Rydra

Ok, so I built my PC by hand.... You can buy a Dell system, essentially the same specs as I built for £1500-1600. That is both their XPS high end work stations and their alienware gaming systems. and if you want to compare the imac's, the highest spec one they do is the only one that matches what i bought, and still costs £2000+. And then you still have an item that is difficult to upgrade, with heavy limits on what you can upgrade. If you look at the lower end, you can buy a basic desktop for £350, the nearest to that from apple is the mac mini at £600+. Laptops, they start at £870 from apple for their lowest. My aunt just bought a lenovo one for £360. So again, why would a 'normal' home user want one over a PC? Most of what you can do with a mac you can now do in windows 7, and what you can't do you can get software that does it for minimal cost. They are generally too expensive for standard home family user, wont do what a teenage gamer wants to do without fiddling, and too expensive for most high end users, unless they are specialising in media work? If it's a 'status' thing for showing off then fine, you're paying for that. Bundled software? Sure, except you can still buy software that does the same thing for a lot less for the PC, or if your good with google, go open source and a lot of it is free. Reliability? I bought a new PC because the old one, was old... It had been running almost solidly for 3 years, and apart from a fried graphics card, was still running as well at the end of 3 years as it was when i got it. My parents have a 10 year old TIME pc, that albeit is running a bit slow now, but is still going. i have used apples, in fact i borrowed one for my honeymoon as it was smaller/lighter than the 19" laptop i had at the time. And for uploading photo's, and browsing the net, yeah it worked, and easily. But I didn't pay the £950 for it in the first place. But for the ability to upload pictures to facebook, itunes, and video editing that can be done with a £50 suite off the shelf, for half the price, I'm really not seeing it here. Apple to me is like the David Blaine of the computer world; they have extravagant stunts that look great, but when you really get down to it, they are living in their own little world and most of what they do is trickery and mind tricks.

Ok, so I'm going to start one of these.... I'm not here to apple bash, I like them in their own place, but i've heard a lot of yay/naying on it recently and felt like voicing my thoughts without derailing other threads.... I built my own PC at the end of last year. Core I7 950 3GHz Quad core Gigabyte UD7 mobo 6GB DDR3 memory 1.5TB SATA 6Gb/S drive Sapphire ATI Radeon 5870 Blue Ray RW drive new Case and 100W Corsair PSU. plus Windows 7 Pro total cost just shy of £1400. Now I'm a heavy gamer, and it's fair to say I'm engrained in MS tech, and have been for most of my life. My first PC was DOS and Win 3.11, and i've worked along and up as i've got older. I don't really do and media work beyond tinkering with some screenshots or the odd digital photo from my phone or compact camera. I also tend to prefer a machine i can upgrade over time to help keep up with the times without replacing the whole PC, eg memory, graphics, hard drive, and occasionally CPU... So if I take a look at what I can get from Apple that as closely as possible matches what I bought.... I looked at the Mac Pro, as it's unfair to compare to macbooks or imac's. Now there are 2 base models, and since it's starting price was £2000, I went for that one... So i customise the machine to closer match what I got already... CPU is a xeon instead of Core i7 and is slower by 0.2GHz. I can match the memory and the graphics card, but cannot get a 6gb/s hard drive, so go for a 1TB SATA 3gb one. Apple do not support blue ray at this time, still, so cannot get one of these added either. I leave off all addons (except for the display port converters )and support options, and the total cost comes to: £2450. £1100 in difference. So you can argue, that Mac OSX comes with some stuff bundled.... OK so lets add a few bits of software to the Windows PC... Full Nero 10 suite with Blue ray support: £60 Let's add Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 as well: £55 I'll also add Cubase Studio 5: £300 and let's add Serif Photo and Draw Plus X2: £100 So we're still £500-600 under the price of the mac, with software that should cover most if not all of what a basic mac has, and in some respects exceeds it. If you wanted to do full video editing or really go into photo manipulation etc, then arguably Final Cut Pro is enough of a reason to want a mac, and Adobe CS works on both platforms. But as a bog standard home user, who wants a home pc to play with, work with the family video's, play some music, touch up the holiday pictures.... as a gamer it's generally inadviseable, though with steam now porting to mac this is improving... I just cannot see, beyond the specialist role, how/why a Mac is better than a normal PC, especially not to the cost of £500-1000 extra. I can do 95% of what that mac does for 1/2-2/3 of the price.

