maniac

That's the nature of the beast, as things get bigger unfortunitely everyones opinion gets diluted and there's so many conflicts of interests and differences of opinion it would be an impossible task to take everyone's opinion on board and act on it. At a certain point when a community reaches a certain size someone has to take control of it and steer it in whatever direction benefits the whole community the most. Because of the diverse range of members on a forum this big there will always be some people who won't like it, and they'll be others who do like it. The only way it works when you're dealing with this many individuals is if the decisions are made by a small number of 'community leaders' as if they ran a vote on every change for instance we'd never get anywhere, as we'd spend all day debating things, and no decisions would get made. You do to a certain extent lose that close community spirit that you get on forums when they only have a few hundred members, that can't be helped - more people = less sense of ownership, but what's the alturnative - you can't suddenly stop accepting new members or the forum stagments and dies. I've been online in many communities for 10yrs plus, and I've seen many a forum go through what Edugeek is going through at the moment - it's not unusual in the least. I wouldn't say that all 'they' (whoever they might be) only care about making money that's simply not true in my opinion. I'm willing to bet Edugeek doesn't turn much of a profit at the moment, and it's not like anyone has to pay anything directly for using it, all the money that keeps the site going is generated from advertising, forum sponsorship and other means. If it were subscription based like some other popular technical forums are, then I could understand this statement. Fair enough Dos_box draws a salery from the proceeds of the site - something he is very open about and I applaud him for that - if he didn't there's no way the site or organisation could carry on in it's current format, there would be far too much work to keep it going part time or by volunteers. As for making the site grow, I think that's just natural progression, and has only recently started to be actively driven and persued as far as I can work out. This is unfortunite, but if this didn't happen someone would end up getting a legal case against them and this forum would probaby cease to exist as a result. I don't think anyone ever said take the fun out of it, but the general bitchyness, open and direct insults and personal critisism of others opinions is no way to be going - if it continued the community would self destruct. Having an opinion is fine, but the way some people have been carrying on recently you'd think that their opinion was a matter of fact insted of an opinion. As for the way the mods handle things, I think they do a damn good job considering they are volunteering to do the job, that's the key word, volunteering - any of them could leave at any time, but they chose not to, and I dred to think of some of the e-mails and situations some of them have to deal with on what is without a doubt one of the busiest forums I'm part of on the internet. We're all only human after all, and naturally mistakes and errors of judgement happen sometimes, no matter what rules the site owners set down to the mods, there would still be differences in the way different people do things - this is un-avoidable. Absolutely. I try and stay out of these controversial threads, but I'm very much in support of the people who run this site and having been involved in the running of websites, forums etc. in the past I know how difficult it is to strike a balance, and also how easy it is for people not to realise the immense task that it is to manage a community this big. (that's not a critisism by the way FN_GM, just my opinions against what you've put.) Mike.

As a result of this link which I forwarded to our Director of learning for Enterprise/ICT we might, just might try building one of these as an extra curricular activity for a few of the brighter students - we've got a lot of the parts to do it in school already so it could be an interesting little project. Watch this space, as if we do it I'll start a thread and document it's progress. Mike.

Absolutely. My next batch will almost definitely be 11" screens, unless the decent 10" screen varieties fall to sub £200 levels, which I guess they could easily do. Could equip a room with 30 of them for £6k, now that's a lot of technology for your £'s

I've got two main different types on site, and a couple of odd ones we've brought for evaluation purposes. I have 28 Stone Neos, which are really neat little units, we've had them about 6 months now and I've only had one warranty issue which was a noisy fan which stone came and swaped out for me the next day - that's what I call service! I have recently brought 28 Toshiba NB200's which we got £50 cashback on per unit - the whole lot came to a shade under £8000 if you include the cashback. So far, no problems at all and the battery life on these is amazingly good. Also have one odd NC10 for a SEN student who collects it in the morning, uses it round the academy all day and it goes back on charge in the office at night, the battery never runs out on him. The last one I have is a HP one which we got with ths years tesco vouchers. At the moment the heads PA is using this for meeting minute taking, as it's much less intrusive than having a big laptop on the meeting table - she loves it so I don't think we'll be getting it back which is a shame as I wanted it to use for myself, ah well. Mike.

