PiqueABoo

An intruiging comment someone added to that article led me to British IT workers 'crowded out' and the examples are government projects. Otherwise 'big does not work' and big IT projects have proved that time and again. Some, obviously that big NHS IT one, shouldn't have been started, not least because shutting them down can be expensive too i.e. some of these savings might be deceptive.

You're just not going to budge on this "then some magic happens" stuff, are you? ;b ::regroups:: There is a old book, non-fiction, that in an ideal world everyone would read. Perhaps I liked it because it reflected existing predjudice, I don't know, but plenty of other folk seem to get it. This is Papanek's "Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change". Forty years old now and some of the once radical memes were quite virulent and caught on, but having dipped in recently that just makes some of it more fascinating. It's a passionate tour de force and unless you're dead from the neck up you should emerge from that with a new (perhaps renewed) fondness for doing/creating socially responsible stuff that works. With that in mind back at the educational ranch, I'm convinced I'm looking at socially irresponsible rhetoric, grandiose undeliverable promises, a direct consequence of Blair's messianic shtick. And having just skimmed one re. parental engagement, they've even got the pet research papers that are supposed to be academic founded on scientific method surely, talking about "quantum leaps" for [bleepity-bleep]! It might improve educational life a bit here or there, but this transformational thing seems like the equivalent of staking your future on buying a couple of dozen lottery tickets and hoping one wins the jackpot. Reality and history are very strongly against that strategy and when it doesn't work there will be excuses, blame displacement ("but they were too risk adverse!") and further down the line history will likely remark on the arrogance or naivete or more likely, plain stupidity of it all.

Alternatively it might show that the transformation stuff was a utopian crock. It's very difficult to see that aspect having quite the same prominence under that potential Tory gov. [Haven't read the report, so..]

People who think otherwise likely wouldn't have come into school for help, but it's a no-brainer really: Schools have control of our kids all week, and given all that "measurement" in modern education, can and should provide better feedback to parents. That alone is obviously a good thing and it should be clear to any sensible geek. Whether it does anything for the political narrative attached to this stuff (the nebulous "parental engagement") is a bit of a distraction IMO. -- Distraction I would bet that the die is largely cast at Primary i.e. that is where parental engagement in their children's learning has most effect on long term outcomes and thus that's by far the best place to focus the resources. But Primaries of course, tend to have parents/carers milling around playgrounds morning and noon and IME most are reasonably effective at doing this stuff the old fashioned way i.e. by directly listening and talking to people. It's still worthwhile, but will throwing tech there actually add much more than a potentially huge reduction in photocopier expenses and a solution to the "but the note about X wasn't in their bleepin reading folder!" problems? Other side of the coin: If some parent is encouraged to develop a new enthusiasm for "engagment" at the Secondary is it actually a bit too late? I haven't got a clue. Are there, as there certainly should be (given shortage of public money and so-on), any credible off-the-shelf answers?

So what is "it" in practice then? Can anyone: a) List the essential, achievable, technical features in terms most geeks will immediately understand? b) Explain how with supporting evidence "it" will increase "parental engagement"? If nothing else this might help clarify which definition of the latter is in use because it doesn't appear to be mine. And if that can't be done with ease then something's rotten in Denmark yet again and I'll just sigh cynically and stick with my "overspun" theory. Everything I've seen so far suggests throwing tech at this is is one big fashionable experimental guess (in a similar way to some of the curriculum tinkering), no one has a well-founded clue about what it will/won't achieve, whether it meets real as opposed to perceived needs and.. ..whether the money might have been more constructively spent elsewhere *before* you've spent it.

Way I see it this is just another overspun nonsense narrative from a bunch of folk who very naively went and reinvented the pre DotCom crash utopian culture where the net/technology would fix everything (they missed out the first time around because it was still fashionable for their type to look down their noses at declasse tech). "Parental engagement" my backside .. it's viable as a relatively mundane but potentially more efficient alternative to conventional comms with parents. I suppose the insanely competitives might pore over the stats you put up and use them to make their kids existence even more miserable, and some of those stats might prompt the occasional almost-there parent to pull their finger out and sit down with their kid re. some aspect of the curriculum. Otherwise I reckon parents tend to be the engaging type or they don't. And critically do not forget that many don't have much time being busy with increasingly stressful modern jobs, commutes, their own homework, household chores/paperwork, taxi driving kids to a club or two and so on. Plus there's a self-important root assumption that I doubt anyone has tested. When I ask Sprogette what she did at school, what am I actually asking? For me it's about the social human e.g. were they happy/sad/bored, is so-and-so still being shitty towards them, is X still their "boyfriend". You could never put what I'm seeking up on the net. It's an information service. If you're lucky it might occasionally provoke some of that genuine parental engagement in their learning, but I don't see it having a significant effect. It could even be detrimental in some ways i.e. be used an excuse to forgo some hitherto real life contact between schools and parents.

