srochford

There are multiple forms of PR. I think that the Lib Dems are supporting Single Transferable vote which means you attach a preference to a candidate. I think their idea is for multiple MPs per constituency so you put (say) 10 candidates in rank order. If there are going to be 2 MPs and 2 people get more than some percentage of the vote as first preference then they get in. If not, you eliminate the people with the lowest number of votes but you then look at the papers and see who was the second choice for each voter. You then take into account the second choice votes and see who now comes top and you keep doing this until you've got enough votes. The idea is that the person who wins may not have the support of everyone but at least they will have been second or third choice for many people unlike now when (say) you want Lib Dem but you end up with Conservative and only 30% of voters actually voted Conservative but that's more than voted for any other candidate.

Good to see you've got it working but, as @jamo says, your try/catch are in the wrong place. Remember you can have more than one of them but the way you had it, you're saying that if anything goes wrong anywhere between try and catch then you jump out of the section to the catch. don't know if you started programming with VB but I'm guessing you used to do "on error resume next" - with that, you would have got to your "error handler". Try Catch is much more flexible but needs a different approach :-)

Pretty sure you can't do this without editing the GINA (and you really don't want to do that)

What's taking up all the space? 10Gb isn't massive for a server C: drive but it's not ridiculously small! Run Treesize or any of the other programs which have been mentioned here before to find out where the space has all gone. Look at using junctions to move stuff to another drive. For example, suppose that c:\windows\system32\dllcache is taking up a mass of space. You really want to keep that folder there but it doesn't have to be on that physical drive. What you can do is make a folder on drive D:, move the content into it and then make a link (junction) to point to the new location. Windows still sees c:\windows\system32\dllcache but you've just gained a big chunk of disc space. You can move pretty much anything but you need to pick folders which are not in use (so don't try moving system32 itself!) - if you stop the windows update service then c:\windows\softwaredistribution is another good one to move.

Have you just made a typo copying it here? You've used "exits" but you need "exist" (no S at the end; S in the middle) (note if you do move to VBScript then it becomes "fileexists" or "folderexists" - there is an S on the end) Otherwise, I can't see anything wrong with what you've got - it should work

I think item 1 is very different from the others and should be handled differently. You should have some kind of change management in place. Key parts of this are that you plan what you're going to do and why. You have written plans which should include things like who has to be notified of the change, when it's going to happen, how you've tested it, how you'll know if it's succeeded and how you will roll back if there's a problem (that also means you need to specify how you will know if there's a problem and what the worst case scenario is and how likely that is). Obviously, a small organisation will do this in a simpler way than a big organisation. Just read that paragraph and I'm not sure if it makes sense - look up ITIL Change Management to get a feel for what it's all about. The others are things which involve risk of injury. Here, I think you should have a list of the things which are done, an indication of how often and the "what could go wrong" "how bad would it be" "how likely is it to go wrong" and "what do I to to try and make sure it won't go wrong" For all the routine stuff I think there should be a scheduled check of what's going on - say once a year - and you complete a form at this point. I think our risk assessment forms are public - take a look at the "Combined Risk Assessment & Standard Operating Procedure Template" - it might help (well, it might help more than the gene therapy form!)

has anyone used one of these? CablesToGo TruLink Wireless USB to VGA Adapter Kit (81657) - dabs.com You plug a wireless sender into a USB port on the PC, wireless receiver into the monitor and you can display whatever on the screen without a lead to connect the two. Looking for a way to connect a computer to a display screen without having to run wires. This looks good but it's £110 so it's a chunk of money to spend if it's no good; hoping someone else has spent the money successfully already :-)

The whole thing about Cameron's vision is weird - I always understand the word "conservative" (small c) to mean keeping things as they are, opposing change. The chants "What do we want?" "Gradual change!" "When do we want it?" "All in good time!" seem to sum up conservatism quite nicely. We do need to do something to stop schools failing and to pull them back if they do fail but just spreading all the existing money around doesn't look like it would help. I don't work in a school but my experience of schools and the people I know who work in schools suggests that 2 key factors in the success of a school are a head who really makes things work and parents who expect the school to work well (with the head perhaps being the most important factor) I live close to Phoenix School in White City; it was a disaster 15 years ago and a new head was appointed. You've almost certainly seen William Atkinson on TV - partly because he is extremely good and partly because his school is very close to TV Centre. I think the school did get some extra money but the key thing seems to have been a head teacher who knew what made a good school and made sure that his school became a good school. I think we need to learn from this and improve other schools by learning from the schools that have improved.

