Roberto

Absolutely abysmal performance by the DfE here.

Can confirm that the nzxt case h710 is a wonderful thing and that the 6800 is a mighty beast of a graphics card. And that given how much I've struggled with this, I may well never build another computer again

Thanks for the replies. I've gone with a NZXT 710 and a promise to myself to measure things instead of assuming next time.

Ok. This is dumb of me I know but this is where I am now. Experienced builder, normally, but managed to buy a XFX Speedster SWFT 319 AMD Radeon RX 6800. It arrived today and when I got in from work all excited to fit it, I discovered it is too large for my Antec P100 Case. Firstly, let's take a moment to laugh at me. I'm usually pretty sure of myself when it comes to this kind of techie work and I figure that mistakes like this are worth sharing to keep me humble. Secondly, does anyone have any reccomendations for a good value, readily available case I can get? I don't want to buy trash but equally I don't want to spend a fortune given that my partner has quite rightly (and after she finished laughing) pointed out that I've spent a fair bit on the card itself, plus a new 750W psu to run it and we have other expenses this month besides my gaming hobby. So I guess that's budget at ~£100 tops. I've got 2x2.5" SSD and 1x3.5" HDD to fit in there too. There's also a BluRay drive in a 5&3/4" bay also but I'm not too fussed about carrying that over to a new case. PC Part Picker suggests the NZXT H710 should work and I can get one for £89. Does anyone have strong feelings either way about that case? Or any other suggestion besides pay more attention next time? What's really annoying is the P100 is a great case - but there's no way to remove the drives bays.

HP Graphing calculator?

I was thinking something like a binatone TV Pong console but the colours are not quite right for that I think.

These things were incredible. The computing power they contain is absolutely dwarfed by that in my watch but as a young lad at the time having one of these was like having a whole new universe open up for me. And when I finally got a spectrum, that was just bliss. I know that each time my parents saved and scrimped a year to get them, too. We didn't have much but they were willing to do all they could to encourage my interests in this IT stuff and my brother's interests in music. I think if my parents were still alive they'd be blown away by what their efforts back then have led me to now.

And this little number?

I reckon a ZX80? A true classic.

They could pay customers £84 per unit to take them off their hands and it would still be overpriced.

Yes, Ubuntu and Red Had are both most well known for being run out of one guy's shed. Commercial support for Linux is now available, if that's your thing. If you want to talk about support and value for money - my employer pays for the top tier of Microsoft premiuim enterprise support and I know how much that costs per year. I'd be concerned about value for money if my local primary was paying that same level for support. I'm not even advocating for Linux to be installed here, just saying that the question isn't as cut and dried as people seem to sometimes thing. Nuance is a thing.

I'm a huge fan of the Microsoft way. I'm a MVP and all that, but despite all that I think your reply here is overwrought and unhelpful. I don't think the value proposition of Linux vs. Microsoft is as clear cut as the "Linux is free" crowd say - but I think it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask about the value of Linux. Long term support, making it more difficult to hire people with the right skills (as Linux skills are less available in the market and will often go to better paid jobs just as higher end Microsoft stack people will tend to do so) is a very valid question to consider - but I think "damaging the school" is a ludicrous statement to make. What even is a "standard school" btw? I remember one point when RM Connect was the de-facto standard and people used to say that you'd be "damaging the school" and you couldn't possibly save money because everyone else pays for it when people used to talk about removing RM Connect and going with 'vanilla Windows'; I think these days you'd say that a 'vanilla Windows' school was perfectly normal. I remember equal doubt here and elsewhere about Office 365 vs on-prem (and again for Google Apps vs. Office 365). These days these choices are perfectly normal ones to make. iPads and Macs - I've been accused and seen others accused of heresy when the question of having these on the network come up. I'd certainly be asking some hard questions about value for money and supportability with a Mac classroom in a predominantly windows school or college these days, but its now considered a perfectly normal choice to make. So why shouldn't Linux be the same, a matter of choice? As a bare minimum, I'd expect any competent admin to look at their network and ask themselves if there are any situations where one platform vs. another might be better value or deliver a better experience, or free much needed budget without a drop in service as a matter of course. The only constant thing in IT is change.

I'm sure things like this absolutely won't exacerbate the recruitment issues people are talking about in the Devaluing of IT Jobs thread...

