
Lesson #1 - number crunching
Education v Foreign trips/floating gin-palace for politicians.
The house is always tipped for the politicians
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/06/01/uk_new_flagship/
Pheonix Software, Deloitte and Computeam are among the 17 winners sticking their snouts into a £100m pork barrel framework for outsourcing in the UK’s education sector. The outsourcing deal was organised by the Crescent Purchasing Consortium and other public sector buyers including Education Authority Northern Ireland and …
Education v Foreign trips/floating gin-palace for politicians.
The house is always tipped for the politicians
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/06/01/uk_new_flagship/
Oh you can't read very well, can't understand how to phrase or answer basic questions, think grammar is an old woman who lives a few streets away? Never mind, here is an iPad that'll make it all better. With the added benefit that your ill equipped teachers don't need to bother teaching or even talking to you any more.
None of this is going anywhere near kids.
It let's them spec a £££££ enterprise class router for each classroom and then charge ££££££ for supporting it while charging ££££££££ delivering a PowerPoint showing how they are dynamically enabling dynamics.
All for 10x the cost of a school employing some local bofh
It's funny how a Tory government all about market efficiency seems to always want some all encompassing national plan worthy of Stalinist tractor production. You would almost think that there was some ulterior motive to hand out govt cash
There is no £140m here, it is a framework contract that has an estimated value of £140m based on past send on the type of equipment and services covered by the framework. Frameworks are not contract awards, they are tools to simplify buying. The actual contracts will be where the money is, all the framework has done has made it easier to buy from the suppliers on the framework. If you want to you can still go and buy from anyone else so long as the value of the contract is below approx £170k over 4 years, or you can run your own public sector tender if the value if over £170k.
Given that there is precious little money in UK schools and FE, no one is going to be buying any high end solutions from consultancy companies anytime soon.
No, it means $consortium has laid out what it might like to buy over the next few years, with some detailed and some woolly specifications. Those sellers who have successfully become part of the framework promise to provide the specified kit at the specified prices. The individual buyers now have an easily accessible menu of suppliers and kit they can buy from. It's the buyers choice who to buy from, whether a framework supplier or not. But odds are, the prices negotiated by the consortium, with a large amount of proxy buying power, have got cheaper prices than each institution working alone could get. But if any institution can find a better price elsewhere, they are free to go elsewhere. But if they do, they will have to go through the whole palaver of finding that supplier and negotiating all the other benefits that the framework likely brings, such as 5 year on-site hardware warranties, specified response times to faults and issues etc
Yet more UK tax payers money sent abroad to foreign big boy companies employing eastern European or Bangalore workers. No investment in skills for Brits by the British government so wait for the comments about there being a lack of skilled workers. If you don't sow any seed you will have no crop to reap. Jobs in UK IT pay less well than cleaning the toilets in McDonald's so why are commentators surprised when no one trains? The are paid so badly because one giant customer - the UK public sector - ignores any company that's not huge foreign and providing fat piles of shares
I agree, I worked for an IT Service Provider in the Education sector for over 10 years and at the end of my tenure most of the support was outsourced to India and the onsite technicians were pretty much print cartridge replacers or just had to be proficient in customer service.
Comment More than 250 mass shootings have occurred in the US so far this year, and AI advocates think they have the solution. Not gun control, but better tech, unsurprisingly.
Machine-learning biz Kogniz announced on Tuesday it was adding a ready-to-deploy gun detection model to its computer-vision platform. The system, we're told, can detect guns seen by security cameras and send notifications to those at risk, notifying police, locking down buildings, and performing other security tasks.
In addition to spotting firearms, Kogniz uses its other computer-vision modules to notice unusual behavior, such as children sprinting down hallways or someone climbing in through a window, which could indicate an active shooter.
Developers in the US with $11,000 to spend, three spare nights a week, and a desire to level up to become an engineering manager or architect have a new education provider to consider: Indian company Scaler, which has made America its first overseas destination.
