flyinghaggis

I think the teaching staff had the concern that pupils might lose changes to projects and settings if it's stored on a virtual machine that's reset on shutdown or changed by other pupils using the same computer/account . If they use cloud/shared storage it relies on them having to transfer code back and forth during the class with the potential to lose work if they forget. We offered them a setup with just an internet connection 'off network' but they want access to network resources/shares from the virtual dev/programming environment. A few other local schools I've spoken just run web servers/dev environments and programming apps locally on client PCs on the live main network but I'm apprehensive about that. Maybe I could use a client firewall or VLANs to try and minimise any potential risk. Not sure if I'm being over-zealous when it comes to security or if the teaching staff are looking for too much flexibility. We can hopefully find some kind of compromise. Is running programming, scripting and dev environments on a live network what other schools generally do?

I did wonder if there might be VLAN options within VirtualBox but as you say sounds like a nightmare to try to work out the VLAN setup and even then there's the question of how to log specific user activity given there's likely no user authentication. Does anyone know if any other software like VMware which might make the setup simpler as I may be able to find budget for if it would work better? Maybe some kind of virtualised VDI setup to run the VM's on a server and give the pupils access to that rather than individually configuring each client PC? Still mulling over the options really:confused:

We've implemented the setup that others have suggested here whereby we have Virtualbox installed on all of the client PCs running a VM with is isolated from the host PC (and the rest of our network) other than a single mapped drive to the home drive of the logged on user. This is working well however our head of computing has requested internet access for the VM and I'm not sure whether this is feasible using VirtualBox whilst keeping the VM isolated from the rest of our network? Have any other schools implemented any solutions which give the VM internet access but isolated it from client PC and the rest of the network?

That's what's irking me really. I have my phone/internet and TV through Sky and with the most basic TV package plus unlimited fibre broadband my monthly bill is still around £70. I think if I added Sky Q it would be around £100 which is a ludicrous amount of money really even if it does include internet and phone IMO. I get that Sky need to move things forward, as streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime must be seriously eating into their customer base, but skyQ is sounding fearsomely expensive for what it is. Especially when you look at what you can do with a £30 chromecast and a £6 montly subscription to something like Netflix! As others have said I'd want to see what the reviews are like and get some feedback before ordering.

Anyone tempted by the Sky Q upgrade as just noticed it's available today? Sky Q now available in the UK | Ars Technica UK I was interested as I'm still running an original SkyHD box which I could really do with replacing but I'm struggling to justify the costs involved in upgrading. I only have the basic TV package with unlimited Fibre as a bolt-on currently. It's a shame all the upgrade options seem to involve an increase in the monthly subscription and that you can't just buy the box outright. On the plus side there should now be plenty of of current gen SkyHD+ boxes for sale shortly

Just pre-ordered this as it's been getting rave reviews all round and I loved Xcom and the Enemy within update. Looks like there's loads of mods including a long war update in the pipeline for it as well. TotalBiscuit did a "WTF is" video yesterday which gives a pretty comprehensive preview Out on Friday........Can't wait

I can see that being their main issue. How many buyers are going to be willing early adopters on launch of a new Nintendo system given how the Wii U turned out? Then you end up in a downward spiral where devs wont make games because there isn't the market share and people wont buy it because there aren't any games. Spec-wise the PS4 and Xbox1 are pretty mediocre so it would be fairly easy for Nintendo to make theirs the most powerful by a noticeable margin. Maybe they could use the power advantage to aim at 4k displays or VR which I think the current MS/Sony offerings will struggle to run. The previous two generations of Nintendo consoles have been built around gimmicks to differentiate them from the competition so there's almost an expectation that the NX will have a similar party trick. The Wiimote/nunchuck was fairly successful but the touchscreen controller on the WiiU less so IMO. I'm keen to see what the Big N release next though.

Once we start seeing laptops and chromebooks with USB c become mainstem hopefully there will be options to start charging them with usb battery packs which should mitigate battery problems a fair bit.

I've been looking at laptops recently and liked the look of the Asus ux305 which is a13" slim fanless core m ultrabook that can be had for around £550.

Thanks for clarifying. I was under the impression that the wording on the DVD about personal use was specific contract giving you the right to use it at home rather than a statement of copyright law. I'll let the powers that be know they can decide how to proceed.