Damn, i just bought 4 of these, they should arrive today/tomorrow

Utterly ridiculous. What next, sacking a teacher for allowing students to sit on a bench in the summer without written permission for outdoor activities and a written risk assessment of the possibility of splinters, or damage to clothing due to chewing gum on seats? Will a teacher next have to ring the head for permission to send a child to the toilet? He might trip over his own shoelaces and remove his teeth when he bites the floor..... Nanny state at work here definately. I'd bet the original complaint came from a parent of a child who probably didn't even get a ride on the sledge!

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even when they don't have a HDMI or DVI port on them? HDCP only applies to those two last i heard, VGA socket has no HDCP compliance...

Damn. I was going to go for "Average number of keys left on a student Pc's keyboard after a bottom set ICT lesson"

Inanimate/non software related equipment marked "Windows 7/vista/xp ready" MY 20 YEAR OLD MONITOR IS CAPABLE OF RUNNING ON WINDOWS 7! THE NAPKIN FROM LAST WEEKS KEBAB IS MORE SUITED TO HOLD THAT LABEL THAN YOUR MONITOR! Oh, and labelling stuff as different and charging for it for absolutely no difference whatsoever.... Yes I'm looking at you cable manufacturers who released "Sata3.0" cables THAT ARE EXACTLY THE SAME AS SATA2.0 CABLES!

I was at the last one too for the 3 weeks. Worked in the staff kitchens on dinner shift (i believe at the time it set a record for the largest temporary construction ever built). technically i was supposed to rotate, but I fiddled my shifts so i only twice did the 5am start... that shift is just not fun. Lost 2 inches off my waistline, put on 1st of muscle weight, came home tanned, and had a damned good time!

Quidco is about getting you yourself discounts it seems. easyfundraising is designed so that it doesn't affect the prices of the person buying, but your cause gets a donation for promoting their business. And it costs nothing to signup to easy.

no idea what quidco is beyond what I can't be bothered to google! But my sister raised in excess of £125 in about a year, and so far a few of my relatives have used it, otherwise just my parents normal purchases

This is something that my parents/sister have been using to raise funds for her trip to the world scout jamboree this year, and is available for just about any charitable group. Fundraising Ideas | Easyfundraising.org.uk Almost every major retailer and many others are already on here, and they seem to add more regularly. Simply, you sign up the school as a cause, and then you make your parents, teachers, neighbours whoever know about it. They can then sign up as an individual, and browse through the retailers list. Any purchase they make by following the retailers links, earns a donation towards your cause. This ranges from £1 upwards in static donations, or up to 15% depending on the retailer. It doesn't cost them anything extra, and it doesn't cost you anything. You can then claim the money back as a cashback donation. I heavily recommend looking into this site for your school, especially in these financially troubling times! PS, if you have a cause setup already, then please post here that you can do referrals! This earns the referrer a little extra each time.

I know we have a lot of you here that may not be able to judge this to it's full extent due to not being long enough in the tooth! But me and the wife are trying for a baby atm now that the whole wedding thing is over etc, and I was wondering; What is the favourite time in a child's life for the average parent? The babies are cute, but come with a side affect of lack of sleep and varies icky substances are a regular feature. The pre-teens is the age of inquisitiveness and boundary testing, but they still hold a level of cuteness. The teens result in mounting expenses, frequent arguements and rebellion Followed by the late teens/adulthood, where you can meet children as an equal, go down the pub with them, and buy them their first car! So do you wish your children were 25 and leaving already? Or are they 25 and you wish you still had that drooling little cute thing in a onesey!

Taking into account fuel, insurance, tax/mot and running costs, it's actually cheaper for me to drive to work than it is to get the bus (I pickup/drop off my wife from work each day). Include the ability to actually reach somewhere with entertainment, or a half decent shop, and the car more than pay's for itself. Plus the buses here are very expensive (£3 for 2 miles down the road!), congested, unreliable, and take 3 times as long to reach the destination.

The principle is that all waves have a frequency, and energy. If you were far too brainy/nerdy, and you could calculate the energy required to break a molecular bond, and the frequency at which that energy is matched, you could cause the molecular bonds to break. Within the human body, the principle is that the body operates by signals sent down the nerves from the brain, and these signals have a frequency attached to them that the brain operates on. In theory, if you directed the right frequency at the right place, you could interupt the signals from the brain. The chances of finding the exact frequency that works on the exact part of the body that you want to control is really damned small. Shockwave effect or exceedingly high db sounds is a lot more likely to have the desired effect, since inner ear's are rather sensitive.

