srochford

The power of science is that you look at what you can see and measure etc and come up with theories. You keep these theories until something else comes along which doesn't fit and at that point you try to work out how to revise those theories. Newton's laws looked good when he proposed them; we now know that they don't work for really small, really big and really fast objects so we have new theories to explain motion.

It's actually just a good old fashioned marketing degree and, just like good old fashioned marketing, they've used a couple of key words to get people's attention. As far as I can see, it's not teaching people about Facebook etc but teaching people how you can use stuff like that to add to the other marketing tools. Given the response they've got, I'd say they do a pretty good job of marketing themselves :-)

Can you put the students into groups before the lesson? If so, you could have something which the teacher could run which says "which group needs access now". The app then just adds the appropriate group to the folder permissions. You could even do it with scheduled tasks if appropriate - eg at 0900 group 9A1 gets access which is removed at 1000; group 9B2 gets access at 1000 and removed at 1100 etc What you can't easily do is set the folder to be accessible to "Folder_Fred_users" and add the users to that group during the lesson because the access rights won't be picked up until their next logon.

There's nothing wrong with the principle of multiple choice and they've been used successfully for many years (it's over 35 years since I did O Levels and some of the papers I tool were multiple choice) although there is a need to have other kinds of question so that candidates are encouraged to demonstrate more of wha they understand. The key thing is setting the paper in such a way that the candidate does have to draw their own conclusions. The "distractors" should be chosen such that they are all plausible to most candidates and only the best candidates will be able to get the right answer. Good questions in science might need you to do a calculation from data provided - eg the gravitational force exerted on a spaceship orbiting a moon at a distance of 200,000m from the surface is 100,000N. What will the force be when the spaceship is at a distance of 400,000m from the surface (the moon has a diameter of 500,000 metres)? (I'm not going to try and work out the answer and the distractors - it's Suinday evening and I'm just waiting for dinner to finish cooking! - but the maths is trivial if you can remember "inverse square law" but easy to get wrong if you only half remember what that means. The key thing is that the distance doesn't double but goes from 450,000 to 650,000; distractors would be based on not realising that. In lots of ways, exams have got better over the years - it wasn't uncommon to get questions at Chemistry A Level like "Discuss the chemistry of elements in group 4 of the periodic table" which is likely to just lead to a list of features of the elements that have been learned by heart with absolutely no understanding!

and with an increased bill, as far as I can tell. The 2Mbit broadband is going up by £2 per month; at some point soon it will also go to 10Mbit but I'd be quite happy to stay with 2Mbit and not pay the extra money!

Which makes this a particularly rubbish question - it says "Which of these would help scientists to prove or disprove this idea?" Which idea - there are two of them listed! The whole paper is online here. It's a foundation/higher tier paper and that question is taken from the foundation only section so it is supposed to be easy but it's also supposed to be a valid test of scientific understanding! What exactly does question 3 test other than an ability to read words and understand what "between" means? Question 7 asks about using eyes for identification; I presume it's asking about retinal scanners but I might claim that I use my eyes to identify people everywhere! Question 8 asks which kind of radiation causes skin cancer and damages eyes. I'd guess the "right" answer is ultra-violet but I feel like exposing the examiner to a good dose of gamma rays or X rays to find out how quickly cancer would develop!! (answer: quite quickly if there's enough of it!) What on earth is the answer to question 19? I'd guess you're supposed to pick B but surely that's wrong? You can get more digital channels into the same bandwidth as analogue but surely that's because you're throwing information away, not because you're sending more of it!

I know that when you feel you're snowed under it's hard to stand back and get an overview of what's taking up the time but that might help. I'm guessing that quite a lot of time is taken up moving between sites given you've got 17 of them and 4 people so you need to make sure that when someone is on a site they get as much as possible done at the one place (eg you don't send a technician to a site to just reimage one machine) is the bulk of the work fixing faults or is it installing new software or new hardware? If it's the first then what sort of faults? Are they things which can be handled by someone else on site. An example would be dealing with printers. Most printer faults which need someone to "touch" the printer are relatively trivial (paper jam, toner out etc); can you get a member of the office staff or the caretaking staff to take responsibility for this? If machines get trashed and need to be reimaged, can you build them with a hidden recovery partition on the hard disc such that you would boot from a CD/DVD/USB to run a small program to unhide the recovery partition, reimage, hide the partition and boot into the fixed image? If so, can your tech contact at each school do this kind of job? I don't know what age range you're dealing with, but can you get one or two students at each school to help with routine stuff?

