PiqueABoo

Sorry. I hadn't quite finished dissing Mr Hunt who very clearly had finding future medal winners in mind. At a more reasonable level, and being immersed in primary age I forsee some re-enactments of Olympic races with giggly Boltisms at the end which is fine. What I'm mostly thinking though is that the majority of those kids all love running, jumping, climbing, balancing, scooters, cycling, swimming etc. Where does it go wrong i.e. should the focus be on inpires, as opposed to what discourages all that natural inclination as they grow up and move through school? Merely growing up is some of it, but I reckon most of the rest is that @alttab's fun factor isn't there, expecially at school where you spend a lot of time being bored. [school swimming - the one they had to do because of the 25m target - a common parental conversation when that kicked off (especially with parents of older kids who'd been through it) was whether to withdraw your kid so it didn't kill their existing enthusiasm.]

To do what, to what level though? For the most part we're watching the results of some rather extreme life-styles: You want to be a Beth Tweddle? Better start young enough to be competing by the time you're 7 years old (and good luck with the lasting physical harm that may well do). Athletics is generally more forgiving (Ennis's bio says 10), I saw someone in a thread talking about tennis at 6, another with competitive swimming at 7 (Sharron Davis was on the national team at 11!) and so on. The reason I mocked "primary schools is [sic] where it all starts", is because the truth in lots of cases is that primary school age is when it starts, and the primary school has very little to do with that or the "it" Mr Hunt implied.

Monday: Olympics: Ministers seek to boost 'patchy' sports provision Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Mr Hunt, said "primary schools is where it all starts and catching people young is incredibly important" but he accepted pupils faced "an element of luck", for example in terms of having an inspirational teacher. Luck? Think you've got more chance of winning the lottery.

Dunno about anyone else, but it jumped out at me during the ceremony (commentary was in Portuguese so I got no help spotting it): Saudi had their arms twisted... Olympics judo: Shahrkhani first Saudi Arabian woman at Games Edit: I'd like to see a medals per $million spent on the team table.

Haven't paid much attention to Olympics since becoming an adult, but being hosted here & having a just turned 9yo child (who does some sporty things and got a large dose of Olympics in July from school, Brownies and so on) we ended up watching the opening ceremony on holiday and a fair bit of stuff since getting back. It has certainly worked for me on lots of levels and a big hurrah for the medium: Freesat and all those event-dedicated HD channels. Hiss-boo to some of the wretched commentary and cringeworthy immediately post-event questions: "I know you probably don't want to answer this now but what..." One of the things I've really, really liked though, is Sprogette getting to see all those females in the spotlight. That said I'm secretly hoping it won't be too inspirational - a home life dominated by a child's dedication to some sport isn't especially appealing. Don't think state schools have ever been good at those. My quite serious concern is they are very good at increasingly squeezing available time to do things like that outside school. All this engagement/involvement waffle seems to have done is unleash more patronising one-size-fits arrogance: Dear School, Contrary to your apparent expectations, Sprogette does not spend all her brief evenings and weekends stuffing crisps in her mouth whilst glued to a DS and/or EastEnders from which she can be rescued via randomly relevant worksheets hurriedly plucked from the net, or by monotonously learning yet more model answers to yet more SATS questions. She is in fact often busy on her own initiative compensating for your indifference to...". The increasing trend for typically more time-costly "preparatory work" (as opposed to the reinforcing stuff) to encourage independent learning, will make the clash sigificantly worse. Edit: Was expecting this in the immediate aftermath but it's starting already - Step change in government sport policy needed, BOA says

Does she always do that blistering sprint at the end of the 800m? I was squirming enough to want to crawl under the sofa when the two amazonians overtook.. was pretty gobsmacked by the response.

I've got laptop with lots of VMs and space problems. Will likely be a few days before I can say anything useful, but I'm just installing zillions of drivers following a new Win7SP1 on that exact Seagate 750GB hybrid drive. TBH I'm not expecting it to make much difference over the existing standard 500GB 7200 rpm drive... expected the host OS to start much faster and right now it is doing that compared to the previous one which was almost 'clean', but I'm not so sure about it doing much for VM virtual disk I/O.

I guess you'd have to hear it, but the bit I don't get is how, given the apparent length of the call in which lots must have been said, you might confuse a genuine three year old with a ten year old pretending to be a three year old. Think this might say more about adults these days than kids...

Won't bother now but I was going to do that via WebClient() last night after reading @Michael's giveaway (surely?!?) comment about speed, except it was already well past bed-time. Aside from scraping the HTML I was considering checking out whether the ID in the initial response might encode a timestamp+ correct answer i.e. whether I might be able to skip the initial request and just craft and post correct answers to a questions it hasn't actually asked me... I'm curious, if anyone's read the *.pl is that feasible?

