Not sure I'd trust a business relying on *cheap* PCs running anything (I'll bet that a decent backup solution is the first thing to get canned to cut costs), but anyway:
I wouldn't use WSH - tried it once and found it a real pain (as if someone at Microsoft said "We need a decent scripting language! What have we got? Er - dunno - will this do?".
VBA makes sense within MS Office applications but not really elsewhere.
What would work would be a either a combination of batch files and Cygwin (which is more complicated than it needs to be) or just write regular shell scripts using the stuff from http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/. There's a "sh.exe" there, and a "date" (which you might want to rename to "gnudate.exe" to avoid clashes with the Windows one).
If you want to run stuff from the task scheduler just schedule "...\sh.exe scriptname.sh".
I've done this for relatives to put a big "copy pictures from camera" icon on the desktop that creates a datestamped directory, copies the files in and opens the directory up in something like Exif Viewer.
This sounds similar to what your friend wants to do (I can't think of a way to automatically invoke Photoshop to make everyone in a wedding picture look like they've not just had 10 pints of lager and now want to kill each other, but some things still have to be done the old fashioned way).
Most don't, because the DST start and end dates aren't standard. There are countries outside the US and (gasp!) sometimes they don't do things at the same time as in the US.
As has already been mentioned, in the US whether DST applies or not can depend on which side of a river you are within a particular state.
Well, I've seen it happen with a friend of mine pressing the buttons (on 2000, at the height of the "Welchia" worm outbreak whenever that was) - and that was on dial-up! I think it depends on the ISP - in this case it was NTL in the UK and they seemed to suffer a lot more "dodgy activity" than some other UK ISPs. They sell phone + TV + t'internet packages and so probably get lowest common denominator customers.
That said, assuming you have another mechanism to download stuff there are such things as free software firewalls, and so there's not really any excuse.
Anyway, in keeping with the original story, he eventually got a new PC (which was "too slow running Windows 2000") and I inherited it for services rendered. It now sits next to the hifi as a "networked media player" (something it's certainly not too slow for).
> Dell's come with a Windows install cd and all drivers and other utilities are on other disks.
True enough, but (assuming you've still got the original disks) installing drivers was a pretty linear process - the setup screen on the drivers disk tells you what hardware you've actually got installed, so next-door's cat would be able to give it a go if it wasn't for the fact that it's paws wouldn't fit on the keyboard.
I can relate to the "weird blue screen that takes forever" though - asking lots of (to me) irrelevant questions since I was going to repartition anyway.
Interesting you pick Outlook and Exchange - that's the one place that Novell really have got a comparable solution.
If anything, the Novell mail client has the edge in terms of functionality, but it doesn't "feel" like Outlook - it's that which causes resistance, and the "no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" thing.
On the server side, Novell is probably easier to administer, certainly for large sites - and I'm not talking as a native Novell admin here.
Well, how to get winmodem hardware working might be a start......and just because you've never had to call your ISP for support doesn't mean that no-one else ever has either. OK, there's Usenet, and yes, there's solid gold support there for anything Linux if (a) you know it exists and (b) you can get online in the first place.
Thankfully winmodems are becoming less of an issue because broadband is getting more widespread. Network card support on Linux has "just worked" for me since around 1994 and the Intel wireless built into my run-of-the-mill Dell did too (along with all the rest of the hardware). Not sure about USB ADSL adaptors, though...
Also, don't foget that some ISPs don't have a problem with Linux support - I've used two in the UK and both have provided "how to connect" info for Linux in their support pages.
At the outset, try and define what it is you're trying to do, on some sort of priority list, and start at the top and work down. Try not to get diverted onto someone's recent "big idea" - keep an eye on the bigger picture.
Try and avoid overcomplicated solutions to problems. If people are pulling you in different directions, try and get them to talk it through together first.
If there's a modular way of doing something and a non-modular way, pick the modular way so that you can change one element of a solution in the future without throwing everything out.
Ask yourself who's going to be doing the ongoing maintenance. If it's you, also ask what sort of support you want to give (hours of coverage, that sort of thing). It's worth setting some sort of expectations up front (including "if you screw your PC up by doing exactly what I told you not to, don't expect to be at the front of the priority list).
Get the basics right - backups (including off-site), security of access to data both from outside your network and if appropriate from inside, and security patches on servers and desktops.
Reading books is useful, but there's a wealth of information available for free in public (especially on Usenet), and "learning by doing" is often the best way.
Have some sort of test systems that allow you to try stuff out first before doing it for real.
Think about the sort of "disasters" that might happen and try and plan for those that might. Planning doesn't have to be a detailed step-by-step list, but it is worth thinking about potential problems before they happen.
Sorry if this sounds like Mr Bleeding Obvious, but you'd be amazed how many people don't do this stuff. You've done the first (and most important) thing already, which is start asking questions.