Is that a cut away Austin A series engine by any chance? Don't think I can beat that really.

Price of 10" screen netbooks is set to tumble according to a couple of my suppliers, I've found 10" screens ok for normal browsing, but anything more is a bit of a mission on them. Kids don't seem to mind thou, we've got about 60 of them in this school now, they're the lowest maintenance laptop devices we have.

I'm all for a bit of lighthearted banter, but when people are openly criticising and insulting other people on the forums seemingly with little restraint, it's all gone a bit to far in my opinion. Remember folks, sarcasm doesn't travel well when it's written down! Thank you dos_box for recognising this and doing something about it. My heart was sinking a bit reading some of the recent threads that have cropped up on here, I've seen many a forum die a slow and painful death when the people running it don't do anything to control the situation, so dos_box - your post might be very to the point, but in my opinion it's just what's needed. I don't envy your job one bit - I moderate a very small forum, and that's hard enough sometimes with only 125 people to try and please, let alone 20,000! Mike.

At the moment, I just backup essential data as our current backup system is struggling to cope - AIT3 tapes are just not cutting it for capacity any more. We backup: Storage server: Student home areas Shared areas Staff Home areas and profiles Netadmin shared area Domain Controllers System state The entire C:\ - just in case sysvol share - I know this is included anyway, but I like to ensure this is backed up as it contains a lot of my scripts which have taken months of tweeking to get right. Exchange All mailboxes and public areas using Backupexec Exchange addon Webservers MSSQL and mySQL run a scheduled backup which is then backed up to tape The inetpub directory Other servers: Various locally hosted SQL databases for Backup exec, virus checker management etc. My software share hosting my MSIs etc. Few other bits and pieces that I can't remember at the moment. SIMS is backed up remotely for us by our LEA, and they handle any issues with restoring data. This service only costs us £500 a year, which is a bargain to take that burden away from me. Kent LEA are very good with some of the services they are offering now. I have a server restore kit which contains all the CDs to re-build a server from scratch, together with all license keys, copy of backup exec with license keys and any other software installed on my servers. In my 6 years of managing networks I've only had to re-build a server and restore it from backuptapes once thankfully! We do a full backup on a Friday, and differential backups for the rest of the week. it takes about 16hrs to do a fullbackup and verify of our system, and uses 4 tapes at the moment, so the only day I can run it with enough time for it to finish is Friday night. LTO4 tape changer on order however. (anyone in the market for a sony AIT3 changer???) For quick restore of lost work, we run Volume Shadow Copies on our Student home area and staff home area drives, this allows almost one click restore of lost work. We used to allow students access to do this themselves, but of course forgot it also allows them to easily restore all the peskey flash games they insist on clogging my network up with, so we had to remove access to that tab for students. Mike.

We don't necessarily have to use the IKEA table, it's spawned the idea, but may or maynot form part of the finished product. I for one would actually quite like to see a DIY touch top interactive tablely thing, and I'm volunteering garage space to build it in, and some cash towards the project if we're actually serious about giving this a go. Problem is, if we build one, who would keep the finished product, or would we donate it to Dos_box for edugeek use Mike. EDIT: just checked that link abullett, that's thing's amazing, I want to build one now!

I've had this error before, usually solved by re-booting whatever server is reporting the fault. Never worked out what causes it. Only happened twice to me, so it doesn't really worry me enough to spend hours looking for a solution to it. Mike.

Sounds like an interesting project. Problem is, you could never produce them commercially, as there's all sorts of approvals and health and safety type stuff for anything containing electrical items, and I doubt a fibreboard table from Ikea meets any of them. Could warrent further investigation thou. . . . .

I must be psychic posting my question about printing this morning. In comparison to other schools printing is relatively under control in my school it would seem. I'm astounded by the figures some schools were reporting earlier.

