations in the future, since technically your job shouldn't exist within schools (in their mind) any more, or if it does, then they could evaluate your job to be entirely worthless in a bid to try and pressure you out due to lack of pay (not sure if they can legally do this, but the thoughts crossed my mind!) and try and force BSF Managed Service in that way. Myself, I think pretty much most of us are on a sinking ship.

Hook me up! I code games in my spare time (read: virtually no sleep) and I'm far better geared as a programmer than an IT Tech. School did nothing for me, University helped a bit but I *really* learned stuff when I joined an open source project and actually made something for real. The problem these days is that most students are in a catch 22: Experienced people only want to hire experienced people, but if you've come out of school you're generally considered inexperienced. Thus, Jobs are quite hard to land! (I think this goes a long way to explaining why I'm working in a school pushing toners around when I have a degree and all that lovely stuff )

Rock on! What a career move!

It's always been this diabolical. The course content taught at School/College level in general is quite dumbed down and very easy, but when it comes to the exam you get presented with poorly written ambiguous claptrap or things so stupidly easy that you could probably guess the answer even if you didn't know what a computer actually was. My IT GNVQ exams were a joke. Completed them in 10 minutes, spent the remaining 1 hour 50 minutes doodling nice images for the examiner on THE PAGE LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK. Intentionally blank, probably to give me some space to keep my mind filled while I have to sit in silence for approx 2 sodding hours wasting my life away. We're talking mind numbingly easy multiple choice questions that I thought were an april fools joke come late. Example of the intellectual level they tested us on: Which of the following is an Input Device? A) Squirrel B) Mouse C) Gerbil D) Ferret AMAZINGLY some people actually failed that exam which makes me think that we are failing as a species.

Not tried Rock Band yet, but I imagine it's a bit like Guitar Freaks + Drum Mania session (which I have) cross Guitar Hero (which I also have). So should be immense fun. They should make arcade machines to be honest, when I was playing Guitar Freaks/Drum Mania with my friends in Italian / London arcades it was a right laugh and attracted crowds to boot O_O Also just read: It changes drum assignments? Ick! At least Drum Mania doesn't do that. Ride Cymbal stays as ride! I'd be freaked if it turned into a tom or something. (I play drums too!)

So you're chair of governors now? Congratulations! You're going up in the world!

This is a wishy washy question to be sure. I am going to make an assumption that you've been asked to justify the design of the database as part of an evaluation of the work you've just done, if so here's some questions you should ask yourself. If it's unnormalised, why is it unnormalised (i.e. flat) will there be a definite advantage over other methods in doing so? If you've normalised it, why have you normalised it in the way that you have? How much data is written to the database, is there any redundancy or replication of data elsewhere in the database? Could it be optimised any more? What about if you were storing several billion entries, is your database fast enough to account for it? Does it need to? What if you needed to upgrade it in the future? Can it roll into a distributed system relatively easy? What are the needs of your client/system and does the database meet these needs? This is the kicker question when it comes to justifying your design.

That's a total WTF in my books.

I'm not condemning any cleaners, I was one myself once (kitchen porter, same principle). It's more of a tasking job than people realise (physically demanding generally, especially if you work in an airport and have to clean around 5000 items of cutlery in the space of 20 mins all day every day...) and you get paid jack all to do it too. What DID bug me when cleaning was that I would spend bloody ages making sure something was spotless, but another cleaner would whip through it in seconds (not giving a damn if it was clean or not). Paid the same wages as me, e.t.c quite unfair. It's not really fair to brandish all cleaners with the same brush, some really do their job properly but there's also some useless bums who really do jack all. This is true of virtually any industry.

Can we nail it to Gordon Brown instead?

The move by David Davis is more than a mere publicity stunt, it's a pretty devious political move. By doing what he has instantly everyone is going 'What is Labours move going to be?'. Will they stand against him? Or will they not even bother standing? Whatever their move, they will be wide open to criticism. Whatever his motives, this is a powerful political statement and I agree with his sentiments about the 42 day thing. Roll on year-long detentions, no wait, infinite detentions without needing to give ANY reason whatsoever. To any moron who thinks this will protect you. It won't. It's a big illusion, to make you feel nice and secure. I just hope that later today they see you, think you're mightily suspicious and arrest you for no reason whatsoever. Anyone who thinks that you have any human rights: you don't. Maybe we can spice this up a little? Re-introduce torture as a viable interogation technique, and bring back the death penalty. Hell, why even bother with courts at all too? Lets go wild!

It could be worse, we had a cleaner here who was throwing away hard disks and stuff, straight off the workbench into the bin!

As far as I know, it only directly affects secondary schools, but I guess primaries get hit indirectly especially if they have ties with secondaries for their IT provision...

What's more worrying is if they do the 'classic' method of issuing redundancy through legal loopholes. If they make you redundant obviously they must issue you compensation for being made redundant. Many companies however, offer you a job you simply cannot take up. For example deploying you to a school on an iceberg in the middle of the arctic, of course if you refuse you've effectively resigned so they don't have to pay you a penny of redundancy. It's constructive dismissal in effect, and I'm very concerned that this nasty trick is going to be pulled on a great deal of people. Also, I'm not entirely sure of this, but if you've "resigned" are you able to claim JSA once you're out of a job? How safe is your job after the TUPE? Unknown quantity, but I suspect not very safe at all. Hmmmm...

In this place you'dd need to smother the walls with them, change the desktop wallpaper, install customised ceiling tiles, a new carpet and even have speakers repeating the message over and over again, and you still would have people do something stupid and STILL use the excuse 'but nobody told me!'.

I would imagine we would have no say by that time anyway. And besides, you're going to get BSF'd too right?