jamesb

All urban legends start out from a grain of truth. There was a successful scam along similar lines some time back. The conman in question made up a very official looking sign saying Out of order - please leave deposits with guard, and got a portable safety deposit box and a security guard uniform. He then walked to a bank, stuck the sign over the night deposit box, and for the rest of the night put all of the shop takings and deposits that people were dropping off into his own box. At the end he took off the sign and walked away with a small fortune.

There are ways to do the conversion. Fight the lock-in! MediaMonkey allows you to I believe, though that may be the premium version, and there are other tools out there.

It would. My old university used a bucket of liquid oxygen to light a barbeque, which was fun. Shame about most of the charcoal being instantly vapourised though.

The one I always recommend is Firebrand, I've done a few courses with them and plan to do a few more (once I've got the money saved up, they're good, but they're not cheap). Residential intensive courses, very hard work and you come out of the course feeling like your head might explode (and stomach, the food is excellent). I think there's a couple of their reps who're members here and will probably chip in if you have any questions. I can't comment on other suppliers, as others which I've tried aren't ones I'd recommend.

Getting SLG2 purely to provide mobile access for a handful of PE teachers would be kind of like trying to crack a walnut with a kilo of semtex. However if there's other reasons to get it (and usually there are plenty) then this might be the reason that tips the balance.

I know that someone's used an iPhone, and I've managed it on a Symbian phone (normal phone, not a smartphone, I wouldn't describe it as easy-access but everything worked). I'll try it from a Windows mobile PDA when I get the chance.

MediaMonkey's my favourite by far.

The blood of the teacher diluted three parts to one with their tears. I used to hate it when this happened. We had one teacher do it three times to the same board. The second time we confiscated their pens, so they went out and bought more to do it again. Usually it was a one-off though, when people didn't realise they were interactive boards. It'll definitely be worth your while keeping a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, or foam cleaner or similar on hand. These incidents seem to come in batches.

Depending on your budget (and whether you're looking for a phone as well) I might recommend the Nokia N85. Excellent MP3 functionality, and a built in FM transmitter which comes across loud and clear on my car radio without any need to mess around with cables. On the other hand that might be a bit much if you're just looking for an MP3 player. Apparently the Creative Mozaic ZEN 8GB is good, and can be found for sub-£50.

Not only unworkable but also completely inneffective. Bird flu? I thought that had gone out of fashion. Aren't we onto the pork variant these days? Besides which its important to remember that because of our climate, and constant exposure to flu, we're pretty much immune to the nastier effects of even these variant strains - deaths only seem to occur in populations where flu is a rarity. Lets be honest, kids aren't going to catch flu from a keyboard. They're going to catch it from each other.

Once you've got the MCSE its only a simple exam to turn it into three MCTSes, and another to turn that into an MCITP:Enterprise Administrator or Server Administrator. So its still well worth doing. However the big question is whether or not the 2003 exams will still be available to take in two years time. There are no plans to retire them yet, but it could happen.

It doesn't sound unreasonable when I consider you get the tutor and so on as well, but if you've got experience then it might not be worthwhile for you. It sounds like its designed to be a course to teach from the very basics and up. If that's what you're looking for then it sounds good, otherwise you might be better off just getting the basic books, refreshing your memory, and taking the exams yourself. Alternatively you could probably find an intensive residential course for about the same, which'd be a couple of weeks rather than two years. Again though you need the background to make use of an intensive course.

Depends what you need it for. If you just want to play music (which I'm guessing you do with a nano) you can pick up a decent MP3 player for about £20 from Tescos which'll do.

Switch to an operating system which is known to work, or at least try it on a machine with a released operating system. It could be a quirk of Windows 7, or something to do with the iPod software itself. This applies to the iPod touch, but may be useful at least - How to make your iPod Touch / iPhone Working in Windows 7 64-Bit - Guides & Tutorials

Wouldn't it be easier to set up an outgoing trust from the Teaching network to the Admin network, create an account to run the script and give it administrative control over the appropriate areas of the Teaching network, and away you go. How you'd do the connection itself is pretty much up to you.

You could, but that sounds disturbingly cheap to me. Have you worked out what your expenses are, and what your desired earnings are? Assume that you'll be working about 33% of the time. Lets say you want to earn £20 000 a year, and don't have any expenses. That'd mean you'd have to earn £20 000 in the 33% of time that you're working. There's 260 potential working days in a year, assuming you're not going to be doing evenings and weekends. Call it 90 that you expect to be working for. 8 working hours a day gives you 720 hours, meaning you'd have to charge £28 an hour to hit your £20 000 target. Of course, that doesn't take account of any expenses, so I'd say you want to go a bit higher. Maybe aiming for earnings of £30 000 which'd give you an average hourly rate of £42. £50/hour doesn't seem unreasonable to me, maybe structured so that the £50's a callout fee for the first hour or part-hour, and then £30 for each hour or part-hour after that (expenses taken care of already after all) during business hours. Working at weekends or in the evenings you might want to slap on an anti-social hours charge as well, both to discourage people from booking you then and to ensure that you get some extra compensation when the inevitable happens. Edit: Note that I'm not a freelancer or sole trader, however I have looked at this in detail and do know a number of self-employed persons. Their charges are based on the same calculation.

Have you seen the one showing you how to get cheap AA batteries by opening a larger battery and pulling out the smaller ones? No idea if this one's genuine or not, I suppose its possible, but it sounds a little suspicious.

I dunno, Bob seems more like a server to me. Maybe Fred, or Murray.

Don't know if its suitable for you, but what about GNUcash?

Which should be done by communicating with the child and the child's other teachers, surely? We've got wonderful technology to help with this - e-mail, forums, bulletin boards, mobiles, all sorts of collaboration tools. If you want to know how they're doing in English, ask their English teacher. I wouldn't really call that common enough to warrant access, and it seems to me that its more a failing in the way that the group work is being taught, or in the way that user areas are set up (why don't they have a general group work area?) than it is an excuse to allow permanent read access to a student's entire user area. Editing can also be done just as effectively, and with no trace or auditing. If a teacher had it in for a child, or thought one needed a little boost, what's to stop them? As someone who was a victim of the former at school I am very, very glad that the teacher in question did not have any untraceable way to edit my work. As for departmental folders, why not flip the perspective. Individual submission folders where a child can save work for review, in their own user area, and with appropriate permissions assigned to the teacher. So why not just look at the child's screen and insist they show you the work? Not too bad, but doesn't really agree with the least privilege principle. Its a start though. I'd prefer for it to be a single folder which the staff member does have access to rather than a single folder that they don't.

I've never understood the tie thing. I mean, I could understand them not wanting to wear a tie but I just really don't get why so many kids seem so desperately to want to look like clowns.

Only because its taking time to get the mob organised - shared calendars aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Follow least privilege and you can't go wrong. People should have enough permissions to do their jobs without hindrance, and absolutely no more. And definitely get that everyone access removed as soon as you possibly can. Better to have a dead network than have it that exposed.

If you're using Sharepoint then its the equivalent to Frontpage, yes, but geared for Sharepoint development. Microsoft® Expression® is the non-Sharepoint replacement for Frontpage.

Might seem like a strange question, but why do you want to deploy it through GPO? Its a development tool, and I can't imagine a school having more than maybe three or four people interested in doing Sharepoint development. Otherwise a simple shared network drive and logon/startup script'll let you install it at logon for users, or at computer startup. Put the installer in the shared drive and make a script which'll run once and install it.