alttab

and yet this France team is the worst I've seen in the last 20 years. They'll only progress because they're in a stupendously weak group. Also, what use is strength of the Spanish squad when they don't offer the variety needed to affect the course of a match as substitutes. this really is about England not having the right type of players in the starting XI, who can perform a function suited to modern international football. England playing Gerrard is akin to Spain relying on Alonso - they're neither out and out playmakers nor true defensive midfielders, they're style of play which is long range passes and shots outside the box is a luxury few sides can afford. Henderson is a far better fit for his versatility. England should have gone with a 5-3-3, with Johnson and Baines as advanced wingbacks Henderson and Wiltshire in midfield, Barclay behind a front two of Rooney and Sturridge.

It's a shame he choose to use a sound bite comment to highlight the particular aspect of careers advice which is who is best equipped to advice students about careers and jobs in say manufacturing (the sector is so broad that even those working within the sector would struggle to give specific advice regarding careers outside of their own experience). It's a very patronising comment to make anyway - even if it was made tongue in cheek, by going to university getting qualified attending job interviews and securing employment teachers are doing exactly what other graduates are doing out there in the 'real world' lol

+1 also, i don't personally think food or early morning regimen can change that AM demotivated feeling - if you have greater energy from a morning run or workout the last thing you want to follow that up with is a morning of tedium in front of a computer screen ....what is certainly going to help getting through the day is interesting challenges at work and a good rapport with fellow support workers.

going with something like the infinity product, even if your not utilising it for general internet traffic, how are you finding the service deals with QoS requirements for voip calls ? with such high speed but shared services you might have sufficient bandwidth to for enough voip calls using G.711/G.729, but just interested to know how these types of services fare if they don't offer QoS or prioritisation for voice calls through the provider network.

that's why a school would factor in contingency in their financial planning. I'd also consider setting aside money in the schools budget for the real terms cost of the scheme a form of contingency planning, is it reasonable for say a 600 pupil school to take on the full financial burden of spending 60k+ a year over three years to fund a 1:1 scheme (i'd even question how many schools have the luxury of setting aside that sum of money even if they wanted to) given the demands of funding new PC's, software, IT maintenance etc. You can't exactly ask for the funding of IT for whole school use to be met by parental contributions, but personal devices with the carrot that they are covered by insurance irrespective of where they be damaged or stolen and are owned outright at the end of the 3-years are a different matter. Parents know the real cost of ownership of these schemes, and the added value of signing up to a school scheme, that's why the majority return their slips, and a minority either won't or can't contribute. I also think the reason apple devices are overwhelmingly more popular is because of iOS and the app store, and the better depreciation compared against alternatives. PS: Great to hear all the "why Apple" comments, always nice to hear your not the only one running into the "it's the best because the nice ad told me so".

So does that mean total cost to the parent is £400 ? Which is cheaper than them buying a new device outright themselves.... on the surface seems like a reasonable deal, and as it's about ensuring no child is left out, I don't see how claims it'd be a money maker for the school stand up to scrutiny. Can it even be said such schemes will allow schools to recover cost alone given you can't ensure some parents don't stop making the donations. I

that would never work, unless a government pursued and was successful in implementing a highly export driven economy, think Norway and it's substantial Oil and Gas exports. But norway is the exception rather than the rule, Japan has for decades been a big export driven economy, but because of it's demographics it's government has to run a large deficit just to get the economy ticking over. I think it's just mad for a government like ours or the US to focus on reducing an already insubstantial deficit of between 5%-9% to 0, through counterproductive tax rises that hit ordinary working people the hardest. Government borrowing only goes up anyway as a result of ill-timed tax rises. I agree the loopholes are a problem, but to me that suggests an overly complex domestic tax situation, I wouldn't argue for a flat tax to correct that, and a race to the bottom to encourage business investment seems pointless because your competing with offshore havens and tax structures that can offer a lower rate, the only way to change that is international agreement.... it'd be more beneficial to domestically take a lot more people out of paying tax completely. And find a way through taxation to put more money in people's pockets, where that money could circulate through the economy via spending and investment. At the moment more money than is necessary goes into the blackhole that is taxation - and amongst the worst is long term tax burdens like the graduate tax. Just as much of a blackhole are excessive corporate profits. Our government should be relaxed about the deficit and debt and realise that if they cut Ni, income taxes, do something about excessive costs of utilities, you'd get a far fairer outcome when it comes to wealth creation. Just about the only strategy that's working for me at the moment are the moves to raise the income tax threshold and 0.5% interest rates. It's not enough though.