That's what I'm perhaps not understanding. Say I have a DVD which states in it's T&Cs of use that it can't be played in public and is limited to personal use but the exemptions to copyright apply in that instance to supersede them. However, presumably the T&C's on the disc form a contractual agreement which the school would be in breach of as they would with Netflix/etc? Why is the pre-recorded DVD be different to Netflix/Amazon Prime in that instance?

I take it there's been no change to the general topic of streaming music/video in schools. We're increasingly getting departments and staff are asking for subscriptions to the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, Netflix as part of their IT expenditure. Has any of this legislation changed or do any of those services offer, or plan to offer, any kind of schools/corporate subscriptions to their services? Would I be right thinking that our PRS licence covers us to play back the content in class but the T&C's of the service prohibits this in most cases? The thing is staff have been using pre-recorded videos/DVD's in school for decades now and if you read the T&C's on them playback is nearly always prohibited in public places or any other environment than personal home use? If we're allowed to use DVD's are we then by the same token allowed to use streaming media in class? Or is it one of those grey areas where it's tolerated rather than actually permitted? I'm finding that staff are staff are increasingly just going and using their own personal services in class anyway so it would probably be in the interests of streaming companies to try and offer something to schools! What's everyone else on here doing when school staff ask for access to these services?

Just wondered if anyone on here has bought or had a chance to try out a Surface Pro 4 for an extended period? I need a new laptop and it was one of the ones I was contemplating (probably the base spec m3 version).

It's still serious monies even with the discount though! Maybe I'll feel differently when I get a chance to play with one in store when it's officially released!

I'm actually in the market for a new laptop and would have been interested in the Surfacebook were it not for the price tag. An adequately spec'd mid range model with an i5, 8Gb RAM, a 256Gb SSD and a discrete GPU is £1600! I get the feeling MS released it as a showcase and proof of concept model rather than something they actually wanted to sell to the public.

I recall a recent incident which I think highlights Windows primary problem and this is one that we'll all be familiar with in IT. Last week a teacher walked into our office with her personal laptop .....you know where this is going. She'd recently been delivered the Windows 10 update and it has stopped her laptop from booting [blue screen/crash/etc]. She said she'd taken it to PC world and they re-installed Windows 10 to get it working at a cost of £80. However somehow it crashed again after another Windows update the following week with a similar issue. So she took it back to PC World again and they refused to look at it again unless they paid her a further £80 for the update and another £50 on top of that for testing/backup/etc. She asked if "we knew anybody" that could fix Windows laptops. Now I've been burned by offering to look at peoples home computers before and know where that leads so everybody in the office said they didn't know anyone and she went on her way. Now I'm sitting here in 2016 thinking "1995 called and it wants it's fault back!". This to me is the reason Windows is unsuitable for widespread BYOD deployments. We can manage thousands of IOS devices without too much issue and likewise I'm sure we could just as easily roll-out Chromebooks and Android tablets with nearly as little overhead. I can't help but feel if we tried to support several thousand Windows pupil-owned devices like Surfaces that the administrative overhead of dealing with hardware faults, software issues/bugs, compatibility problems and malware/viruses would rapidly bury us. That's what I'm personally looking for MS to improve on. Right now their competitors are simply doing a better job on delivering stable, cheaper, reliable lower maintenance devices than MS is currently able to. They may not be quite as fully featured just now but IOS/Android are improving rapidly with a new versions/features on at least a yearly basis. Windows on the other hand hasn't really moved on since Windows 7 IMO. Right now we're currently discussing moving to Windows 10 from 7 and there aren't really many compelling reasons to move. Heck, If I had to put together a business case as to why the school needed to move to a new OS the only reason I can think of right now is "because MS are going to drop support for it and we're being forced to". What I really want to be able to say is we should move because of all these amazing improved features that will improve productivity , reduce overheads, yada, yada but right now I can't because it simply won't ! Honestly, moving to the cloud isn't as much of an issue as some make out. I've heard the same old arguments and they can all be worked around :- "We want to keep control of our data and store it onsite" Why? Google/MS can provide guaranteed internet connectivity 24/7 to their hosted services and can provide 99% up round the clock. As a small IT team we can't provide that level of cover even if we had staff on call and 24/7, 1-hour response on all our hardware plus our internet provider would never be able to provide the bandwidth MS/Google can! Not to mention the pricing. Google give you unlimited free storage for school and I believe MS are the same. It makes accessing the systems from home and phone/tablet apps much easier as well. "What if our internet connection goes down" Buy a second internet connection from a different provider run a different route into the school site and configure it for load balance or failover and you can be pretty sure that it wont. If your internet connection goes down these days it increasingly means the business is down regardless of the servers onsite so best to make sure it doesn't happen in the first place than worrying about providing the contingency of onsite servers. Going slightly OT with the cloud sales pitch I seem to be doing but I guess it's still somewhat relevant in the context of what Microsoft are likely planning on moving towards in future!

