MikeGilbert

OVS isn't "a" licence, it's a way of paying for various different licences. The "Desktop Edu" bundle does include Office Professional and Windows CALs, but it also includes other CALs too, *which you may not need*. The nominal discounted price is only of value if you're using all the servers to which the CALs in the Core CAL package apply. If not, it's cheaper to take separate licences for Windows Pro, Office Pro and Windows Server CAL, and even to add the Exchange CAL.

Interesting looking, but will give him the link to that one, seeing it's a free ebook. Not the sort of birthday present I'd get many kudos for. - - - Updated - - - Oh, how I laughed. :/

Looks good, will be going through Amazon and am confused on the products two prices on apparently the same book. Sigh. And mildly annoyed that a new one is coming out in January...

Briefly - what Python manual would anyone recommend? No 1 Son is on an apprenticeship, getting keen on the Sysadmin stuff, has expressed an interest and has a birthday coming up... TIA

Briefly - I've a school with a Meru MC1500 controller and a bunch of APs bought in 2010 as a bundle deal purely on price. They've just been sold a set of iPads and AppleTVs, but Bonjour is blocked by the controller. Having spoken to various people, it seems that there is an upgrade to fix this, but that they will need to buy into the support services and backdate the purchase to cover the intervening period. Can anyone give me an idea of an indicative price of this? As it stands, I'm waiting for a quote from distribution, but they'd rather sell me new stuff. TIA Mike

It opened the last tab I closed. Fair enough...

IME, any Enterprise wireless will deliver what you need if the site survey's done right and the supplier talks to you and knows what they're doing. 99% of wireless installs I've had described to me as being bad are bad because someone has done something wrong. Including buying the wrong kit for the job, whether that's cheapo consumer routers or incredibly high spec stuff in the wrong environment. Bad site surveys, too - we've just had a vendor "specialist" nominally do one for a potential customer, and he might as well not have bothered. So, I'd agree totally with pantscat - talk to people locally who can do the job. Note what flavour of stuff they want to sell (should be on their website), and take that into account. Ask about reference sites, and talk to them direct. Take a look here: Wireless Access Point Comparison - Best Enterprise and Home WAPs It's an American site, but the only place I've found that gives independent ratings of a wide range of APs. And also, the fact that vendor X made bad products once doesn't mean they still do... And finally, 802.11ac isn't in many devices that you're going to have yet, it's new tech and therefore will cost more than 802.11n, and so put it in your plan for a refresh in three or four years...

AppleTV needs a HDMI port (there are VGA-> HDMI adapters, but they're rubbish), so the old projectors will need replacing with something - and are probably well dim with expensive lamps, too. By "TV" you need to mean "Large Format Display with Commercial Grade panel" - otherwise it'll be less than brilliant/suitable. There are plenty of options out there; NEC E-series are nice and reasonably priced. Short throw projectors will cost less than a panel, and can be interactive, if necessary - the new BenQ unit is pretty decent, and can go to pen-interactive for about £150 over the base price, as a retro-fit that anyone can do "Proper" interactive screens need to be 6-touch and will work as a Windows or Mac input device, rather than requiring proprietary software. There are other options, too...

So glad I put that caveat...

As long as the OS runs on the VM, any program that runs under that OS will run in the VM. Within reason. You can set up an Acorn RiscPC and run BBC BASIC, or whatever, never mind any of these fancy modern things. I'll get me zimmer frame...

Having listened to an interview with the guy who actually formulated the concept on PM yesterday, wasn't entirely surprised to discover that the whole "it's Michael Gove's fault and he hates " wasn't the case at all. The core of the policy is that teachers can choose to teach books they want to teach, within the constraints given as to period and type. Professor Bate's (or it might have been Bale) suggested replacement for the "modern" strand represented by Harper Lee and Steinbeck was Zadie Smith's White Teeth, on the basis that books from the first half of the last century aren't actually that relevant to kids' experience. Which is fair enough, really. We did Steinbeck 40 years ago, and it felt archaic then. Mind you, I was more into Larry Niven and JG Ballard and John Wyndham and Michael Moorcock and...