Mine shows up as a small read-only USB drive in Explorer, you go there launch the idiot-friendly app where you enter the password, then the second big encrypted USB drive shows up in Explorer. No password recovery though - get it wrong too often and you're out. [You can just have it autorun the password prompt app, but these days having USB autorun on is a really stupid idea.]

Perhaps you're confusing an apostrophe with a translator? [i routinely get to decrypt some older gen. Black Country "I ay|bay|day" stuff.]

Have you ever missed an audible apostrophe in a real, spoken, conversation?

This is the key point: By all means do it, but don't expect it to be trivial. For 2008: You could try MDT for building. Use GPPs for drive and printer delivery and a few other bits. Native S/W deployment isn't great, so investigate and consider some of the alternatives. GPOs in the same attention-to-detail ballpark as RMs will take quite a lot of time to make.

Why not just buy an encryting penstick - they're very cheap now and even PC World sell them.

Yeah, but was he in charge of the universe? I think that concept .. which only works from a distance, fails in lots of places and most people appear to parrot rather than comprehend .. is overrated. If you want a useful concept, especially in tech-design, try "less is more". [Cue ye olde less v. fewer debate]

Perhaps, until we get to the point at which it is very difficult to understand what others are trying to convey, given their lack of said grammar and spelling! Given that the net was significantly academic when these "rules" were crafted I suppose there were far fewer sins compared to what happened after it reverted to mean, but since then it's usually been the messages (what people are saying, assuming they're saying anything) rather than the medium (quality of english grammar) that have annoyed me.

I think you should have your own sub-forum so everyone else can ignore it ;b When I first got on the net almost 20 years ago, the still significantly academic consensus said grammar/spelling pedantry in forums i.e. largely conversational places, was bad netiquette.

That can be a pain with domain admin rights: Pre-reqs are clean DNS, that Remote Admin hole in the firewall, WMI actually working, the machine not starting up or shutting down, and "are-they-still-logged-on?" threads really need to time-out much quicker than Windows RPC does when it hits some of those problems. This is where client-side code has some advantages i.e. it bypasses all of that.

Ballpark numbers: £10-12,000 for server + CC4 server licences + perhaps around four days commissioning including peripheral detail. Then very roughly £50 RM licence per workstation (there are different licences with different feature levels), plus those above PC specifications are realistic so there's the costs of getting your workstations up to scratch, plus costs for any new curriculum software and possibly packaging existing software into MSIs, plus an annual support contract. Given that public spending is being squeezed you also need to consider long term costs and sustainability, same way you might consider mpg, insurance, tax, servicing and cost of parts when buying a new car. [<= Wow! A motoring analogy that works!! ] It's certainly not that cheap on a Primary budget. Whether the cost is worth it really depends on what you've got now and how much time=money it takes to support: The basic principle in a system like this is that the cost is offset by reducing the amount you need to spend on having someone looking after it. Some early adopters seem to have had a rough time with CC4 but it's nearly two years post release now and more stable. Couple of schools I've talked to this year think it's great, but their former IT was dire so almost anything would be an improvement and they get their support from some company signed up to the [RM] Affiliated Technician Support Scheme who have a bit of a clue about proper care and feeding. Alternatively I could put a better, cheaper, more reliable, fine on older 512MB workstations system into your school but you've only got my word for those claims and I might get hit by a bus next week (Problems: Other people might have trouble supporting it without trashing everything. Documentation? What's documentation?). In part CC4 is about assurance you wouldn't get with someone like me and sadly RM don't appear to have any serious competition for an "off-the-shelf" system. I do think it's OK and it's a lot better than most of the home-brews I've seen, but there's too much management code and overhead, and there's a kind of inertia and complacency to it: Must be at least three year's professional development now and on my planet that is three times too long.

