A good balance?

Originally Posted by Chris T

when I was a bit older and it became fun to enslave other machines on the Econet or hack the school teletext system

The whole of my Year 11 was spent messing around with the administrative program which we got our hands on. Oh the fun! Then we got that took of us and our account temporarily deleted. When we got our account back we were sending messages to the whole domain via the 'NET SEND' command on the Win 2000 command line. Then we got the command line took off us but I found a way around it. I typed the NET SEND command in notepad and copied and pasted it 5 times and saved the file as .BAT, making it a batch file, and executable. It worked and the whole domain got 5 messages instantly.

Someone copied and pasted it 100 times, silly boy, and I got the blame for it .

I bet the IT department were glad to see the back of me and a few other 'silly boys' in that corner

I know it was very stupid, looking back but it was fun nonetheless, we didn't really hinder anyones education except in the last few weeks . I was a very silly boy. Geez, I think I've matured in a matter of 8 weeks

I remember some one totally messing up our school network this year, every system got the BSOD from it

[LemonyBrainAid]

If anyone knows any hacks for the RM school security system, feel free to pm me now,

Originally Posted by Macca371

The whole of my Year 11 <snip>

I think the worldwide virus/trojan/exploit problem would be a whole lot less acute if teenagers like you applied that kind of ingeneuity to making the world a better place instead of holding virtual p1ssing contests in the school IT lab.

[LemonyBrainAid]

Originally Posted by Chris T

I think the worldwide virus/trojan/exploit problem would be a whole lot less acute if teenagers like you applied that kind of ingeneuity to making the world a better place instead of holding virtual p1ssing contests in the school IT lab.

Heheh. But thats the fun of being in school!

Originally Posted by Chris T

I think the worldwide virus/trojan/exploit problem would be a whole lot less acute if teenagers like you applied that kind of ingeneuity to making the world a better place instead of holding virtual p1ssing contests in the school IT lab.

The school IT technician actually applauded me for my method after giving me a b0ll0cking

[zoombini]

My kids spend hours on the computers & Xbox between them.

Yes it worries me how much time they are spending on them, however the alternative is what?

Go outside & play, go & have some external activities etc.

What activities? there are none that do not cost huge amounts of money each week. I.E. a few hours skateboarding at local skate park = £5.

Play outside?
As parent we are constantly worried about our kids when doing this, not because we think they are going to get abducted or run over, but because they are likely to get bullied or assaulted by other kids or yobs in the area.
And this does happen, and there is history of it. My eldest once plucked up the courage to nip to the local shop 500 yards away & got beaten up on his return & his glasses smashed for doing it.

As for abductions & being run over, well drivers zoom up & down constantly despite road humps, so yes it is a worry no matter what any stat's say.
The same goes for abductions etc.

I'd rather my kids played too much IT than became a statistic thankyou.

[Ramrod]

Originally Posted by LemonyBrainAid

Getting out and about? Doing what? Going around town with my mates? Playing football? Playing other games? What life skills will that teach me?

Social and physical interaction with people and the world , physical coordination and fitness.............

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by Chris T

Mrs T and I are almost paranoidally careful of introducing Americanisms to our wee man. I'd cringe if I heard him say 'tomayto' or 'brought to you by the letter zee!'. That'd put me off the Seasme Street site, although I admit I've not seen it myself.

Mrs H is American as such it is inevitable that he will get introduced to them He's already flown over 40,000 miles before his 2nd birthday!

Originally Posted by Chris T

Thankfully most electronic spelling toys these days seem to have the 'z' re-recorded for British use. However, we were in Toys'r'us looking for birthday presents at the weekend and came across some talking Bob the Builder stuff ... great, we thought, until we pressed the buttons and found the characters were talking with American accents!!

I do find it funny on some of the toys we have (the leapfrog Drum springs to mind) where they have clearly just dubbed the z not the rest of the alphabet and it is said so differently that it it clear it is someone else. I also find the Alphabet Pal® Caterpillar funny, it has a phonetic option, but if you try to get it to phonetically say rude words it giggles instead.

Originally Posted by Chris T

However, we were in Toys'r'us looking for birthday presents at the weekend and came across some talking Bob the Builder stuff ... great, we thought, until we pressed the buttons and found the characters were talking with American accents!! Presumably the voices are re-dubbed for broadcast in the US, which is fair enough (Clifford the Big Red Dog is re-dubbed for the UK), but trying to sell the Yankee voices back here is just arrogant corporate laziness.

Arrogant corporate buying power IMHO, ToysRUs probably found it cheaper to buy the toy in the US and import it themselves, leading to the import of the US voices.
Anyone else remember speak and spell not being able to spell colour.

