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I appreciate the point you are driving at @seawolf and if money was no object, as ever, I'd probably agree. If money was no object I'd be running a mirrored fibre channel SAN with D2D2T backup in a remote building using an auto tape loader and probably add in some method of cloud based backup to boot. Alas money is very much an object and thus compremises have to be made. For bet or worse tape wouldn't work here as a backup medium. It's proven to be the most unreliable of backup medium. And, honestly, that is 99.999% down to the human element (we forget to change tapes). It's also slow and expensive, especially for the terrabytes of storage involved and the rotation strategey required. We use what works best for us based on careful analysis of the problem. That's an onsite NAS finally enough running virtual tape backups, and an offsite NAS taking a full termly site snapshot. Whats the absolute worse that can happen? A fire/tornado/flood manages to take out both the server room and the backup NAS, and to top is off 2 drives in a rarely used NAS go bad at exactly the same time. Possible? yes, but I'm sure the odds of winning the lottery are better. So what then? Well, there's no school so all bets are off anyway until some, even temporary, provision for buildings is made. Heads of Department may have to contact local schools to get hold schemes of work. The exams officer will have to phone round the various examboards to get special despentation for our students. Finance will probably be the worst hit having to worry about paying invoices and wages. It'd be bad, crap will definately hit the fan, but the school will get through it. Life will go on, the school will rebuild. There is nothing that mission critical about any schools data. We're not a multi-national corp that'll face going out of business or lossing millions of pounds. In all likelyhood, it's doubtful any one event will take out both buildings. If it does we lose upto a terms worth of data. Should we back up offsite more often? Probably, and I'm actively looking in to it. Do we need tape? No. As for keeping data only for a year. That's just the main rotation. Were needed we have archives that are backed up within that rotation designed to retain key data longer. There's honstly not that much of it. Most of our backups are of staff and students MP3 collections. It's a great service we offer the music industry

Not unexpected. Still same price as PS4 though, which as you say is more powerful. Without the Kinnect does it loose its unique selling feature? Too little too late?

I tend to only ever use 320kbps 48KHz MP3's wherever possible (some old tracks are at lower quality). Everything get's converted to this as I find it gives me the best mix of audio quality and file portability (MP3's play everywhere - period).

My first real console was the Playstation. Before that it was the Commodore Amiga and Amstrad CPC. Just before getting the Playstation (we're talking a matter of months) my brother got a Binatone Pong console, a Sega Master System, and a SNES. I got a GameGear with MS adapter to play the 2-3 MS games we had. I've discovered most pre-Playstation console stuff through emulation since. I'd say I preferred Sonic to Mario. That said Star Fox was pretty special with it's Mode 7 3D graphics!

If that's truely the case surely the iMac and Parallels/VMWare Fusion is the best option?

Discovered this the other day: OpenShot Video Editor | Download They've got a live DVD so no need to install, boot from DVD and get straight to work. Very feature rich, but also extremely easy to use. Very, very similar to iMovie on the Mac. Personally I think it's a better choice than Movie Maker.

I'm not interested in changing anyones mind - or indeed suggesting one method is better than another. The point of my post was simply this, especially in terms of backups, each institution needs to do their own cost-benefit analysis on the subject and work out what is best for them be it tape or hard disk or a combination. Very little data in a school environment is actually that mission critical. Even less is protected by law. Where we do need to keep data longer, we have archival provision in both our on and offsite backups that take care of that need. You post assuming yours is the only right way. In truth, as with many solutions, the answer a little less black and white. I find tape in the capacities required to be costly, slow, and a pain to manage. I can see why using it is necerssary when other more user friendly alternatives exist. The most important thing to note about our data center - we're not Google and don't have Google's back requirements.

Normally I'd agree with this, but this year seemed different. There was still some obvious political voting but ultimately I think most of the best songs did actually rise to the top of the leader regardless. I think Austria were a worthy winner. Actually did like the song very much. Definately top 3. Personally I'd say Netherlands had the best track, but hey it came second. This year the voting seemd less politcal and more about the songs. Even Russia (who was constantly booed) deservedly climed the leaderboard.

Of the three - I'd give ESET alook. Never heard great things about Sophos and I've used Kaspersky. But... Are you an EES school? If so then you already have Microsofts Endpoint Protection, although that does require a SCCM server which is a pig to set up.

In the printer properties, under advanced, is it set to print after last page is spooled or start immediately? Also, under Ports, it might be worth trying with Bi-directional support disabled. The other thing to look at would be drivers. Are you using PS, PCL, or manufactuers proprietory language? Also, under "sharing", there's the option to "render on client computer" I think (from memory) this should be ticked to the processing happens locally rather than on the server. But you could see what happens if you untick it.

Depends on the OS and software you are running. If it needs it and the OS supports SMP then it'll have and use 2 CPU's. So long has the host can support the configuration (enough resources) - then you'll probably get a bit more speed for the VM.

The Volume License software are full installs. They don't look or check for any previous OEM licenses. However, the OEM licenses are required has the Volume Licenses are sold as upgrade products. The CoA sticker is the proof of licenses - with out it the machine isn't licensed. These stickers are non-transferable between OEM machines, but are transferable if you pay out for the full retail boxed poduct. Thankfully schools licensing is pretty - lax. If you don't have enough CoA stickers pop on eBay and buy copies of the oldest retail copies you can find that do come with the stickers (I think Win98/Win2000 might be the ones now). But againe they must be retail not OEM. In terms of licensing. If you have less staff than computers then odds on EES will work out the cheapest option (about £40 per member of staff per year). For server software I often find it's cheaper in the long run buying Academic Select Volume Licenses than EES because I don't want/need to upgrade my server software that often. Finally server software, as far as I know, are full products as is Office under the Volume License system. Only the client OS is sold as an upgrade - go figure.

