CyberNerd

ITIL is designed to be flexible, and ITS is just an implementation of ITIL that is tailored for schools. I've read through FITS stuff and it is all pretty rational - but TBH I don't think it is necessary if you understand ITIL. You'd have to have only half a brain to not make the connection between an ITIL concept and a specific example in FITS. I'd stick with ITIL as it has more relevance and credence than FITS outside of schools.

Centralize mail from different accounts - Gmail Help

Genius. This is so obvious - but in all my time it never occurred to me to do this. Thanks Geoff !!!

Fog for imaging, WPKG for post installed deployment WPKG | Open Source Software Deployment and Distribution

for 3D Trimble SketchUp

If you take a look at Google apps you will find it has a lot more things than email,text,phone! Things like calendars,MIS access, spreadsheet access, wifi are all useful to senior teachers but not usable on sub £100 phones.

looking after samba AD is not any different than on windows as it uses all of the windows tools. It it s the AD protocols that they re-wrote, so you still get all the windows Group policy management, AD users and computers etc. sure someone has to hit yum update once in a while, but most companies will have a few nix people anyway to look after their Oracle and Apache. Samba will get commercial support at a fraction of the cost of MS.

No-once cares about the O/S - its all about the APPS - right?

I'm not so sure, posts by Jeremy Allison on Slashdot reveal MS were quite supportive - although this was all backed up by EU legislation calling for MS to open their protocols. Besides, MS just seem to care about tablets and the cloud now.

on every quotation I have seen. Your provider will be able to produce one. You can buy OEM licenses through EES or Select though

EES is an upgrade license only.

ssh to matlab then

They said that about XP, and I managed to avoid that and every windows release since for my main computing needs. I've tried Windows7 and 8 and they are both ok, the biggest problem is learning all of the commands to make it useful - but that goes for other operating systems too (perhaps with the exception of OSX which is surprisingly intuitive). I tend to use windows as an application now, rather than an operating system per se. I boot win 7 for games about once per month, but for day to day I have 10 desktops open (actually 5 desktops split over 2 screens). I don't bother closing the machine down as it permanently seems to have a couple of VM's running and several RDP sessions, so I invariably have plenty apps running at once. I don't seem to understand how my working needs are ever going to be helped by a touch-screen, and not at all by windows 8. As a regular 'user' I use a touchscreen android tablet for browsing the web - it works nicely with a bluetooth keyboard but it's not likely to replace my desktop if though I can (technically) do all the same things. It's not that I'm in any way against new interfaces, and I use a variety depending upon the machine I work at - I even used Unity for over a month! I just don't think touchscreens are likely to help with the way I work. I need to rapidly jump between different users on systems to test things out and have a range of applications at my disposal. XP couldn't help me with this (not least because it would take 3 days to install all the apps I needed), Win7 isn't any better and on first inspection Windows 8 is about 10x worse. - don't get me started on how windows 7 "works better on newer hardware" XP is still faster on a VM. For Microsoft the cloud that is windows 8 does have a silver lining; 99% of users don't actually use the operating system (or even know what one is). They just load a browser, SIMS or (rarely) an educational application. I think that is the thing that people forget - its all about the APPS no-one really cares about the operating system and it's usability - open an application, get a job done.

Nexus 10 then

I'd go for a Nexus 7 with one of a plethora of apps designed to annotate over other applications. You can also get a bunch of stylus direct from China off ebay for a couple of quid. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattm.whiteboardpro&hl=en

Sorry, no idea. I've only been using macs for the last year.

No, its based on spamassassin, sendmail and clamav. It runs on most unices including Linux.

Hold ALT and it re-images it from the interweb. You don't need the disk.

It doesn't take long to re-image it for OSX

Google mail. Before that we used mailscanner/ which includes spamassassin

when I ran bootcamp it automatically downloaded the drivers for the specific hardware and burned a disk for it.

We have a 6yr renewal policy for servers, 5yr for desktop and upto 7yrs for thin clients. As soon as the 'core' servers reach that date they get replaced - but usually get recycled into something less mission critical.

I reckon it should be called "MS Window" as opening two "windows" is such a chore now.

yay - you can discuss both of the apps in the store.

Yes. I posted that yesterday and I cannot overstate how important this is and I have been waiting years for this release. Not only does this mean that you don't need to run windows domain controllers, it effectively means that all those annoying restrictions in windows such as only being allowed to deploy .msi files are done away with because the python bindings will integrate with whatever you wish. No more obscure error codes, no more rubbish and expensive 'support' from Microsoft. We'll probably start a test migration in the new year.