::shrug again:: Enumerate AD for every computer that isn't a workstation in your domain, drop any logon activity where the associated computer is in that list. If necessary add some custom computers to the drop list via some app registry key. Now what does that leave you with? And how hard was that aspect? OK there will still be some things to deal with in the remainder, but I think the difficult bit (besides needing to get you head around making subauthentication packages for DCs), is knowing when someone pulled the plug out of the wall instead of logging off gracefully. I'm struggling to see a way of doing that centrally which doesn't involve polling your current list of computers-with-logged-on-users every so often... ..and having said that I'm struggling to see how a solution with client-side code hooking logon/off events would cope with that much better (you could do it in the other direction though i.e. have the client send a server some kind of "keep alive"). PS: Doh.. polling ..I don't think we care unless some user logs on to a second machine i.e. that's the only point you really need to go look at what's happened on the first one. Or is my brain broken tonight?

It is a lot easier to go get and then use oldcmp

::tries to imagine wanting to stream HD over wireless at home:: ::fails::

Me. YMMV but some of that is probably because knowing a bit about them, I can see how worthless some of those gadgets really are. Age/experience can count too, as in very little new stuff is actually a new *concept* .. smaller, shinier, faster or whatever isn't enough to stop it being something you've seen before in a dozen incarnations i.e. boring. Last real gadget: One of the early HD based MP3 player/recorders 10 years ago.

Some posh and very serious firewalls of my acquaintance can be configured to apply policy based on Windows domain group membership etc. In order to do this the vendors will typically provide software that lives on all your DCs, to track who is logged on where at any point in time (and what groups they belong to). It's 99% the same problem. So how do they hook domain logon events (I don't mean event log events)? How do they detect logoffs? How do they deal with machines reset rather than logged off? Etc. PS: I've done event log event grabbing. The hook I found for that doesn't cut it because MS don't notify you for every single event i.e. you'll only get one notification with an event attached in a particular time slot (I forget how long). So you end up having to go look at the event log(s) anyway and enumerate the events that have turned up since last time, and when you're doing that you have to wonder whether it isn't easier to just skip the hooking and just go look at the event log from whatever point you were at last time every 10 secs or whatever. Oh and also accomodate log wrapping, clearing and so on. It's a bit fiddly.

Multiple DCs = several places to look for logon events. If I were interested in doing something for this I'd start with: "How do those AD integration products for firewalls monitor logons?".

::shrug:: As someone who registered an OID for doing precisely that 10+ years ago, I find that about as scary as some app creating a registry key. We obviously don't want every other app extending the schema coz the poor quality of too many apps means it would get ugly, but an unused schema extension (which I assume in this case just describes a new attribute or two for use with a user object) is not IMO, a big deal. LimitLogon using AD and a deletable app partition doesn't seem at all strange to me, it was the SOAP that made me groan.

Nowhere near the system with this now, but I think this is the "little script" I actually used. It's a JSscript, so needs to be saved as e.g. mrsa.js, and I always throw these things in c:\windows: dN = WScript.Arguments.Item(0); ss1 = dN.split(","); ss2 = ss1[0].split("="); wsh = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell"); wsh.Run("c:\\windows\\system32\\msra.exe /offerra " + ss2[1], 1, 0); I add that as an ADUC context menu item via another script, but that's a bit too me-specific and wrapped up with other stuff to post here. It's not hard to do manually though, use ADSIEdit or SysInternals ADExplorer to drill down to here: CN=Configuration -> CN=DisplaySpecifiers -> CN=409 -> CN=computer-Display Now edit the "adminContextMenu" attribute and add an entry: 2,Remote Assistance,c:\\windows\\msra.js Because I do that shortly after a dcpromo it safely assumes there is one existing entry (beginning with "1"). If there were two entries there already I'd change the "2" to "3" etc. -- This basic and very useful context menu item principle works on other key objects in ADUC (e.g. Users). I'm not sure what happens if you highlight several computers and invoke a script, because I never needed to do that and I've had better things to do on rainy days. Suspect they'll be presented to the script as additional arguments i.e. WScript.Arguments.Item(1), WScript.Arguments.Item(2) and so on.

Three boxes is begging for some kind of failover cluster, or whatever your favourite virtualisation product calls that, isn't it? The VMs and load all nicely spread out with enough slack to squeeze the VMs from one (dead/down) box on to the other two?