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To add further to the description of BT - a company split into three parts - BT Retail (the phone provider / ISP), BT Wholesale (who run the infrastructure and exchanges), and BT Openreach (who run the last mile infrastructure). It's supposed to mean they can't abuse their monopoly. As far as the customer is concerned, it means that reporting a fault might have to go through 3 companies and most of the time spent is the 3 companies passing the buck. They also like to charge each other and pass the cost on to the customer.

Phone lines cut out randomly

I was present as he reported the findings to his Boss and I heard his Boss say "Can you make it look like their fault so we can still bill them?" He replied "No cos he is stood here listening and watched me fix it". This was followed up with an extremely apologetic conversation between me and his Boss where he claimed he was just Kidding!!! Yeah right...That sums BT up exactly

BT Retail is basically staffed by a bunch of MBAs, salemen and shit tech support (although their BTnet tech support is actually pretty good). BT Local business are a bunch of complete wankers and will [literally] cancel your ISDN30 and recreate it so they get more commission - this resulted in 36 hours of downtime.

BT Openreach - you're not allowed to speak to - but when an engineer does come out, they are generally professional and knowledgable. However, in the above case, they will fulfill BT Retails requests to cover their arses. In the above ISDN30 case, they pretended that the failure was due to a faulty NTE-2D (Fibre termination equipment) even though we had it confirmed that our contract had been "cancelled" the day before.

We have a 100Mb/s leased line with BT, which I have to admit has been pretty bulletproof - we've had about 30s of downtime in 4 years (but is also insanely expensive). Anyhow, when we renewed out contract I told them we wanted an IPv6 subnet, this was subject to a charge of £400 as they said they needed to upgrade our bearer. This was never done, so we complained, and they said they would have to charge us £3,000 - the normal installation fee. We pointed them to the contract we signed. Now, instead of sending out a bloke to update the router, or even send out a new router, they have:
* Spliced together 26km of fibre to the exchange.
* Installed a 3rd fibre into our office
* Provided a new NTU
* Provided a new Cisco 3xxx router
* Sent 3 engineers out to do all this

I spoke to one of the Openreach guys - he shrugged and said "that's the way they like to do it". I said "it's ok, we're not having to pay the standard installation fee, just sounds like a waste of time and money though". He also explained what the bearer was (confirming my assumption) and looked pretty confused when I told him BT Local Business insisted that it had to be upgraded to "carry" IPv6 packets.

Did some quick research on it and it does look like it would work. But I did find this information:

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=655463&page=6

But here's the problem.... usually, when you use the printer object in VB to print with, it puts MORE PCL code round what you send (or PostScript, depending on the driver you use) and that messes the whole thing up.

So one of my colleagues found a reference at MicroSoft on how to do what they call Raw Printng, which is direct to the printer not thru' the driver. We experimented with it and it does work. Here's the url: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q154/0/78.asp

This says otherwise.

Surely a better design is to produce a series of very small, highly specialized, very fast cores on a single piece of silicon, and then have a layer on top of that which makes it appear to be an x86, ARM or whatever.

Yes, they call that a modern x86 CPU.
They don't create the x86 instruction set in hardware anymore. They just have a translation layer in hardware that takes the x86 code and runs it on another type of hardware (usually a RISC core).

The internal execution core of this type of CPU [a modern x86] is actually a "machine within the machine", that functions internally as a RISC processor but externally like a CISC processor. The way this works is explained in more detail in other sections in this area, but in a nutshell, it does this by translating (on the fly, in hardware) the CISC instructions into one or more RISC instructions. It then processes these using multiple RISC execution units inside the processor core.

http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=788

Incidently CISC had a big advantage over RISC. Each instruction typically did more and so for a given program a CISC computer will typically use less code. Saving cache, memory and bandwidth. So modern x86 CPUs have the advantage of the dense code of the x86 instruction set and with their instruction decoders the advantage of an efficient RISC core.

# Adobe: GIMP(shop) and Inkscape; evince and gnash

What are the colour depths of Photoshop and GIMP? PS CS3 has 32 bits per colour change whereas GIMP only has 8. Can GIMP work with CMYK? Only with a plugin. Does PS? Natively. So, if you want print then you need PS as GIMP won't do. However Film GIMP AKA CinePaint can do it. I plan on working in photography and I'll give CinePaint a try but if it doesn't work I may have to get PS. As for Inkscape, it is for vector graphics not photo editing. I'll also try Inkscape, as well as Blender.

The tip here usually works. http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1385288 &page=1
The programs that you're having issues with seem to have been installed using the Windows Installer. In that case, you'll just have a GID for the program under the Uninstall key instead of the program name. The tip still applies. The Cleanup Utility doesn't remove the actual installation--just the file associated with the installer and the registry keys that go with it, which would get you to the point where you could reinstall the program.