I suppose my thoughts on this have been driven by recent experiences in our school where we've gone 1:1 BYOD with Ipads and have moved to Google Apps for Education. So in the space of a year we literally now have more iPads than Windows PCs in the school. I get what some are saying about Windows devices being more manageable but the iPads are really being driven primarily by user demand. Simply put, people WANT to use IOS tablets in preference to Windows devices as they find them easier to use and like the fact they have more control over then when installing apps/configuring settings/etc. Us telling them to use Microsoft Surfaces (or similar) because they're more flexible and easier to manage for the organisation doesn't seem to change their opinion. We certainly don't have anything like the same level of control over them as Windows devices but at least MDM software does exist. However, with more services going cloud based and less reliance on Windows servers/infrastructure the lack of AD integration or the ability to run Windows apps is less of an issue than it would have been a couple of years back. Plus with going to something like Google Apps it provides the option to move users across to cheaper/simpler hardware like Chromebooks/Chromeboxes. Maybe even some kind of thin client remote desktop style solution as all you really need to provide is a web browser. I'm certainly seeing lots of more viable options now available to us in place of rolling out expensive and comparatively high maintenance full-fat Windows desktops. So far these changes haven't led to any decline in the number of Windows laptops/desktops on the site yet but I'm feeling like this number will soon start to drop substantially as more staff find ways to adjust. Beyond email/word processing/etc and generally light apps that are well suited to a web browser version there aren't that many departments that really require dedicated non-mobile clients in number Possibly just technology and computing really. Likewise with servers I can imagine the next time we upgrade our blades/SAN/ it'll see a substantial reduction in size as many of our services (file storage, email, etc) become cloud based. Right now there may well be a lot of legacy software out there preventing people from dropping Windows entirely but I think MS really need to up their game as if nothing changes over the next couple of years I can see Windows devices dropping off the radar of most people entirely. I haven't had experience of Office365 from an admin point of view so it may be that MS's cloud based services are improving but from the client hardware side it's looking like they might not be a substantial player in a few years unless they can capture mobile/tablet market share from Google/Apple and turn their fortunes around. The way things are going with BYOD not being a major player in the consumer sector means you rapidly become irrelevant in the business/education sector as well. I don't want this to come off as an anti-MS trolling. I've owned several Windows devices over the last 20 years and have spent most of that duration primarily administering MS products so I should be the ideal target market for a Windows tablet or phone to and this should be driving me towards MS's cloud services and platforms. I even had a Windows mobile 5.0 phone a decade ago but found myself being forced to move across to the competition (IOS initially and now Android) as MS continually failed to deliver on their promise to improve the Windows Mobile platform. Likewise, they still IMO don't have a compelling tablet OS. Also, I feel their reliance on generating revenue from apps like installed versions of Microsoft Office has meant they've been fearful to really move forward with cloud/browser apps and generally providing sofware as a service lest it impact revenue from their historic cash cows. Given their installed user base of Windows devices I cant help but feel there's so much more they could have done to improve things. It really feels like they've been caught sleeping at the wheel relying on long term revenue streams and are only now starting to realise those are about to dry up sharpish. I think that when Microsoft say Windows 10 will be the last version they already know the writing is on the wall for Windows in it's current form as a mainstream consumer OS. I'm sure they realise a massive paradigm shift is going to be required on their part if they want to remain competitive with Google/Apple and that simply churning out iterations of Windows 10 alone isn't going to win back customers. Hopefully they can pull something out of the hat. Just wanted to get down some random thoughts to see what everybody else's take was. Anyway, no more coffee for me

