AngryTechnician

Postini has several different tiers, Message Security being one of them. The other tiers are chargeable, but this page states that Message Security is free "for a limited time", and doesn't have anything about that time having ended. I signed our school up after December 2010 and got it for free. I'm pretty sure it's still current.

Spotify cannot be legally installed in schools. (Source)

I know that 2003 recognises UPS in the Power control panel, but wasn't aware 2008 could do so. Where does it appear?

From what I've seen of some of the hardware encrypted sticks, what you're doing with TrueCrypt is far more secure.

Started rolling out IE9 last night across the site, and despite there being now only a tiny number of buttons you can click on, some of my precious charges still haven't quite realised that if you need to find something, maybe just try clicking one of the 3 buttons to see which one does what you want? Anyway, here's a quick guide that covers the very basics about which I have been asked by nearly a dozen different people today after they click on the links to the IE9 website I posted on the Intranet for them. Feel free to modify to suit your environment as you see fit, on condition that you treat your users with the same hyperbolic scorn I do. The Angry Technician's Quick Guide to Internet Explorer 9.docx

Until I see some sensible education pricing, it's not even worth looking at as far as I'm concerned. The list pricing works out at nearly £90/year per computer. I have 140 workstations, which pegs it at more than £12,000/year. My current annual spend on Schools Agreement and AV is just over £5,000, which gives me a lot more than InTune and leaves me a cool £8000 a year to buy the server hardware to run it on.

Comodo are a root certification authority that is trusted by all major browsers. You don't need to be a customer of any of their products to be vulnerable. I've updated the top post to note this.

Tip: If you set an install deadline in WSUS that is in the past (say today at midday), machines will install the update as soon as they check in with WSUS, instead of waiting for their regular daily update time (which they might have missed and therefore have to wait another 24 hours). The update does not appear to require a reboot.

'Iranian' attackers forge Google's Gmail credentials - The Register Note: Comodo are a root certification authority that is trusted by default in all major browsers, so even if you don't use Comodo products yourself, your browser is vulnerable until updated. Updates that block the fake certificates were quietly snuck into Firefox 4 just before the release, Chrome included the update in 10.0.648.151, and an update for IE has been rushed to Windows Update today, and is already in WSUS. Certificates were issued for the following names: login.live.com mail.google.com www.google.com login.yahoo.com (3 certificates) login.skype.com addons.mozilla.org "Global Trustee" So, you know, nothing important or anything... :S

Sorry. If it's any consolation they didn't listen to me in my last school when I said I didn't like them (although at that point even I didn't know how bad it would get), now they have a 1-1 provision to the entire sixth form and they are sick to death of them.

My experience with Samsung support is that they are incompetent buck-passers. There is another sobering thread on Edugeek here about their netbooks. I would avoid them, personally.

Been using this successfully for about a term now, but have had one user in this morning on a Mac who has had problems. Whenever he loads the Silverlight version of the site, Safari presents a Silverlight message with error number 2105 "Initialize error". He's using the latest version of Silverlight (had to install it for the first time when using the site) and his browser UA is Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.19.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.3 Safari/533.19.4 Another user has the exact same setup and his works fine. Haven't tried reinstalling Silverlight yet as I've only had a few minutes with his MacBook to look at the problem, but I was wondering if anyone else had any pointers for the next time I get hold of it?

Surely the fire station has some opinion on the road being hard to traverse in large vehicles?? From the response you've had it seems like the road has not been adopted and is treated as private. It is therefore down to the landowner(s) to enforce any restrictions. If the road has been adopted, I'm pretty sure it's down to the council.

"Improves" is subjective. The use of Direct2D and DirectWrite makes it look different from previous versions, but not necessarily better. I find text is crisper without it and that looks "better" to me.

Yes. Subpixel rendering seems... different. Looking for more info on it now, not sure whether I like it or not. Edit: it's using Direct2D hardware rendering like IE9 does. You can turn it off in Options > Advanced > General as below, or set gfx.direct2d.disabled to true in about:config This almost certainly has a performance implication.

