Flatpackhamster

I'm sure it will always be required, but the question is how many people does it need? When I started in IT in Education in 2000, we needed one sysadmin for around 80 computers. Netware 4.1, Windows 98, 10-Base T to the desktop. There were 200 machines, and four staff including the IT manager. I hear that the same school now has 500 workstations, supports 500 BYOD laptops, campus-wide wifi, and a host of smaller schools - and has 5 staff to manage the network. You can get away with far fewer people running much bigger networks. I'm seeing the same thing with my retail clients. Microbusinesses are going to managed solutions for their email, and NAS boxes, rather than a client/server architecture. They can cut their IT costs in half by doing that. Home users - well, lots of them are junking the home PC and switching to a tablet, which is all they ever really needed since about half of them only want internet, email and photos. No antivirus needed, no yearly service. The better the tech gets, the fewer of us it needs. It'll always need some people, but it really doesn't need that many any more. Tablets clobbered the retail market and cheap managed hosting killed the SME one.

Are you doing anything special on it? Draytek's range is pricey but full of goodies, including a content-filtering system (extra cost), VPN, and lots of other malarkeys.

Hoverflies are great for your garden. They love to eat aphids. You can tell it isn't a bee because it only has one pair of wings, not two.

Why not? They can't identify you to the police, can they?

My brother plays a couple of MMOs and does that new-fangled talking-video-whatchamacallit. Maybe I'm just an old git from a gaming point of view.

I guess I just don't see the fun in what is essentially a solitary act where you interact with other people through the medium of a screen being transported to a pub, which is a place where you interact with other people through the medium of talking to their faces. I just don't see how an anti-social activity gels with a social one. And gaming is an anti-social activity, and I write as a keen gamer (with no time to game any more).

HUGE TEETH! They've got HUUUUGE TEEETH... And mouthparts like tungsten drill bits for cutting through the bone and tendon. Am I helping?

Wow, what a wit. Well, half of one, anyway. You really don't know how it works, do you. IPSA is responsible for setting MPs pay. Not Parliament. Not the Government. MPs have no veto, no vote, no leverage over the pay rise. It isn't up to them. By all means blame the government for the stuff it's done and responsible for. But ranting about something they have no control over and haven't done makes you look like a partisan cretin.

Maybe it's the way they crawl in to your ear when you're asleep and latch on to your brain stem and suck the life out of you.

But I wouldn't go to a pub to game.

I fail to see how anyone who isn't relentlessly partisan or totally ignorant of the way MP's salaries are now set could blame Cameron for this decision.

I think it depends what design of barbecue you've got. My gas barbecue used to have a diffuser but I've replaced it with a base grill covered with lava pebbles. The difference in the heat is remarkable (the first time I used it all the paint peeled off the barbecue and the grill warped). The diffuser ones, I agree, there's not the same flavour, but the lava ones, particularly once it's been used a few times and the lava has been caked in cooking juices - I guarantee you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. And if you like the wood flavour, toss a handful of wood chips on to your lava while it's on preheat, and you'll get that smoked effect.

That's just snobbery. As if the production of large amounts of delicious, uncindered food that doesn't taste of lighter fuel is somehow a bad thing.

That's not a blind taste test, is it? Loading the barbecue, getting it lit, waiting for it to be hot enough, clearing up the ashes afterwards... Even if you were 'ready to cook in 10 minutes', which I simply don't believe you can be unless you're cooking on unheated coals, you've still got an awful lot of mucky setup and clearing which you don't have with gas.

Nah, it just cuts out an hour or more of messing around and means you can guarantee you won't poison anyone. I defy anyone to do a blind taste test between gas-cooked and charcoal and tell the difference.

Prep and public schools also allow 'unqualified' teachers. All 'unqualified' means is they don't have a PGCE. Doesn't mean they can't do the job or they aren't educated. Depends on the school environment. If the TA is dealing with that sort of issue, fine. I think Gove's concern is that they aren't dealing with that, and they're taking on half or whole classes. Inclusion is an article of faith now, and if you oppose it then you're basically an evil racialist disabled-hater.

This is the argument being put out, but I'm unconvinced by it. I don't know if it's better for the SEN child, and just as importantly for the other children in that child's class, to integrate them. I think it depends upon the nature of the SEN.

If I were you I'd put the IPPR paper in the recycling where it belongs.

Mmm, and she wasn't much cop either, although she was popular with the unions. AFAICT the problem is that the number of TAs has tripled since 2000. Instead of doing what they ought to be doing, which is offering assistance to children with SEN to enable them to integrate, they're now taking half or whole classes, and they're neither trained nor qualified for that. Anyone who's in favour of quality teaching in schools should balk at the use of semi-skilled labour. The teachers themselves ought to balk at it because it's doing down their profession.

I shower straight after sex. The water company sent someone round to check on my meter because it hadn't budged in years and they thought it was broken.

Are you me? Same situation here. We have an adorable 8-month old girl as a consequence. Induction isn't frightening - or at least it wasn't for me. The c-section was the frightening bit, although it was 4am by then and I had been awake for 20 hours so I was a bit vague on the actual details.

I was talking about two different tablets, not a book and a tablet. My point is not the objection to the technology but the cretinous wankitude which says 'What a lovely apple logo - I must own 5 million of those'.

At any cost? If you had to choose between two tools that did the same job, one costing £25 and the other £250, would you choose the more expensive one or the cheaper one?

It's not that we don't want IT, it's just that we aren't cretins who go "OMGGG I MUST HAVE DER SHINEY". We know full well what the end cost to the school will be, because it's not just about the initial outlay. It's about maintenance, replacement. You've got to have spares for when someone drops/sits on/throws their iPad. You've got to have a content filter, and a tool to stop them being loaded up with Angry Birds. You've got to have a system to maintain them, and an asset register, and so on and so forth. If there's a case for e-readers replacing textbooks, then fine, let's see it made. But from a cost point of view alone there's no need to use iPads. Cheap generic £60 tablets running Android, fine. Apple's flagship revenue generator - no thanks.

My DVD copy (region 2) refers to Taco Bell. Maybe they kept it the same for the DVD version.