jamesb

Free Email to SMS Gateways - these might be worth a look.

If you're looking for something cheap, Nokia's probably the way to go. Almost all of their handsets run Symbian.

The Symbian app appears to work without a touchscreen, or GPS, and just needs a long press on one button to send the SOS out. I'm sure there are others out there too, probably free ones.

You could go with a cheap Symbian phone and use an app like this - Download Smart SOS 1.1 for Symbian Free Trial - Smart SOS is presented as a perfect personal safety companion. With this application you can GPS location and snap images to your friends or family with only one click. In other words, Smart SOS can sav

Any of these any good? Granny friendly phones ? reghardware

Might be worth reinstalling, or just doing a search to try and make sure the perl script is in the right path.

A robotics class, with a robot wars, or robot football, or robot olympics every year sounds like a brilliant idea to me. If you could get other schools involved as well it could be a big event.

Okay, can't argue with that one, and at least it's an easy one to test. You're assuming that's the only function of touch-typing, it's not. Being able to quickly fire off commands is useful. As for the e-mail argument, well, people don't think when they're typing an e-mail normally. If you're touch-typing it you can actually read the e-mail as you type, meaning that you're more likely to pick up typos or mistakes as you go. You're much more likely to miss a mistake if your attention is split between keyboard and actual text coming up. We're back into the technology improving again - shouldn't we be looking at the technology that's available now? The tablet thing just looks like a 'give all of the kids a shhiny new toy' rather than a carefully considered move. I still believe that if you're going to give all of the kids tablets, you'd be better off providing them with the ASUS T90 or something similar.

Why do a certificate course in it? It doesn't need to be a qualification, just a skill which needs to be taught. I also don't see the need for a dedicated classroom when tablets with an actual keyboard would be much more effective, and generally faster to use. Just to give a comparison - the best hunt and peck typists can usually get up to about 37 wpm, for memorized text, and maybe 60 wpm for short bursts. An average professional typist has an average speed of about 50-70 wpm, whether the text is memorized or not (since they can read as they type). A good typist, one who has put effort into learning, can generally reach around 80-95 wpm, and with a bit of practice can hit around 120 wpm without difficulty. So, typing a quick e-mail for me is around four or five times as fast as for a hunt and peck typist. It all adds up and saves a lot more time than you might expect. The same applies to any sort of writing. 120 wpm is nearly as fast as speech, and an advanced touch-typist can come close to dictation speeds. But it also kills your typing speed completely. Not only that, but anyone who can touchtype can generally type much faster in general, and type one-handed with a tablet perched on their arm faster than a hunt and peck typist, so long as the keyboard is within peripheral vision, just not as fast as they can on a physical keyboard. In a classroom how's speech-to-text going to help? Even if you can get the computer to work at the average speaking rate of 150 wpm, you'll have a whole classroom of noise. Text-to-speech is handy, but again you've then either got kids wearing headphones and struggling to hear the teacher, or a lot of noise. I can see that you don't view touch-typing as a useful skill, and understand it. I'd probably agree that being able to touch-type isn't an essential skill - but neither are many of the other useful skills which kids should be taught. Familiarity with and understanding command-line environments also isn't essential in IT - but your life will be a lot easier if you have the knowledge required than if you don't.

Well if you can't do it, then obviously you'd never find a need to. Because it is much, much easier to learn how to touch-type while younger than it is while older. It is also a really, really useful skill. Would you expect kids to handwrite their homework and written work? If not, why expect them to type it by hunt and peck, or looking constantly at the keyboard? I cannot really explain how useful it has been for me to be able to do this without sounding like I'm boasting, but believe me, I'd place it as being essential. I've also noticed that it is only people who cannot touch-type who tend to disparage it's value. I'd agree on the MS Office applications being vocational, but these days I just can't see why you'd consider touch-typing to be specific to a particular career. If you can point out to me a career which school should be preparing children for, which wouldn't benefit from much faster typing speeds, the ability to read and type or talk and type or look at the screen to error check your text while typing and so forth, then I'll gladly concede the point. I still don't like the idea of tablet PCs without keyboards - there's a reason that the keyboard has been around as long as it has, and it's an incredibly powerful tool if you know how to use it properly. Of course, if you have to stare at the keyboard to type anyway then I suppose there's no problem with tablets. Also - how're you planning to deal with any visually impaired children in such an environment, or would the school just not be suitable for them?

