Sims Discover or Medal of Honour?

[Banjo]

http://i666.photobucket.com/albums/vv26/banjo789/Snap2.jpg

 

Let's hope the dedicated graphics card gets dropped from the spec.

[creese]

According to the Software Seminar, things are very unclear at the moment. Some old machines without dedicated cards work, some new with dedicated card didn't.

 

Hopefully this will be rectified by Spring.

[SYNACK]

That is interesting given the spec of current integrated offerings from the intel core iWhatever line and the general ones that they tack on to modern AMD boards. In the past onboard GPUs were junk but now with Windows Vista and 7 floating about they are actually fully competent Directx 10 capible units that will even play most low end games alright. I can see the need to have a aero capible GPU to be able to run Vista or 7 nicely but above that it is redundant for a basic workstation.

 

The only thing that I could think of that would truely benifit from a full on discrete GPU is DirectX 11 DirectCompute or Nvidia CUDA support if the program was doing GPU accelerated sorting or processing of data. Given the size of the dataset and the fact that most of the data handling is probably done by a backend SQL server anyway makes this very unlikely.

[creese]

I would imagine the problem is the Venn diagrams. They look pretty good. I'm sure some users will be dazzled by the look.

[SYNACK]

I would imagine the problem is the Venn diagrams. They look pretty good. I'm sure some users will be dazzled by the look.

DirectX 11 accellerated fully 3D tripple AA rendered venn diagrams modeled in an environment subject to physicly accurate physics? My eyes bleed from the mear thought of it

[scholarpack]

4GB?!?!?!

[SYNACK]

4GB?!?!?!

 

Well they don't spec a hard drive, maybe a ramdrive

[CyberNerd]

Capita need to learn to write code that doesn't use such stupidly high resources, they probably would if schools/LA's took into account the TCO if buying their crap.

[pete]

So if the requirements are to be believed, there's no point attempting to use this on most laptops or most office desktops?

 

We haven't bought machines with dedicated cards for years - there's no point, it's overkill for the usage model. Only a handful of machines in Art (heavy Photoshop work) and Tech (complex 3d modelling) have add-in graphics cards.

[matt40k]

I'm sure I won't having a machine capable of running Battlefield 3.

 

I think what they're trying to say is, don't get the cheapest graphic card out there, the Intel HD 4000 series would prob work which is on most good laptops \ desktops

 

Did they say about the extra database?

[vikpaw]

Is Discover aimed at everyone? Or just a few key users?

Obviously it would be nice for everyone to have fancy graphical analyses and interaction a la Minority Report, but i thought this was initially a tool for senior managers, data managers, spreading out to Heads of Dept. So it wouldn't be an upgrade for every class teacher if it really is required.

I figured the teachers would use the static output and reports after someone has done something fancy with the data.

[PhilNeal]

Discover is on a field trial and the requirements may well come down as we have an optimisation phase before release. It has a massive amount of processing to perform both datawise and graphically.

Tests on kit are inconclusive at present we can't see what is causing one pc to run slowly when another lower spec one runs fine.

 

It is designed to excite SLT.

[vikpaw]

....It is designed to excite SLT.

 

I wish you big companies would stop doing that, us lowly techs can spend months / years dealing with the fallout! ;p

[PhilNeal]

So that's why we get so much stick on EduGeek!

[GREED]

Phil, I think the key is in the website title!

[vikpaw]

So that's why we get so much stick on EduGeek!

Maybe. Perhaps you could design something to excite techies...

[jamesb]

Maybe. Perhaps you could design something to excite techies...

 

SOLUS3?

[pete]

SOLUS3?

 

*cough* System Manager update *cough*

 

(or a decent exportable audit trail, I'll take either)

[PhilNeal]

System Manger should be ready for field trials by April 2011.

[GREED]

System Manger should be ready for field trials by April 2011.

 

Wow! Only taken 3 years Phil! But having said that I know you were waiting to have most modules up to .net before taking this on, be very interested to see this in action when it is ready!

[PhilNeal]

Graham it has taken too long - in our defence I would point out that some things have been delivered such as AD integration and SOLUS which were part of the SM vision.

[GREED]

In actual fact Phil I fully agreed with holding off on SM until everything was together in .net, having the facility to start from scratch and not be held back by legacy issues as such. AD integration was a fantastic step forward, and I was sorry I left the school before I got to see SOLUS 3 introduced.

[zag]

System Manger should be ready for field trials by April 2011.

 

Hurray!!

 

I went on a systems managers course about a year ago and the training guy was pretty embarrassed to be teaching the old system manager that looks like it was built for windows NT

 

My question of why the user list didn't respond to auto jump (like every other windows program available for the last 10 years) went unanswered

[Sivadam]

One will no doibt be reporting back in the near future on how well Discover works on different machines. I will mainly be testing on my own which does have a separate graphics card - but I will no doubt try it on others with integrated boards etc.

All will be revealed in due course!

[pcstru]

Discover is on a field trial and the requirements may well come down as we have an optimisation phase before release. It has a massive amount of processing to perform both datawise and graphically.

 

I kind of struggle to see how even in a large school with over 2500 students, any data analysis could be described as requiring 'massive' amounts of processing. And given that these days even modest PC's can perform billions (a billion being a thousand million) of calculations per second, isn't it far more likely that the real reason for poor performance in schools MIS systems is far more mundane ... poor programming and poor use of the resources available.