srochford

This should get you started: set oNet=createobject("wscript.network") set oSysinfo=createobject("adsysteminfo") 'get full name eg cn=pc010203,ou=finance,ou=allpcs,dc=ic,dc=ac,dc=uk sDN=lcase(oSysinfo.computername) 'separate at commas; sdata(0) will be cn=pc010203; sdata(1) will be ou=finance etc sData=split(sDN,",") sOU=mid(sdata(1),4) 'get the lowest level OU - finance here - and start at 4th char; ie lose "ou=" 'find the path to map for this OU select case sOU case "finance" sPath="\\server1\fin_data" case "admin" sPath="\\server2\adminstuff" end select 'and map it if sPath<>"" then oNet.mapnetworkdrive "Z:",sPath end if

Looks like lynx on the web was after the NeXT browser but had been around before that, just not connecting to the internet.

Are gas and electricity not essential? Pretty hard to run the fridge without them! Children's clothes don't carry VAT but adult clothes do. If you're a woman using tampons etc then they're pretty essential and you pay VAT on those (but note that this government reduced the rate from 17.5% to 5% in 2001) Not all foods are VAT exempt; takeaway food carries VAT and many low income people eat a lot of such food. The country was in a real mess in 1974 (we'd just had 3 day weeks, regular scheduled power cuts and so on) so some drastic measures were needed. Putting VAT at 25% on electrical items was not good but most people don't buy fridges regularly. Of course, if you needed one then it was a big increase in the price but it was a one-off hit rather than stuff you have to buy every day. Healey also reduced the standard rate of VAT (ie the one which is paid on most VAT rated items) from 10% to 8% when the 25% rate was introduced. A couple of years later he dropped the top rate from 25% to 12.5% - leaving it to Margaret Thatcher's government to put everything at 15% just after she was elected.

The man appears to be in the terminal stages of cancer so it looks unlikely that he'll spend much more time in jail whether he's freed or just dies. Much more important, however, is the probability that he's not guilty - he was convicted just so that we could close the case and tidy everything up. There are way too many implausible "facts" in the evidence that was presented at his trial.

It was never intended to make anyone go on a spending spree - it was more about trying to help people on low incomes have a little bit more money to live on. Of course, that has no impact at all on the average journalist - they mostly don't earn low wages so they just mis-report the facts to make the government look stupid. If you earn £10,000 a year (minimum wage type income) and spend £2,500 a year on items carrying VAT, dropping VAT from 17.5% to 15% is roughly equivalent to changing income tax to 18.5% (saves about £46 in tax). It doesn't seem much, but it's better than a kick in the teeth. If you earn £20,000 a year and spend £2,500 on VAT items then the change is the same in money terms (about £46 per year) but it's almost meaningless as a change in tax - it's equivalent to reducing income tax to about 19.6% Increasing VAT is bad for people on low incomes and has little effect on people with average or high incomes. That's why Conservatives increase VAT (basically, they don't care about low wage earners - they don't vote and if they do, they probably vote Labour or BNP) This government has reduced VAT (temporary VAT reduction is no big deal but remember the massive reduction from 17.5% to 5% on fuel which also has a much bigger benefit for lower income people)

Shouldn't that say "one of the first graphical browsers"? I don't really know the order things appeared but I thought Lynx was one of the first browsers - Lynx source distribution directory Best thing is that it's still current (latest update on the web site is just a few weeks old!)