Whether it's a wiki, a bunch of text files somewhere, or even a paper notebook it's definitely worth writing stuff down, so that next time you'll learn from your (inevitable) mistakes.
So it looks exactly the same as XP, only more so (presumably more drilling down in control panel is required to get to anything useful).
Surely what's needed is two sets of settings - an "idiot mode" and a "non-idiot mode". By all means default to idiot mode, but at least allow a common series of changes to be made by non-idiots without having to go through lots of different areas of the system making the same changes (turn off the search puppy, search for all files not just a subset, turn on explorer details view, etc.)
Cars have a similar idea for years, allowing you to turn off ABS, ESP or whatever, if that's what you really want to do.
Linux distributions tend to provide these two levels "out of the box" because in addition to a GUI frontend you've got the config files as well - so if you want to see EXACTLY what changes have been made by an action you can.
Obviously you'd want to copy everything off it onto your PC when you walk away from your desk, encrypt it with something like Gnupg, delete the contents, put the encrypted versions of the files down, walk away, walk back, transfer the encrypted versions back to your PC, unencrypt, delete the encrpyted versions and transfer the unencrypted versions back.
Or (seeing as you mentioned it), you could try the Blackberry route - it's strongly rumoured (if not already confirmed) that some newer versions will play audio. It may not exactly be the most cost effective digital music player, but at least it's secure, right?
(OK, I know I shouldn't feed the trolls - but when the ARTICLES are trolls, what then?)
The industry isn't going to do anything unless they're persuaded by market forces or legislation. Granny probably doesn't spend much on consumer electronics and votes once every 4 years or so, and so probably isn't as much of an effect as you think.
I'm in the UK, where Freeview boxes (essentially the same thing) are down to about 30 quid - a few days' "pensioners specials" down the local pub.
If you can get at the cable, and you've got access to 110/240v, RVs etc. shouldn't be a problem. 12v portables and handhelds will be - but they're not really a granny thing.
Last Christmas in the UK, Freeview boxes flew out of the shops into the homes of plenty of grannies (among some of my relatives ITV3 was the draw - Morse instead of Matlock (as mentioned by an earlier reply) but the same idea).
While it sounds like the poster's network is as bad as the open internet or worse, and in that situation anyone with a bunch of servers to protect would stick a hardware firewall in the way, I've got to ask how many remote attacks a fully updated W2K3 server would actually be vulnerable to.
Even without the firewall turned on, you still don't have to run every service that comes with 2003 just because you can.
Anyone aware if any of last month's remote exploits (such as the SMB one) actually in the wild before their announcement?
So that's a law under which anything that they "might" have done is illegal. Marvellous. However, taking them down the station to have them fingerprinted and saying "they might be charged with a felony" is surely just a way of trying to scare the kids (and their parents) into not doing it again.
If it were to come to court "in excess of given authority" would be an interesting thing to prove given that one the admin pw was given out on some occasions and was the postal address of the school district (as mentioned elsewhere here).
The school and the admins already look stupid in the local paper. I doubt that they want to look stupid in court too.
There is a tendency for some people who look after Windows servers to be described as "system admins" when all the really do is stick the monthly patches on once a month and run "setup.exe" every now and again. Having people coming from a different background asking questions about "why" certain things are done a certain way can only be good.
The same's true the other way around as well ("why can't I see this on one screen without someone having to write something?" for instance).
Really? I've got a couple of books at home printed in the early 1800s and late 1700s that, although they look a bit "mottled" are still perfectly legible.
Which notebook isn't going to fail in the first place?
There are a few reliability surveys around, but they tend to be a bit general ("IBM, Good; Dell, Fair" - that sort of thing).
The paper mags don't seem consider anything other than "what's new next week", and web campaigns only get launched when somethign seriously goes wrong (as the person below relates about an issue with Acer).
The £100 (or even "£93" - the current official estimate) is a red herring.
If something costs money, it must be paid for, and whether than comes out of general taxation or a charge per card, everyone (apart from the criminally inclined) pays for it. Even if it is "free to everyone", you still pay.
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> I absolutely hate pdfs embedded in web browsers.
So (in Firefox) untick the box that opens it in a web browser.
(edit / preferences / downloads / plugins, or tools / options / downloads / plugins, and then click teh tick so that it isn't there any more).
Not sure I'd trust a business relying on *cheap* PCs running anything (I'll bet that a decent backup solution is the first thing to get canned to cut costs), but anyway:
I wouldn't use WSH - tried it once and found it a real pain (as if someone at Microsoft said "We need a decent scripting language! What have we got? Er - dunno - will this do?".
VBA makes sense within MS Office applications but not really elsewhere.
