localzuk

Man tells random strangers about his life from a bench.

Nazis find ancient artefact and die after opening it. Man with whip doesn't affect the outcome at all.

The USSR loses a submarine. The Americans find it in America.

Man makes friend. World gets wiped out by asteroid.

Team of soldiers and a nerd travel through a wormhole to a distant planet. They meet the natives, blow up their leader and then leave.

Teenager, criminal and giant bear blow up space station, with help from more criminals.

My comments are purely about perception and reputation. Both of these are affected by actions like this more so than the actual outcome. There won't be a member among us that won't use some company or other due to reputation or perception. Its human nature. Heck, there are hundreds of posts on this forum about suppliers and bad reputations, covering the full breadth of things we buy. Just look at discussions about copier contracts! So my comments are basically that I feel the benefit from pursuing this case, and even if they win, may not be enough to counter that reputational damage. If they lose? It could be truly disastrous to them. Their competitors will jump upon the loss and use it as part of their own marketing. My actual feeling about the case itself, whether it is fair, right, moral etc is not what I'm personally talking about.

As I said in response to the tweets defending the legal action on Twitter, all of this doesn't really deal with the reputational damage such a case will have. I completely understand your desire for a fair process, but I do feel your company is underestimating the damage this is doing to your reputation. As I said earlier in this thread, most MIS procurement is still done on a small scale, far below the tendering limit. When searching the market for suppliers, schools will now see that once again, your company has resorted to legal action. Rightly or wrongly, it doesn't matter. So, smaller procurements will simply not include your company at all because they'll fear a court case should they include you and then decide not to use your services. Why take that risk? Yes, it seems unfair, but ignoring the reality of how people look at this sort of thing, in favour of the technical correctness of a process will do far more harm to your business than you think. As I said previously, there are many within education who were just starting to get over the prior dislike of Bromcom as a company. This case is about the worst thing you could have done in terms of damaging your reputation. But anyway, too late now, the damage is done.

As I said in a tweet earlier, this will be pretty damaging to Bromcom's reputation. Most MIS procurement will still be below tendering level, as there are very few MATs of that size, so this sort of thing will instantly put a black mark against their name for a lot of decision makers. Add in their history of litigious behaviour and this is likely going to cost them more in the long run than they would make from having won this tender. Schools talk to each other, even now, in the age of academies. Many schools still consider Bromcom to be pretty much a dirty word. This will just confirm it for them. And all that is regardless of the merit of the case.

Note that not all Android apps will work on Chromebook.

This would be an issue with any extension based filtering on a Chromebook - extensions are installed on a user basis, not device. So, if a user is assigned to have that extension, they'll get it on any Chromebook (and on any Chrome browser they sign in to also). I'm not sure how you'll resolve this one, other than telling the children that have the DfE chromebooks to bring them in for use in school, putting them on their own IP range, excluding from normal filtering in Sophos XG and then put those users in their own OU with the extension installing.

I'm going to be blunt and say this is entirely down to poor leadership. Excuses about reduced staffing, old kit, not enough budget are all symptoms of poor leadership at the top of the pile. The headteacher and/or bursar and/or CEO/COO are failing to provide adequate resources to provide key services that schools run on. Yes, we as IT staff can scrabble around cobbling old kit together to keep it running for a bit longer, but all it does is feed back to management that they dunt need to invest. It's 2020. Computers are ubiquitous to our lives. If your school's leaders still can't see that they need to pay to have modern kit, then personally I'd suggest looking elsewhere for a job. If they put that little funding in IT kit, then they're not going to invest in the staff either. If you were looking to send your children to a school that still ran Windows 7 computers, I'd be looking elsewhere and would probably write something to the local papers too.

