| Microsoft licences too expensive, say schools
Schools do not get good value for money from current Microsoft licensing agreements, IT professionals in the education sector claimed this week. In a series of interviews with education professionals at the BETT educational technology show in London, ZDNet UK found broad consensus that Microsoft educational licensing agreements are too expensive. "A lot of schools are looking at open source budgets come into play here. Microsoft licensing takes a big chunk out of schools budgets. The biggest issue is cost, basically," said Michael Allen, ICT technician of Swanmore College of Technology. Microsoft educational licensing agreements fall into two categories: perpetual agreements, where schools buy software outright; and schools agreements (also known as annuities), where schools buy and renew contracts.
Williams ahead of his time
The Times-Herald will feature an inductee each day leading up to the March 8 Vallejo Sports Hall of Fame banquet. D.L. Hurd could talk about Richie Williams for a week. Williams, the 5-foot-9, 133-pound blur, was ambidextrous, the guy nobody wanted to play a game of H-O-R-S-E with, stepped up his game against the best competition, was the consummate teammate and, best of all, a great person. These are just a few things Hurd lists about the very close friend he still speaks with on a once-a-week basis. Williams - a Vallejo High and Vallejo Junior College star in the 1950s, and later a basketball player at Gonzaga and San Francisco State - is slated for induction with the fifth class of the Vallejo Sports Hall of Fame on March 8. "I just can't say enough about him," said Hurd, a former football player with the Baltimore Colts and a VSHOF member.
Dead Zones Off Oregon and Washington Likely Tied to Global Warming ...
It was a good amount of crabs," Pazar said. "But they were dead, or dying or very, very weak. Those that we managed to keep alive didn't survive for long." The fishermen called Oregon State, which dispatched a boat of researchers to investigate. "It was a big mystery," Lubchenco said. "We didn't know what was killing them." Fishermen found other oddities. As they pulled up their crab traps, they found baby octopuses, about the size of silver dollars, inching their way up the lines toward the buoys floating on the surface. "I'd tell my crewmen, be careful with these cute little things," said Dennis Krulich, a longtime fishermen in Newport. "Peel them off the rope, and we'll put them back." Only later did he realize that these babies were coming up from oxygen-depleted waters that hover near the seafloor, climbing to save their lives.
John Lennon iPod touch box covers five touch versions
Apple also packages the newly released $499 32GB iPod touch in the Lennon box. The company has previously suggested that it would temporarily discount and phase out iPod touches without the updated applications; it was not known whether these models would receive box updates to distinguish them from later models. [Editor's Note: This story was updated based on reader comments - thanks Jeff + rTwelve!] .
Automated Killer Robots ‘Threat to Humanity’: Expert
Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP. "They pose a threat to humanity," said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain's Royal United Services Institute. Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world — from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones — can already identify and lock onto targets without human help. There are more than 4,000 US military robots on the ground in Iraq, as well as unmanned aircraft that have clocked hundreds of thousands of flight hours. The first three armed combat robots fitted with large-caliber machine guns deployed to Iraq last summer, manufactured by US arms maker Foster-Miller, proved so successful that 80 more are on order, said Sharkey.
Billie's Set To Wed
So hear those wed bells ringing, ring-ting-tingaling too. Come on, it's lovely weather for a New Year's wedding tonight. Yup, Billie Piper's all set to get hitched to her fella, Laurence Fox, in a romantical New Year's Eve ceremony today. The couple, who met last December when they performed together on stage, will wed in traditional fashion in a church near their home in West Sussex. Twenty-five-year-old Billie and her man were pictured walking into St Mary's Church in Midhurst at the weekend, spending over an hour inside in preparation for the big day. Billie's ex-hubby, Chris Evans, and his new wife, Natasha Sishmanian, are expected to be among the guests today. The couple's decision to ban children from their wedding was said to have caused tension in the run-up to their nuptials.
Show me the money and the perks
Not surprisingly, that shortage is pushing up wages. The latest EMA National Salary and Wage Survey showed that it wasn't just the bosses who got the big pay rises over the year to August. Although managing directors of companies with 50 to 199 staff did very well for themselves with average pay rises of 9.5% for the year, they were eclipsed by shop assistants, who achieved average pay rises of 9.9%. Other jobs which provided pay rises well above the average 4.5%, were registered electricians (9.2%), registered nurses (9.1%), diesel mechanics (8.4%) and general clerks (6.3%). However, that may be just the tip of the iceberg. A survey of pay and conditions by remuneration consultants DSD Consulting showed that companies were having to do much more than just increase pay to attract and retain staff.
'Flying Scotsman' defies gravity
WHEN THE EDINBURGH INTL. FILM FESTIVAL opens Aug. 14 with the world premiere of Douglas Mackinnon's debut movie "The Flying Scotsman," it will mark the climax of an extraordinary odyssey for the filmmakers. What makes "The Flying Scotsman" unusual is not the 12 years it took to get made, nor the number of times the project collapsed and was resurrected before the cameras finally rolled last year. No, what's remarkable is that the film, with a paper budget of $11 million, seems to have been made out of thin air, with no visible financing in place and no obvious producer (despite the 10 named in the credits). This is a movie that never got greenlit, never had a completion bond, never closed its finance, went into administration (the U.K. equivalent of Chapter 11) during post-production and still hasn't paid half its bills.
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