Not true!! If you want a startup script to connect to a server resource and "do stuff" then it's perfectly possible to map a drive. What you can't do is map a drive as a startup script and expect it to be available for the user - it won't be. Also, you can set permissions for computer objects - the commonest one is that if you're deploying software using group policies then the folder which stores the MSI needs to allow "domain computers" read access to it. Computer objects have SIDs so they can be listed in Access Control Entries just like users and groups

I don't know how old you are but the school exam results become pretty irrelevant when you've got a reasonable amount of work experience. It doesn't really matter whether you call it a resume or a CV - it ought to cover pretty much the same stuff. The important thing is that the CV and covering letter are the only things a potential employer has in order to decide if they want to interview you. Try and stand back from what you've written and pretend that you don't know you and are reading this for the first time. Would you be impressed by what you see? If not, then neither will an employer. I know it's probably obvious, but over the years I've read far too many forms and letters of application which tell me very little and really don't sell the candidate. Look carefully at any job advert - there will always be a list of requirements. Go through them, think about what you've done that means you fit those requirements and explain that. If you can, get someone else to read through what you've written - check the spelling and grammar; make sure the layout is good (but don't make it too fancy) Watch out also for just producing a list - eg if I say I want experience with Windows desktops, experience of configuring switches, experience of backing up servers then don't just put "I have experience with Windows desktops, experience of configuring switches" etc. Tell me what you've done - how many machines have you worked on, what sort of things have you done? Many employers will get tens or even hundreds of applications for a job. They'll go very quickly through the forms or letters and any which are poorly presented will get chucked. Any which don't give good info about the candidate will also go. You have to make sure that the content of the letter/form really makes the person reading think "I'd like to meet this person; I'm going to call them in for an interview"

Thirded for Super. No idea why the website is so rubbish; it's the kind of thing you expect when someone's trying to sell you something but they're not! A useful tip is that Super just provides a GUI for tools like mencoder and ffmpeg both of which have masses of weird switches and can be difficult to manage. If you work out how to do a conversion with Super then run sysinternals process explorer, find the process that's running (it'll be the one using all the CPU!) and get its properties. From this, you can get the command line needed to carry out the conversion. This would then let you write a batch file etc to automatically process files.

The problem is that Unix is case sensitive; you needed to type "rm" on the RM web site :-)

You can set permissions so users can read/write files but not delete. Not sure if you can prevent a move (because effectively that's a rename operation) What about using a web based photo gallery. Users can then upload photos, appropriate people can look at them but no-one can just shuffle things around. Joomla does a photo gallery add on but there are quite a few others.

That's a good way to get the settings right for the user. What you can then do is copy that profile to \\\netlogon\default user When a new user logs on who has (say) \\server\profiles\ specified as their profile they will look in the "default user" folder if there's nothing already on the server. You also need to make sure that you get the permissions right on the default copy. When you've configured the pupil profile on the workstation, log off, log on as admin and use the user profiles bit of control panel (System | advanced | user profiles) to copy the profile to the server - this will set the permissions for you (specify "everyone" as the user allowed to use it)

Use styles. It may not be easy to add them now; it depends on how the documents were created. If there's lots of formatting applied without using styles it can be hard to get it right but if you can select everything, set it to "normal" and then just add heading1, heading2 etc to the headings then you quickly get stuff looking consistent.

I always set up shares with full access and use NTFS permissions to control access. I know that there can be some security benefits when the share permissions are restricted but there also seem to be weird problems - this looks like one of them. If I have a share which I know should be read only then it makes sense to make the share and NTFS permissions read only but for anything else I'd put full control on the share and just lock down with NTFS permissions.

