Roberto

While having a good overall level of health can improve one's resistance to disease, whether or not you are infected with flu, say, has very little to do with whether or not you 'think healthy'.

I'd rather clean my teeth with a chainsaw myself, but to each their own.

I wouldn't want to stay long term in a holiday inn myself, which is what you'd effectively be asking a MP from, say, Newcastle to do. But yes, there's nothing wrong with decent, but not luxurious, accommodation. I wasn't getting the impression that was what the person I replied to had in mind though. The pay rise was supposed to be about giving them a decent payrise in return for removing most (all?) expenses, which would arguably put them on precisely that footing. As for treating them differently, or not, because they are "in power" I think they should all be given what they need to do the job well. If they need to be treated differently because of the nature of the work they do in order to do their job as well as possible, then giving them less than they need seems a lot like cutting off our noses to spite our faces. Still feels like a kick in the nuts to those of us having to deal with 1%, I know. I'm no better off than anyone else here in that regard... but the idea of giving a decent wage to the people running the country and cutting off their chances at making crazy expense claims in return is fundamentally a good one imho.

Again, making the job as awful as possible, which is what you appear to be aiming for, is not going to improve the quality of the people doing the job. If you're fed up with the current lot of politicians from all parties as I am that's fine, but setting out to make the job conditions worse hardly seems like the best way to improve the quality of the people taking the job...

Of course they can. But they need to be able to afford to take up the post, right?

So you're saying that only the people rich enough to afford to be able to do the job of an MP regardless of salary should be doing it? After all, if those people who can't afford to do it without a decent pay level don't do the job then that's all that's left...

I couldn't agree more with you but too many people are still unable to tell the difference between their employer's professional web page and that thing they personally knocked up in geocities back in the day, and think that the only thing that matters is getting eyeballs on your page. Sounds like your deputy is one of these. If they want to provide links to local businesses then does they really think people will use them instead of just googling like they do now? Have you tried using that .gov design page with them? Have you tried asking them to explain precisely what problem or query with/about your school that causes members of the public to visit your site in the first place will be solved by a link to greasy joe's chippy?

Presumably, if the governors don't want to spend that much, they know of a suitable alternative? Obviously its a part of all our jobs to ensure that our respective institutions get good value for money out of their IT spend, so I'm not suggesting money should ever be spent rashly, but equally, the leadership in schools needs to realise that if they want/need good quality IT tools then these have a corresponding cost attached to them.

We've looked at this and implemented a few trials, and from where I'm sitting going to VDI or Terminal Services is more of a case of choosing where to spend the big money, and less about saving money. The capital outlay you save on the workstations frequently ends up invested in infrastructure and/or servers instead.

You need to establish this with your line manager. If they say "no" then what will you do? Do it anyway or refuse to cover? I personally think that yes, if you're on call you should be paid a suitable rate for being on call. As to what is suitable... do the caretakers get paid an on call fee? If so, you should say you want the same amount of money or same percentage of your salary, whichever pays more, obviously. What you need to establish as well, is the rate you'll be paid at if you actually get called.

I really don't understand the mentalilty of some of these answers. God forbid the students should learn something eh? It's not like they're at school to learn or anything is it? Oh... wait... I don't see the problem with these questions. Some of them perhaps should be answered in broad terms, especially given that they are trying to learn something for a curriculum assignment so would need answers framed in a context suitable for that anyway. If anyone really thinks that students knowing that something called "a GPO" (or "SCCM" or whatever) is how you install software genuinely puts your network security at risk then your network security simply isn't adequate anyway. This is kinda like the big fear some people have over letting students know that a command prompt exists... On a properly secured network it should not be an issue, and if your network isn't properly secured then the answer is to secure it, not to pray that no one notices the emperor has no clothes.

We had a project at work to do this. Nothing to do with IT really as we have a specialist film/AV department. I know they ended up taking someone on for 6 months to do it (later extended constant times until they had enough other duties to hire him anyway, but he easily spent about 6 months just converting tape and then at least another 10 'just converting tape, and...' and we got remarkably little useful material out of it for the time and money spent. Not for lack of trying on his part either.