I'm not really after that, I was more curious to see how we compared to other schools, as I've never run print management properly at any of the other schools I 've worked at. A lot of the suggestions you've made are actually things we already do. There's a copy limit of 3 copies on printing, any more than that and staff should be photocopying. There's department printing budgets set at 1000 pages per department per term apart from Business and Enterprise who get double. Staff are also quotad, the only people who aren't are the admin team, LRC and Senior teachers, although they still have the 3 copies restriction apart from our admissions officer and exams officer who both do mailmerges. Also there's a 60 second restriction, print the same document within 60 seconds and it gets rejected by the print queue. I also have a documentxx blocked so students have to save their work in word before they print. I'm very surprised by the figures coming from some people, absolutely astounding amount of printing some schools do! I looked into this, but we have Toshiba and Konica Minolta copiers, which Papercut doesn't integrate into easily, it was going to cost too much so we've left the photocopying out of it for now. When our contract comes up for renewal we will look at getting copiers which allow this system to integrate easily and manage the copiers using papercut as well. Mike.

You'd be correct, as I don't manage the copiers they are managed by our reprographics person, I'm only responsible for printing. I dred to think what our copying is like, but that's good because part of the reason for print management was to encourage the use of the copiers as they are cheaper to run than most of our printers. Mike.

I'm running papercut NG print management software, which is excellent and very good value for money as well. If you're just interested in monitoring your printing, you can download their free print logger from here PaperCut - Print Logger - a free print job logger for Windows. Mike.

This is the first year we've run print quotas properly here, and I'm astounded at the amount of paper that flies through our printers. Since september, as a whole school we've printed 86,000 A4 pages. Considering we're only a school of 420 students with around 80 or so staff I think that's quite a lot. Out of that 86,000 pages only 18% of the printing is down to students, again I was astounded that the percentage was so low. For comparison purposes, anyone fancy sharing their stats here? Mike.

333 - Three Hundred and Thirty Three.

The coding for Hesk is well written, I added this feature to it when I used to use it for my helpdesk which displayed a drop down box at the bottom of the view ticket screen with all the users names in, you could select the user and click update and it allocated it to that person. I also added an extra collumn to the main display to show who the ticket was allocated to and also an extra line at the top of the ticket display to show the same information. All you need to do is add an extra field to the mySQL database, then for the collumn display and the display at the top of the ticket replicate some of the lines from the HESK script, changing the database field it references to your newly added one. For the allocation bit, I took the script which displays all the usernames at login and adapted it with a simple form submit button which updated the database - again this was stolen from elsewhere in the program. I had zero experience with PHP when I did this a long time ago, if you start looking through the PHP files, it's relatively easy to work out what they do, just have a play with a seperate copy of it like I did, and eventually you'll get the right bits of code in the right places and it will work. I don't have the code anymore unfortunitely, so I can't share it - sorry. Mike.

When the vehicle is paid for. The finance company are sperate to the dealership, they are merely acting as agents for the finance company. When the agreement goes through, the finance company pay the dealership for the car and then take on the mangement of the finance arrangement. Depending on the agreement, the ownership may pass to the finance company up until a certain point in the agreement, or even for the full term. One things for certain, at the moment as it stands because no money at all has changed hands, unfortunitely the OP will have no rights over the vehicle, even if it was the dealerships mistake. There may be some milage in this (excuse the pun), you may be in a position to negotiate some more freebies, or even a discount or compensation for your time if you're lucky. Best thing is to approach it in a friendly manner, if you go in all guns blazing you probably won't get anything, go in with a pleasent manner, speak to the dealership manager and explain you're a bit miffed at having to keep returning to sort things out and more than likely you'll get what you want and more. Mike.

I would just go sign it or they will get the car back as it's still officially their property, they could just come with a removal truck and take it and there's nowt you can do about it. Whether they messed up the finance agreement or not, the simple fact is the vehicle has not been paid for so they do still own the vehicle. The name on the logbook means sweet FA and does not constitute legal ownership of a vehicle - they use the term "registered keeper" on the Logbook to try and avoid this confusion. Mike.

The main suggestion I have is there's too many forums! It took me ages to find the one for job vacancies the other day when I had one to post up - almost gave up.

I dunno, which is the lesser of the two evils?

I can quite proudly say I don't have a single item of Ikea furniture in my house. (Argos, yes but so far no Ikea)

Dunno John, it's a tough one to call that is . . . . . . Personally I'd say it's really not worth it, as I've applied and undoubtably I'm by far the best candidate for the job.

Next day if you pay about £120 and goto the passport office in London.