FishCustard

YES. That's insane. Several orders of magnitude too large. Redirect folders to network shares and nobody needs profiles over a few MB.

We use Office 365 with no third-party filter in front, and get very little spam. Phishing we filter using custom rules (as everybody should in my opinion) - go see the Phishing Emails thread in the Security forum. Evidence?

I am assuming therefore if it is MAT-based not school-based that for Local Authority schools the fee would be payable by the LA?

They have an "overheat and die" problem to be specific.

Are these onboard NICs or PCI-E cards. If the latter, I'd swap the card out and see what happens.

I'm less concerned about the sphere vs cylinder thing (something launched ballistically would likely be a sphere - better chances of surviving reentry), and more that the tripod seemed to come out of the thing fully formed. In the book the Martians worked for ages to build the thing, that was one of the points of tension - what were they building? I realise that I probably sound like a nerd screaming "IT'S NOT LIKE THE BOOK!", but I just feel they're missing some of the points that made it a good story. The juxtaposition of the alien pit and the normality of everyday life carrying on... until, of course, it didn't. YES! This is partly why the Jeff Wayne version (in which the Journalist sets off for London partly to reach his wife, Carrie) resonates with me. The idea of being so far away from the one you love in the middle of an apocalyptic alien invasion, with God only knows what between you... makes me shiver. I like to think I'd do the same thing as he does, damn the sense of it and go to them!

I also don't understand why they needed to add in the "post apocalyptic world" bit - if anything, show us the Martians and their civilisation, that would be really new. We don't need yet another post-apocalyptic story.

Spoilers for The War of the Worlds - you've been warned! I'm unsure about the whole "post-apocalyptic Earth" stuff in TWOTW to be honest - if they wanted to add to the story (which I don't object to in principle at all!) I'd much rather see Mars and more about the Martian civilisation than yet another post apocalyptic wasteland. Like... isn't every other story some post-apocalyptic dystopia these days? Can we have some variety?

This is probably stupid, but would the catch-up services (iPlayer etc) work?

I imagine you could do it using a calculated column, the issue would be getting the "N" (i.e. the number of values) for the formula... interested in this one myself!

Send them to Lenny: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-lenny-the-internets-favorite-telemarketing-troll

There are two sequels - "This Book Is Full Of Spiders" and "What the F--- Did I Just Read?". Both are also excellent.

Watched the first episode of the BBC's War of the Worlds yesterday - very good. We couldn't help but hum the Jeff Wayne music at appropriate times though. I wonder how well they'll balance the Martians against the humans - in the original story the British military does reasonably well against them initially, harrying the tripods all the way to London and taking out a few (the issue was that they moved too quickly for inaccurate artillery to zero in on them). Adaptations tend to make the Martians more threatening and/or the military less useful. Of course, you need to do that if you update the setting - the original tripods would be ripped apart by modern weaponry.

You can get HDMI over power modules (https://www.avforums.com/review/vision-tc2-hdmip-hdmi-over-powerline-review.12630). Can do 1920x1080 at 60Hz but nothing above that.

Agreed - unless it's in the wall (which is where my HDMI-reterminating experience came from!) don't bother.

Well, you can re-terminate HDMI, but it'll be one hell of a job. The cables don't have a standard colour coding, so it'll be a one-by-one job with a multimeter or a 9V battery, some wires, and your tongue...

How many users are we talking about?

This - switch user works perfectly well as long as sensible mitigations against having 30+ profiles loaded are in place. Nightly reboots are a good option.

I'm no Chromebook fanatic, but the idea of "kids will only succeed if they have our product" - particularly when it's an expensive product - is quite frankly offensive.

I imagine the staggered Disney+ launches are because they have to wait for existing licensing deals for movies (e.g. the SW trilogies) to expire in the various territories first. Now, why they don't launch with their own content and add movies as these deals expire I don't know... I like this description! Usually when people ask questions like that I say something to the effect of "you'll need an eyepatch and a parrot".

Yes, I was the same and would recommend that schools with full-time IT departments avoid them at all costs. Not any longer!

They used to be very "we know what's best" and inflexible in terms of filtering/firewall exceptions, and a remnant of this attitude is still there occasionally. However, they are much better than they used to be, and for schools without a full time tech they are a very good option.

And I suppose they're also losing high-value/low-volume trade to more mid-to-high-end stationers like Paperchase. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/whsmith-high-street-success - they're actually doing very well indeed!

Ahh, now, if it's beta firmware that people opted in to installing, that's a different matter as the opt-in agreement probably covered this.

IMO, regardless of whether they're doing it in a GDPR-compliant way (which they certainly seem to be doing), users should always have the right to opt-out.