What would work would be a either a combination of batch files and Cygwin (which is more complicated than it needs to be) or just write regular shell scripts using the stuff from http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/. There's a "sh.exe" there, and a "date" (which you might want to rename to "gnudate.exe" to avoid clashes with the Windows one).
If you want to run stuff from the task scheduler just schedule "...\sh.exe scriptname.sh".
I've done this for relatives to put a big "copy pictures from camera" icon on the desktop that creates a datestamped directory, copies the files in and opens the directory up in something like Exif Viewer.
This sounds similar to what your friend wants to do (I can't think of a way to automatically invoke Photoshop to make everyone in a wedding picture look like they've not just had 10 pints of lager and now want to kill each other, but some things still have to be done the old fashioned way).
> Many applications have DST deep in the code.
Most don't, because the DST start and end dates aren't standard. There are countries outside the US and (gasp!) sometimes they don't do things at the same time as in the US.
As has already been mentioned, in the US whether DST applies or not can depend on which side of a river you are within a particular state.
Well, I've seen it happen with a friend of mine pressing the buttons (on 2000, at the height of the "Welchia" worm outbreak whenever that was) - and that was on dial-up! I think it depends on the ISP - in this case it was NTL in the UK and they seemed to suffer a lot more "dodgy activity" than some other UK ISPs. They sell phone + TV + t'internet packages and so probably get lowest common denominator customers.
That said, assuming you have another mechanism to download stuff there are such things as free software firewalls, and so there's not really any excuse.
Anyway, in keeping with the original story, he eventually got a new PC (which was "too slow running Windows 2000") and I inherited it for services rendered. It now sits next to the hifi as a "networked media player" (something it's certainly not too slow for).
> Dell's come with a Windows install cd and all drivers and other utilities are on other disks.
True enough, but (assuming you've still got the original disks) installing drivers was a pretty linear process - the setup screen on the drivers disk tells you what hardware you've actually got installed, so next-door's cat would be able to give it a go if it wasn't for the fact that it's paws wouldn't fit on the keyboard.
I can relate to the "weird blue screen that takes forever" though - asking lots of (to me) irrelevant questions since I was going to repartition anyway.
Interesting you pick Outlook and Exchange - that's the one place that Novell really have got a comparable solution.
If anything, the Novell mail client has the edge in terms of functionality, but it doesn't "feel" like Outlook - it's that which causes resistance, and the "no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" thing.
On the server side, Novell is probably easier to administer, certainly for large sites - and I'm not talking as a native Novell admin here.
> And what exactly would that support be?
...and just because you've never had to call your ISP for support doesn't mean that no-one else ever has either. OK, there's Usenet, and yes, there's solid gold support there for anything Linux if (a) you know it exists and (b) you can get online in the first place.
Well, how to get winmodem hardware working might be a start...
Thankfully winmodems are becoming less of an issue because broadband is getting more widespread. Network card support on Linux has "just worked" for me since around 1994 and the Intel wireless built into my run-of-the-mill Dell did too (along with all the rest of the hardware). Not sure about USB ADSL adaptors, though...
Also, don't foget that some ISPs don't have a problem with Linux support - I've used two in the UK and both have provided "how to connect" info for Linux in their support pages.
Not that it's relevant for West Africa, but WAAS aware GPSes does work elsewhere - with EGNOS in Europe (or at least in the UK and, I think, Finland).
Of course, if you're mapping villages (like the poster) then 3m accuracy is probably way more than you need.
At the outset, try and define what it is you're trying to do, on some sort of priority list, and start at the top and work down. Try not to get diverted onto someone's recent "big idea" - keep an eye on the bigger picture.
Try and avoid overcomplicated solutions to problems. If people are pulling you in different directions, try and get them to talk it through together first.
If there's a modular way of doing something and a non-modular way, pick the modular way so that you can change one element of a solution in the future without throwing everything out.
Ask yourself who's going to be doing the ongoing maintenance. If it's you, also ask what sort of support you want to give (hours of coverage, that sort of thing). It's worth setting some sort of expectations up front (including "if you screw your PC up by doing exactly what I told you not to, don't expect to be at the front of the priority list).
Get the basics right - backups (including off-site), security of access to data both from outside your network and if appropriate from inside, and security patches on servers and desktops.
Reading books is useful, but there's a wealth of information available for free in public (especially on Usenet), and "learning by doing" is often the best way.
Have some sort of test systems that allow you to try stuff out first before doing it for real.
Think about the sort of "disasters" that might happen and try and plan for those that might. Planning doesn't have to be a detailed step-by-step list, but it is worth thinking about potential problems before they happen.
Sorry if this sounds like Mr Bleeding Obvious, but you'd be amazed how many people don't do this stuff. You've done the first (and most important) thing already, which is start asking questions.