Here's an interesting answer to the Wii-U problem: UPDATE 1-Nintendo to introduce console for emerging markets as early as 2015/16 | Reuters Ignore western markets completely and consentrate on offer emerging markets like China a cheaper console were Sony/Microsoft haven't taken hold.

But, as good as the N64 was (and it was the closest Nintendo ever got to the hardcore market) it too failed against the compition. It's game library is a fraction of the PS1. I've seen some comparison vids on YouTube recently and the textures on the PS1 make a huge difference. The catridge media was over priced and ultimately couldn't contain the same content as a CD. This is Nintendo all over. Had the N64 been released with a CD-Rom drive I'm sure their fortunes might have been different. Even the GameCube - which is an otherwise spectacular piece of hardware - is hampered by it's proprietory mini-DVD format. Can Nintendo develop a Spec equivalent next gen console and attract third party support? And what about online service and multiplayer. They are so far behind it's not funny. Really can't see how Nintendo can mount a direct assult on the big 2. And don't forget Steam are looming on the horizon for thier shot at the title.

So where do they throw the dice? Can't compete with Sony/Microsoft Can't compete with Ouya/Fire TV/AppleTV Can't compete with Android/iOS Can't compete with Steam What's left?

Last two were bespoke model from Novatech. Highly recommended. 2x 12-core 2.6Ghz AMD processors. 128Gb Ram. 6x1Gbps NIC's. 2x 250Gb HDD RAID-1. About £2,500. That was over a year ago so specs/prices/markets have almost certainly changed somewhat.

The problem with the indie community is that they represent the polar opposite of Nintendo's locked in licencing model. Sony have pretty much beaten both MS and Nintendo to the punch in embracing indie developers. And besides, Amazon Fire does it better - a problem even Sony are going to face. Sure Ouya wasn't an outright success, but iOS and Android still dominate. Fire TV seems to be winning hearts and minds, an updated Apple TV can't be far off. It's hard to see how embracing indie will do do much to turn around Nintendo's fortunes. What is it? The key to business success - diversification. Nintendo are a single product company being hit from all sides by companies that can do it better, and many with deeper pockets.

I think Nintendo are in an all round difficult position and have a bit of an identity problem. They've never really been the "hardcore gamers console". The closest they ever really got to that was the N64. I think their quality control and licensing terms tend to alienate third party devs. Their business model pretty much has revolved around the cutsy graphics "my first console" for 5-13 year olds and mobile gaming. The Wii was the very pinacle of this and attracted a lot of casual gamers. The problem for Nintendo is they can't compete head on with Sony or Microsoft. Android and iOS has all but taken over the mobile market. Casual gamers have moved on to Facebook. The Wii-U isn't exactly being priced or marketed as a "my first console" product. I'm not sure were Nintendo can go from here. I've said before their biggest asset is their IP, and they can work closer with Sega and their IP. They don't need the most powerful console on the planet. Even the Wii-U can be a success for them. Drop the silly overpriced, oversized touchscreen gamepad. Open up the Virtual Console to the entirety of Nintendo and Sega's back catalogues. Get some new Nintendo and Sega first party exclusives. Be the only place you can (officially) experience this. Maybe they can turn it around?

Why? (6 chars)

I think you totally misunderstand the point of watching Eurovision... 1) Listening to the barely concealed sarcasm from Terry Wogan, and now Graham Norton 2) Listening to how bad the UK entry is - it always amazes me they think the dross we send over each year is worth more than nill points 3) Seeing if the UK can actually make in to double digits 4) The political voting - it's a laugh in and off itself 5) Finding the 2 good enteries - and then being disappointed when they barely score above the UK But mostly - it's about Graham Nortons commentry.

Silly question - but what is disk1? How about making disk1 a new drive F and robocopying the contents of the old F drive into that? Then you can delete both the F and Free Space at the end of drive0 - making it all unallocated, hopefully you should be able to extend the C: drive (although this might depend on the version of Windows - older versions don't like extending the system drive for some reason).

I tend to find 1 or 2 songs each year worth adding to the iPod, never the British entry for some reason.

We've got a domain registered with 1&1 too. I got fed up arguing with LEA, new ISP and 1&1 about the hosting of our .sch.uk DNS records - so I decided to host my own DNS server. Updated Nominet to point to our own host, all problems suddenly disappeared. I now have 100% full control and can change an adapt on the fly. Only issue I came across was our Exchange server requiring a reverse lookup entry which I couldn't host locally due to the subnet provision of our ISP. Thankfully our ISP agreed to host the reverse DNS entry, so all is good.

Maybe not. I looked into this just after the PS4 was announced. Trying to work out why it didn't have ray tracing as I thought it made logical sense. Turns out GPU's are so advanced now with things like CUDA programing, it can be pretty much done in software. That, and the number of polygons being shifted on screen, etc, means traditional graphics cards have caught up to a point were it can actually be quiet hard to see the difference. I think ray tracing is the preserve of higher end CAD and that's about it. Send constant reminders to my iPhone that my coffee has cooled by 0.01 degree, or the milk is half full and 3 days out of date.

See you should have invested in double sided disks and a drive with two read heads (saves having to manually flip them). You might have been done by now