srochford

Wakes from hibernation check out Launching a program and Monitoring Computer Usage to give you some ideas. One day I'll grab the stuff of that website and move it somewhere else (it's nearly 3 years since I left CNWL and one day they'll wonder what all that stuff is doing on that server!) but it's still available now. Shout if you want any more info.

Not offended, just amazed that someone might think that anywhere in the UK is so risky you might not be able to do an evening course!

And that, surely, is why schools keen to save money will go the way of the cloud. You can buy an awful lot of internet connection with good backup for the price of a decent IT member of staff. I'm not suggesting that it's the best way to go but it's certainly a good bean-counting way of looking at things!

I'd guess that Office 365 is in part a response my Microsoft to Google Docs. Given Microsoft's app-v product I'd guess the next move will be for them to combine this somehow - you've then got the flexibility of the full MS Office product but delivered in a way that can be used offline. It's obviously not here yet but I've no doubt that something like it will come (and please don't drag my words up in 2 years time to prove how rubbish I am at predictions :-))

You're pedalling an age old stereotype - Hackney might be higher risk than some places but it's not high risk.

Can you explain what doesn't work/what you are trying to do? Maybe someone here can help. I don't personally have any dealings with Viglen now but they were always good in the past and I think we've still got a lot of their equipment here doing some fairly important stuff.

It will kill you :-) Sugary drinks associated with higher blood pressure

50Mb sounds pretty small -as you say, there are apps that can dump nearly that much stuff without you doing anything remotely "wrong" It's relatively cheap to buy more disc space but it gets more expensive when you factor in backups (and think through "how fast could I restore this when it all goes horribly wrong) and "cheap" is always an unhelpful term when you've got no money at all! Those who were at Microsoft yesterday saw the presentation about Office 365 (Microsoft Office 365 - Online Services & Hosted Software in the Cloud) - this isn't actually available yet but it may be something schools could look at. I've no idea about what sort of SLA you get with the free service but it does give 25Gb of space which might be suitable for some things (but then you get issues of how you get 25Gb of data per user to and from the cloud!) Not expecting any sympathy, but it all gets much harder with university students - we have individuals here who have >4Tb of data each and storage for that is just a little bit challenging :-)

The "different test for each student" is already there in some of the tests - the Promissor stuff was doing this years ago so the exam seating model becomes much less important. There are some exam boards which allow exams to be taken on demand - not sure if this is true for any UK qualifications but it certainly happens for some of the Cambridge International stuff (I used to set the papers!). The issue with this in many schools is that the exams end the year and nothing happens after the student has done the exam but you could have a different system. It's not just about passing costs on to schools (although I'm sure there's an element of that in there) but making exams fit in better with the teaching and learning. It's not going to happen tomorrow but we can start thinking about how we would do it and how we make sure that the system develops in a way which doesn't cause unnecessary expense, disruption etc etc.

As well as thanks to the organisers and hosts, we ought to say a big thanks to @edu_tech for an amazing cake - well done :-)

One of the things that Isabel Nisbet said in the interview was along the lines of "this has always been considered too difficult - I'm now just taking it off the 'too difficult' pile" to get people thinking about it" and I think that's fair. There are loads of reasons why this could be a good idea and loads of potential problems. We're using it for a limited number of exams (mainly where you're being tested in things like programming or where you need to use a particular piece of software as a rather special calculator) I'd guess that in schools it would make sense to start by using computers for exams where they provide a real benefit in the same way that calculators started being used in exams because it meant that you didn't have to make the arithmetic easy and could concentrate on the physics, chemistry etc. It isn't going to happen this year but I'm sure it can happen. Many schools have a good framework in place (eg the facility to lock down machines, reset machines to a known state at the end of a day, restrict internet access by user group or machine group) and so on but getting enough hardware will be a challenge. Is this the time when we change away from everyone doing the same exams at exactly the same time?

You can also do this the other way round - remove "domain users" from the local users group and add in "staff" (or whatever group you need) (so you're allowing a specific group rather than denying all the others) Note that if you do this on Windows 7, people who aren't in the users group won't be able to log in interactively (you just get a blank desktop)

Acoustic coupler! Those were the days. Kids today, don't know they're born :-)

It's home brew. The login script writes to a syslog server as a user logs on and I think that data is analysed to see which machines have a user on them. I know it also does more than that but I haven't seen the actual code. I think we will eventually go live with a mobile app so people can check for free machines - we have a very lightweight web page at the moment which can show every cluster and the number of free machines.

Don't have a sample letter but there are a few points to think about. The chances are that the movies are illegal - you should warn them about this (who knows, they may have some agreement with Warner Bros which allows them to have a digital copy of a movie) but they should go sharpish. The pictures and iTunes stuff could well be legal but you don't want them on your system because they take up too much space. It would be reasonable to give them time (say 1 week) to get the files off the file servers - you should offer advice about where they should go (it might be that they should just go off-site to the user's home PC but it would be sensible to give advice on how to do that) The problem with iTunes is that it will default to putting its stuff in the "music" folder so for someone who legally buys stuff online and downloads it, that's where it goes. They will almost certainly need help to get it to somewhere better.

You could use it but what version of Windows are you using? If you've got windows 7 then the search facility is amazingly good. If you've got XP and a reasonable spec machine then I'd just put on the Windows search - it's pretty good in the last version (4??) and if you haven't got a decent spec machine then I really wouldn't put Sharepoint on it -you're adding a webserver and a SQL server which need a fair bit of oomph to work well!