Hear, hear to that.
Whether it's a wiki, a bunch of text files somewhere, or even a paper notebook it's definitely worth writing stuff down, so that next time you'll learn from your (inevitable) mistakes.
Sounds exactly like the setup in the University computer lab back in 1984.
So it looks exactly the same as XP, only more so (presumably more drilling down in control panel is required to get to anything useful).
Surely what's needed is two sets of settings - an "idiot mode" and a "non-idiot mode". By all means default to idiot mode, but at least allow a common series of changes to be made by non-idiots without having to go through lots of different areas of the system making the same changes (turn off the search puppy, search for all files not just a subset, turn on explorer details view, etc.)
Cars have a similar idea for years, allowing you to turn off ABS, ESP or whatever, if that's what you really want to do.
Linux distributions tend to provide these two levels "out of the box" because in addition to a GUI frontend you've got the config files as well - so if you want to see EXACTLY what changes have been made by an action you can.
Obviously you'd want to copy everything off it onto your PC when you walk away from your desk, encrypt it with something like Gnupg, delete the contents, put the encrypted versions of the files down, walk away, walk back, transfer the encrypted versions back to your PC, unencrypt, delete the encrpyted versions and transfer the unencrypted versions back.
Or (seeing as you mentioned it), you could try the Blackberry route - it's strongly rumoured (if not already confirmed) that some newer versions will play audio. It may not exactly be the most cost effective digital music player, but at least it's secure, right?
(OK, I know I shouldn't feed the trolls - but when the ARTICLES are trolls, what then?)
The industry isn't going to do anything unless they're persuaded by market forces or legislation. Granny probably doesn't spend much on consumer electronics and votes once every 4 years or so, and so probably isn't as much of an effect as you think.
I'm in the UK, where Freeview boxes (essentially the same thing) are down to about 30 quid - a few days' "pensioners specials" down the local pub.
If you can get at the cable, and you've got access to 110/240v, RVs etc. shouldn't be a problem. 12v portables and handhelds will be - but they're not really a granny thing.
Last Christmas in the UK, Freeview boxes flew out of the shops into the homes of plenty of grannies (among some of my relatives ITV3 was the draw - Morse instead of Matlock (as mentioned by an earlier reply) but the same idea).
> small, seemingly inconsequential...
No they're not. They're the ones with the decent beer.
That's a very good point.
While it sounds like the poster's network is as bad as the open internet or worse, and in that situation anyone with a bunch of servers to protect would stick a hardware firewall in the way, I've got to ask how many remote attacks a fully updated W2K3 server would actually be vulnerable to.
Even without the firewall turned on, you still don't have to run every service that comes with 2003 just because you can.
Anyone aware if any of last month's remote exploits (such as the SMB one) actually in the wild before their announcement?
So that's a law under which anything that they "might" have done is illegal. Marvellous. However, taking them down the station to have them fingerprinted and saying "they might be charged with a felony" is surely just a way of trying to scare the kids (and their parents) into not doing it again.
If it were to come to court "in excess of given authority" would be an interesting thing to prove given that one the admin pw was given out on some occasions and was the postal address of the school district (as mentioned elsewhere here).
The school and the admins already look stupid in the local paper. I doubt that they want to look stupid in court too.
(and vice versa)
There is a tendency for some people who look after Windows servers to be described as "system admins" when all the really do is stick the monthly patches on once a month and run "setup.exe" every now and again. Having people coming from a different background asking questions about "why" certain things are done a certain way can only be good.
The same's true the other way around as well ("why can't I see this on one screen without someone having to write something?" for instance).
> paper only lasts at most about 300 years
Really? I've got a couple of books at home printed in the early 1800s and late 1700s that, although they look a bit "mottled" are still perfectly legible.
Nah - we get to INBREED the moron, so we can be absolutely sure that we get one every time!
Which notebook isn't going to fail in the first place?
There are a few reliability surveys around, but they tend to be a bit general ("IBM, Good; Dell, Fair" - that sort of thing).
The paper mags don't seem consider anything other than "what's new next week", and web campaigns only get launched when somethign seriously goes wrong (as the person below relates about an issue with Acer).
If they try and charge $500k and don't sell any, you won't have a problem (at least not that problem, anyway).
Indeed it is, what with the North Sea been one of the most heavily populated areas of Europe, and one of the most seismically active.
The £100 (or even "£93" - the current official estimate) is a red herring.
If something costs money, it must be paid for, and whether than comes out of general taxation or a charge per card, everyone (apart from the criminally inclined) pays for it. Even if it is "free to everyone", you still pay.
Strange. I've been to Sweden many times (from the UK) and have never been asked for ID when paying by credit card.
Sounds like all Swedish criminals would need to do is fake a non-Swedish accent.