srochford

I'd guess it depends on what you mean by "civil servants" and "vast majority" 70% of the awards this time went to "local heroes undertaking outstanding work in their own communities"; 39% of the total are for people working in voluntary and local services. Obviously, some of those will be civil servants but I don't see it as the vast majority. If you feel that the wrong people are getting honoured or you think your local binmen etc should get an award then do something about it. The details of how to make a nomination are on the web site and there's even a YouTube channel with more info.

I haven't seen the programmes so I'm not sure what point they were trying to make with the 0-31 in 5 bits but I'm guessing it's to do with the fact that normally you'd store numbers in at least 8 bits. If you can be sure that you only need the values 0-31 then you can save space by packing stuff more tightly (but it's not a good example!) Suppose you have a bitmap image. the "standard" way of storing it is to look at each pixel, work out how much red, green and blue and allocate 1 byte for that (so a pure red pixel might be stored as 3 bytes - 255,0,0; yellow would be 255,255,0; magenta would be 255,0,255 and so on). This means that if you have a 1024 x 768 image you need 1024 x 768 x 3 bytes to store it - a total of 2304 kilobytes which is a big file! A simple example of compression is something called run length encoding. Instead of looking at each pixel, you look for patterns. Suppose the picture has a lot of sky in it. It might be that you have 200 pixels in a row which are all (0,100,200) (in RGB values). What you can now do is store this as 4 numbers - a value 200 followed by 0,100,200 - this reduces the 600 bytes to just 4. What you're now doing is storing blocks of 4 bytes; the first is a count, the next 3 are the RGB values. If there are lots of blocks of identical colour then this works well. If the colours are more varied then it falls over - you can end up having to use 4 bytes instead of 3 if you have 2 different colours alternating, for example. text compression is often done using dictionary type tables. If you are just using a simple alphabet (ie no accented letters) then there are spare numbers in the ASCII set from 128 to 255. This allows you to say that instead of storing (say) "THE" as 84,72, 69 you store it as 128; "AND" can be stored as 129 instead of 65, 78, 68 and so on. In these examples, you use 1 byte instead of 3 for the words; if you can replace longer words then you get even better compression but you do also have to store the dictionary which says "128=THE; 129=AND; 130= anti-disestablishmentarianism" etc so again, if you don't have many words which are repeated then you don't gain. I think that the same sort of technique is used by zip compression but instead of looking for words, you look for patterns of bytes and replace them with single codes. Each of these techniques is lossless - you can get back exactly what you started with. mp3 and jpg compression are lossy - you don't get back what you started with but what you get is probably good enough. The maths behind these is a bit difficult (look up discrete cosine transform and be boggled!)

In a word, no! Grumbledook and others explain it better but basically there is no real point in legal terms - all it does is serve to annoy people or make them laugh at you (eg the one in this thread is typical "this message does not represent the views of this school" looks pretty stupid when sent in an official mail from the head, business manager etc establishing a contract)

It's not quite as simple as that. There's a good document here which admittedly shows things from the manufacturer's point of view but it matches what I've seen elsewhere from a consumer point of view. If the accessories (in this case) were faulty in the way they were manufactured and that fault existed when they were sold then you have rights. If they were made to the standard specified by the manufacturer and that standard is just not very good so the items wear out quickly then you basically have no real rights. The classic examples are things like clothes and shoes. If you pay (say) £50 for a shirt then you can reasonably expect that the stitching and general manufacture will be better than if you pay £5. The cheaper shirt may well wear out more quickly (stitching come undone, cloth wear through or tear) but you should expect that - it cost very much less - and you have no redress in law because it has suffered the expected wear and tear.

Don't think that is what you want - there's an explanation of what it does on technet The idea of this is that if you are on machine1 then you might make a shortcut to (say) c:\program files\some program\application.exe on your desktop. You then move to machine 2 which doesn't have that app installed. Your shortcut now won't work because it points to C:\ . The tracking process adds an extra bit to the link which says "really, the shortcut is to \\machine1\c$\program files etc You can possibly see that this is not useful if you're not an admin on the machine ...

That looks familiar :-) I think the whole of our stuff on cabling standards is public. Some of it is very specific to Imperial but there is good info in there on good ways of working.

It's an interesting article but it doesn't have to be bad news - it very much depends on who provides the IT for the schools and how it's done. There are plenty of big companies that don't have IT in every small office - they centralise it and it works well. There's no technical reason why a lot of the stuff currently handled in a school can't be handled centrally and done at least as well. The difficulty is making sure that it happens. The writer talks about getting requirements right from the start in the section about costs not covered by BSF but it's true for the whole process. As a trivial example, let's say the backup process is managed centrally. How will that happen? (Disc, tape, whatever) How long will be backups be maintained? How quickly can data be restored? Will support be given for single file restores? All of these things can be built into a contract but I'd guess if it's not thought about up-front then it can be difficult (ie expensive!) to change it later.

I mostly use Context It's free, it works reasonably well but development has pretty much stopped (and there's some pretty acrimonious discussions in the forums about it!)