Personally, I'd look very hard at ChromeBooks as an alternative to Tablets, certainly for students. Do be aware that the nominal vendor price will need to have £19 added to cover the Google management software licence, so you can have the multiple user login thing you need, etc., and that all users need a "complex" password. A good solution as a PC/laptop replacement rather than the sexy "look ma, I've got one of them" side of tablets.

All the public holidays should be easy - there's a tickbox option in File -> Options -> Calendar to "Add holidays to the Calendar", so you should have a GP switch somewhere to do it. As far as the other goes, there should be a way to do it using Calendar Groups - there are quite a few results from a search for same, but it'll depend on the flavour of Outlook and exchange you're using.

As Helen Mirren said recently (and has said before), forcing kids to read Shakespeare is pretty well guaranteed to put most of them off. Especially if it's being taught by someone with no empathy, understanding or connection to the plays. Having read, watched, performed and directed Shakespeare (pretentious little sod, ain't I), I'm quite happy that the plays are bloody amazing, the language is a piece of cake and the stories flow like a dream. BUT, if you suffered under some poor sod who had to try and force an understanding of the texts into a relentless sequence of teens over an interminable number of years, with any interest s/he might have had in the task atrophied to nothing under the yawning disinterest of said teens, then it's not surprising nothing connected. Some kids will connect, though. Like my daughter, all by herself. Which is great.

Saw the new BenQ short throw the other day, which is quite nice, well priced, and can be bought with (or retrofitted very easily with) an interactive kit. This is pen-only, but there's also a finger-touch add-on.

Depending on how proprietary the mount is, it shouldn't be a problem. I don't think anyone makes a short throw LED projector, but I could be wrong. Personally, I'd look at replacing the boards with touchscreens or interactive projectors in the near future, so look at the cost/benefit on that.

Indeed you can. Not thinking straight.

If you have EES already, you have the licences already, unless someone has done something weird with the licensing. It's based on MS peculiar definition of Full Time Equivalent staff (200 hours/year? How's that full time?) rather than on number of boxes, so you should already have the licences.

Variables, dontcha just love 'em... If the laptops cost £333, so you get sort of 3 per £1k, then 99 would cost £33k, which you can get on lease for about £334 per £1k per annum, which is about £11,022 per annum, so you'd pay about £33,066 in total over 3 years. Five year leases will cost more, as the Residual Value will be much, much lower. If you want to hang onto the laptops after the three years, then you can generally make a one-off payment of a percentage of the annual payment (which is the RV, basically) to hang onto them. The Residual Value is where the finance company makes its money. HTH Mike

More likely to be the way the lease is set up by the MFD company (Sooo much nicer than "Photocopier contract", isn't it...) than the process of leasing. There should be someone at County Hall who can give you chapter and verse on what hoops lease providers have to jump through. You can then put those as part of the quote criteria, which makes life easier for you, your SBM and the supplier. A lease should be as easy as 1) you order it 2) it's delivered 3) you sign it off as done. There can be hiccups at 2) and 3), obviously. Your supplier will be paid in full on their invoice to the lease company once you sign the kit off as delivered to spec and working, and not at all until that happens, so there's a good incentive on them to perform.

Fair point, the Academies thing has thrown a bit of a spanner in the simplicity of things, as it has done for everything financial. But lets not go there...

encryption. Another password for teachers to forget.

It isn't as if they're going to be lurking live on the network for any great amount of time. And wiping the system to put a new build on is quite easy.

It depends on your source of funding: http://www.investec.co.uk/products-and-services/finance-and-lending/asset-finance-and-leasing/Equipment-Finance/education-leasing.html

Just to reinforce what I said: it's not a choice. If you take out a Finance Lease, which is the alternative to an Operating Lease, you are borrowing money. You are not allowed to do this as a publicly funded body. At the end of the lease term, the units leased have a Residual Value which is calculated at the start of the lease by the leasing company and used to determine the actual payments. I wouldn't worry about leasing any hardware, to be honest, whether for staff or student use. It just works.