the recent raising of the tuition fee threshold has been a huge hit to those on middle incomes, the uk was already pretty high up the list of developed countries when it came to avg. tution fees and proportion of those fees paid by the student...the govt. will use the argument about university graduates on avg. doing better over their lifetime in the job market, but then there has to be a balance between needing future graduates with key skills entering the workforce and the disincentives of yet another tax on career progression/increased earnings. I just don't like the idea of people being mortgaged for years to come based on the perceived benefit they receive.

i think consumers [and as end users in the workplace] have more computing power at home, more flexibility with the devices they own in their pockets, than what is available to them in the workplace. So yes, businesses and the employer are slower to upgrade and less likely to embrace the technology that consumers are buying into. I read an article today that says this can be a cause of great frustration dissastisfaction for the employee as they are tied to a more rigid way of using technology in the workplace. But you can't ignore the big changes that have happened and will continue to happen that fundamentally change the nature of the sysadmin role. Neither does it all have to be about the cloud either....if an ICT decision is made in a school or business whereby they buy a product or service that automates a process that previously required time and in-house IT man power to implement how can it not change the nature of what in-house IT support does ? It will be the case that improvements in technology which enable automation or doing more with less input result in downsizing....i've seen it happen in the company I used to work for, which went from a department of seven to just three...and while this often occurs with a wider downsizing of workforce in an organisation, there are other organisation changes like mergers, and in general the move toward shared services and outsourcing of IT has clearly shaken up in-house IT. Even if outsourcing doesn't happen in the corner of education that an individual is happily plugging away in, shared services could very easily happen on their doorstep.

right, so how does that work with administering the new features in windows 2012 ? Which is presumably the main reason for having windows 2012 instances over tried and tested windows 2008 R2.

for which you need windows 8, which is just as bad if your not a fan of the nonsense. I've seen one suggestion of publishing various admin tools as remoteapps, and then accessing them from the start menu of a windows 7 host, but it's just more minutes wasted when all your trying to do is be productive from the get-go.

I don't see why they wouldn't eventually be accepted. I guess there's a process to making an application for membership, and it could take some years. But in the meantime there's no reason why they couldn't trade with the European Union just as Norway do, without either being a fully fledged member state or signing up to the single currency. I don't think it would ever be a good idea for Scotland to join the single currency, not in it's current form anyway. the big questions for Scotland is what they would lose by gaining independence, and would they gain substantially more than the significant powers they already have through devolved government. The other worry for scottish voters is that they don't become the next Iceland or Ireland a few years down the road.

I think that's what they are doing, I'm pretty sure their elearning ide's can output for html5 on mobile devices. And it think that's pretty important, given the vast number of people familiar and productive with the flash ide. Their designed for html5 development products are fledgling, so i don't think your going to get tonnes of people with years of flash and action script experience dumping it all to go with far less mature tools.

the thing is, you can get resources that are SCORM compliant that can be uploaded into a VLE of choice, but a lot of subscription based services where you do have things likeindividual assessments and a lot of online content unless they all sing from the same hymn sheet as far as federation/shibboleth, then this is forever going to be an issue. Unless you really can get by with having as few of these separate systems - but then that requires content tailored for your VLE to match what they offer - and secondly can you really get all the content they offer into digestable modules for your VLE ? Several massive asks in my view. I know people have mentioned AD integration for Moodle, but does the same route work for allowing moodle users to access shared areas. Like server shared folders and homedirs ?

