PiqueABoo

::shrug:: Sensible people might do some of that research I suggested on the decline of multiculturalism as an intellectually fashionable concept, as opposed to making stupid assumptions about my concept of "good ideas" and whose politics they might align with. Hint: I'm not tory, but they're much closer to the pragmatic Warsi's than Griffin's. -- Long time no watch, but I thought QT was generally dumb and it certainly wasn't all Griffin's fault. Lot's of pedantic point scoring with peripheral tat, very little on anything of substance. Bit like here really...

Gosh. That a significant portion of this thread has nothing better to debate than whether word A is officially racist (According to who? Big Brother?) or not is interesting. Too much ignorance and um.. black & white thinking for my liking, once again it is all **very, very complicated**. Something I think everyone ought to go research and think about is that "multiculturalism", the un-brilliant concept that has pretty much governed the country's approach to all this is increasingly being pronounced dead. It beats me when it was actually alive, but the point to take from this is that times appear to be changing. I won't hold my breath but we *might* actually end up with a few good ideas, and if BNP getting elected and on TV helps trigger that then hurrah... anything is better than brushing it all under a carpet and sprinkling magic PC dust on top.

I've previously automated (and still do coz it ain't broke) mass GPO editing with a bit of JScript wrapped around a free utility called GPScript.exe which comes as part of a collection: batch tools.zip[1]. It takes a text file as input and applies the changes therein, to a registry.pol file. YMMV but I've given that util a bit of exercise and it has always worked for me. My script is about a) finding the right GPO to point GPScript at (I'm dealing with servers where certain GPO names are consistent), b) Updates the GPO version in the right places afterwards. You can download Microsoft spreadsheets that are lists of standard Windows ADM[X] policy settings, with their descriptions, exact registry keys etc. Very quick and easy to search for things, but I once got bitten by a couple of mistakes in one so verify before production use. [1] There are some other useful utils in there. PS: The only way I've made this thread work is to RDP (or something) to domain X server as an Admin , then within that session Remote Assist to domain X workstation. Unsolicited RA from Admins needs to be configured in a GPO for the workstations first though.

I believe we're talking about Remote Assistance? If so you'll have problems authenticating unless your workstation is in the same domain as the target. This may or may not be fixable somehow (haven't looked hard yet).

1) They let the riff-raff in.

Ditto. I'm not especially concerned about malware jumping from VM to a host, but having two OSs to support is a potential problem.. I really don't want to have to use XP mode.

Absolutely.. euuuw.

Free, at a glance looks like it's got some useful content: Deploying Windows® 7 Essential Guidance from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and TechNet Magazine [if nothing else it makes MDT sound easy]

Yes that was the exact problem I hit and had to swiftly reverse out of around a year ago. I included roaming profiles in my whinge not because I hit a problem (I'd already given up because of the FR issue), but simply because Adobe say use with roaming profiles is not supported. To clarify: Use with RPs might work now, but next month's patch may break it at which point Adobe could easily turn round and say "Well we did warn you in the release note...".

Which ones? An earlier FA250 has been fine, but I've gone through a couple of FA500s which couldn't read (allegedly happily written) data back at 450GB and 320GB full respectively. Didn't lose anything besides lots of time because of the amount of data I had to rehome, but I was not a happy bunny over that.

Unless you're running a perfectly reasonably Windows config with roaming profiles and perhaps a touch of Folder Redirection, when it's a complete crock. How can any vendor/developer with a shred of self-respect participate in making an alleged Windows version of a product that doesn't support roaming profiles?!?

Step one ought to be gathering the requirements for this potential vanilla system.

Yes. We don't have enough information on the current system, requirements, your current skills to say anything particularly sensible, however there's a very big difference between throwing a basic Windows system together and making something roughly equivalent to your current CC3. For me, if I were starting from scratch, I'd say that difference would be at least 3 months solid work.

