Norphy

"Sure, who would you like to make redundant so that we can afford to pay for them?"

When I was young, I always liked going to the end of the catalogue and looking at their toys. Then when I got a bit older and they started selling PCs, looking at the computers in there. My nephew always looked looking at the vacuum cleaners for some reason. I don't think I've actually seen a physical Argos catalogue in about ten years now.

It's not a rumour any more, as you've already noted Apple announced their migration to their own silicon based on the ARM architecture a couple of months back. However, that doesn't mean that Intel Macs are going to disappear overnight. If the PowerPC to Intel migration is anything to go by, the MacBooks and iMacs will get the new CPUs first, followed by the Mac Mini and finally the Mac Pro. The entire process will probably take a couple of years but Intel Macs will still be supported and receive OS and app updates for the next few years. This is conjecture on my part but I would expect that Apple will continue to support the Intel version of macOS until at least 2025; the last PowerMac G5 was released in 2005 and the last security update for Leopard was released in 2010

Ah, Due South. I did like that. My favourite episodes were the ones with Leslie Neilson in. The one where a trainful of Mounties all get gassed while singing a song, then at the end of the episode all wake up together and start singing again as if nothing happened was brilliant.

Or something like this? https://www.hoxtonmacs.co.uk/collections/mac-mini/products/mac-mini-mgen2b-a-core-i5-2-6ghz-late-2014 That plus a monitor and cheap KB and mouse would work out to be not too much money, it should still be useful for three more years or so considering they were still selling them up until 2018. Not ideal but better than nowt. That said, going for the refurbished Mac is just postponing the problem. Mac prices have been going steadily up for the last ten years and as they get more niche, I don't see that changing. And $DEITY only knows how the upcoming CPU architecture change is going to affect matters.

Going by experience, I know that there will be howls of protest from your teachers but it may get to the point where you have to say "Macs are too expensive, we need to look at alternative options". I'm guessing these Macs are running Logic. Could you use something like Ableton Live or another DAW on a Windows PC instead? The software is probably more expensive than Logic but that would be offset by considerably cheaper hardware.

That's some kind of bizarro world there, where Intel is struggling with new processes and other fabs are ahead of them.

The S2D solution would be fine, on the proviso that you got faster spinny disks. 3x4TB? That's likely to be either parity (RAID 5 equivalent) or mirroring with a hotspare (RAID 1 equivalent) so performance would be pretty horrible for anything that's sitting on the spinning rust. 2TB of flash (Again, RAID equivalency would be RAID 1 or 0 so mirroring for resiliency) isn't that much so it's likely it'd get filled pretty quickly. I'd want 10000 or 15000 RPM disks in there, even if it means having to have more of them.

Have you tried Upgrade Options? That’s where Dell pushed me when I wanted things like that.

No matter what platform you use for installation, whether its Chocolatey, PDQ, SCCM, ZCM, Altiris, GPO, whatever needs the installer to be in a package that the OS can recognise. Whether that package is an MSI, MSIX or an EXE is a different question. For what it's worth, it's my opinion that you should stick to the manufacturers installer as much as possible rather than repackaging it. In my experience it generally means less headaches down the line and you're installing it in a way that the software publisher supports. If you are going to repackage it, using an MSI is a probably the best way since that's the native Windows installer platform and the EMCO suite is still pretty good and not unreasonably priced.

If Passmark is to believed, the CPU is comparable to a Celeron N4000. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-A9-9425-vs-Intel-i5-8350U-vs-Intel-Celeron-N4100-vs-Intel-Celeron-N4000/3278vs3150vs3270vs3239

In the short to medium term, I don't think that Capita looking to sell ESS off is going to have much on of impact on the likelihood of our MAT moving away from SIMS. No-one particularly likes the product but the fact of the matter is that it's deeply, deeply entrenched in our organisation and moving away from it would not be a simple process. Yes, there are conversations about moving away from it but those conversations were being had long before this was announced. I guess we will see what happens.

Turtle Graphics/Logo in a browser

Be careful not to make my mistake and get these two mixed up!

HP storage controllers can be very fussy about the drives that they use. More often than not, if they don't have an HP firmware on them, they won't work.

I’ve not had to queue to get into my usual branch of Sainsbury’s for at least six weeks. There’s usually someone at the door counting the people going in and out so there must still be a limit on the amount of people they’re letting in. Whether that means that limit has increased or that fewer people are going shopping at a particular point, I don’t know. Could well be either, I think a large part of people queuing was because of the panic buying and scarcity of stuff. They never had a one way system or anything like that so that doesn’t apply. I got my hair cut last week, on the Monday after the restriction was lifted. I booked my appointment at barber, sat down in my PPE and got my hair cut. Oh, the relief. I no longer look like Neil the Hippy, more like Mike the Cool Person. Off topic, all through this pandemic, I’ve been hearing about PPE and I still associate the term with building sites. The thought of doctors and nurses going into work in a high vis jacket, a hard hat and steel toe capped boots still makes me laugh a bit.

Even assuming that the Nightingale Hospital is going to be cleared away by then, it will depend on what the situation is like closer to the time. That said, I think that right now the safe answer I can give is "No, as I don't think it will be safe to do so". There are cities worldwide that are experiencing secondary lockdowns, in countries that have handled the situation far better than this country have and where the general populace has taken it a lot more seriously. The way that people in London are behaving at the moment makes me think that a second wave is very likely and I don't especially want to be stuffed into that conference hall with tens of thousands of other people.

I think the best advice would be to not do this unilaterally and consult closely with your staff. Bring them into some meetings, say "Our iPads are getting old, it's time to replace them, I'd like to look at alternatives, could you please help me evaluate and give me some feedback?" Running different device types in parallel can be a pain but if you have a half decent MDM, it's more than possible. What is your role in the organisation? Are you in IT or are you part of the teaching staff or management?

Questions: 1) What do you use them for? 2) How are you managing them? 3) Do you have many apps? If so, would you need to re-purchase those apps if you changed the device type? 4) How likely are you to be strung up from the nearest lamppostHow attached are your users to iPads? How much would they protest if you decided to get another kind of device? How much training would be involved? We all know how much people like to complain about not having training. I'm not saying keep or ditch but the answers to those questions would have to factor in your decision to move away or not.

You could maybe try an ethernet or wifi IP camera instead? I'm sure there must be a driver or app somewhere which could make an IP camera appear as a device which Teams could use?

Yes, I think so. In which case, the SharePoint Migration Tool should do the job. I’ve used that to copy shares into Office 365 before. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointmigration/introducing-the-sharepoint-migration-tool

All of our students have "STUDENT - " in their displaynames as well. Makes it clear in the address book that this person is a student and that if they send a dodgy email to someone outside of the organisation, they recipient knows it's not come from a member of staff.

Is a little schadenfreude allowed here? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-53319517

Another thing I’ve found, if you’ve updated your ADK, you need to make sure that the new version is installed at the same path the old one was, otherwise you get that message. I found that one out the hard way, when I originally installed it on the E: drive of the server, removed it and put the newer version in the C: drive...

AszSyzz See we