This is actually relatively easy - in theory. Arguably this should already be happening but whenever you buy a new piece of infrastructure you should already have an expectation of how long it will last before replacement would be necessary, what your future replacement strategy is likely to be, e.g. is this the last hurrah for something legacy you have to support, will you probably want more of the same (with possible changes to minor things like capacity) or will you be changing direction, for example is this the last server for application X you will buy before transitioning to AppX's cloud offering. You can then use the results of that thought exercise to do a few things Design for different replacement schedules in your initial purchase - choose some things that will need replaceing in 3 years, some that will need replacing in 5, etc) Put down a marker _now_ with SLT for the replacement schedule for new build equipment Ask the vendor what the expected lifecycle is. Look at their warranty offerings - I'm not necessaraily saying you have to buy their extended warranty but they know more about their own products' lifecycles than you do, and their warranty terms might reveal how they think about that...

Based on previous experience 1) No. Aside from anything else, you have to transition from old building to new (well we did) so you need kit in both places to parallel run as it were. As our move was planned years ahead it was accounted for in our replacement schedule (e.g. we stretched the lifecycle of kit in the old campus rather than replace it and have to dump new kit) 2) Yes, though we had to go out to tender given the value of the spend so "choice" isn't entirely the right word perhaps.

I'd probably be in a similar position if I was trying to buy our current house from scratch. Our mortgage is about 2x my current salary but to buy outright would be about 9x which is astonishing. The only reason we can afford this is because we've 'worked our way up the ladder' when doing so was much cheaper and easier. My partner's daughter and her partner have probably paid 5 or 6 times their salary for their first home (which tbf is a 3 bed family home). We do have a housing crisis and housing is starting to be unaffordable unless you've already taken advantage of the good times like I've been fortunate to do, or if you're young you need a couple of good jobs in your family and probably people in your family who can give you a hand with your start in life. This can't go on indefinately can it?

I think you're probably already doing pretty good then. Access to webmail (Google also?) and Google Docs will be locked down anyway, especially if they're doing so via apps.

I guess, where do you think the threats are, what would they be connecting to, and how would they be connecting? If they're connecting to RDP sessions then in 2022 those should be through a RDP gateway regardless, which acts as an SSL VPN effectively. If they're connecting to cloud sessions, then those should be via an SSL/TLS web connection, which will effectively encrypt the connection. Of course, at this point you're potentially vulnerable to MITM attacks so that's where the VPN comes into play. However, some services won't work well over a VPN (e.g. try doing a Teams or Zoom call over a VPN and you'll have latency issues). So yes, VPN all the things is still a thing, but should be done intelligently - you're protecting the data and the service so focus should be on those things. Are users locked down so they can't override unexpected certificate errors when connecting? That and certificate pinning will help secure connections to services like GApps or O365. What's the fallback when your VPN is down? Do you have support for the stance that its more important to encrypt connections than get jobs done if the VPN fails for any reason? Are the devices themselves using, e.g. bitlocker to encrypt data at rest?

I’m sorry. Just been reading the fca notes on this since I saw your first post, how terrible and infuriating it must be :-( this absolutely sucks.

Our remortgage completed yesterday, 2.9% for 5 years and feel luck we started looking at it when we did - accepted the offer in June and was just waiting to change without the early redemption on the old one. I’d say, always look for a good independent mortgage advisor if you can, I’ve used the same one for years (happy to share details here if it’s useful/allowed) and she’s always been really good at finding the deal I need. Used her for 3 mortgages so far, 2 of which were while I was in education and she always found deals that were good and affordable (clearly that’s a relative term, can’t give you something the lenders aren’t willing to offer)

Called it but still sorry, because I think its a neat idea. But I'm glad it looks like you're getting a refund.

Teams site. It's like a SharePoint site for those people who can't handle that new-fangled Teams stuff, but also works with Teams for those that can handle it.

Lots of the big sites use certificate pinning or suchlike to prevent MITM attacks. Which is what traditional SSL inspection is doing, albeit we don't call it a MITM attack because we're doing it with good intentions. This problem is only going to get worse imo, I think you'll need a product that installs an agent on EUC devices in the future if you want to continue to monitor their traffic...

How complex is your DNS namespacespace? Where you say that being able to control your own DNS space 'comes in handy sometimes' - is this not a value to the business you can quantify to the head - I assume you mean setting up new services that require a DNS change to track? Have you made it clear to the head you will not be able to do this in a timely manner if you go with their proposal? Do you use AWS or Azure already? Both of those provide DNS-as-a-Service offerings.

Carolean, apparently... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolean_era