PiqueABoo

It's not how big it is, but how you write it that counts Seriously.. I've done the pro-thing more than anything else and since that is a world full of deadlines I inevitably think about project size in man-hours. Number of lines discriminates against finesse, tells us nothing about difficulty etc.

Uh huh .. I did read that beforehand, I'm trying improve the statistical significance of your paint-drying moment.

*bump* Has anyone else installed this (on a real system) yet? Was it fundamentally boring or were there issues?

They apparently got the numbers from the DCSF's "School Workforce in England, June 2009, Tables 1 and 14". Did anyone say that? Will they? Have they? Where? They appear to have their sights locked on manglement in that document.

I'm not employed by a secondary school and was, well.. ignorantly wondering about that having seen the same basic point in a comment made @ The Times article. Went out fishing and found "How to save £50 billion" from the Taxpayers Alliance (TPA) and Institute of Directors (I know nothing at all about either of them, but one assumes the figures they quote are real): ... the growth in managerial positions in our key services has far outstripped the benefits such employees bring. Between 1998 and 2008 the number of doctors in the NHS increased by 45.5 per cent, but managerial positions increased by 75.8 per cent. Administrative staff places in the English schools system increased by 82 per cent between 1997 and 2009, while regular teacher numbers have increased by just 10 per cent, a pattern echoed across the public sector. Over the same period the productivity of public services has declined by 3.4 per cent. Such backroom positions, far from freeing doctors and teachers from bureaucracy, have increased the burden of it. They make the usual criticisms of BSF and go on to say: "In these circumstances, personnel and equipment must come first. From now on capital investment in schools should be the responsibility of schools themselves. Once sustainable public finances are restored, investment in schools infrastructure can resume again." Interesting times..

That part isn't supposed to, if you read the article at the other end of the OPs link : "Officials believe about 3,000 senior school jobs could go, mainly through “natural wastage”, saving the department about £250m a year".

A while back I posted about a (right-wing think tank) paper on BSF. One of the reasons was because i reckon the Labour gov will be history by next summer. What the Tories think *is* what is going to matter.. and only two weeks ago: Local authorities have spent £170 million on consultants in a government scheme to refurbish and rebuild schools in England, the Conservatives say. They say the £50 billion Building Schools for the Future programme has delivered "hardly any improvements". The Schools Secretary Ed Balls defended the scheme and accused the Conservatives of planning to make cuts. My emphasis. The Tories will probably do some things I don't like, but if they set about nuking some of the real bureacrats, quangos and bottomless-pit big IT projects I won't complain.

..just to add to the requirements sorry, I definitely want to be able to annotate the video i.e. scribble all over it with arrows/pointers and comment boxes.

*bump* I want one. This thread is a bit old now, so does anyone have any updated, fresh opinions on (free) applications you can use to make video tutorials demonstrating how to do/use something?

They've had July 2015 published as the end of the extended support phase for ages.

IME it's much more common to crack misuse of a crypto algorithm than the algorithm per se i.e. you're better off worrying about how an application uses it, whether they use it in the right mode, how keys are derived, stored and so on. But Truecrypt, being Truecrypt should be rather solid in that respect.

I've lived in a couple of places around there. Might, or at least it ought to, have something to do with the convenient for running around the Dales, nipping over to the Lakes etc. location?

DOS doesn't like UNC paths very much in a variety of circumstances. It is good practice to put this right at the start of any batch file that references files in the same or sub-folders: pushd %~sdp0 If you want to get back to wherever you were, make this the last command: popd The pushd line changes the working-directory to the folder where the batch file lives, and if that happens to be a UNC path then it (necessarily) maps a temporary drive letter there first.

Yup, I use RDC or RA subject to whether I need to see the user demonstrate a problem. If you're on Vista onwards the RA client can be pointed at an IP address e.g. msra /offerra 10.9.8.7, which is easier than it used to be. [i've added that command to the context menu for computers in ADUC] But why would you run two remote apps on a workstation when the MS one does both those jobs?

::ho hum:: Re. my mysteriously slow BGInfo times it was obvious really. Screamingly, screamingly obvious. As usual, if there's no sane reason for [some behaviour] then it's: A/V interfering!

What's been delightfully described as the "incontinent expansion of the state's reach" i.e. all the Orwellian nanny state stuff, but that generally annoys lots of people too.