#1: Fire suppressant. Obliviously went on holiday to Madeira last week. Went there once before in the late 90s and it was very lush, but there has been a bit of a drought and this (impressive, time lapsed) video is the edge of the main town and one of several large outbreaks in various locations around the island a few days prior to our arrival: Didn't affect the holiday at all besides: a) Getting a hotel room upgrade presumably because of cancellations, b) Not being able to take Sprogette to some aqua park thingy that was very close to one fire (closed, dunno - guess it was still full of ash or perhaps used in fire-fighting and half-empty). However on one day we did The[tm] mountain walk which is half the reason for going there, a strenuous ~4000ft up/down between two ~6000ft peaks and it turns out the top 1000ft of the highest mountain burnt in 2010 - last century there were lots of green 'heather trees' that I think were hundreds of years old - this time they were dead, charred and leafless.. very sad, won't be the same for generations, but it's still a really, really awesome walk though (not my blog). #2: Child motivator. Previous day Sprogette whinged, whined and tarried over aching legs/feet/whatever on a 15 min walk to town. On aforementioned walk clouds had formed for the last bit which after about ~5 hours is a final ~2000ft ascent back to where you started.. demon child kept racing off ahead and this time bitterly whinging and whining over getting wet whilst having to wait for us old folk who were almost literally crawling and probably would have just sat down and cried if that bit had been hot/sunny. #3: Traffic calming. We had a LHD hire car. It was the Rally Vinho da Madeira (with, if you're bloke-ish, a first outing of a Lotus Exige R-GT) on Friday and all week it seemed like every car impatiently up my backside going up+down the steep, narrow, zig-zagging mountain roads with random obstacles was some professional rally driver figuring out the course.. expect once when driving through clouds+rain for an hour one day when thanks to much practice with the Brit climate I finally got to leave some backsiders behind in the fog+puddles. I love Madeira - if you like walks with fabulous scenery and don't mind interesting driving getting to them then it's brilliant. Even has a little beach now (a bit of imported saraha or something). Only downside is other tourists.. a lot of middle-age+, and often rather dour Europeans but you can leave most of them behind on the sun-loungers around hotel pools.

If you were to send a mail to 1,500 parent addresses then in principle you can't send another mail from that account to anyone for 24 hours - the recipient rate limit

No, that is the max number of separate messages sent from a mail client in a minute. In practice you'd address that email to some "All Staff" distribution group - it's just one message.

Go to the branding portal thingy and remove some of the associated hyperlinks that otherwise show in the user's OWA banner?

You did it last month, but forgot. They've changed the default to $false but didn't tell us? I do that line (with slightly different irrelevant capitalisation) and another for the galdisabledmailboxplan. In theory it is telling you that IM is already set to $false. If you don't trust it you could umm.. try turning it on and off again.. run your set-owamailbopolicy line again but with $true on the end, then a third time with it back to $false.

Look in the MDT help for the HideShell option.

It took some research/work but I managed to sort that scenario out very nicely indeed for XP SP2+ - it just works and has done for multiple systems for quite a while. Sadly being one of Win7's "improvements" made this significantly harder for both me and users. Primary: I've seen some spectacularly dim/harmful 'old' wireless solutions largely because the science, that there actually is a science you need to grok, went right over their tech-support's heads. Tech comprehension has slowly improved though and if they move from old cheap 2.4GHz kit then it's inevitably to managed wireless - there's been quite a lot of that moving in the last couple of years.

**Multi-user**

What's the consensus, the state of the art for the Logon Screen in a school/corporate scenario (as opposed to the evil-hackery you might do on a personal machine)? What did you settle on + why? Picture Frame: The only good reason for that inherently ugly item appears to be that from a distance you can tell whether it is locked (=picture) or awaiting a logon (=empty frame). For me desktop locking is disabled for kids, so the picture frame is redundant. You can hack some XML in the right DLL to give the frame a zero height to disappear it, but is there a less icky way? Background Image: No-brainer described with varying accuracy on a 1,000,001 blogs... put in ..\oobe\... blah blah blah .. Dynamic Info on Background. BGInfo followed by any little command line BMP to JPG convertor almost does the trick same as on XP.. the trouble is it loads the background before BGInfo has run during the current boot, so if you've got any dynamic stuff on there e.g. IP address(es), they will be one boot behind and if it's a laptop wandering between school home will likely be wrong quite a lot. I also can't persuade this to work with any kind of background picture. [Note: BGInfo on user *desktops* is fine for me] I note RM have an app running on the CC4 logon screen (their "banner" across the top). Haven't looked so I'm not sure whether that's via a) a psuedo-credentials provider, b) running out of a slightly naughty service, c) perhaps something else that MS told them. I've played with the naughty service thing, but that feels too icky i.e. adds overheads/complexity. Does anyone bother much with this kind of thing now now?

Sounds like a reasonable take on what happens: It's offline so it's telling you it can't get to their roaming profile [correct].. and it's going to logon using your profile that's sitting in c:\users [that's what we want].. and because it's offline it can't write profile changes back to the server when you logoff [correct]. That said, I use local-only profiles in this scenario.

Bah.. I'd have given them anonymous numbers as usernames in the first place and said: "Well that's what the tax office do!". [Avoids collisions, gives them slight touch of two-factor since they're not predictable for any given person etc.]

Quick sanity check: The rule was (is?) the ONLY account that could get into the SMP is the one you made the administrator when you enrolled for the Live@Edu tenancy. Is the email link clicking happening via that account? If not forward the mail to the aforementioned administrator account, login to their mailbox and try clicking it from there.

Quite. Here's a lil' seven part walkthrough (using MDT to make it easier!)

Correct? You won't like this. At the very least read section A, especially the last paragraph.

That rang very true so I just looked at one. I'm calling it a list of sets of GUIDs, each set is enclosed in square brackets and apparently dedicated to a specific area e.g. I found folder redirection: [{25537BA6-77A8-11D2-9B6C-0000F8080861}{88E729D6-BDC1-11D1-BD2A-00C04FB9603F}] Having searched, that's apparently the folder redirection "CSE GUID" and "Tool Extension GUID (User Policy Settings)" respectively. MS-GPFR.pdf CSE GUID: A GUID that enables a specific client-side extension on the Group Policy Client to be associated with policy data that is stored in the logical and physical components of a Group Policy Object (GPO) on the Group Policy Server, for that particular extension. Tool Extension GUID: A GUID defined separately for each of the user policy settings and computer policy settings that associates a specific administrative tool plug-in with a set of policy settings that can be stored in a Group Policy Object (GPO).

I think it's called realpolitik. Ignoring the price: Live@Edu (with a dash of school friendly extensions) est mort, vive l'Office365 (with none) nombre total d'utilisateurs! Or something like that.