broc

BSF ICT contracts were normally for a fixed period (5 or 10 years). To leave early may trigger penalty payments to the managed service provider (depends on small print). I don't believe too many BSF managed services are very profitable so it may be the service provider would be happy to see the school go..... The current Govt pulled the plug on BSF leaving many managed services below their critical mass to pay their way. You need to check who owns the hardware & software licences & any other maintenance agreements. Who do the staff work for? Are they employed by the school or the managed service? If the latter then TUPE may apply.

Antivirus on demand scan? McAfee hammered Photoshop here until we put exclusions in.

My Airportable is as it was when demobbed..... untouched.... a 'shed' in fact. I stopped counting the cost of spares when adding up what I needed to rebuild it, mine needs a new chassis & bulkhead for starters & a full set of running gear & canvas tilt. The cylinder head needs hardened valve seats too. In my head I have a budget figure of £5k-£7k just to get started. Series Land Rovers are a cross between a Meccano set and one of those Tamiya R/C car kits, but for grown ups I keep seeing another one that has been restored driving around my area, it makes me want to get started on mine. I just need to overcome the thought of spending the money

Retirement Plans include : Not having to get up at 6:15am unless by choice ..... Holidays any time I like ..... We have a motorcaravan which is going to get some serious use I have a 1983 Land Rover Series 3 Airportable awaiting restoration, it's a great big Meccano set for grown-ups Spending more time with my family - providing a free childcare service for my grand-daughter Gardening - we have neglected our garden for years DIY - house to decorate, bathrooms to refit I don't intend being a couch potato

I shall be switching off my school laptop for good in less than 3 weeks time, after a long career in IT. I am retiring at the end of term & I intend to spend more time with my 1 year old grand-daughter & of course taking the occasional holiday in 'TERM TIME'. I started work more than 40 years ago & have had a great time. I have been fortunate to have been fully employed all my adult life, the last 11 years working in a school have been the most rewarding from a job satisfaction viewpoint. I have enjoyed being a member of the Edugeek forum for a number of years & have found it a great source of information, help, and sometimes provocative debate..... long may it continue. The very first computer I worked on was an IBM System 360/195 with 4mb 'core' memory, one of only 3 systems like it in Europe at the time. It occupied a room the size of a tennis court. Each of the 1mb memory 'boards' occupied a frame roughly 6ft long, 6ft high, and was about 1 ft wide. They were on wheels so engineers could slide them out of the mainframe chassis. By way of comparison 42 years later I am sat here with a mobile phone in my pocket with 16gb memory & a further 32gb in a micro SD card Technology is still moving at a pace, I am glad (& sad) to be stepping off the escalator of change, it has become harder to keep up to speed in the last couple of years To all my fellow Edugeek users & supporters, I wish all of you a long and happy future in whatever you do..... So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish........ Brian

It will never fly, once he realises schools will need increased budgets to cover increases in staffing, heating, lighting........

I suggest you speak to Promethean. 3 years ago we had 40+ Promethean boards in school with Activinspire licences. We were told we had to use the hardware to qualify for the 'free' licence, ownership of the board is not enough. We proposed using the Epson Interactive projectors along with the Promethean board switched off & they said that we would still have to pay for additional licences as we were not using their hardware.

If I remember correctly, it is per licenced user. It was 3 years ago when we hit this problem. We switched to RM Easiteach Next Generation, at the time a site licence for Easiteach was less than £1k

We have a Panasonic breadmaker. It has a 'quick' recipe for a white loaf in 2 hours. We haven't bought a loaf in more than 10 years. My wife uses it at Christmas to make the dough for Panettone, my favourite bread. It is so easy to use even I can make a loaf

We have a 1279U with 24tb (12x2tb) in it, does what it says; it hosts our user data intermediate backups. Solid piece of kit.