Changes in VAT have a big effect on those in the lower tax bracket because they spend a bigger fraction of their income on goods which carry VAT. If I were cynical, I'd say that Margaret Thatcher put up VAT from 8% to 15% just after she was elected (and later raised it to 17.5%) because it affects poor people (ie those who mainly don't vote Conservative) more than richer people but I'm not so I won't :-)

They do for some of their stuff. Some (many?) DoD staff have 2 computers - one allows connection to the rest of the world etc; the other is used for secure working and is completely disconnected from the internet and only connects to a secure network. I'd guess the trouble is that they have to talk to mere mortals like us so some of their computers have to be connected to the internet. They may have nothing that's sensitive there but it doesn't stop people trying to break in. You can't easily put up a sign saying "nothing to see here, move along please" and even if you did, people would just assume that something was hidden there and would try to get in so they could find out :-)

Probably teaching granny egg sucking, but you do know that the values set by proxycfg are not those shown in Internet Explorer (but they are the ones which BITS will use)? You say BITS is working OK; do you just mean that the service is running or have you used it to download a file? (If you've not done this, you can do it with bitsadmin - sample command is bitsadmin /transfer myDownloadJob /download /priority normal http://downloadsrv/10mb.zip c:\10mb.zip; you would substitute a suitable name, http and file location. You can then monitor the progress with bitsadmin /info myDownloadJob)

Steve's mantra: "If it takes a long time, you're doing it wrong" :-)

What would happen if there was a fire on Saturday? I'm assuming that you don't use the same tape every Friday so you'd be able to restore from "last" Friday's tape plus Monday - Thursday diffs. You'd lose anything done after Thursday night (so all day Friday). Does that matter? Maybe not - but it's something that needs to be considered as part of your disaster recovery. Just doing a backup on Saturday by leaving in the tape doesn't help - you still lose it if there's a fire (it's probably unlikely but so are the other disasters you're protecting against) Can you have a computer with a big hard drive somewhere else secure in the building and do a backup to that? That way you've got the comfort factor of belt and braces (the tape drive will fail on the day you absolutely must be able to restore but that other PC will be working) There is a downside with disc backup - you generally don't have historical copies of stuff (so you can get back to "yesterday" or maybe "last Friday" but not much further. Whether that matters depends on what you're trying to do. I've always felt that backup is to do with disaster - the disc fails, the server gets stolen, the building catches fire - and archiving is about making sure you've got old versions of data (what was the finance data like at the end of the financial year? Give me year 11 project work from 1 July)

Key thing is permission! Not all landlords will give it and even when you own you might not be allowed if the property is leasehold and the lease forbids it (I own my flat in a block of flats; we do now have a communal satellite dish but it's not allowed to install dishes other than that)

Some people (me??) will be confused whatever happens but I can't see a reason not to put HD on Freeview. As I understand it, part of the reason for digital switchover is to free bandwidth for this to happen. If you live in rented accommodation then it may not be easy to fit a satellite dish but you can often just use an internal aerial for Freeview (although obviously not for the original poster). If this works then it's easy to buy a really cheap (<£30) USB TV Tuner and you can have TV on your computer (and I'd guess most people here have a computer) I don't know how soon you'll be able to get HD Freeview on a PC but I can't see why it shouldn't be possible.

It is fair and I don't think you could sensibly ask for more. I would expect a company the size of Capita with a product as important as Sims to be very involved in the Beta process and to be telling Microsoft about any problems that exist. If the problems are (say) that they need ordinary users to write to HKLM and Windows 7 doesn't allow it then I'd expect MS to tell them where to go :-) If it's a problem with the coding where MS appear to have got something wrong then I'd expect MS to fix it or at least advise Capita how they can work round it etc. I can also see that big companies never want to commit themselves to definite time scales with beta products but it's reasonable to assume that some schools will move to Windows 7 (just as some moved to Vista) and you'd expect them to have plans to deal with it (eg "we aim to have support for Windows 7 within 3 months/1 year/whatever of public launch" would be reasonable)

Is this just on a single machine (eg WSUS server) or are all your machines having problems? Could you have changed the status of the BITS service to disabled? This will stop updates working (but I think you'd get a helpful error message!)