If you want to do it with a startup script then this works: set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") sPassword="" for i=1 to 20 sPassword=sPassword & chr(rnd()*96+32) next sCmd="net user administrator " & sPassword oShell.run sCmd - it will set a 20 character, random password (mix of chars from ASCII 32 to ASCII 126) If you actually need to log on as local admin and you still have domain access then from another machine you can reset the password (eg with psexec:) psexec \\computername net user administrator NewSecretPassword or you can just use a password reset disc if the machine has lost domain access You could extend the script above so that it writes the password it chose to a database somewhere but how often do you actually need local admin access?

at the command prompt: ren *.xml *.doc - will keep the name bit intact

Whenever I get stuck with things like this, I build the line like @ChrisH and then check it by sticking in a wscript.echo - that way you can see if you've got the quotes right. Also worth using a text editor which understands the syntax - it will then highlight literals etc and you can see better if the quotes are correct as you type.

The codes are different but it's worth a try - I think it would be legal (it's not the CD which entitles you to the software but the sticker so that's OK) Microsoft seem to often use 1 disc image for different purposes and what gets installed is determined by the code (eg I think there's only 1 disc now for Vista even though there are shedloads of different versions effectively on the disc) I'd say make sure you backup the data and then give it a go but before you do, there isn't by any chance a hidden recovery partition on the disc? If so, you might be able to boot from that and reinstall.

Think we should probably have started panicking quite a while ago. In a Guardian interview during the summer, Alistair Darling said [The economic times we are facing] "are arguably the worst they've been in 60 years," he says bluntly. "And I think it's going to be more profound and long-lasting than people thought." At the time he was criticised for being too gloomy; looks like he was just being honest. It's a rare quality in a politician but it looks as if some of them can do it :-)

Err, no, not by a long way. Turn out at UK general elections has averaged 74% in the past 60 years (numbers from the electoral commission) Although it is lower this decade, it was still 61.4% in 2005

And the pound sterling is only worth 75% of what it was last year; we pay for oil in dollars. None of this changes the fact that fuel has not gone up by more than inflation; it's actually come down!!! Perhaps it could be cheaper but that's not what you said!

have you bought petrol recently? It's now cheaper than it was 12 months ago; given that inflation has been at least 5% in the past year that means that petrol is dramatically cheaper - ie it has not gone up above inflation!

Well, maybe, but linux isn't free :-) ("No software is free and spreading that misconceptions is harmful")

The funniest thing is that the internal network starts to be a limit when you are connected to Janet. The building I work in is still served with 100Mbit switches so although Imperial is a key point on SJ5 with multi-gigabit links to the rest of the internet, the fastest I can get stuff is about 10 Megabytes per second :-(

You do know that there is a serious vulnerability in this version of Reader ?? Agreed with your opinion - I hate them :-)

Although it will "clutter" up the registry there's no harm in having this in every user's registry - it doesn't "do" anything. If you really don't want it on every machine then you could adapt @tomscaper's code so that it checks to see if Audacity is installed. set oShell = Wscript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell") set oFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") if ofso.fileexists("c:\Program Files\Audacity\audacity.exe") then oShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Audacity\Audacity\MP3\MP3LibPath" , "C:\Program Files\Audacity\Plug-Ins\libmp3lame-3.97\lame_enc.dll" , "REG_SZ" oShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Audacity\Audacity\Version" , "1.2.6" , "REG_SZ" oShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Audacity\Audacity\PrefsVersion" , "1.1.1r1" , "REG_SZ" end if Finally (!!) why not just push it out everywhere - it's free and installs pretty quickly :-)

Can I ask why you're trying to do this???

Strongish economy, possibly but just take a look at the whole of the 80s and a good chunk of the 90s - not such a strong economy then - maybe the Conservatives don't know what to do after all. Of course, we can go back further, and look at the late 70s - massive inflation, government drifting, complete mess; looks like Labour have no clue either. Peering further back into the mists of time, we have the 3 day week, no electricity, candles running out in shops because people had to buy them to provide lighting. Maybe the Conservatives weren't that good then. We can play this game for a long time - everyone can come up with reasons why the "other" side is bad or good but it doesn't really help. I've no idea whether this government's plans are going to fix the problems but I really hope that they have got the right idea and we're not going to go back to the poor economic circumstances we've had too many times before. A few of the things which could help compared to the last recession is that interest rates are very low so although people have borrowed stupid amounts of money it is still affordable to pay it back (for those who weren't around or have just forgotten, in the early 90s we were paying over 15% interest on mortgages). Unemployment is rising but it's nowhere near the levels of the last decade. Prices have risen but seem to be stabilising (petrol is cheaper now than it has been for well over a year; if the dollar/sterling exchange rate were improves then it will be even cheaper) I want a government which tries to make sure that most people do OK. Not really sure which party that might be in the future.

What format should the files have been submitted in? I'm guessing they're submitting more than just a write up of what they did otherwise Word would seem to be OK.

@ful56_uk should have pointed you in the right direction; if not then give me a shout and I'll dig out some more sample code. You can't do it with the "net group" command because it uses the API from Windows NT days (probably LAN Manager days!) which didn't support nested groups. You have to use the ADSI interface and then it will work well. If you can't get that to work and you need it in a hurry then take the list of usernames and make a long list of: net group /add /domain (create them in Excel!) followed by a matching list of: net group /delete /domain (remember that even if you don't have the username list that net group will give you that list)

Not sure if it's just a typing error in your post but that needs to be double slash B (ie wscript //b remprint.vbs) Have you got any wscript.echo or msgbox in the code? If so, remove them and then there's nothing to pop up. What does the message say? Can you post the code?