Just been mulling over the current state of the IT industry and how things have changed over the last decade. Microsoft have gone from having pretty much an all out monopoly to now being a minority player in the mobile and tablet markets squeezed out by Google and Apple's duopoly. From what I can see we're increasingly heading towards a mobile first world where smartphones and tablets are the primary devices for most users with laptop/desktop devices left to fill the niches. Most of my non techie friends no longer own a desktop/laptop and a tablet/phone combo is all they really use. From what I've seen this is becoming somewhat of a trend. This obviously puts Microsoft in an awkward position as their mobile phone OS is pretty much struggling to gain any traction. Likewise Windows 10, to my mind, hasn't really improved things in terms of its usability on a tablet so I don't see MS gaining any ground there over the iPad. Especially given their reliance on less power efficient and more expensive x86 hardware plus given all the issues MS has had with surface devices if they can't make a windows device work reliably there's little hope for other companies. MS have stated that Windows 10 will be the "last version of Windows". I can see a future where most of the staff in our school will soon primarily use a tablet rather than a desktop or laptop. Given we're running Google Apps the only app most of them really need is a web browser so the majority could cope fine with a chromebook/chromebox which leads to the question of why go to the expense and complexity of using a Windows based PC. I'm finding staff that require more than a simple web browser are as likely to ask for a Mac as they are a Windows PC. I'm starting to wonder where this leaves Microsoft in another 5 years time? I guess their only real option is to keep updating Windows whilst they continue working on their cloud based offerings like Office365 and try to build on that. However Google/Apple are obviously chasing that same goal of offering cloud based platforms in the shape of Google Apps and iCloud so MS has their work cut out to keep up. Especially as once you take phones/tablets into account the majority of devices are IOS/Android so MS don't even have direct influence over most of the clients they need to offer a cloud platform for anymore. So what does everyone else think Microsoft's next move is going to be?

I'm kind of in two minds about it. Technically the acting was great and the scenery/camera work fantastic but the plot is thread bear (if you'll excuse the pun!), the story trite and the dialogue dull. One review I read described it as "pain porn" I can see why as it's basically two hours of Dicaprio grimacing, screaming and groaning the entire duration. Wouldn't recommend it overall TBH. If you're looking for something to see at the flicks check out Tarantino's new movie The Hateful Eight. That was way more entertaining IMO.

I'm guessing apple will allow schools to bulk create apple IDs and arrange them into classes somehow. I dont expect they'll ever link into AD though as they'd probably rather try and cut Microsoft out of the process and I can't see them allowing AD to link into apple IDs? Seems like it's not in their interest from a business point of view to do that so I'm guessing they won't. Knowing apple I suspect it won't link into any other companies systems or products in the way we're hoping for as that isn't normally their approach. Keen to see what they offer though as we desperately need better ways to manage the hundreds of shared iPads we have on site here now.

Does anyone on here own a Dev Kit and/or has anyone tried them at trade shows/etc? Do you think it's going to be the next big thing or another fad like 3D? I think it sounds intriguing but I don't think it's the kind of thing I could ever contemplate buying without actually trying it out for myself. There's not really too much point in worrying about the cost of the technology at the moment given how new it is. Once we see a few competitors start to appear and more open standards being adopted I'm sure prices will drop rapidly if it's something people want to use.

I guess the best bet is to pick the one with exclusives you want and the platform that your friends are playing on. As someone who's had both I think that PS4 has slicker hardware/UI design and marginally more powerful hardware plus I much prefer the Sony PS4 controllers. The Xbox's One's controller is too large and feels noticeably cheap and tinny IMO. The Kinnect was a total waste of time and I feel like I was sold a pup buying into it now MS have practically ditched support for it. However, between Halo and Forza IMO the Xbox One has the better exclusive titles. Online support (via Xbox live) is superior to what Sony offer plus it seems to get hacked less frequently! As mentioned the game streaming is a pretty cool feature if you have a Windows laptop/PC and struggle to get the use of a lounge based console. Tough call to choose between them really.

How the smartphone changed everything; or, the rise of BYOD in the workplace | Ars Technica UK Thought this was quite an interesting Ars Technica article that some of you might enjoy reading.

As others have stated don't buy a first gen 2012 model. Since lolipop mines so slow it's practically unusable as anything other than an ebook reader.

I had been mulling over getting one of the base spec m3 (fanless) Surface Pro 4's to replace my old laptop but having checked out reddit and SurfaceForums.com there are a lot of folks complaining about experiencing a variety of bugs and glitches on it so it's kind of put me off. Hopefully they're just due to issues with the newness of the Skylake chipset and will be fixed sharpish. Also, I really wish they'd bundle the keyboard rather than the pen as even in base spec (4Gb/128Gb) it's a pretty steep £860 by the time you add the, virtually essential, type cover. I'd need to try it out before spending that kind on money on one! It does look like an impressive piece of kit though.