Just has a little introductory play with a fresh install (in a 2K8 VM), but obviously not going as far as deploying anything coz that would require a bigger play with those paint-drying moments: - I've been replicating an LTI task sequence for XP from scratch and I *think*: - - The Format and Paritition Disk task now handles the diskpart BIOS - - compatibility fix automatically i.e. it checks the OS version and if it's XP (5) it - - does the fix. - - The Inject mass storage drivers for XP and 2003 task has been - - assimilated into the Inject Drivers task. - The Selection Profile stuff in the UI is much better i.e. you can organise things like applications and drivers into "sub-folders", copying, cutting and pasting between them, although these are not real sub-folders in the file-system. This appears to replace the previous driver group functionaility. - Sadly I can't make "Add/Remove Columns" work in the much snappier driver view. Basically I want to see "OS version" to help me organise a ton of drivers I just imported. - There's a Hash column for the drivers that presumably exists for a reason, although I've yet to figure out exactly what that's a hash of, and thus how useful it might be in keeping drivers clean and tidy.

That's actually the right question for the right reasons, but it inevitably requires real code to do it that way, although not very much. Your event handler would essentially be waiting for Windows to tell you about the network status changing i.e. half the point of the OS is as an abstraction layer to save you having to care about how this or that vendor's hardware does things.

Just watched it. Basically Derren spins a good, audacious, yarn - and once again I found myself sitting there waiting for each subsequent "chapter" in the story and mostly being delighted by the cheek of it. We know it's a crock (don't we?) and we know where we're going to end up, it's all about the journey. Take it seriously and you're doomed, to enjoy it I think you've got to have a cynical sense of humour.

Something of a minority interest and I certainly won't be rushing in to an upgrade, but MDT 2010 has been released.

The public are apparently against you: There was some poll published only a couple of days ago and only 1/4 were for the deployment, more than 1/2 were against (the rest were undecided, confused etc.).

You'll have to hunt for this because I can't remember or find where I acquired the idea, but my murky old personal notes for offline files have a comment claiming you can clear the cache whilst CSC is enabled simply by zapping the %windir%\CSC folder in a shutdown script. Thus: 1) Disable CSC (and all the relevant policy settings) 2) Zap the %windir%\CSC folder Should be fine. I'd test it on one box first though i.e. ensure CSC happily remakes the folder and works if you enable it again. PS: Got it - look for the text "Reset the Cache" in an article called "Introduction to Offline Files" on Jonathan Hardwick's blog

You can if you (know how and) make it yourself i.e. have complete control of whatever-it-is. I made something very ambitious/serious earlier this year, it obviously does exactly what I want and although this never ceases to amaze me, it just carries on working. Otherwise probably not, because you're dependent on all that 3rd party stuff which should be perfect by now, except they keep rewriting it and making you buy the "new improved" buggy version.

You can't afford the hardware. That aside, it pretty much has to be virtual these days and you ought to want failover. There's ESX but I might be tempted to use Server R2 HV now. Thereafter, the basic problem is compatibility with the applications you need to run. The OS for (virtual) servers: I'd use 2K8 x64 right now and 2K8 R2 whenever the 3rd party software you need has fixed it's compatibility problems. The OS for (virtual) terminal servers: Depends on the apps you want to run - do they work on that version of the server OS? The OS for (fat) workstations: I'm still happy with XP because everything works on it, no one in their right mind is going to do anything new with Vista, but the world hasn't had enough experience of Windows 7 yet. Again do all the apps you want that have to be "fat" work on Win7? The manglement: Well there's always that SCCM, SCOM but they, especially the second one, appear to need dedicated staff (who do nothing else) to figure out and use. This time next year I expect to be saying 2K8 R2 + Win7 and they get you some desirable things, but yes I agree that OS is only part of the picture and it absolutely does depend on careful/clueful (genuine requirement driven) design and nurturing.

Which ensures CSC on the laptop has seen/cached every bit of the files. It could be they're "sparsely-cached" i.e. CSC has some of the file, but not all of it. I'd copy a blank to a penstick, take it somewhere else and compare it against a copy from a server (binary compare, difference in SysInternals strings.exe output etc.) If the blank is a fraction of it's server copy then the CSC "fill" isn't working for some reason. PS: Except I thought CSC wasn't supposed to show you sparsely-cached files when you're offline - still, it's probably worth checking/eliminating.