tmcd35

I've played it for a couple of hours. Nothing really difficult to understand yet as far as I can see. Pretty much a bog standard open world game. Very similar to Sleeping Dogs in gameplay style. Artwork suffers from it's last gen roots. Plastic faces, hair drawn on the sculp. I thought with The Last of Us and GTA:V we'd pretty much passed that. The NPC AI is very, very impressive on PS4. Chicargo really feels alive. The Hacking is everything I was expecting it to be. It's a single button affair, but you can pretty much hack anything at any time - it's not scripted. Love the multiplayer. Not as seemless has Ubi wants you to believe (2-3mins for a player match!) but alot of fun hacking into other peoples games (and other people hacking in to yours). Big city, lots todo. Tonight I'm going to complete the next mission and then start roaming around the city and unlocking the CtOS districts. May do a couple of multiplayer hacks as well if Ubi have sorted their servers out. I don't think the story/overall game is going to stand up too well against GTA:V, but I'm not going to complain too loudly. I'm pretty much the target audience for this!

Personally, I'd find 3-4 independent retailers willing to come in and do full wireless surveys and have them recommend kit based on their findings and your projected usage model. Ideally I'd ask the reatilers to quote for atleast 2 if not 3 different solutions and then get them to recommend their favourite stating why. Or atleast that's the strategy I'm gonna follow here if the budget ever gets approved.

Xbox One update will allow external storage, portable games Ooh, looks like XB1 finally has a cool feature over PS4. Common Sony you can't let Microshaft ()get away with this. We need portable gaming on removable hard drives (and I suppose I need friends with PS4's - that'd be cool too).

^ This is the easiest way. Can't see why login on 3 time in one day should matter. Next time child logs in they'll be asked for a password reset. Can't see why you'd want to force resets everytime they login.

I think for virtualisation it's AMD all the way. More cores, larger cache. Happily accept slower clock speeds and less efficient instruction pipelines. Even my most demanding SQL server has never showed any signs of needing the single core speed an Intel processor would bring.

Ignoring the fishy comments (I was gonna post "King Edwards" - but ya'all beat me to it) - I love all those benchmarks that show Intel processors massively outperforming AMD. Can't remember the last time I saw even a lowly Celeron or Atom top 50% usage in task manager. I just can't type quick enough I suppose it depends what you're using it for. I'm sure most tasks these days see bottlenecks elsewhere almost regardless of CPU. I think even gaming top's out somewhere mid-range in the i5's. After that you wasting money for very little gain.

On the subject of licensing... ...Getting Datacenter on EES may not be the cheapest option. Datacenter center on Volume Select isn't crazy money. You need to work out how often you plan to upgrade the host server OS to see if EES annual subscriptions are better. We have EES for the desktop but by server licences perpetually because we don't want to upgrade every 3 years or so. Either way Datacenter usually works out better value than Standard when you're virtualising.

@mats, I suspect there's a little bit more being recorded in the dbase than you might first think (or indeed the end user cares to mention at the start of the project). Building a dbase is usually straight forward. The problems start with reporting. I've done a few af these sorts of projects, small scale, to understand the headaches involved (almost all end user created - mission drift!). Best advise would be to hire a school/college leaver for 2-3 months to work with the stakeholders and create a bespoke solution.

Of course there's nothing wrong with Aldi/Lidl food - it was meant as a light hearted joke The fact is they are German food stores and some of the merchandise reflects that in taste. It's like buying American chocolate - not quiet what I was brought up with from Cadburys. I shop in Sainsburys, purely because the only other people in the store are clutching their pension books. I can usually get in and out without experience trolley rage. Can't say the same for Tesco/Asda.

Sorry, that was a tongue in chick statement on the general quaility of food from those stores. Which I always find...lacking. Maybe it's just my unrefined tastebuds

Aldi, Lidl = healthy food. Surely thats an oxymoron?

I'd say the biggest single cost is in data entry. Whose going to do it? How is the database going to be kept upto date? Are all primary schools signed up to this and happy with that level of data being stored "in the cloud"? Personally I'd make certain of the above before going out and getting quotes on development. Web hosting is quiet cheap. I just picked up very good hosting and a domain name for under £30 for 1 yr from Unlimited Web Hosting | Affordable Web Hosting | Zyma Technologies For the rest, I suppose you need a competent web developer/SQL admin to create a bespoke site for you. Depending on the level required you could be looking it a couple of thousand to outsource the work to a web developer, or maybe have someone hired on a temporary contract (school leaver?), or indeed there's the cheap D.I.Y. approach if your happy with SQL web development and the time it will take.