One other thing you could try is to check under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uni nstall\{GUID HERE} for the application that you're looking to uninstall. There should be a value named "UninstallString". For example, the information for Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 is at HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uni nstall\{BE5AD430-9E0C-4243-AB3F-593835869855}
UninstallString is "MsiExec.exe /X{BE5AD430-9E0C-4243-AB3F-593835869855}". Sometimes, you'll see an install string with /I instead of /X. If you use that, you should get the install wizard and have the option to uninstall. If you don't get that, change the I to an X and it should just proceed with the uninstall.

(Ignore the space in Uninstall. /. appears to be putting that in.)

I worked at a bank once with "no" internal connection to the internet for security reasons. I also work at the State for a while where we had limited access. No Google, but I could still get to places like http://www.tek-tips.com/ and other tech knowledge sites.

-Rick

Meetings CAN be streamlined. With lunch brought in, enough discussion will happen to cut back on some.

I've been in good meetings, and I've been in bad. One of the worst I've been in recently was for a project that had no project manager. At one point, I had to tell the Accounting Manager to put a magazine away and pay attention. One of the meetings in that series we decided to order lunch to cut some time. It took almost an hour to get everyone to agree on something. Then just when we were about to order, someone decided they were just going to drive to the salad bar anyways and pick up our order. So another hour later the food finally shows up. Another 30 minutes - hour later we're finally through lunch but completely distracted. Out of 8 hours spent in a board room, we accomplished maybe 2 hours of requirements documentation.

The thing that is most sorely needed where I work is a professional project manager. Someone with experience, know-how, and balls to demand these middle managers get off their asses.

That can be reading /., daydreaming, wandering about looking busy/important, or doing some other productive thing (except that the latter is too often forbidden). In final analysis, it's not the productive time that will be burned by side projects, it's unproductive time.

I completely agree. I read /. and post on http://www.tek-tips.com./ Looking at other peoples' coding questions helps keep my mind fresh when I stuck documenting, or running reports, or testing extended processes.

-Rick

For my Java needs, I go to the Java Technology Forums http://forum.java.sun.com/index.jspa For any MS or SQL needs, I go to Tek-Tips http://www.tek-tips.com/ Both are free, and if you ask questions intelligibly, you'll get answers very quickly.

Okay, I preach on this at http://www.tek-tips.com/ way too much.

VB.Net (any version) IS NOT the next version of VB.

VB.Net is a fully object oriented language, it is fundamentally different then VB6. Your best option is to document the heck out of the current app's functionality and behavior, and then look into developing a .Net app from scratch to match those behaviors.

The built in porting tool will not work. It's kind of like an san script to english translator. It can replace old words with new words, and guess at what the code means, but since the two are fundamentally different, it can not effectively convert everything appropriatly. If your entire VB6 app was writen perfectly in an object oriented manor (as best as was possible in VB6), then the converter might work acceptably. But realisticly, running the converter is going to leave you with a uncompilable piece of crap.

-Rick

How can I use this program with other vendors, like NewEgg, or someone smaller like CoolDrives?

No idea. I suppose you can ask NewEgg if they carry the OEM editions. Personally, I checked out NewEgg when I was building my new system and found their selection to be lacking. I ended up going with MWave and found all the components I wanted at low prices. (Especially the A8N-E NForce 4 board I wanted.)

Can I use this discount direct from Microsoft with proof of hardware purchase?

No idea. Ask Microsoft.

What hardware "counts"?

No idea. As long as the retailer sells you a copy, I don't think it matters. ;-)

If I buy a motherboard from one place, a case from another, memory from another, and drives from another, could I buy discounted Windows at any of them?

I think so. Check with MWave support to see if they'll sell you a copy with only one component purchased. My guess is yes, they will.

There's some info here where it's suggested that even purchasing a power cord is sufficient to obtain an OEM copy.

Just thought of something else you can check out... I've been a member on this forum since 2002 and I've learned a lot from them....

http://www.tek-tips.com/ Free registration, lots and lots of forums.

You're already have access to servers and a network. Use it. Practice working on the skills that are listed in the test objectives. If you can't or don't want to do this on you companies network, set up a lab at home. (at least 2 servers, recommend VMWare or Virtual PC to get a more systems going, if you want)

The MS Press books are ok but they don't spoon-feed you. Sybex books are also good. You'll get the most out of them is you spend time applying what you learned in the lab.

Avoid Braindumps. You goals should be to learn not just pass the test.

I recommend visiting the forum at Tek-Tips for more advice on certifications.

Good Luck

Fortunately for you, most people don't know about Firefox or AdBlock, and M$ most certainly won't support and implementation of it.

