PiqueABoo

I just don't know how to say this diplomatically so I'll just say what I think: There are some security idiocies on this thread: "it's stored as numbers", "as hashes", "it's encrypted" really doesn't make much difference to potential utility of the data or the long-standing case against collecting it[1]. [1] First made really well by the bloke who wrote the quote in my sig.

YES! KS1 sprogettes homework is really hacking me off for all the reasons in the original TES article - it certainly does "blight" family life.

'Progressive' is headed for my never hear again list. And if they renew New Labour what will they call it? Perhaps I can get it in the list early.. I'm content because on balance I would much rather have a bunch of (recently proven and then some ) pragmatists in charge of anything significant. Plus, to an extent, the whacky ideas thing works both ways. But what about Gove, of whom I know little besides recalling how extremely irritatingly umm.. "teenage" a couple of his articles seemed before I stopped reading them sometime last decade. Has he grown up yet?

Can think of lots of better places to have thrown "smug" in the last decade or so, but no matter the new model appears to be (thanks to the Lib Dems apparently): Forget Deity, and bleeping well help yourself. PS: Has everyone who was going to leave the country left yet? ;b

Forget Brown with the blame-it-all-on-me schtick, it's New Labour collectively I'm oh so happy to wave off. I was actually thrilled last-night when people like John Reid kicked off talking like credible socialists are supposed to, and more to the point **with a bit of honour and integrity** as opposed to smug [smelly b-word] we've been steadily fed ever since the start of Blair's first victory speech.

What should - life? Regardless it's not going to be is it? The difficulty lies with the definition of "merit" and even when the one applied to any given scenario is consensually reasonable/honourable, there is a problem with the finite number of places available for people who deserve to be "there". I fret over this re. sprogette: Do you raise your child to be good/wise and trust that their merits will be recognised, or do you raise them to be successful i.e. competitive/selfish/less humane?

Completely does my head in. Highlight of this year so far: Six-year old **year 2** sprogette being sent home with some maths homework that teacher asked us to do as a "family project". You can find that specific project all over the net and it's very definitely aimed at **year 6**. Lacking 3 - 4 years of the basics leading up to this level sprogette won't understand any of what we're going to have to do for her. Absolutely [bleeping] brilliant. School does this, but doesn't seem interested in fundamentals so I'm currently doing traditional times-tables with sprogette at home (star on the chart when she's recited one faultlessly a couple of times, there's a treat in store for completing the set etc.) and very easily getting her to play TuxMaths.

Must every thread on this forum, including ones with an explicit primary in the title be Secondaryfied?

Sprogette's school: Nursery and reception accounts: N01, N02,... and R01, R02,... no one cares which kid uses which account and their are no passwords. Y1 - Y6: Have format "yyAliceB" where yy is year of entry to school e.g. "07" (reduces account name collisions), no passwords for Y1-Y5, but Y6 have passwords in preparation for Secondary ICT-life. Seems to work fine.

Yeah, I'm a retired world expert on the Windows NT side of things. Passwords are context dependant i.e. a good password for one system/application, isn't necessarily a good one for another. It depends on the crypto and in some cases how it is configured e.g. not a lot of people know this, but you've been able to adjust some interesting bits in Windows so you can take account of advances in brute force rates (via newer, faster hardware), since XP. Further some crypto despite being labelled as something you've heard of e.g. AES, isn't necessarily implemented or used well and can at times seriously undermine the security of your lovely long and complex passwords. [i've seen an app touting AES which when I played, took seconds for any password] Summary: There is no reliable answer unless you know the system/application the password is for.

You think? I live with someone who is paid to be a Primary teacher. They recently got tagged with that co-ord role (can't think why!) in addition to another they got earlier, and they're not paid anything more or given any extra time for either of them. --- Third time lucky: This thread remains stubbornly Secondary-centric whereas the report wasn't. I'm beginning to doubt whether Edugeek-as-a-whole can help the sector that apparently needs it most.

Cursed by a rusty security 'mindset', I first think the idea has merit and inevitably gravitate towards ways to break it.. sorry. To begin there is this line in the report: all of these initiatives may be struggling for awareness among many heads. How would an Edugeek initiative overcome that very real difficulty? Reasonable price ranges for computers are relatively easy but that is a fraction of the problem, not a central theme in the report which includes examples of 'rip-offs' concerning configuration and maintenance tasks, photocopiers, power points, building work etc. Focusing just on ICT, some areas are extremely difficult to pin down with any great accuracy e.g. what is a fair price for packaging some random s/w? There are plenty more where that came from and I genuinely think providing sufficient coverage of the necessary angles is quite a tricky job. There is a risk that enumerating basic features and tasks that should be present might be taken as the sum-total of what any school needs from their support. Care required. Primary, primary, primary! Many Secondary concepts do NOT fit. Finally if you do pursue this then please devote at least some of it towards the school's expectations and responsibilities, and in particular towards what might be summarised as 'change management'. The very best of techs and thus the school's system can easily be undermined by frequent change and unreasonable requirements i.e. the kind of things that sometimes feature in one of those frustrated rants BtRD.

Quite a few Primary schools have combined SIMS +office-user XP workstations in this neck of the woods and they're on my personal hit list. For a typical Primary these days I reckon the best £££-saving and pragmatic approach is (where necessary) to throw a bit more RAM into what I hope is an OK-ish curriculum server with next-day warranty and run a SIMS VM (server OS) on there. It's a relatively small and lightly stressed database and despite the MS/SIMS bloat a half-decent workstation *is* up to the job for a few users in a Primary. In this scenario you only really need Sever when it's more than a few users because of the 10 connection limit.