You can't - you need a separate box (or VM) monitoring the UPS and ready to send the commands to ESXi. Remember, ESXi doesn't have a kernel, or even an OS, other than a very, very limited tech support console with a scattering of commands which isn't intended to be used to manage the server.

If it's not a GUI app, then the best method will be to work a new installer which doesn't require a GUI. However I still don't see that installing an app on vMA is the best approach to this, so I'm trying to determine what the purpose is in order to see if there's another approach.

Structure and letting them find their own way aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. A good balance between the two is needed.

If the program is to be installed on that machine, then why was the installer built as a GUI? I'm aware of the reasons to install an app directly on the server, however vMA is not a server, it is nothing more than a remote management console, an appliance. It'd be like trying to install a GUI application on your vyatta firewall (yes, I'm sure it can be done, I'm just struggling to find a reason why you would).

I always thought the idea of teaching a group of students all the same skills at the same age was fundamentally flawed, and that more of a vertical system would be appropriate. So everyone gets 'base' skills across the board, but from there you work on more advanced skills in your chosen areas. Interested in physics more than biology? Fine, you get basic science (science changed to be more methods, experimental design and ethics based rather than actually 'teaching' the random factoids) and then you extend that into studying different aspects of physics, building on the modules as you get more advanced. Less interested in science? You still get basic science as a base skill, but then rather than taking four physics modules next year you might take Classical and Modern literature. Of course for all this to work schools need to be able to offer a huge wealth of subjects, tiered appropriately so that you complete the prereqs before moving on. Specialist schools where students can attend any of the schools for individual subjects would probably be the best way for this to happen, but there's all sorts of logistical and organisational difficulties in play. I'm not really describing it very well of course. It's been a long day.

It somewhat raises the question of why you'd want to. Run the GUI installer on your local system and have your app set up to use whichever API you need.

Given that vMA is a virtual appliance for managing ESXi, I really wouldn't recommend anyone try to install a GUI on it - just sounds like a recipe for disaster. I also wouldn't see why you'd need to - you can do anything you want to do via vMA through PowerCLI or one of the APIs.

Just one question I have to ask here, and I mean no offense whatsoever by it, but can you touch-type? I'm only asking because if you can I find it a little odd that it wouldn't be useful to you. I find it invaluable whenever I'm trying to copy or edit a document, write e-mails without constantly glancing up and down, do any sort of scripting, programming, or in fact any typing I do at all. I've heard the same argument put forwards about shorthand (I can use Teeline and do regularly) where people can't see the use in it, mainly as they don't actually use it themselves.

You could use PowerShell, or just about anything else, to directly access the vCenter API if you're using vCenter I suppose.

Unless you install a GUI on vMA (wouldn't recommend that at all) then I don't see any way to do it. Build another VM for the GUI app?

I wouldn't have thought so, no. At least not any supported way I can think of since the Tech Support console isn't meant to be used. Can I ask why you're not meant to use the management tools which VMWare recommend?

There's a script here which will create computer objects from a CSV file, and should give you the basic structure to work with. And another here which demonstrates how to modify AD attributes. Hope that helps.

PowerCLI: Shutdown your Virtual Infrastructure | Virtu-Al might have the answer you're looking for.

Are you happy using PowerShell? If so you could use Import-CSV and a foreach loop, just replacing the computer name in the LDAP string with something like $computer.

People said, back in the fifties, that AI would be possible in two months. I have my doubts. More importantly you cannot touch-type on a touchscreen, the tactile feedback isn't sufficient and I still feel that being able to touch-type is an essential (or very beneficial) skill for anyone using a computer.