Scaler has already seen 18,000 students graduate from its courses, which deliver three two-and-a-half-hour lectures a week. The entire course takes between six and nine months to complete.
The company told The Register its instructors are former employees of major technology firms, and its curriculum focuses on both high-level system design and lower-level coding concerns so that students emerge with the skills needed to devise and manage projects. Soft skills and career development are also taught during the program.
Rick Smith, founder and CEO of body camera and Taser maker Axon, believes he has a way to reduce the risk of school children being shot by people with guns.
No, it doesn't involve reducing access to guns, which Smith dismisses as politically unworkable in the US. Nor does it involve relocating to any of the many countries where school shootings seldom, if ever, occur and – coincidentally – where there are laws that limit access to guns.
Here's a hint – his answer involves Axon.
Russian crooks are selling network credentials and virtual private network access for a "multitude" of US universities and colleges on criminal marketplaces, according to the FBI.
According to a warning issued on Thursday, these stolen credentials sell for thousands of dollars on both dark web and public internet forums, and could lead to subsequent cyberattacks against individual employees or the schools themselves.
"The exposure of usernames and passwords can lead to brute force credential stuffing computer network attacks, whereby attackers attempt logins across various internet sites or exploit them for subsequent cyber attacks as criminal actors take advantage of users recycling the same credentials across multiple accounts, internet sites, and services," the Feds' alert [PDF] said.
The US Federal Trade Commission on Thursday said it intends to take action against educational technology companies that unlawfully collect data from children using online educational services.
In a policy statement, the agency said, "Children should not have to needlessly hand over their data and forfeit their privacy in order to do their schoolwork or participate in remote learning, especially given the wide and increasing adoption of ed tech tools."
The agency says it will scrutinize educational service providers to ensure that they are meeting their legal obligations under COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
Britain's competition watchdog is probing the largest local provider of school management information systems to ascertain if it is abusing its market dominance to force customers to sign three-year agreements.
Education Software Solutions told schools in November that it was ending the option of a one-year contract for MIS and was instead creating a minimum three-year deal for the previous SIMS Annual Entitlement Plan.
Some schools responded negatively and saw the revision as an attempt to lock them into longer-term deals. The Department for Education advised all schools to "pause" before signing new agreements as it investigated the revision but reportedly changed policy in December, telling them to buy as normal.
Intel plans to spend $100m on improving semiconductor engineering education and research in the US.
This pledge comes as Intel plans to, for one thing, spend tens of billions of dollars on a chip manufacturing mega-site in Ohio and will need a suitable workforce to populate it.
The processor goliath detailed on Thursday how it will spend this $100m, saying it will put half into higher education institutions in Ohio with the hope of lining up enough talent to help fill the 3,000 high-tech job openings when the first two fabs in the state open in 2025. The rest of the cash will be spread across America.
New research by the British Computer Society (BCS) has found girls are outnumbered six to one by boys in computer science classes across the UK.
However, once young women choose computing, on average they outperform their male counterparts, according to the study.
BCS's report titled "Landscape Review: Computing Qualifications in the UK" draws on publicly available data covering the five-year period from 2016/17 to 2020/21. It covers England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as the home nations sought to shift their computing education curricula.
Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University has entered a second week of woe following a vist by an infosec nasty.
The 200-year-old institution's IT team first referred to the crisis as a "security incident" but a spokesperson confirmed to The Register that it was a cyber attack.
A week on, things remain resolutely broken. VPN? Down. Oracle R12 Finance System? Down. Staff shared areas? Down. Even staff and student directories remain unavailable, hinting at some severe trouble within the university's on-premises infrastructure.
Educational users of Google Workspace will soon be facing a new storage policy that limits the free tier to 100TB shared between all users at a site, and some are expressing their dissatisfaction with the change.
Google Workspace for Education, formerly G Suite for Education, is Google's offering for schools and universities. As part of the rebrand last year, the free tier was renamed Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals, alongside paid-for Standard and Education Plus editions.
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022