Yup. You can't compete with rose tinted glasses. They will forget any and all issues they ever had on the old devices, and treat them like the best devices ever. This is where good leadership and management needs to come in. Give them a device, train them well, and support them with the transition, whilst also being strict with and whining about what they used to have. With our Trust, we issue whatever is a decent deal at the time. Imo £750 on a school device is far too much to spend these days. We have just ordered some i3 ThinBooks from VeryPC - complete with a custom design vinyl skin on top. IIRC they were about £450 each. 8GB RAM, 240GB SSD, Windows 10, 15" screen etc... 3 year warranty.

Odd, as they still advertise it... https://swgfl.org.uk/services/schools-internet-service/

Please take into account that SWGfL aren't an independent third party here... They sell Internet connectivity and filtering. So take what they say with a pinch of salt.

In my view, the reason behind it is decades of "well, we're a monopoly, so we don't have to invest" thinking by BT/Openreach, then a lack of understanding of the importance of the internet by successive governments (obsession with roads and rail when internet is arguably more important these days), and an unwillingness to pay to upgrade the network (which in places has all sorts of weirdness). EU rules come into play a little too, with the obsession with privatising and outsourcing everything (or at least, the UK's interpretation of those rules). Our government has invested a couple of billion in rolling out a minimum speed connection to rural homes, instead wanting Openreach to do most of it commercially. Whereas the NBN is being rolled out by a government owned company - NBN Co Ltd. Sure, they may private companies to do the work, but they do it as contractors rather than as outsourced providers like the UK gov and Openreach. The government has spent $51bn so far on the system. All that said, the government did say they were committing to roll out FTTP to 15 million properties by 2025, and "nationwide" by 2033. Again, it will all be done by commercial providers, but with subsidies for a certain percentage of properties. That said, it does look like a lot of small companies are not waiting around any more and are building their own networks instead. I know Jurrasic Fibre are rolling out an FTTP network in Taunton and Honiton down this way. Exascale are building in Telford and Wrekin, CityFibre have started rolling out into villages near Warrington etc... So, Openreach is slowly having its monopoly nibbled away at.

Been running Unifi switches across our Trust for a couple of years. Not had any issues with them really. Not to thy extent that I feel like u should have paid triple the price for a competitor's product anyway! I managed to refresh the switchgear in 5 schools for the budget I had planned for just one of them when I was looking at HP Aruba.

Another generation of Playstation and I'm still uninterested. Their exclusives never seem to interest me. Think I'll stick to Xbox. Though, I won't be rushing to get the new X either as I can't see any value in it right this moment. Plus I don't have the space in my cabinet for it!

To be whitelisted on the server, please visit your Profile on the site and add you Minecraft username to the field there. The server updates the whitelist every 3 hours from 00:00 BST. Next sync is in about 43 minutes and takes about 5-10 minutes to run.

I use the Google gcds sync tool, and SimpleSaml.php for the actual signing in SSO. That way, passwords are never actually in G Suite its all handled by our AD. Currently pondering migrating from SimpleSaml.php to LogonBox too.

My experience of any HP kit these days is repairs are a PITA if you want to do it yourself. If repair-ability is important to you, consider VeryPC ThinBooks.

My recommendation is for the Acer Spin or the Dell. The build quality on both is great. The only thing that set them apart when we bought was price - Acer were a little cheaper. So, we have 600 of the Acer 311's and another 189 on the way. One thing to note - the channel is sold out pretty much entirely. My order of Chromebooks, from July, is not due here until October. And I've been told that any orders placed now would likely be December or even January before they arrive.

Have you closed and reopened SOLUS? I find that it updates the AD structure on launch, so any changes don't get reflected in it until it is closed and reopened.

Could you not hide the converter cable in trunking and have a HDMI coupler and short cable plugged in to it coming out of a brush plate?

You can blame the media for this. They often take a journal article talking about a new idea in battery tech and then run with it. There's all sorts of new tech being developed but usually it takes decades for it to go from theory to the lab to commercial uses to mass market production. So, while we only ever see incremental improvements in reality, those technologies are still being developed and will one day appear but by the time they do, they will just be another incremental improvement.