nikaso

I saw a demo of this last week, it all looked and sounded good but the cost was prohibitive, it was going to be north of £30k for an IT suite (30 PCs) because the PC base units have to have the special PSUs that can accept DC. Savings on energy were quoted at around £5k per annum but how realistic that is I don't know. Unfortunately the equipment started to smoke when it was being demo'd due to being wired incorrectly but never a good sign in a sales pitch! The energy savings come from the fact that they are not losing energy by converting from DC solar panels to AC for distribution on the grid and then back to DC through the transformer in the PC, not through any massive advances in solar panel tech. The server proposition sounded a bit more attractive because you can effectively save a bit of money on power but get a 4 hour UPS in with it as well due to the battery. From what I remember the plan is to get it to a state where they can lease the equipment (thereby reducing the massive initial Cap Ex) and the savings in energy pays for the PC lease but they aren't there yet.

Hi all, My exams officer has asked me to try and get people to vote on this, it's basically to get Capita to allow Student exam timetables to be placed in 'Linked Documents' which bizarrely they can't be at the moment.

When I used to do that sort of work I operated on a flat fee basis so the company was called FlatFeePC, basically I charged £30 callout which covered up to two hours work (I would be charging more like £40 or £50 nowadays). It worked out because some jobs took 15 minutes and some took 2 hours but my hourly rate worked out good enough.

Proxy server?

I've had a request from a member of staff to allow the goo.gl URL links to be accessed through our Lightspeed filter. My initial reaction was 'no way' but he then advised me that Google screen the links for malware. This may be the case but as I test I was able to shorten a definitively adult site's URL and it allowed me on without any issue. The argument I am getting is we only allow the shortened URLs for Staff users but it still seems like too big a security hole to me, what are other people's opinions on this? Does anyone else allow shortened URLs?

Oh 4chan........what would we do without you.

Hopefully Linfit can shed some light on the patch, I can't seem to find the emails discussing it now and the SIMS manager is busy at the moment.

We had the same issue, Capita has a fix for it but it didn't work for us, the SIMS manager ended up having to enter the results manually through editpi

I agree there is probably something in the T&Cs about it, unfortunately the agreement was signed well before my time. They are insisting on an extortionate fee for the service they are providing though.

Capita told us categorically we could NOT move all our data across to SIMS so it wasn't an option. Your MS Publisher analogy falls down, if I had bought MS Publisher and wanted to access my files 5 years on I would expect to use the product I bought, I wouldn't expect Microsoft to support me with any technical issues but I would still expect to be able to open it. The bank charges point is a straw man argument, if you bought a fire safe to keep your documents in but then were expected to pay an annual rental for the key that doesn't seem right does it?

We only stopped using Facility in December and went to SIMS in January but obviously we need to keep records. We are currently being chased for an RTU (Right to Use) licence for our historical Facility installation, it sits on a server by itself and is accessed maybe 3 or 4 times a week by one person. For this high level of service Advanced Learning want £8646.01 This seems a complete and utter rip off, anyone else had this??

I've just started playing Star Conflict, I'm only a few days into it but I find it quite enjoyable so far, what problems are there with it?

It's pretty easy to dip in and out of, if you want instant action type games this is pretty good

Just wondering if anyone else is playing this? Its still in development but is quite good fun, fast paced and frenetic with Freelancer style flight and combat mechanics. We could set up and Edugeek corp if anyone fancied it? I'm currently flying for Jericho (because they have the coolest looking uniforms on the faction selection screen, a very deep thinking choice I know). Website here if you want to have a look, my player name is the same as my Edugeek name.

I'm an NM and I don't have a beard, I did have one for a while back when I was a tech though but a new girlfriend saw that off!

I was just reading something about a hall of fame and initially read the thread title as 'inducted' and was thoroughly confused! Good luck and best wishes in any case.

I went for and got this job, yay me! This does mean that there will likely be a Network Manager position coming up at my current school, feel free to PM me for details....

I've just got a job at another school so there will likely be a Network Manager post coming up in South Leeds as well.....

Well i think that has solved that question then! The custom bitcoin board might be worth it though, if it's netting £10 a day then it would pay itself off in under 20 days?

So I was reading an article in this month's PC Format about Bitcoin mining and it got me thinking, would the payoff to the school in terms of Bitcoins mined be worth the extra power consumed by leaving computers on to do it? We have roughly 200 desktop PCs with discrete graphics cards and combined would make a sizeable resource? I need to read a lot more about Bitcoins and how they work etc. (I have noticed a handy infographic using the forum search) but just wondered if anyone had mined Bitcoins (not necessarily on school equipment!) ?

So she can find things like the @ symbol, she can't touch type very well either. (my Black Widow is an International layout)

Seconded, both are brilliant (although the other half complains that she can't read the Black Widow keyboard because of the font!)

That sounds wrong in my head, but then a lot of things do! Have a great day anyway and enjoy it!

Sorry to hijack the thread slightly but just to ask how do you use the camera on a daily basis? Do you completely remove it every night etc. and set it up the following morning or is it some kind of fixed installation? I used to have an in car camera (cheapy chinese one) but the faff of messing around with suction cups etc every day and aligning it just stopped me using it?

I've always preferred Dominos to Pizza Hut but like you I have had to refrain due to increased pie quotient.