there are potentially a number of issues at play here. as others have mentioned roaming profile size would probably be one. Under windows 2008 with win7 it's easy enough to go with redirected folders and have nothing but local profiles with GPO set to clear local profiles after 30 days? i think. Under windows 2003/xp you'd be looking at something like delprof if you were to go the local profile route or as witch mentioned mandatory profiles, both should be coupled with folder redirection. The issue you have with your wireless is that it is a shared medium, you don't have 100mbps full duplex for each client to pull down large profiles. Wireless by it's nature almost forces one to redesign, whereas 100mbps+ switched networks allows you to get away with all sorts of stuff. so design to keep things lean. And even without profiles depending on what's happening during start and post-login you could potentially have a lot of network communication going on and each client contending for shared bandwidth. Often wireless that's designed primarily for coverage has situations where a single AP is used to provide coverage to two rooms. This isn't ideal if you have clients with thick victorian walls on the other side of an AP with the 'strongest' signal or worse if you have a room which has the physical characteristics that demand an AP in the room but there isn't one!!! Especially if you have non-enterprise AP's on the other side. A good starting point if fixing the profile issue doesn't improve end user experience would be to get to the bottom of how your managed wireless works and optimises as far as it's control characteristics. Another starting would be to look at the type of wireless NICs you have in your end user devices and how they can be optimised [difficult if you've got cheap as chips NICs that don't take advantage of all the cleverness and high specs of modern managed AP's]. ultimately you best is to manage expectations, your client server and network architecture should be architectured as such for a worst case scenario that each user can only be able to obtain single digit MB/s -. Sure in theory your AP can take advantage of multiple radios and on paper provide 450Mb/s and your clients might say they're connected at 140Mb/s or whatever but this is real world where the AP just cannot physically dedicate 100meg to each client during the duration of it's login -many portable devices don't even have the hardware to connect at close to those advertised speeds anyway, unlike what even a decade old Fast ethernet switch and 10/100 network cards can do for instance. The important thing is to try and provide a good experience rather than expect to do on the wireless the same stuff that's done on the wired. Roaming profiles are bad enough on the wired, it can be tear your hair out stuff on wireless.

i agree with most of that. i personally don't think the learning curve for end users is sufficiently steep for business and schools to have to stick with windows 7. if anything the start screen makes more sense as a desktop replacement. maybe i'm off base with that, but i don't see why a user would want or need a start menu if the things that they need to get to can be presented in a non-cluttered fashion on the start screen. Plus, if there's group policies to control what's presented then what's the big deal. The other aspects of Windows 8 that don't require a learning curve like the faster boot up times, the ribbon, the UI effects [or lack of] are a bonus over windows 7. by and large i can see schools going for either iPad or some variant of a windows 8 slate. That commonality of interface on windows devices is really important, even if there's some adjustment when using keyboard/mouse rather than touch. It can't be that big of a deal for schools to do phased roll out windows 8 onto desktops if they're providing win8 or RT slates to staff and pupils.

ipforwarding and ip-helper should be enabled at the switch level if your in a multi-VLAN environment. consult your switch vendors documentation or vendors' dhcp whitepapers on the commands required.

on the node where your getting CSV access errors, have you tried restarting the server, are you seeing the LUN in disk mgmt ? if so you should be only seeing one LUN with MPIO working properly, if your seeing two instances then you know MPIO isn't working. Try rescan disks although tbh a restart should detect the SAN storage. Most importantly, if you've had any disruption to SAN access to any of your hosts, if they're not completely identical in terms of HBA/iscsi adapter with same firmware versions, drivers etc. then the normal resolution steps may not work first time. it's in these types of situations that issues with non identical setups can cause problems.

fair enough, but with something like progresso your not really dealing with a locally install version and a centrally hosted cloud version. Schools are either in the facility camp or the one's that are now going live with progresso. If i was an MIS provider, i'd want to focus my efforts in the future on the platform that i wanted customers to eventually move to - whether that was a newer edition of a locally install product or a new cloud based offering doesn't matter, providers all have a roadmap for their product lines...clearly as an MIS provider you have to expect to support the differing products for quite some time, but if the hope is to move people onto the newer platform then they would be wise to ensure they get some good testominals rather than risk treating them as second class citizens because they represent a smaller proportion of their customer base. i personally think it's a very ambitious move, but as it's not about to discontinue the locally installed product it's a manageable undertaking. i think clearly there's a lot of potential for wins from the new schools and academies being created all over the place, they may be looking at a pure cloud-based, presumably from the ground up system, with someone else maintaining the DB instances, the updates, the power and cooling is a real selling point if they don't have the onsite resources, another plus if cloud can shave several k's off the alternative locally installed alternatives. For some of the sizes of these free schools and academies on paper it makes a lot of sense. Given their size you wouldn't necessarily expect them to want to go to the trouble of hosting their own Exchange 2010 infrastructure, so why should MIS be any different. Obviously MIS in the cloud is not all a bed of roses, but then it's a case of whether you can work with the downsides. I find it a bit odd when people say they can't tolerate any performance issues or downtime with their MIS, when businesses have to deal with performance and availability issues for datacenter hosted web apps that are far more real world business critical.