Pretty sure that @p-dave is right. @bart21 - is your machine connected to a domain? If not, try joining it and see what happens. I've found something which says that you can't use the admin shares (c$ etc) if you've set up a homegroup - have you done that? The other possibility is that firewall rules are blocking access. Can you access any shares on the machine? If not, then check the firewall settings - by default, Windows 7 does not allow inbound SMB connections.

Teaching is supposed to be some kind of profession, not a call centre type of job where you might have to get permission to go to the toilet (and the writer doesn't appear to want to go to the loo during a lesson; just for it to be easier to do during lesson changeover. I don't suppose he would mind being blamed if he lost but when you're responsible for 20-30 people it's pretty much impossible to know what each of them is doing all the time. Sure, you can do things like checking at the end of the lesson to see if (say) all the mice are still there but then what do you do when you find one's missing? Dealing with that kind of thing makes life an awful lot harder than it is for the office worker who needs to make sure they don't lose the mouse off their desktop PC. Tidying up my desk is easy and I would expect to have to do it; making sure that 20-30 other people get their desk tidy is possible but again adds extra workload. Getting overtime signed off is probably universal - it's the blocks put in the way of doing it that the writer is complaining about. Why can't it be an online system? Why does he actually have to go in person to see someone who's not there at a convenient time? I don't know what a public school teacher gets paid in NY; I have an idea that it's rather less than in the UK but that's not really important. What is important is that this is not a particularly pleasant working environment and it could be better; so could the jobs of the people being paid less. I'm afraid that you and many others have got into the mindset that whenever you see someone that you think is better off than you are you don't say "How can my job be changed so it's as good as theirs is" but rather "How can I drag their job down so that it's as bad as mine" and I think that's one of the things which is wrong with our society today. (I'd guess we could call it Broken Britain although I think that term may have been used elsewhere!)

Not sure of the exact figure but we do have a valuable manufacturing industry. The difference from (say) 50 years ago is that it employs very few people. My dad worked in the Sheffield steel industry in the 50s and 60s; in those days it was a major employer of people. Today I think Sheffield manufactures more steel by value than it did then but it's done with a tiny fraction of the employees. I can't see the banks ever leaving London. In theory you could have banking in any country in the world. In reality the bankers want to be in London, not just because they see it as an area where they can pay little tax but for the same reasons that lots of other people want to live here. I'm certain that there are areas in pretty much every public and private sector organisation where efficiencies can be made but more efficient doesn't always mean better (it's more efficient to have mixed sex wards in hospitals than single sex wards because you don't get totally predictable numbers of men and women needing a ward at the same time but most people don't want that) It's also obvious that anyone who's physically capable of work should be working not claiming benefits. We could employ them in the public sector - there are plenty of jobs which could be created - but this is seen as a bad thing. What we need, then, is for the private sector to employ all these people (5 million???) and there's precious little sign of that happening. Most private companies seem to be working out how they can employ fewer people to do the same work, not more. And then there's tax avoidance. Private Eye has reported on £6 billion tax avoidance by Vodafone. Vodafone deny this; HMRC won't discuss it so who knows if it's true but if it is then that's one hell of a contribution to clearing budget deficits (it's more than 10% of the entire education budget, for example) Instead of just cutting public spending he government could choose to make a tax system where companies that do business in the UK pay tax on their profits in the UK and aren't allowed to pretend that their business is actually in Luexmbourg etc. I can't see this government doing it but it's one of the alternatives which they pretend don't exist.

Photo or we don't believe you :-) I think the comments about getting more respect when smartly dressed are interesting - I'd guess this is because you then look like teachers (who probably get respect). If you worked in a place where the dress code was more relaxed then it probably wouldn't matter. I spent 18 years wearing suits etc and was quite happy to do so but now I generally wear jeans/trousers and shirts or T shirts (and shorts when the weather is warm!). Working in a university means that no-one cars what you wear. You're pretty much always judged on what you do than how you dress which I think is the way it should be.

It's in the budget for a particular purpose (eg buying Microsoft Licenses) If that purpose no longer exists (MS licenses got cheaper) then it's totally appropriate for it to go back in the central pot and for everyone to have a chance to bid for the money. Pretty much every department in a school will have put forward budget requests and been told "sorry; not enough money" - this now gives all of them a second chance to say "well, I need £xx to do yyyyy" and for senior management to evaluate them all and pick the best use for the money. It may well be that they will opt to buy new PCs (although I'm not sure that the cost saving on the basis of power saving is likely to sway things).

Agreed with @powdarrmonkey. If the kids aren't even using the computers (eg the one with the roast dinner!) then making them unavailable won't help. If anything it could make it worse - you'll have people poking at things to try and make them work etc. You've got to get the kids out of the room or make sure they're properly supervised if they really have got to be in that room - it's not acceptable for them to be behaving in this way.

For those who can't get everything they need on a single screen, Kyocera have just announced a dual screen phone - Sprint | Introducing the Kyocera Echo™ - only from Sprint Not sure if it will be available in the UK (don't think I've ever seen a Kyocera phone here) but it looks fascinating. This, of course, is why I have a 5 year old phone; there's always something new around the corner and so I'm just waiting for the best thing to arrive :-)

Take real care if you try this - "For the most part, this is not recommended" are the first words in that article and they make sense. I've played with this before and ended up with a dead machine. Can you not just reinstall them - it will be much, much safer!

they're all firewalled so it's not much of an implication but it means that staff/students can connect to the VPN and then access their machine from outside without any weirdness that you'd get with NAT. We have loads of collaborative working so you'll get users on the other side of the world who've remote desktopped into their own machine. We now also have a system where they can remote WoL their machine (all part of our power saving initiative)