Don't take this the wrong way but getting tablets in just to run twitter in classes sounds like the AHT (deputy head?) has a bad case of "oooh, shiny, I want one now what excuse can I use?".

I can kinda sympathise with people disliking netbooks because I've never seen a netbook that I'd consider pleasant to use, but I find the idea that they're "scared" of them to be somewhere between absurd and possibly a scathing indictment of the person responsible for teaching them to use the netbooks...

Absolutely have a lot of time for the lenovo laptops as good workhorses myself. I'd totally look at one for a personal Windows laptop, I agree. Still personally prefer a mac though; when I say that macs last better in my experience, I'm not just talking about them groaning into life in their 4th or 5th year, I'm talking about them still being an absolute pleasure to use at that age.

I really like my macs. They've always been a pleasure to use, the support has been top-notch (I know @Norphy just got a fault fixed on his imac by applecare warranty support, even though its out of warranty) and they've never let me down. As for the extra money, yes they cost more up front but every mac laptop I've purchased, I've kept for at least 3 years and managed to sell for a very good price afterwards because they hold their value. the last macbook pro I had, I purchased it in 2008 for about £1300 and my sister-in-law purchased it last year for my niece to use in college. They offered me £500 for it and my niece is absolutely delighted with it.

We're currently trialling a Sonicwall NSA 5600 to replace both our firewall and filtering boxes. We have a demo box on site which we've got working and so far I'm fairly pleased with it. Worth a look I'd say.

Nothing. I used to like halloween but now its just the anniversary of my mother's death, so I don't see much to enjoy from it now. To be fair, the kids round my way are pretty good at the whole 'no porch light on = don't bother calling' thing.

We're managing OSX clients via SCCM 2012 - using Profile Manager to generate preferences and SCCM to deliver/enforce them and this works well. We've upgraded about 70% of our mac fleet to mavericks so far and not had any issues with this setup. Only useful if you're already using the right version of SCCM to manage your PC fleet, I know, but if you are then its worth a thought...

There's no 100% bulletproof method of stopping students viewing the local hard drive, so I'd suggest to your SLT that the time spent worrying about that could be better spent on making sure that what they do see on there is properly secured. That's what we do.

Good grief. Lets see now.. Portable: iPhone, Kindle Front Room: Blu-Ray, Xbox, TV, Mac-Mini Study: Desktop, Macbook Air Bedroom: 2nd Mac Mini Server Room: NAS I _think_ that's it.

I work in the college sector rather than a primary so I'm not really qualified to comment on how suitable macs are for your place in general. As for the technician - were these macs sprung on him at the last moment by some idiot who gets easily mesmerised by shiny things, and were they told to make them work with no training? I any of us would be annoyed and discouraged if that's what happened. Macs can integrate into AD and it will take a bit of extra work and yes, training, for them to be supported effectively. I'm a big fan of mac/apple gear on a personal level myself and even with already being used to it from a home perspective it was quite a bit of work to integrate them into our network... any discussion of how well they will fit in with your organisation needs to take that into account... there's a cost to integrating anything out of the norm into your system that needs to be recognised by all the people involved in the decision... and if the things they're being pushed for can be achieved using your normal PC setup then I'd want to make sure somebody was taking a long hard look at why the normal systems were not being considered.

Ran the update yesterday and it updated the firmware on my disk. It's a bit odd if you're not expecting it - several restarts then the machine shuts down.

Yes, a preponderance of students saying "we woz" and "innit" in the playground must clearly have been why the school this new one is replacing failed. Clearly this kind of slang has no place in formal writing, but language is evolving all the time, for better or worse, and attempts to strangle it like this are doomed to fail. Don't the people behind nonsense like this have anything better to do?

Oh I'd agree, this is a classroom control issue. I've always wondered with the people who want to block websites because students are wasting time, if they were teaching back in the days before the internet was common and students used to bring magazines to class, did they want to burn down newsagents and smash up printing presses to 'block' Heat and FHM?