I voted for the first time at 25. I was away the previous time there was an election, plus voting in my area has become a moot point. Only the big 3 ever go in and the occasional distance-bencher looking for any seat he can get. Most of them don't even live within 50 miles of the area either. And the tory candidate has won for something like 10-15 years on the trot, if not more, as I can't remember his predecessor! I've met him, and he's a nice enough guy. But he's about as useful as a chocolate teapot in securing services/assistance for our town, as we get bulldozed by the neighbouring constituency, where the council has more clout, and anything they want they get, even if it buggers ours in the process.

Digitally impose himself somewhere into the movie? He's done just about everything else that could possibly make them worse.

My work week is fairly quiet, but it's a busy/hectic week otherwise. Cubs final party was monday, had my car broken into (£10 worth of stuff stolen, hundreds worth of damage to the driver door they bent out of shape to steal the £10) Yesterday morning was dealing with that, which took all morning, and the wife went away to a work's xmas do. Last night I built my new PC and got it fully up and running, it's purring along nicely despite SCAN computers incompetence, and claiming there is no fault with the audio ports on the mobo i sent them for repair, and they sent me back with a £35 bill. I went and bought a PCI sound card which I hate, but at least I have working audio now. Tonight will be putting my study back together since it's covered in PC boxes/bits/paperwork. Then I might see about some xmas shopping one of the next couple of days. As to work, I might reimage one of my ICT suites today/tomorrow, and i've got a few niggly little jobs like clean the projector filters, poke a couple of misbehaving laptops etc.

Over the years the workload around xmas has varied somewhere depending on where I worked. When I worked in retail, it was obviously rather busy, but in a retail services company, the workload was lower (noone can spare tills etc at their busiest time of the year). In one school the last 2 weeks or so was no stop, others there is little to do except answer the "my dvd doesn't work" and catch up on outstanding old paperwork or jobs that are so non-urgent that they date back to the stone age. What's it like for you?

As a general rule I don't let work colleagues or people from online gaming be my friend on facebook. If I haven't known/met you in RL, you don't get added. Exceptions come if i can socialise with them outside of work hours, and not just meet once every term for the end of term pissup; but going out just for the sake of it. I have my mother, sister and a few aunt/uncle/cousins on there. I have nothing to hide from them, albeit some of the photo's are embarassing, they are just as embarrassing to other friends. If your living with your parents still, there is probably no reason to be friends on a social network site though, unless it's for sharing photo's with friends/family. But once you start moving away, then it's great to have that link to see what's going on, what they get up to, and it works both ways. A parent should not need to do it for 'safety or checking up on their kids'. But another way to communicate with their children/family, in a time when communication and interaction between families is getting lower by the year, should not be discourage.

For £10 a year I don't think you could pay me to breathe in your general direction. At least not intentionally.

So they plan on putting a tournament in one of the coldest most under-developed (yet largest) countries in the world. Then 4 years later put it in one of the top 3 richest GDP wise countries, one of the hottest in the world, which is half the size of Wales?

open here, and likely to remain open unless we have a massive shift in weather. North, east, and from what i've heard west and south have snow, and plenty of it. Barely more than a dusting about half an inch at best here, all major roads gritted, shame about the path's and non major roads. And the buses are just **** while my car isn't working. Bus drivers who screw you over charging you wrong prices, buses just not turning up at times, and never turning up at the right time. Paid £2.80 return for a 2 mile journey Monday-Wednesday, Today's driver charged me £3.20, as he set the destination to 2-3 miles further down the route than i was going. Nice phone call going in to arriva this afternoon to complain.

The only issues I see, is companies, councils and parties who take up this option will not have a strong enough internet link to sustain it. Business prices on connections is extortionately high compared to home. What my school currently pays for a 2mb line is probably 5-10 times what I pay for 20mb at home, and my uptime at home is as good as it is here easily.

less than an inch of snow in Luton in most places, it was funny listening to the weather report. only a few miles east of me schools are closed, roads are impassable, all sorts of fun. I miss that snow we had about 5 years ago in like march or something like that... Working in a PC repair centre, listening to the radio and them giving reports about snow starting to cause trouble. Just about lunchtime we look out the window and see the snow start to come down steadily but light, and catch the radio news about gridlock in surrounding areas. We stood looking out the window, and decided it was time to get out while we could. In the time it took to walk to the next room, shutdown pc's and put on coats, then walk out the door an inch had fallen. By the time i got the car out the carpark, which was less than 25 metres across, another inch had fallen. By the time I'd travelled the 100 yards towards the traffic lights at the end of the road, I had to get out and clear the 3-6 inches of snow that were building up so thick the wipers couldn't move it. It took me another 1 1/2 hours to travel 1.2 miles down the road to where my parents lived, trying to drive through over a foot of snow and hoping none of the other idiots on the road slammed on the brakes, because they simply didn't work in those conditions.