Beat me to it! Was about to post this. Sad but unsurprising. Can't say their website is the best for gaming news. For a real trip down memory lane, most of the old back issues to about 1993/4 are available for download here: https://archive.org/details/computer-video-games-magazine

Not just split screen though. I remember on my first XBox being able to play games like Halo and Project Gotham across a local LAN. Seems multiplayer today means "online server with rooms full of douchebags".

Also, could the problem be with the USB on the first machine rather than the disk or SATA controller? You'd have thought if the disk or controller were at fault the second laptop would have the same problem? no? Might be worth checking out before erasing an otherwise healthy disk.

Initialising a disk/quick formatting *should* only write a new FAT to the disk. Although unaccessible the under lying data shouldn't be over written. I don't think even a Windows full format actually overwrites the data. You need to use something like DBAN to zero out the blocks/sectors to erase the data entirely. So, yes, something like PCI File Recover or Recuva *should* work if you initialise the disk. That said. If you've got a method that can read the disk as is, without re-initialising. I'd do that instead. First rule of file recovery - don't write anything to the disk.

Got to be honest, this is why I never play multiplayer games. I've a game hasn't got a strong single player story - it's not worth playing. That said, local multiplayer can be fun with friends/family, but it's rarely supported in the console world these days.

They're not, but XBL does seem to be the online equivalent of swigging White Lightening on the swings in the local park.

very, very, much this! IT Support is a customer service industry. Ouch, it took my brain a full 30sec to remember what CSMA/CA stood for. Why would someone be that cruel at interview?

Can you imagine - on XBL? 10-11 yr old american boys screaming obscenities down their headsets? You want Nintendo to expose your sweet innocent children to that?

Have to say I love 2012. Especially the new Server Manager. A much welcome addition. I even don't mind the start screen, although accessing it can be a bit annoying. Somehow it all works on the server in a way I don't think it can on the desktop. Part of it might be the small number of installed apps on a server and everything being accessable from the Server Manager anyway so you rarely need to enter the start screen, and when you do it's not cluttered.

While I do agree with @elsiegee40 that each job description will have differing requirements and the most important thing any applicant can do is read it thoroughly and match their skills and experiense to it, I also think @MrJDH is on to something. There must be certain basic skills and knowledge common to all IT Techs. If anywhere could come up with a top 100 list I'm sure Edugeek can... I'll start with a few ideas: Basic problem solving. The ability to break down a problem into a series of steps that will ultimately lead to a solution. A bit abstract, but methodical thinking skills is probably the single biggest, key, requirement of the job -IMHO. Names and functionality of basic components. Do you know what the Motherboard is? Hard Drive? CPU? RAM? Can you confidently walk into PC-World and match the specification to a users requirements? Software knowledge. Can you install and OS and drivers from scratch on bare hardware? (no manufacturers restore disks). How well do you know your way around the Windows control panel and the various setting there? How confident are you in using MS Office? Especialy Publisher, Powerpoint and Excel? Basic networking. TCP/IP? DHCP? DNS? Domain Controllers? Default Gateway? Understanding how these function and why they are important, from the client side, is essential. Where to find the answers. Google, Edugeek, Peers. Never be afraid to ask for help. In a school environment you may want add things like: Child protection Lesson/Timetable structure Management Information Systems For someone looking to move on/up after 4-5 years, I think alot will be networking based: Server installation Virtualisation Storage management Backups Active Directory Switch configuration bit of SQL and scripting I think that's it from the top of my head. No doubt lots more I haven't thought of...

I answered "no real reason, waiting for Windows 9". The truth on the other hand is "ask me January 14th 2020". To be honest, unless theres a driving need before then, I see Win 7 as a long term replacement to XP. We'll keep it till it dies. Not even certain how relevent Windows will be come 2020. So, even Windows 9 is looking unlikely at this early stage.

I have had one student here whose managed to work very well using Google Apps to transfer between a PC and the iPad.

The way I read it was they were using standard binary. They are only in the "both" state until you querie the result, at which point it chooses the right answer!?! I think the idea is to use the ambiguaty of the "both" state to run multiple calculations simultaneously thus making it faster than regular computers - kind of hyper-parallelisation?