If the plan was to say "we have £x million pounds per school and the school can be run by anyone" then that might be reasonable. What they're actually saying is "we have y million pounds currently split n ways; we are now going to split it n+m ways" (where m is the number of "new" schools) and also not split it evenly. This means that perfectly reasonable schools will lose out just so we can make the "new" schools get more money. You end up just making things worse - the parents who care about the education of their children will get better schools (they've been described as pushy, middle class but this is unfair - loads of people of every class care about education) but the parents who care less or are less able to do stuff will get worse schools and we all suffer if kids leave school having had a bad education.

How important is the machine and how quickly could you reimage it? If you can reimage it easily then that's likely to be the simplest fix. I suspect that if you could delete all the security settings you could then reset them to defaults (How do I restore security settings to the default settings? tells you how) but I don't know what happens if you try to delete that folder and hope a secedit fix will put it back. You can't easily convert back to FAT32 (there are 3rd party utils which will do it but I've never used them). You could use imagex to back it up to a WIM file and then restore it to a new FAT32 volume (imagex does keep the permissions but I think it will write files back to a different format partition). You then convert that to NTFS and reset perms.

I don't know the organisation but I know the area (used to have a centre just round the corner). You're walking distance from Wembley stadium so when the development in that area is complete it will be a really good place to work (it's not bad now). Tube station is close and there are reasonably good roads. If you want open space, Fryent country park (Fryent Country Park) and Brent Reservoir (Welsh Harp Reservoir - much nicer than the name suggests!) are close by and if you want a supermarket then Asda is just a short walk away.

Yes. There are a lot more files there now but system, software, sam and security are still there.

@Martin - I think you're missing the point. The Daily Mail article doesn't seem to be objecting to the law, just the enforcement of the law. If they think it's wrong to enforce speed limits (or just to enforce some limits in particular places) then they should say that and campaign against that law so that it can be changed. They don't do this - the campaign against law enforcement which I just find very, very strange (at least I would if this wasn't the Daily Mail which I believe is written by some kind of weird alien!) @IanT, I appreciate you've taken the ball home and are no longer playing but I simply cannot see how you can treat a fine for breaking the law as a money making exercise. If the cameras were hidden away and no-one was told about them then I might agree with you. As it is, the roads (generally) have clearly signed speed limits, the cameras themselves are painted bright yellow and (generally!) anyone who gets caught by a speed camera is just choosing to break the law and gambling that the camera won't be working. The report that drivers were "clobbered" with 1 million tickets in 2008 just goes to show the stupidity of a large number of drivers. That's orders of magnitude more than can be explained by the odd confusing speed sign or one which has been overgrown by trees or whatever.

I don't know why the Daily Mail is so opposed to law enforcement! They quote a Conservative MP "'You always have to ask if it is really necessary to watch over people". If this really is the case, why are we putting more police out on the streets if not to watch over people and make sure that they don't break the law (or catch them if they do break the law!)

RES PowerFuse will work for users with notebooks at home as long as you enable off-line files for the home folder (because the settings are stored on the home drive and you've got the off-line version of that). Pretty sure this wasn't mentioned by the appsense people (we're only looking at it for teaching desktops) but no reason why it shouldn't work as long as they have web access - the system works by talking to a webserver rather than SMB or other protocols which don't work nicely through firewalls)

Logon scripts run in the security context of the user so you can't change permissions unless the student already has full control on the folder or can take ownership and then change permissions. (This applies if you're using cacls, xcacls, icacls or any other tool) There are ways in which you can effectively do a "runas" in a login script and then make changes but I think it's easier to put permission changes in a machine startup script (if it's a local set of permissions that need changes) or to run it directly on the server (if it's changes on things like home folders)

Logon scripts run in the security context of the user so you can't change permissions unless the student already has full control on the folder or can take ownership and then change permissions. There are ways in which you can effectively do a "runas" in a login script and then make changes but I think it's easier to put permission changes in a machine startup script (if it's a local set of permissions that need changes) or to run it directly on the server (if it's changes on things like home folders)

