pcstru

I'd be fairly confident a letter would do it, just include details of the items and have both parties sign. A sales receipt should also do the job - you could charge 1p.

Honda CG125. Almost bullet proof and holds it's value well.

In my (not very clear) reply, refno was just a variable. Mod is the remainder from an integer division operation i.e. 10 divided by 3 = 3 remainder 1. So 10 Mod 3 = 1. It is extremely useful in programming, especially for when you need to do something every n things (every 30 cells, every 10 cakes, every 22 dead aliens etc).

£350 for an engineer to visit doesn't seems that unreasonable to me. That is presumably inclusive of travel and is a price for the job however long it takes. Companies do have to cover their costs and engineers should be paid a reasonable wage. They will not be out all day every day earning.

We prioritise as a function of the severity of the issue (from it's "slightly annoying" through to it's "shuffled off this mortal coil") and the number of people affected by it. We try to allow all means of communication but we encourage mail to our central helpdesk@ and we have a walk in counter for staff and students. It depends. We iterate two curriculum images a year and those are the processes which deliver changes to software available for students and we encourage people to use them. Outside of that it would be treated like any other request (i.e. prioritised along with any other work) but it is likely to end up as a "change request" because it has the potential to cause issues for other software. Since we have two chances for people to make the request at times where technicians expect to be developing the image, we expect people to use those but people do forget or just don't think so there does have to be some flexibility (we always have to be aware that even if Teachers were deliberately mucking us about (very very very rare here), it is the students that end up being let down, so we suck it up, smile and do our best).

Since they are on the public roads, surely *everyone* has to trust it with their lives? Sad to think then that even software development for safety critical missions where cost is not really an issue, fails to produce defect free systems. What will happen when small car manufacturers have to produce such systems to a low price or be unable to compete. Whatever happens then I hope we have better legislation that sets high quality standards for such systems before they are allowed anywhere near a public road.

Our backup strategy is subject to a full review every three years. That doesn't tend to result in wholesale replacement - but most of the system has been replaced over the last 6 years.

I guess it depends what you have. Our main SAN is a dual node, active/active OpenE software on mostly Dell hardware (we have a couple of SATAboy arrays) - all in all about 50TB of raw storage. I guess we could change components on that but after 5 years I would expect benefits from all areas of hardware so replacement is likely to be competitive in terms of performance benefits. Our file server storage is a single node but we also have a hot standby which copies overnight (because restoring that ~30TB from backup to a replacement device will take a while). Overall, our backup is D2D2T or D2T with an emphasis on having multiple generations of files going back a year and yearly snapshot archives going back several years. All of which is expensive and demanding of staff time and skills. I'm not saying it is more expensive than Azure - but I don't see it costed in along with server, licensing and electric costs and it may be a fairly significant omission.

What I meant was no one has listed those costs in relation to their locally hosted storage.

Maybe. I haven't seen anyone list backup costs as part of storage costs, nor the time spent every 3-5 years (or however often) planning, replacing and migrating or investments we need to make to get up to speed with our latest shiny SAN. So perhaps we don't have a full appreciation of our current costs. That said, I think the driver in the next few years will be service, flexibility and features - not particularly cost savings.

The fact that you need to reset after 30 cells suggests you need to keep track of that and derive the reference accordingly. the Mod operator is your friend for doing that, so if we count with iIdx from 0..n but we want it to spit out sequences of 0..29, it would be refno = i mod 30 which can then be concatenated into the string used as the cell formula.

Heh. M$ designed this to be even more complicated than their volume licensing despite that being almost impossible.

Ah. Surely then we need the cost of the file server which will manage that block storage and there are other costs listed against block "put operations", "other operations", "data retrieval", "data write". Then support costs etc. Or am I missing something else?

I'm quoted $0.08 Gb/m on basic tier pricing, which is just under $1 per year. Buying in TB pushes down but not by the two orders of magnitude you are quoting. Where am I going wrong?

Ah, yes, the Amish School. I heard there had been an escape ... Could you could use Sharepoint for files? It is possible to map document libraries as drives. Sounds like you are already up with the times. It is worth pointing out that even if it can be done, change costs time, effort and usually cash. It also usually involves different risks. Even if the destination is not fantasy, it is not what you have now. Perhaps you both need to visit the school and see how they make it work in practice. Maybe they boast of no servers but their IT provision is actually ... pants. You need the facts!

Pay up or if your school can deal with handling cash in other ways, choose not to upgrade ... yet. £400 isn't outrageous and if you are on a support contract, I doubt you can DIY.

You should be able to change the 'default save' location by changing the default scene (the last location saved to then becomes the default). After install that may be a per user thing but you should be able to overwrite the master copy of that.

Done. Good luck.

Errrr, Nope. (OK, I should be clear, you might have been taught that, but it's not definitive or common)

Make something from them! http://www.moletrap.co.uk/cast/melt http://www.moletrap.co.uk/cast/octo-no-mmarks

@Dave_O, thanks for doing the leg work. It is interesting even from the POV of someone who does not use SIMS.

Hard Drives in a safe are not good bets for long term archival storage. The problem with HD's compared to tape is the component complexity means there are many failure modes and all of them are directly coupled to access to the data. Drives tend to fail on power up and there seems to be a fairly common belief that the longer drives are stored without being spun up, the more chance there is of failure. If you do have to skimp on archival costs (and if you do, then you can't place much value on the data being archived) then use as many as you can, preferably from different manufacturers and re-write the data to fresh drives every year. I would not personally use RAID 1 without testing the drives are readable outside of the array. They should be but it's not an assumption that you want to test when you need the data. NB - I am a little in the paranoid camp when it comes to data integrity and backup. On the downside that probably means we spend a little more than we perhaps could. On the upside I sleep well.

If you licence them to a GAE Domain, you can control what is installed. However it does remind me of one PITA issue. Google likes to update them quite frequently and does not like you getting too behind (automatic updates will stop working and you then have to do each one by hand). The problem for us has been that the updates break the integration with the smoothwall single sign on. At least that has been our experience.

We run several hundred for student use in classrooms. However, even the champion of all things Google at the time looked like the toys would be firmly out of the pram when I suggested he might like to hand back his windows laptop and try and go native.

There is a script here which may help with creating folders.