srochford

In what way? I've installed it and apart from a different wallpaper the machine looks exactly the same as the 8.10 machine I've been using for the past 6 months (except I can't get MythTV to show me TV pictures!) Not really a criticism; 8.10 basically worked and I'd hope 9.04 would also work so I'm wondering what's more promising about it?

How can I remotely execute the same command on a batch of computers? In Windows I'd do something like: for %i in (1 2 3 4) do psexec \\computer%i and as long as I'm admin on the remote computers the command gets executed. I know I can use SSH to remotely execute a command but it prompts for a password every time (and if I've not connected to the machine before I also get asked to accept the key). I'd like to do this without having to type the password lots of times or I might as well just go and log on to 36 machines!

Do you have Office 2007? If so, type the words as above in Word, highlight and then just scroll through the font drop down - it "live" formats the text so you can quickly see what each font looks like. I think it looks like Hattenschweiler but I'm not that good at fonts :-)

Think it's been mentioned here before, but if you want to make your own really large posters from photos etc then try out Rasterbator (and no sniggering at the back!)

I just don't think that's true! I think loads of people have pride in their country but the "English way" is not to make a fuss about such things - we just get on with life. To say we've lost our identity because we don't go round waving flags is also not true - the whole point of the English identity is that we don't do flag waving - that's the American way! The English way of celebrating would be something like making a nice pot of tea and some small cakes to go with it but doing this completely privately :-)

I think the point is that most English people don't really care either way - we're far too reserved to make a fuss :-) No-one stops anyone from putting up flags etc but most people aren't bothered. Add to that the fact that the cross of St George has been mis-appropriated by some pretty dodgy people over the years and I suspect that there are people who actively don't want to display it!

I don't use Sims so I can't really comment but have you read what it says on the tin?? Most software packages are so hedged around with exclusions that there's no guarantee of anything! Jon Honeyball's column in the latest PC Pro pulls to pieces a Microsoft agreement which essentially promises nothing!

Not quite sure what you mean! What I have done in the past when I've got a lot of updates to do is create an LDAP query to find the users I'm going to update (could be all of them!). You then get that in a recordset and step through it one at a time. For each user, you then call out to (say) your SQL database, get the new info, update the AD record and move on. You can link SQL server to AD so that you can do links between the 2 dbs and then do big update statements but that's always seemed a bit scary to me :-)

I think 30mA RCD is too low for that many machines. The page linked to by @plexer shows that you can have up to 3.5mA leakage per device and it's considered OK; with 34 machines you've got 68 devices so even if they each only have leakage of 0.5mA you're going to trip. Murphy's law says that you get more leakage as the machines are switched on; it then drops to a lower value - this is why you can switch them on one at a time without problem. You either need to increase the trip value for the RCD or split the circuits so that you have multiple 30mA RCDs (eg 1 per 10 machines)

What software are you using to run the backup? It shouldn't fail just because "you" don't have rights to the folders. there is a special privilege (SeBackupPrivilege - details here which can be given to an account which allows it to bypass file and directory permissions - make sure that the account running your backup software has that privilege. If you use robocopy to backup then the /b switch tells robocopy to temporarily use the backup privilege so that it can backup files/folders to which the account running the job normally doesn't have access. Using the backup privilege is important - it's very easy for a user to just reset permissions on their own files either accidentally or deliberately.

Brightcode provide hosting for a range of clients - it would be worth talking to them to see what they can do; I'm sure they can provide what you need.

No, and it's not what they've been found guilty of which is weird. I'd expected something along the lines of "aiding and abetting" which would probably be hard to disprove. They've actually been found guilty of breaking copyright law and that seems surprising (but, as others have said, did the court understand what was actually happening and how it linked to what was being alleged?)

Synovate's web site doesn't work at all in Chrome "Aw Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this web page"

It depends on what you're doing. Some code will work nicely on multi-core processors; some doesn't. Problems can occur with memory bandwidth - FSB speed on a quad core Xeon is much bigger than (say) a 1GHz Celeron but it may not be big enough. If you want to do this seriously, take a look at Torque and Maui (and probably others!) - these are open source pieces of software to do resource scheduling so that you can make full use of your clustered machines.

You can do serious maths with it - this is an article describing some maths done here on a similar system. The system doesn't actually use scrap machines; it uses "current" equipment which is just left running when the building is closed and booted into FreeBSD. The current incarnation uses 36 x quad core machines, 36 x dual core machines and 10 x 8 core machines. If you want to know more about the maths that uses such a system then look at [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method]Monte Carlo method[/ame].

Not true! As @meastaugh1 has pointed out, it's fairly easy to reconnect a mailbox to a user account as long as you do it within the mailbox retention period.

Or they could vote the Conservatives in and get a different kind of punishment.

I can recommend HDB but I'm afraid it's a private system :-) More seriously, as Tony says, you need to think about what you're doing and why. If you've only got a limited number of IPs then a simple database or spreadsheet and a script to generate the reservations in Windows DHCP is doable; if you've got a huge number then you might need to look at something bespoke.

I think that's the best way to look at it - every Easter, the NUT get together and some of their weirder members come up with stupid demands. I don't know why they do it - there are lots of other things they could do to get more support for teachers (particularly in the current financial situation) but there are some union members who just live in a rather different world!

Haven't used CC3 but one reason why some of the scripts will fail is if you have a group policy saying "don't show last logged on username" machine startup scripts run after group policy application so if you can't turn off the GPO which is taking out the defaultusername value then you can push in the username with a startup script; the script basically does what powdarrmonkey has given you but doesn't do a reboot.

Not sure what you're commenting on but if he hasn't got a CSV file but has one with an odd layout and colon delimiters then he needs some way of getting that to CSV or something else which can be processed. This is the kind of thing where the route you take depends on how often you need to do it. For a one off, you'll probably put in less effort than if you're doing it multiple times. if you're familiar with grep, sed and the other Unix text processing commands then you could probably do it all with them!

This kind of thing is a real nightmare - for once, I almost feel sorry for BT :-) it isn't even just a case of minor damage where they can re-splice; they reckon they're going to have to re-route and then join the cables. Glad I don't live anywhere near!

It depends on the make of PC but for most modern PCs the answer is yes. HP and Dell both have utilities to allow you to make BIOS settings remotely; the HP is easy to use, the Dell less so. If the machines have vPro or AMT stickers on then you've got complete remote management facilities (and a replacement for WoL if you want it) otherwise look for terms like "SMBios" (System Management BIOS I think!) and a utility to go with it. Even if the answer was "no" I wouldn't expect anyone laughing at you - the question you're asking is absolutely spot-on in terms of common sense. Anything which requires you to go and "touch" hundreds of machines is a bad idea so looking for a way to automate that is totally sensible!

Open the file in Excel, tell it that it's delimited and the delimiter is :: or whatever. You'll then get nice tidy columns which you can do with what you please :-)

Worth remembering that if it ends up in court, what really matters is who's sitting in the jury box - juries have a tendency to do their own thing if they think either prosecution or defence are being stupid! (and, given the fact that jury discussions remain private, I couldn't possibly say whether this relates to any trial at which I have been a juror!)