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Comment Re:He's right. (Score 5, Informative) 426

by kelsey.grammer (#32355994) Attached to: For Automated Testing, Better Alternatives To DOS Batch Files?

AutoHotKey or AutoIt are better and they are free unlike Visual Basic.

Mod this up. I've used C++, Java, Perl, Ruby, vbscript, batch, and likely a few more to do this kind of thing in Windows over the years. For something this small I haven't found anything that beats AutoIt. It's so easy to learn and is fantastic for creating small, standalone executables with a GUI on Windows. This task is a perfect fit.
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Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki 249

Posted by samzenpus from the 9cm-edited dept.
sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"
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Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson from the toil-and-trouble dept.
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."

Comment On W2k and XP... (Score 1) 121

by kelsey.grammer (#13236707) Attached to: Towards a Comprehensive USB Flash Drive Policy?
XP SP2 does support using Group Policy to limit USB storage devices to read only. Where I work the Corporate Security group doesn't even want to allow read access. That makes sense for a number of reasons, so that wasn't an option for us. Not to mention the fact that SP2 is a minority in our environment.

Our solution was to create a package for software delivery that does the following:
1) Create the reg key HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/USBSTOR if it does not exist.
2) Create a REG_DWORD value named Start if it does not exist. Set to 4.
3) Change permissions on the key, removing all inherited perms, and setting System:Read, Everyone:Deny

This will effectively disable any USB storage device and stop Plug and Play from installing any new drivers for USB storage. The job runs multiple times a day on each machine. In addition, it also reads machine names from an exception list (VIP users approved by Corp Sec) and takes no action (or reverses the changes) if it finds it's running on a listed machine. It also logs any non-exempt machine where an administrator has removed the restrictions manually.

Works surprisingly well.

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Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac (and nobody cares about it). -- Bill Joy 6/21/85

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