i'm not sure i understand this point. The hosting provider is doing the updates so that the user doesn't have to, and so that it doesn't need to be done a thousand times across a thousands schools in a region.

i think that type of anywhere, anytime access is the point of going with a cloud based solution. It's surely more cost effective than LEAs offering wide area clustering. I'm not sure LEAs are geared to going down that kind of route anyway nowadays of replicating MIS instances. IF a school have a couple of separate sites they can probably do something off their own backs, and the issue of a cloud based MIS not being tested in the field is a valid one but for quite a while now business critical apps for small, medium and large companies have been shifted to remote datacenters and/or the cloud, and i don't really see the distinction from an availability/performance point of view...the only difference is who's ultimately responsible for hosting the data and ensuring uptime. , obviously nothing beats local access but then locally hosting stuff in every satellite office or department didn't make much sense for businesses and councils. A lot of schools are still large enough and have enough staff needing to manipulate data that they can justify it, but for how much longer. It'll be a while before 100meg+ speeds and bonded ADSL backup become a commodity for most locations and cloud can do it at a far lower annual cost. Then again a lot will depend on early adopters experiences in the first few years of cloud MIS, as to whether they continue and others follow, or they go back to a locally hosted solution. I think it'll be good enough for more and more schools, it's just that SIMs has such a large market share that it doesn't necessarily need to feel threatened by cloud based MIS alternatives. Decision makers in schools will look at much more than how much they can save when it comes to MIS, other elements of ICT procurement and they focus squarely on the bottom line...MIS is a different beast

maybe it's actually good, current design. It's not necessarily a whim just because someone doesn't like the change. what tends to happen on any forum where stuff like this is debated is that there are howls of derision about a step change...whether large or small. But then people just get on with it, sometimes even convert to liking it. You had the same with the london 2012 logo. People who make a living writing about such stuff on blogs and in print ooze cynism and incredulation, but it was never enough to warrant a U-turn from the decision makers. They just needed to be a bit thick-skinned and wait for the chatter to move on to something else. Same with this logo, same with Windows 8. Everyone hates it, why couldn't they just stick with the nice, old comfortable slippers. But now all of a sudden threads popping up about how folk are warming to win8. what a surprise. not. However, no-one will ever convince me that this whole Outlook Web access 2010 / outlook.com web email look is better than the classic exchange 2003 OWA [was it still called OWA back then ?]. Maybe it's one of those where i can't see the good, current design, but i don't think i can ever like it. let alone love it. the metro style for future owa/outlook.com is a definite improvement. metro everywhere is fine by me if it means we can get shot of the transparency stuff in win7, the w2k8 gui in it's entirety , and the current OWA ui.

i would say folder redirection with offline files is a better idea these days than roaming profiles. admin rights for staff is probably not necessary these days, staff may throw their arms up - but overall AUP policies apply to them just as much as to those who you'd expect to lock down. I found it to have been a bugbear when nasties like confiker were still loitering around a network, all the work done to try and keep machines up to date undone by not having complexity requirements for domain passwords AND giving users with common passwords local admin rights. So why bother unless you desperately need those badly written scripts and apps that upset the applecart.

didn't realise he was in his 80's. sad news.

The colors haven't changed since the old logo, the new logo is all about it seems a restyling to fit in with the metro style where I'm guessing there's no room for wavy lines. Apples logo has undergone a far more radical snake up over the years. The windows logo is no more untouchable when it comes to redesign.