Not quite so exciting but you can see the van itself on this street.

So true! You also need a drain which actually goes slightly down hill from the units to the outside. Otherwise you get what I had at a school a while ago where the drain pipe leaks and you basically get the condensed sweat of teenagers running down your wall. Lovely :-)

I'm not holding my breath, but it's perfectly possible that in 14 years time the debt will be nicely cleared. The money that's gone to the banks hasn't just been poured down the drain. If the banking industry can be sorted out then money starts coming back from them to the government. As I understand it, Northern Rock, has already paid back quite a chunk of the money it was given. As I say, I'm not wildly optimistic that it will happen soon but there's no reason that it shouldn't happen. Just because Margaret Thatcher sold off every state owned industry at a bargain price so the state didn't get the money it could have done, doesn't mean to say we have to do the same with the banks when they go back into private ownership.

This Microsoft page goes into detail of how to make sure you're not an open relay. When you think you've got it right, go to a command prompt and type the following sequence (put your mailserver name in place of but enter the other stuff exactly as is) telnet 25 helo computername mail from: [email protected] rcpt to: [email protected] Exchange should reply to your "helo" (you ought to put the real name of your PC but it doesn't matter for this). It will accept the "mail from" (it doesn't know that address doesn't exist; it could do and that's fine). After the recipient bit it should reject you - at this point you've said you're sending email from testdomain.com to test.com and (unless one of those happens to be your domain!) that won't be allowed unless you have an open relay.

If you go with aircon remember that it's not just an up-front cost; there are running costs and maintenance costs (aircon uses lots of electricity and will need servicing once or twice a year) If you can get away with big fan shifting cooler air into the room then that's a lot cheaper but, as @dwimorberg has pointed out, it does need to be a *big* fan. If you're just going to shift warm air from your IT suite into the server cupboard then I doubt it will work. Stirring up the air in a warm room cools people because it helps to evaporate sweat. On the whole, computers don't sweat so just blowing air over them doesn't help :-)

Look in System - you'll see records shown by date/time - look for those with a source of "Eventlog" and an Event of "6006" - this shows you when the machine last shut down.

I'd forgotten about the stuff @sirbendy links to but I think that's exactly what you need! You need to install the Dell OpenManage Client Instrumentation stuff - this then adds the necessary, scriptable objects - search the website for R214518 and you should find it.

Run eventvwr (you can do this remotely - eventvwr \\machinename) and look for the eventlog entries. There should be one at 1830 this evening showing that the system was shutdown; the next entries will be when the machine restarts. Are you sure DNS is working OK for your network? If you do nslookup (without domain) at a prompt what happens? if you do ipconfig /all at a prompt, what does it show as the domain name?

Which Dells? Are they vPro/AMT? If so, you can use the AMT tools to make the BIOS changes. I think you can also use Microsoft SCCM but that's quite a big sledgehammer to crack quite a small nut :-) The other thing that might be worth a try is the HP tool; I don't know how "transportable" SMBios settings utilities are so it might be tied to HP BIOS but it's called biosconfigutility and it's really easy to use.

@powdarrmonkey has pointed out the layout but other than that it should be OK. How are you creating the scheduled task - if you use the "at" command then it does try to run under local system and that has no access to the networked machines. If you go to control panel and add a scheduled task then it will prompt you for a username and password. I've always used a special account which has domain admin privileges for this purpose but as long as the account you use would be able to shut down a machine then there's no problem. Try adding a couple of extra lines to the file: echo Starting > %windir%\temp\shutdown.log echo about to do machine1 >> %windir%\temp\shutdown.log shutdown -s -m \\computername1 echo about to do machine2 >> %windir%\temp\shutdown.log shutdown -s -m \\computername2 then schedule the task for 5 minutes time. Take a look in c:\windows\temp for a file called shutdown.log - it should include some info about the process starting etc; that will at least confirm that it's starting etc finally, if you just type shutdown -s -m \\computername1 then does that work? if that doesn't work then it certainly won't work when you schedule it :-)