[Caff]

When my 3 were very young (20, 18 and 14 now) I knew exactly how long I was going to let them watch TV every day. PCs never entered into the equasion. But children tend to want to be these independent little things!

4 years ago I had to stop my daughter (now 18) from chatting all evening, for 2 years, because her grades were dropping.
But she has, through using her PC and the interntet, learned to touch-type, hosts fan site listings and programs her own website.
She organised a week-long trip to a Lord of the Rings convention for 14 young people she 'met' on the internet of which none had ever met in real life and from various parts of England, Wales, Germany and The US. She regularly stay and holidays with these friends, and they often stay with us. I have to say that some of them are a heck of a lot more pleasant than some of her local friends! She sailed through college studies in business admin and now is ready to start a degree in business management. She has just started to promo work for one of her favourite bands.
I doubt that any of this would have happened without her PC and 'chatting'.

But I had to be vigilant on her behalf for years and her PC also had to be in the lounge. I also had to trust her judgement and character.

[Halcyon]

Originally Posted by LemonyBrainAid

If anyone knows any hacks for the RM school security system, feel free to pm me now,

Cant remember exactly what we did now, but that RM machines log on was too funny.
We used to give ourselves extra print credits and send a million messages using Net send.
We'd also track down all those little games hidden in excel and other software. Easter eggs or whatever they were called. Really rubbish but it passed time by.

[Bex]

i didn't actually get a pc that was online until i was about 18. and even then i had to teach my folks how to use it
before and after we got the pc, most of my out of school hours were spent with friends.

although i do think even i spent too much time on the pc when i was out of work/on sick leave and i found i started dreaming conversations in MSN format lol

i think if you socialise your kids well from an early age, to understand how a pc works and that it can be fun, but that "real" life is more important they grow up with a balanced idea. lemonybrainaid seems to have a fairly mature attitude to pcs.... although learning more than at school.... hmmm depends what your trying to learn i guess

my nephew (whose five) is always on at me to let him play games on my pc. i do let him every other day for about half an hour, then he is sent off to play with his toys or we read a book together. so he is getting a balanced experience. he also loves talking to my friends on MSN...

We have had a PC since '97.it was in the lounge in full view of everyone.With two teenagers and me time had to be rationed so that everyone got a turn without interfering with homework,sleep and a social life.Therefore I got the lions share of the time .

We got connected in '99 and I had to be even firmer about timesharing.

However as the only real alternatives for my two was to hang around street corners(they hated the youth club and rebelled against Guides and Scouts) or spend a small fortune going to the nearest town to just hang around on street corners as they pulled our cinema down,the ice rink/swimming pool were very inaccessible(two bus journeys) and we had no where else for two underage teenagers with no physical interests to go apart from the local playground I guess staying at home to read/listen to music/play PC games/watch tv/go online were much better and safer at the time.

[snodvan]

About a week or so ago I posted a thread titled Use Timer - a project. The idea was for piece of code that could be activated by a parent from a screen icon and which would then start a timer - and shutdown the machine at the end of the timer run.

Escapee very kindly pointed me in the direction of the program AutoIT and provided some code intended to do the job I wanted. After a bit of fiddling with the code it WORKS A TREAT.

LOTS of big thanks to Escapee

Junior has to ask me to log him onto the machine ('cos I will not give him the XP password) and at the same time I activate the timer for whaterver time seems appropriate for the prevailing circumstances eg proximity of meal times, bed time, homework starting etc.

One day he will be bright enough to work out WHY his machine seems to randomly shut down. Actually, I would dealy like him to acquire sufficient IT skills to work it out. For someone doing A level IT he shows a remarkable ineptitude and lack of understanding.

If anyone is interested I will update the previous thread with the AutoIT code that I am using

[Caff]

Originally Posted by snodvan

About a week or so ago I posted a thread titled Use Timer - a project. The idea was for piece of code that could be activated by a parent from a screen icon and which would then start a timer - and shutdown the machine at the end of the timer run.

I wish I'd known about that a few years ago!
I've also heard of a keystroke recorder but it wasn't around when I needed it, I don't think.

But children will still have to be trusted some day.
The hard work is letting them have enough knowledge of what they shouldn't be wrapped up in until they are able to censor for themselves. And think: "Mum'll kill me if she knows I clicked on that!"
And realise "This is not a good idea!".
And take the rap for downloading every piece of devious rubbish that appealed to them.

I'm making my youngest and his friends use a 'guest' account at the moment. It's a kind of half-way house.

Also bear in mind that you're not the only parent with a PC ...
Your kid will be in other people's houses.

Am I being too gloomy? Too cautious?