The difficulty with the several posts above is we're largely talking Primary and not just about standard-issue paper-clips i.e. it's not necessarily easy to decide on what will be "best value" for money if every quote proposes a different solution. But even so that obvious kind of approach clearly doesn't happen sometimes and on blunt reflection I think the real story here may be that apparent supply and demand problem re. decent heads: I can think of several heads who are largely IT-illiterate, but they're intellectually sharp, inherently reasonable-to-good managers and are perfectly capable of shopping around, asking other schools, LAs etc., before they part with significant amounts of money. I suspect the schools we're worrying about here probably have the Peter Principle heads i.e. ones they had to settle for who are out of their depth. [Wish I could get a job I was not very good at on that kind of salary and then have people bending over backwards to help me do that job.] So what's stopping the sharp folk from becoming heads?

There's a problem? Quick, let's have an enquiry, preferably a very expensive one, that'll fix it for sure.. ::screams:: I guess this is the full NAHT report: NAHT IT SURVEY REPORT. I found some of the quotes in there umm.. 'interesting'

It's certainly this week's (well if you're old enough to remember that the first time around).

Me neither coz my off-domain requirement precluded ever trying it. I recall seeing threads here from folk with issues, but that may well have been related to some specific quirks of their systems. I'm a pragmatist so if it works for you... If I had done that I would have *tried* access based enumeration to control which domain groups get to see which start menu folders. Does anyone do this? It needs a bit of script or code to chew through your copied start menu folders. With script you can open existing LNKs with the "WScript.Shell" CreateShortcut() function, then get their target path, check if the target exists out and delete the LNK if it doesn't. In reality you also need to worry about [link] how you make shortcuts to network resources which eventually came along and bit me, and perhaps you have to accommodate a "special" where the shortcuts points an OS app at something e.g: "cscript.exe c:\myapp\myscript.vbs" (cscript.exe is always there, the vbs file might not be), but most of it is fairly mundane scripting.

Online computer startup differentially robocopys from a server and constructs a bunch of menus (each one aimed at a different domain group) on the local drive, including evaluating and deleting LNKs that aren't relevant to that computer. I specifically wanted it like this so I had the same menus to play with both online (to the domain) and offline, but it apparently has some performance advantages over redirecting to a server share. This is insignificant for me, but the downside is that you've got to restart the computer to pick up start menu changes. [Read-only desktops are done the same]

VMWare what? Based on experience with Workstation I believe you get as much bandwidth as the host can provide regardless of what the virtual NIC in the VM says e.g. VM <-> VM bandwidth which essentially just travels through memory rather than down a wire can be very zippy. I don't know about bigger VMWare, but I imagine you've got some throttling for the VM bandwidth on a virtual switch (assuming that can be done at all - I haven't got a clue) or the bottleneck is the host bandwidth. When you think it's going slow what does the host and say about network performance? Ditto for the VM? Are you sure the issue is bandwidth and not disk I/O?

Because I've done it, and sometimes still do, I'm sympathetic to to the support side of the fence. Drawing the line is difficult, but broadly speaking there are two things you do NOT get from a support provider unless they're intent on operating at a significant loss: a) Free unlimited on-demand training for any aspect of Windows that takes your fancy. Your assumption was wrong for both Vanilla 2003 and CC3/4. Group policy only lets you fiddle with HKCU and HKLM. If you want to centrally play with HKU a common method is with a computer start-up script, but **the package method is better here because they inherently only run once**. Note: You can happily set HKU with 2008+ Group Policy Preferences. b) Extensive support for some service or product you bought from someone else. If I'd written and were selling that product to run on Windows domain systems then in return for your money I'd certainly accept responsibility for providing a means to deploy those reg settings across a Windows domain and probably with MSI properties. That so many vendor's don't do Windows domains very well is really a reflection of purchaser gullability. Support skills vary and much depends on who you get, but if I were dealing with this I probably would have gone "Uh.. OK.. errmm it's HKU.. make a package to do it" and that would probably have been it because your support contract is unlikely to include MSI making and on any given day there were always lots of more pressing system break/fix issues to get on with (on another day those could be yours). Anyway all that aside, if you do what you said correctly then I agree it should just work.

Well if they support one virtualisation platform they ought to be familiar with the various issues you can get via that e.g. USN rollback from reverting to snapshots , and thus tell the difference between something that would have happened regardless and something you're just going to have to fix yourself. It would be nice to see some formal RM statement on this though, especially for running on Hyper-V [R2].

Server 2008 Group Policy Preferences but I don't do anything with loopback (ughh) because you can target a GPP at users on certain machines, or groups of users and groups ofmachines, or OUs that they're in etc.

From RM's site: "VMWare and Network Virtualisation. For CC3, CC4 or any network" It's the virtualisation layer that you have to understand and support ( vSphere, a SAN and so on). A bit of virtual h/w aside, the VMs work just the same as they do on physical.

RM have been using VMWare for dev/training/seminars for ages and they will currently sell you a VMWare vSphere solution for CC servers which implies they support it, but I suspect that is only when they've installed it... which is fair enough i.e. no one in their right mind would want to commit to supporting any virtualisation product configured (including P2Ving) for better or worse by anyone.

Several means at least 3 of those thousands and I really can't figure out what it is you're counting over what period and quite how an swapping in an iPad might make much if any of that go away, but a few extra hours of overtime a day soon adds up and it adds up to a lot more than that. Perhaps, but that conveniently ignores all the other stuff that has to be done and isn't "lesson delivery".