Autoleads & Connects2 do a range of fascia plate adapters to convert factory radio apertures to single & double DIN along with the leads for converting wiring harnesses & connecting steering wheel controls. I swapped out a Peugeot Boxer radio in my motorcaravan & replaced it with a double DIN JVC multimedia unit and connected it to the steering wheel controls, it works a treat. The cables are generally radio vendor specific... JVC, SONY, Kenwood etc. It should be 'plug & play' with the right leads

A chocolate pizza would go down very nicely here Thank You. I know of a number of chocoholics in our support & admin staff who would help me eat one

Christmas present for Edugeeks ? Yo!Bot

Britannia Rescue have special rates for Unison members, they are part of the LV insurance group.

Nikon DF DSLR in black

11 for me, it must be because I am winding down towards retirement

take a look at the Brodit site, they do mounts for all sorts of cars & devices. You can buy from places like Amazon. Brodit-Mounting platform specialist!

Just because people are living longer does not mean they are staying 100% fit longer. A significant % of over 50's are now suffering with long-term health problems, some with multiple problems. This may not affect desk-jockeys (like us) or the career pools that politicians are mostly drawn from but it does affect those people who have to carry out hard physical work. If you accept the argument that we as a nation cannot afford for people to retire early because of pension costs then there needs to be suitable work available for people in the 50-70 age range who can no longer do jobs that demand a high level of fitness & stamina. Unfortunately ageism is still rife in the world of work, as the increasing number of unemployed over 50's will testify. UK employers have a very long track record of underinvestment in training, in the past they preferred to 'poach' staff from other companies. This needs to change too.

Front line firefighters get the same money as reasonably paid network managers, at just over 60 I know what I would rather do. I have a lot of respect for what our emergency services do & if I needed a fireman to rescue my family from a blazing inferno I would be happier with someone who was young & fit rather than a 50-60 year old who is taking pills for high blood pressure due to work related stress!

I am sure there are loads of reasons; family ties, language, inertia...... the belief that things might get better here one day.....

Norway is a great country to visit, I suspect it would be a great place to live too. Their leaders haven't squandered their oil revenues like ours have. They have banked a lot of it & spent a huge amount on infrastructure projects. They are heavily into hydroelectric power generation. Their fishing industry is booming as they have managed and conserved their fish stocks inside their vast territorial waters.

Even if you want to use the high street to shop these days, the choices are dwindling, especially for white goods & electricals. If you are lucky, a store may have something of interest on display, but they don't carry the stock.

Corporations have no morals like people do. Corporations (mostly) operate within the law and take advantage of any means of maximising revenue & shareholder profit. You can and should expect them to behave in an honest, legal way but don't expect decency or fairness unless it is good for business!

Same here in the North East. Many of our kids have grandparents as well as parents who are on long term benefits. They participate in the 'black' economy too where things get done for cash in hand. You wouldn't believe the number of iPhone & Blackberry MAC addresses I have blocked with DHCP filters......

Politicians of all persuasions seem to forget that most ordinary people aren't interested in politics. They are so involved in their own little world in Parliament they forget about the rest of us. (A bit like teachers in a school sometimes). I think the majority of the general public care more about day-to-day things like their family health, whether they are fed, warm & adequately clothed. It's only when the media whip up a 'storm' about benefit scroungers, immigration, the EU, Plebgate, MP expenses, fat-cat bankers, etc that ordinary people take notice but their attention soon fades as they focus on the pressures in their daily lives. It seems to me we live in a country where at one end of the spectrum we have people who are greedy & selfish & don't care about anyone but themselves & at the other end there are people who think the rest of society owes them a living while they just sit around doing nothing. However, we don't live in fear of being locked up or tortured for disagreeing with the government of the day, or where pregnant women can be locked up if they suffer a misscarriage, or where women can be stoned to death for infidelity, or where children are used as forced labour, or where schools have to employ armed guards.... & no-one is forced to drink dirty water tainted by raw sewage because that's their only supply..... There may be better places to live, but there are many,many worse places to be.