I think that sometimes, but not tonight! If it's a Windows environment I'd have them doing C# which is easier unless you get too hung up on the OO and reading C# for Sharp Kids" which is based around the VS Express edition. Not that I have a clue about teaching the stuff, I just like the Hello World equivalent in there: Console.WriteLine("Yo!");

I don't do it, but once upon a time I would have said cluster. These days I'd be tempted to make a Print Server a VM that can be fired up somewhere else if necessary... automatically if you can run to a shiny HV failover cluster, or the ESX/other equivalent.

I've made event sinks and much worse, but when looking at this a few years ago for someone's E2K3 I picked QS: Cheap & easy for them to modify the disclaimers, and it has just worked ever since.

All of the above, but I'm not a school. I get your point as intended, but at a slight tangent that depends on the "Vanilla". There's a implicit premise in both yours and some other folk's posts in this thread that a Vanilla is harder to manage and maintain than a CC. Whereas I firmly believe that a well designed and implemented Vanilla should be easier. You certainly need the skills up front to make that Vanilla, but the more of those you have, the easier the subsequent management and maintenance work. Plus (focusing on CC4) you don't have the subsequent care, feeding, bugs and patches for a bemusing large set of management software and it's idiosyncrasies. You have your system configuration out there in standard AD etc. where you can manipulate it rather than shut away in a "black-box" DB you dare not touch. You don't have the extra layers and their bugs getting between you and the underlying native functionality. CC saves you from needing the skills to make the system from scratch, it has more novice friendly documentation/training than you're likely to find for Vanilla and it has support, but it is not inevitably easier to look after.

But we do NOT know whether they are worth anything because there is, AFAIK, no case law to guide us, just a bunch of untested if/but/maybes from lawyers. That this is true when people have been appending these things to the bottom of e-mails for over a decade suggests to me that they are mostly useless i.e. if they were useful then surely we'd have that case law by now. [businesses are obliged to put their company reg info on mails though]

Hah! Try telling that to someone whose first real job wasn't working on a [county|city|small country] size public library system. That is the principle though. ;b Never again. I'm doing something else and used authors+books as a convenient way to express a generic problem.

I'm absolutely certain that every "authorname" will be unique and each one will have written lots of "books" because these are just easier to explain substitutes for the real tables.. ..but I guess I'm a bit of a perfectionist because book-less authors was still nagging me this morning... better to do it right first time than have to go back and fix it later.. and it's something I can easily imagine wanting to do in other scenarios.

MS & purely platonic. The trouble with that query.. I think.. is that it returns authors who have written some books that aren't titled "Zen..". That's not the same as authors who have not written one titled "Zen..". This sub-query approach seems to work-maybe-but-being-SQL-naive-I'm-not-sure: SELECT DISTINCT(authorname) FROM Books WHERE authorname NOT IN (SELECT DISTINCT(authorname) FROM Books WHERE title = 'Zen and the Art of Educational IT') Note that only uses the Books table and won't tell me about authors who haven't written a single book, but in that case they're not proper authors so I don't care!

Mmm.. probably something like that only much more complicated That didn't work for me... returns the same number of rows with or without the "AND books.title.." line.

I've been deliberately avoiding SQL most of my life so this feels a teensy bit difficult, but I bet it isn't really and one of you will prove that in no time at all Take two tables: 1) Authors (authorname, vital statistics etc.) 2) Books (title, authorname, ISBN etc.) How do I select a list of authors (authornames) who didn't write a book titled "Zen and the Art of Educational IT"?

We'll see how it's protection works out in practice, but I like MSE for the relatively small memory footprint and (can't believe I'm saying this given it's MS) the lack of bloat i.e. doesn't contain a zillion competitive features I don't want.

Yup. I've done it at computer startup: 1) Copy SMs from share to local box (RC mirror), 2) Delete "unresolved" shortcuts and any subsequently empty folders, 3) Redirect user to relevant local SM at logon. The second bit is where the serious script came in and although I'm an old hand at all the ingredients involved, it was quite tricky.