Copying the fonts and writing the registry keys will work but sometimes seems to need a restart of Explorer (so if you run this at startup then the fonts will be there the next time the machine starts). The link from @chrish looks fine but it looks like hard work :-) MS provide scripting support for installing fonts - the code I've used is below. Basically, put any fonts you want installing in a server folder (\\server\share\fonts in the example) and then call this code as an extra sub-routine in your machine startup script. If you ever want to add a new font, just copy it to the server; next time the machines reboot they'll install it. Sub InstallFonts on error resume next Const FONTS = &H14 dim , oFSO,oShell, oFolder1, oFolder2, sRoot sRoot="\\server\share\fonts\" Set oShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application") set oFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") Set oFolder1 = oShell.Namespace(FONTS) set oFolder2=ofso.getfolder(sRoot) for each oFile in oFolder2.files sName=lcase(oFile.name) if right(sName,4)=".ttf" then if not ofso.fileexists(oFolder1.self.path & "\" & sName) then oFolder1.copyhere sRoot & sName end if end if next on error goto 0 End Sub

That is one dreadful website! I can live with the messy layout but I can't find anything which tells me why I might want to buy a Dreambox! Does it just do the equivalent of a Freesat recorder? More? I can see that it supports a "bouquet list" - does this mean I can use it to order bunches of flowers :-) I found a bit more info on Wikipedia but £900 seems like a lot of money for what's described there so I'm guessing I'm just not seeing some special functionality which makes it a "dream box"!!

Agreed; belief systems are fine but I'd rather not have it forced on people as fact (eg creationism)

That's because the 64 bit ones are wider than 32 bit so you can't get as many in the pipe at the same time or something like that :-)

This is one of the downsides of moving budget control to individual schools - you don't have a legal team on hand. I suspect that even when LEAs totally managed school budgets there were still contracts signed that were unfair. Of course, in an ideal world, contracts would be nice and simple and you wouldn't need a lawyer to go through it all. Sadly, the world isn't ideal. Incidentally, just on a technical note, you don't have to type in user ID/password on safecom devices. If your users have pretty much any kind of ID card then you can just use that (the HP devices will work with readers for MiFare smart cards or magnetic stripes)

But if they'd been DHCP last time then you'd have nothing to do this time :-) You can't change the past but you can make life easier for the future and it's probably a lot less effort to tick the box saying "DHCP" then enter new IP, subnet etc etc (particularly as you probably have to do that via a series of poor web interfaces or even by visiting devices with a laptop!) It might not be the right thing for you but it's just something to think about.

I'm sure you could do it in VBA but I'm not really sure what you're trying to do :-) The code below is pretty trivial but it might show you something about what you can do. When you send an email it will pop up message boxes showing you the message, recipients and subject. It then sticks the word "Checked:" at the start of subject and sends the message. Not sure if this will get you started as to how you can change the message when it's sent??? Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As Boolean) MsgBox Item.Body For Each x In Item.Recipients MsgBox x Next MsgBox Item.Subject Item.Subject = "Checked: " & Item.Subject End Sub

It's worth looking at that and I was thinking about Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) recently. We've been seeing in some newspapers that "whatever the military ask for when they are fighting a war, the government should give it to them". Well, this is an example of what happens when the military get everything they ask for and it's not good. Please note, I'm not saying I think everything is perfect in Afghanistan, Iraq or even bases like Cyprus; I'm just saying that "whatever they want, without question" is not the way to go.

For pretty much any "how do I convert multimedia format X to multimedia format Y" type question, the answer is Super (linked by mac_shinobi above) Super basically gives you a GUI to a range of open source tools but does it well (and acknowledges its use of those tools). Think I've mentioned this before, but when it's running you can use sysinternals procexp to see what's happening - this will give you the command lines it's using to carry out the conversion and you can then just use those directly if you need to do multiple conversions in the future.

If you have to change DHCP scope etc then I'd take the opportunity to think really hard about what has to be on fixed IP - everything that's on fixed IP means more work if the IP range ever changes again (and it will!!!) If you just add reservations to your DHCP scope for anything which you want to have a fixed address then it's easy to change those reservations later (you can export the current reservations and probably do search/replace if you're doing a predictable change and reimport)