We often have threads about profiles and how best to manage them. I reckon you could summarise it by saying that mandatory profiles work best for IT admin and roaming profiles (when they work) work best for users Using mandatory profiles with redirected desktop, my documents and application data gives at least some ability to save settings but you still lose anything that would be saved in the registry. If you have a mix of Windows 7/Vista and XP then you have more problems - settings won't roam between the v2 profile and the XP profile. As part of our preparation for the move to Windows 7 we (Imperial College) have been considering various ways of dealing with this and have been looking at a couple of products - Appsense and PowerFuse 2010 A big problem with profiles is that they become huge because they contain settings for everything so even if you're logging on and only going to use Word for 5 minutes you still get the settings for every app you've ever used. What both of these do is decouple the user settings from the profile. An agent runs on the user machine and watches for any app starting. When it does, the settings for that app are loaded from a store and injected into the registry "just in time". As settings are written back to the registry, the agent captures and stores them. This works transparently across OS versions and can even work if you're logged on at multiple machines while you're still logged on (eg change the font in Notepad on machine 1 while you're logged on at machine 2. Open Notepad on machine 2 and the font change is immediately picked up) Appsense writes all the settings back to a SQL database, PowerFuse to a set of encrypted files on the user's home drive. Both packages offer far more than this (management of settings, ways to roll back settings per app, control over what users can do and so on) and both look very interesting. I've no idea of pricing - both companies did the "what's your budget" line rather than just saying "it costs £x per seat" so I'd guess they're expensive. I don't know if anyone has used either of these products but they do look interesting and it might just be a suitable approach for some people.

Would certainly be worth asking how much BT would charge to install a new line - it might not be that much. I haven't done this for ages but the annoying thing used to be that there was a flat charge for an install whether that meant running cables for a few miles or just enabling it at the exchange for an existing wire which had been disconnected. If this is still the case then it's not too expensive.

I suspect that there's no legal way of downloading any of the streaming media which is normally DRMed You can download iPlayer stuff using po-ru.com: iPlayer Downloader - basically, it pretends to be an iPhone and collects the MP4 stream. Not sure what you want to do by hooking up the PC to the DVD recorder - if you've got an MP4 (or any other file) then you can just make a video DVD and burn it on the PC. If the programmes you want to keep are on Freeview or Freesat then buying a Sagem box (Sagemcom Digital - Range of Freesat and FreeView Set Top Boxes for BBC and ITV) might be a possibility. I've got the Freeview 67320 version which was just under £100 from Asda. It records the transport stream (basically MPG2) to the internal hard disc but has a USB socket so you can plug in a USB drive and export the video on to that.

The M25 is one of the best examples of why making roads wider doesn't reduce congestion but just encourages more people to drive, probably making journeys they would not previously have made. It was built (I think) as 3 lanes wide in each direction but got busier and so got widened. Parts of it are now 6 lanes wide in each direction and still it's busy. Introducing variable speed limits has helped to keep traffic moving (if everyone goes at 50mph you get more vehicles per hour going past any point because you can pack them in more tightly) There probably is a limit to how much car use will grow but I don't think we're any where near that limit yet. There are some interesting stats here about growth of car ownership. When I was a kid few people had cars (and I know that's a long time ago :-)), now it seems automatic that people expect to have cars from the age of 17. That's not necessarily a bad thing (it's part of the "you've never had it so good") but it does mean that some things don't work. I think we need different strategies for different parts of the country; public transport can work well in big cities because you've got enough people making the same journeys which mean that in London you only wait 2-3 minutes for a tube or 5-6 minutes for a bus. It's not bad between the big cities (far easier for me to catch a train if I go to Liverpool or Manchester than to drive) but it's harder to make it work in smaller towns or in rural areas - too few people want to go from A to B at the same time.

Not sure I understand exactly what you've got but I suspect you need to do a vlookup to find out info from one list and add it to another. This needs one field in both tables to be the same (typically you'll have the student ID in both sets of data) If this doesn't make sense then can you post some example data (anonymised!) then I can show you what I mean.

Without reading the license agreement I don't know but I suspect you've got no chance. Most software has a license agreement which pretty much says "this might do what you want, it might not. Is that OK?" and once you accept the agreement you're stuck with it. You can certainly try asking the supplier - if this is something that they're aware of (eg this is a newly released system and others have brought up problems) then they might be sympathetic but your description sounds more like it sort of works but isn't ideal for your situation - that means you may not get anywhere. Too late now, but in future, always try an eval version of software; if you can't get it to work then don't buy (and if the company won't give you an eval then just run away!)

You know people are going to hate you now :-) If you think of the all the trauma about stopping flash games, how are you going to stop people playing games which are basically plain text??

Sorry; I should have included a bit more detail for clarity. For each of the hazards I have described, there is a >0 likelihood that it will occur. In that case, there is a non-zero risk. Does that help to make it clear? To go back to the original point, there are so many things which could go wrong with flying a plane that there is again always going to be a risk when you fly (the likelihood that (eg) the engines all failing simultaneously is not huge but it's not zero. The likelihood that a terrorist will get on board with some kind of bomb is not huge but it's not zero. I could go on.) Does that help to explain why I think it's nonsense to say you should never fly "if there is any risk at all"??