srochford

Some do, but you're right - it should be a given. Suse Linux, for example, not only objects to dictionary words but also to simple obfuscations so you are really forced to use something half decent!

I'd install it - the kids might start to use it, particularly if you can find any good web based tutorials and link to them off your intranet/VLE. The big problem with any new software is that "package X" works, does what's needed so why bother to come up with a whole new set of learning materials that don't provide any benefit!

The FE funding was very different from the BSF idea. Although government claims that they value FE (and seem to expect them to pick up kids who've failed at school and magically get them qualifications at a fraction of the cost of a school) there has never been the same level of investment and it's now gone very, very wrong. I suspect that the money for "bricks and mortar" in BSF will dry up but the move to outsource stuff like IT support will continue. If some big company comes along and says "we can run your IT for half the price it now costs" I suspect that there will be lots of people saying "yes, please"

You can use Sharepoint designer to create HTML pages - they don't have to be stored on a Sharepoint server (but they can be and Sharepoint Services is free if you're running Windows Server) so that gives you a free MS product to design web pages (and I'd also say a much better product; it defaults to creating standards compliant HTML!)

This is a classic mis-use of statistics! it is a 66% increase but it's actually just 16 people (a total of 40 died). OK; 40 people dying like this is 40 unnecessary deaths but it's still not as bad as a headline "66%" suggests!

pfdavadmin is also a useful tool for this sort of thing. As the name suggests, it's mainly to do with public folders but it will also act on mailboxes.

We have users who must be downloading most of the internet. They routinely download stuff at 1Gbit/s and have recently asked for an increase in their link to 10Gbit/s They must be sticking in an awful lot of floppy discs to cope with it all :-)

There was a recent thread about printing out big posters which I now can't find but I don't think it referenced this useful web site Basically, you upload an image file to Block Posters and say how many pages you want creating. It then produces a PDF for you to download and print. It works well, it's free, and I like it :-)

It's obviously not needed for some people but I know a good few geography people who find it extremely useful. It can be abused just like almost anything you can put on a computer; I think we need to give people a reasonable set of tools and then deal with those who misuse them.

I think this is just a non-story! The company charges to connect you to the person you want; I think it's about 50p. No direct sales company is going to pick random names and then pay 50p to get a chance to call them! As ever, the sales companies will get mobile numbers in the same way they get land line numbers and they will buy lists of numbers with info about what sort of person you are (male/female; young/old; interested in double glazing etc etc). A raw list of "person X has phone number 12345" is not a lot of use without the matching info about what person X might be tempted to buy!

It's not really the product that matters, it's what you do with it and no product (Gartner recommended or otherwise!) really helps make the decisions about what's appropriate for your institution. Can you also stop chucking in references to Gartner; it's generally seen as an indication of cr*pness; almost everything ever published by Gartner is just marketing nonsense which has little if any real value!

What about teaching the programming using web tools? Write the code in VB.Net, PHP etc but running on a web server? This is both really good (because web coding is useful) and you can have loads of people putting their code on one machine. Even if someone does manage to mess it up (and it's much harder to have web code causing harm; it will run as a low privilege user with relatively little access to the file system) it shouldn't be too hard to just fix the one machine (need to make sure users copy their code to home drives so that the web server is sacrificial!) I don't think you should worry too much about what users can do with a programming language. Most simply won't have the skill to do anything bad (they might think they can do clever stuff - eg bring up a listing of all files on drive C:) but if the permissions are half decent they won't be able to break anything! Those who do have the skill will do it whatever tools you make available - you need to get them on your side and benefit from their ability. If you don't want to go the web route and you can't get reasonable VMs on the desktop machines, can you put a batch of VMs on central boxes? A desktop class machine with 4Gb of RAM should comfortably host 8 VMs running XP. VMWare Server and MS Virtual Server will allow you to have the machine on one box but the user accessing it on another (both can use a web client to do this)

Sadly, the fuser is always stupidly expensive. I'm sure CPLTD's quote is fair, but that's nearly the price of a new printer.

That's what I'd do; it's a trivial batch file to do a diskpart to wipe everything and create a new partition and then an imagex /apply to put the .wim file back. Doesn't cost anything and is using standard MS tools.

Yes - you can do it with ftype/assoc commands. The silent install switch is just /S (case sensitive) and that will then give you the standard set of file associations.

Is it worth mentioning that WinRAR isn't free (can be freely downloaded but it's not free software!) 7zip is open source and will open pretty much any kind of archive (including RAR)

I'm guessing they're talking about the kind of things you often see on here "Should I use FOG or WDS?" - you need to be able to weigh up options and make a decision. No idea how they were trying to assess that at interview.

Pretty sure it does a silent install with a switch so if you need an MSI you can just use the MSI wrapper wizard to make it go. It doesn't actually need installing - you can just copy the files into a folder and it works.

If you want externally hosted stuff to use LDAP to authenticate against your internal AD then you can use ADFS - brief excerpt:

Use IPSec Block Web Browsing but Allow Intranet Traffic with IPSec Block Web Browsing with IPSec Down at the bottom of the first article there's a link to configuring IPSec using GPO so you can get it on all machines.

I personally hate cluttered desktops but I think it is very much a personal preference which makes it very difficult if you're using mandatory profiles. With a bit of user training, Vista (and Windows 7) makes things a bit easier; you press the Windows key and start typing part of the name of the program you want. It then doesn't matter how logical or organised your desktop is; users can quickly find what they want.

Corollary is that it will give you the skill set to make you able to apply for another job ... I'm sure we've had threads before about employers wanting an agreement that you will pay back the cost of a training course if you leave within a certain time.

That surely has to be a joke?? Have we got the date wrong - should it say 1 April??? The toilet charging was a sort of joke by Michael O'Leary; as I understand it, he wasn't intending it seriously (but Ryanair does look at every possible way of getting the headline fare low while still making a big profit)

Not got a script like that but we used to use a web page to do it - it's easier to do validation etc and you can put the data straight into the helpdesk system. It's also worth using the page to check if a fault has already been reported on that machine - makes it look good if you can say to the user "Fault already reported" (as long as it doesn't say "4 months ago" :-)

How much of the client do you want? Just enough to load the redirector and map a drive? I may have an image somewhere which would do that. Alternatively, you might be able to find the "ultimate boot disk" (not CD!) somewhere and that had the necessary client on it.