I consider myself a good netizen. When I'm visiting a site and see ads of interest, I'll click on ads that are relevant to my interests. However, I'm not going to scratch your back if you dig your nails into mine. I'll click on your ads, but don't make annoying, flashing, popup-embedded-in-flash, ads that take up 75% of the content window, and fly-in ads.

In the end, I guess we all lose for your selfishness.

You're almost there. Once your toy database (tm) actually implements those data-integrity things like NOT NULL and DATE correctly, then we can start discussing how it can be used in a real data-critical production environment.

I didn't think it was possible to view the source of an ASP. So I did a search and came up with this.

I'm not sure why you think of NTFS file streams. That's a complete different issue. How would your trick work if the ASP pages are on a FAT file system? NTFS streams are interesting: I once used them in a pratical joke to consume all of somebody's disk space. They couldn't see in Explorer where it went! Incidentally, it's too bad that Macs can't make use of them for their resource forks when browsing the networks. They seem to leave .ds_store files all over the place.

Although this article is very important, what's more important is a new exploit that seems to be taking out WindowsXP machines these days. It involves DCOM server {00020906-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} and you can read what little is known about this problem at http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=893026.

I started getting the strange DCOM entries on my Windows 2003 machine right after removing my router from the picture. Without Microsoft's firewall (or other software firewall of your choice) enabled, Windows 2003 machines eventually reboot due to a bugcheck. Windows XP machines probably slow right down to a crawl before needing a good reset.

What's your favorite help sites?

Computer Hope's Unix
Tech-recipes's Unix
Tek-tips forums
Sun's BigAdmin

Help me add to my favorites...

Davak

there is only a matter of time or a matter of a new platform release before someone else devises another medium to push their product in an "In your face method".

This pretty much means that the popup window will be officially dead in a year's time.

Actually, it simply means that window.open() popups will be dead in a year's time. It's an arms race, just like spam vs. antispam. Popups will simply move from JavaScript to CSS. The popup window appears as a CSS layer which is above the layer showing the main page.

To see an example of this, go to http://www.tek-tips.com. The first thing you'll see is a popup sailing across your screen and bouncing a couple of times off the bottom before giving you the opportunity to close it.

This is the near future of annoying adversiting, folks.

Even better is the fact that two PCs with identical hardware and configurations MIGHT react differently to the original patch so you can't use a safety PC and pre-test a roll-out. Grrr.

They make a patch
to fix a hole
which breaks something else
which requires you belong to a special club
that paid more than I did
and somehow knew they'd get better treatment (that wasn't clear in my "discount")
to get the NEXT fix
AFTER they said they'd patch even stolen copies of their product.

Where is my motivation to play by the rules, which I did and am screwed?

Tek-Tips is pretty useful. There is some decent advise on there, although if you have a really obscure question, don't expect an answer. It's free. There servers are kinda slow, though, and wouldn't survive a good Slashdotting.

Not really a good "chat" forum, though, like in the way that Slashdot is.

The main problem I found was installing a linksys router I had behind the DW6000.

The DW modem acts as a outer/firewall too. It will assign IPs and the only thing you need is a switch to connect multiple computers to it.

The problem is you can't really configure the modem/router. So you can't disable the router feature for example. If you want that kind of control, you'll need the pro version which is quite pricy (although it gives you a static IP).

Here's a forum I found that addresses the DW6000 and linksys router problems.

So... DoubleClick says it's coming up with a way to evade the pop-up blocker.

I'd imagine it looks something like what sites like www.tek-tips.com are doing. Instead of a top-level window, they do some fancy CSS that slides a box in front of the viewable content on the screen. Tek-Tips is using it as part of their content, because they want to bring something to your attention, but I could easily see this method being abused by annoying ad campaigns e.g. DoubleClick.

That'll be a lot harder to block, but it'll be blocked eventually. *sigh* just like spam vs. spam blocking, it's going to be another arms race.

Sorry, that link should be this. I don't know what happened there.

a link that works: www.tek-tips.com

OK, I blew the link.Tek-tips. I'll preview this time, I promise...

For Gods sake, why would someone choose BSD over linux????

If you've got a installation of more than a couple of these HDs you'll *know* about the failure rate. If not, then the 10Gb unit is part MPG3102AT dated early 2001 - if you have one of these replace it NOW. I guess that MPG3204AT, MPG3307AT and MPG3409AT are faulty too.

There's an interesting thread here. But trust me, if you have a home PC with one of these units in, replace it right now.

Well, it isn't quite a bug, but it comes pretty damn close. ASP (VBScript) doesn't handle SQL queries longer than 255 characters. link This is the only place I could find it referenced on the web. Lots of hair-pulling on this one. Still haven't fixed it, and any workarounds I can think of are extremely ugly, hairy and otherwise full of cruftiness.