We have class logins for Reception and Year 1. Year 2-4 have their own username, but a password that is shared by their year and that they cannot change. Year 5 upwards have their own username and password. It works very well for us and I would advocate something similar. The exact years you make the switch from one scheme to another will depend on your pupils' ability and the teachers willingness to persevere for the first few lessons where they have to adapt to remembering something new. My teachers do not have admin rights. When they did, they would regularly muck things up. However, restricting it isn't really practical unless they have full-time knowledgeable staff who can manage their admin requirements for them, and unless they accept that software that won't run without admin rights simply doesn't get used.

From the linked page:

It adds about 7% for me. If I was only buying the Desktop Schools pack it would be almost exactly 10%.

I think there may be some confusion over when Microsoft talk about "MDOP for Software Assurance". My understanding is that you can only buy MDOP when you have a licence agreement that includes Software Assurance - but you still have to buy it if you want it. There's nothing in that link that says it is included FOC.

Source please? I''m pretty sure it's NOT included automatically with Software Assurance, I buy it as part of MDOP which is an additional charge.

The 90s called, they want their scanners back. Am I the only person who remembers how awful handheld scanners were because you had to move them across the paper dead straight or the image would skew? The reviews on Amazon suggest this problem still exists.

The only major problem you are likely to run into is if you have older printers or other peripherals that do not have 64-bit drivers. If you're currently using Macs you're probably already familiar with the lack of driver support across different platforms - 64-bit is not much different to Mac support for a lot of manufacturers! If you have any truly aged software that was designed for Windows 3.11 or DOS, that may not run on the workstations either as 16-bit applications cannot be run on 64-bit Windows, but those are luckily few and far between these days. More on this here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/71980-32-64-bit.html

I actually rolled my own system which imports the daily logs into an SQL database at the end of each day. I then query that using a page on our Intranet and through Excel data queries. It doesn't provide live information like yours does, but it does allow me to combine data from multiple installations and perform complex queries on it very quickly. Plus, I love me some databases.

I've always viewed systematic restrictions as a last resort, for anyone. There will always be users, both staff and students, who have a legitimate need to exceed their restrictions, however lenient they may be (and yours are towards the lenient end of what I've seen). I take the same approach as you and strongly encourage people to print to the networked photocopiers for any and all bulk jobs. That particular point is official school policy, so it's a good management stick to beat people with. The approach I take to enforcement is to carefully log all printing and target the top offenders, but you have to have management both on side and willing to kick some backsides for this to work. In my last school (a secondary grammar), a report of the top 20 bulk users each week would be sent to one of the Assistant Heads. She would take a look at it, and typically would instruct us to block the printing of any student who had printed more than 100 pages that week until they had visited her to explain themselves. She had a reputation as a battleaxe and word got around very quickly; students began to self-regulate very effectively and about 6 months later our overall printing bill had dropped by about 1/3. In my current school it's the staff who are the problem, and I've recently begun supplying data from PaperCut Print Logger to the Bursar on which members of staff are ignoring the school policy and sending bulk jobs to the printers. He's had a bee in his bonnet about wasteful printing since before I started (it was even discussed in my interview), so he's looking forward to seeing the patterns that are beginning to emerge.

Morrisons still do it, but it's not an anti-theft measure. It's so that more trolleys end up back in the trolley park instead of littered across the car park - and on that front it works a treat. We still see Morrisons trolleys abandoned around the area by people who would rather lose the pound than carry their shopping home. To their credit, they did come and pick up the ones I reported very quickly. I think if the trolley has area brakes fitted and people still nick it, there's not much more you can do. If the shop hasn't made a decent effort, and doesn't pick them up themselves when notified, it's reasonable to charge them. If they've tried and people still nick them, I don't think the shop should have to pay out.