tmcd35

Without knowing the individual circumstances I'm unwilling to say. I live quiet comfortable as a single person earning around that wage. As a single person with a couple of sprogs I can imagine not feeling so comfortable, but am not in that position to know how I would cope/finance differently. Without knowing the exact circumstances and comparing to a similar family on low wage using tax credits to top up their earnings, I wouldn't want to commit to the right or wrongs of that figure one way or another. One thing I can be very sure about - a single unemployed individual cannot claim anywhere near £26k in benefits. We're talking a family, possibly two unemployed adults, some kids, maybe even disability of some nature.

If I was setting up completely from scratch again...I'd look at the Dell PowerVRTX. Alternatively I'd go for two servers with local storage and use Hyper-V Replica on a dedicated network link (10Gbe Crossover?). I'd use Storage Pools to manage the volumes on the local drives rather than Hardware RAID and I'd make sure the HBA's in the servers supported external JBOD's to support future hard drive expansion if needed. I'd be tempted to forget SSD's completely, maybe a single small S3700 for basic read/write cache - wouldn't worry about tiering at all, and stick with 15k SAS drives and get as many spindles as I could afford (eg. 8x450Gb 15k SAS instead of 4x900Gb 10k SAS). I'm in two minds over Thin provisioned Parity volumes or Thick provisioned Mirror volumes. The latter would be better for write speeds, former for read (according to my tests). I suppose that depends on that total capacity of the drives and amount of space required?

Strange choice of words given the story. (which is typical tabloid sensationalism given the stock photo being used). Maybe if there wasn't a benefits cap then not so many food parcels would be needed?

Does the destination contain any files? If it does then /mir will delete anything not found in the source. That copy command looks fine to me. Personally I'd reduce the retries to at most 10. /MT:64 might give a bit of a speed boost (multithreading). /EFSRAW might be handy (encrypted files). /NP might speed things up a bit as well, no need to display progress if you keeping a log?

I can only assume you do not know anyone affected by some of their policies. All I can say is you and your family are fortunate and I wish you all the best. I do, unfortunately, have various family members who are being hit in different ways and it really isn't a pretty sight. Financially I'm doing well under the last government and will probably continue to do well under this government. Looking across my family I certainly don't feel "we are all in this together".

Personally I disagree. Implemented correctly, equal constituency sizes, I think AV provides the best compromise between PR and Constituency Representation. At least you can say for a set number of people this is the candidate that more than half agree would be the best to represent them even they're not your first choice. Other PR schemes break the constituency link and I'm not sold on that being a good idea.

I'll take that as a win and shoot me some tories then

And if I can't shoot foxes then you can't shoot Tories...

I've convinced the head to install swivel chairs so the kids cook evenly.

I thought it was Gordon Brown that broke the link between NI and Pensions? NI is just Income Tax under another name. Pensions are effectively a welfare payment now. At some point, given how much universal pensions cost us, we have to ask the question about giving the more affluent retirees in our society a state handout. By the time I get there (about 30 years or so) I fully expect it to be means tested.

Usual Microsoft affair. I'll stick with Storage Space now, early adopter and all that. It be fine in Server 2016

Thanks @SHimmer45 I was looking for something just like that! Scanning through the document and it appears to be confirming the speeds I'm seeing - which is a good thing!

None at all. There is CPU and RAM difference between the two servers but I can't believe they are the cause of this effect. The hard disks are 100% identical in both arrays (2x100Gb SSD, 7x900Gb 10k SAS, 6x600Gb 15k SAS). The only major difference is the controllers. I've run the tests at 4GiB, 1GiB and currently doing 100MiB, all over 6 passes. The results remain consistent each time they run. I'm guessing there is something the RAID controller is doing in caching/managing the data that is getting in the way with storage spaces management of the drives. But the results are around half the speed on most tests with the RAID controller.

I've been running some Crystal Disk tests on our two storage servers. In a like for like set up our older server, that uses disks presented to the storage pool as individual RAID-0 volumes, runs at about half the speed of our newer server that uses an HBA. I've also noticed that the SSD cache on both systems is slower at reading than accessing the underlying drives directly but much faster at writing.

Not sure if it's the best clip, but best I can find quickly on YouTube. The discussion on civil servants and political opinion reminded me of Sir Humphrey:

You can but I'll admit to assuming a newer mac.

Pretty much. Only enter the box if your exit is clear is the rule. I've seen drivers wait at the lights because of oncoming traffic and thus you end up being stuck for 3-4 rotations of the lights because the idiot in front won't enter the box (my Aunty is famous for this). Or idiots just going into the box when their exit is blocked only for lights to change and them be stuck their blocking traffic. A common one out side our local bus station - not a good position to be in when you suddenly have a double decker barring down on you!

Those yellow boxes are one of my pet driving peeves because nobody seems to know how to use them! (hint: you can actually stop in them)

If you have access to a second mac and a thunderbolt cable you can try target disk mode (hold down T while turning on).

Fountain of all miss-knowledge: Her Majesty's Civil Service - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (citation: Bradley, A.W. and Ewing, K.D., Constitutional and Administrative Law (Pearson, 2003), p.279-80) Seems quite sensible to me. You wouldn't want a Labour Secretary of State having to fight with Conservative civil servants (or visa-versa) to enact policy voted on by the government/parliament, would you?

As I said above, chicken and egg. I'm actually in favour of increasing min wage and using it as a vehicle to minimise tax and welfare payments. However, that then passes the burden over to taxation and getting the right mix that will compensate small business for loss of profit from the increased min wage, but also still generate enough income to pay for schools, NHS, welfare, etc. Personally I feel Gordon Brown Chancellorship had a better track record (not perfect by any means) at squaring that circle than Osbournes.

Which means less jobs, which means more benefit payouts...

It's the chicken and egg scenario. The Living Wage is currently thought to be around £7.85 outside London, and £9.15 within. Do you - pay less wages but tax more so you can top up those wages in benefits Or - increase the minimum wage so you don't have to pay out as much in benefits and can tax less?

I'd accept that if they weren't cutting public sector jobs and promoting zero hour contracts.

Without seeing exact figures and individual circumstances it's really difficult to argue one way or another to be honest. How is the £26k actually made up, and for what reasons? How does it compare against tax credits and benefits available to similar families who are working? There's a lot of knee jerk reaction over Daily Mail style £90k benefit cheat stories that hide the more important detail. For this reason I've long thought that there should be a single means tested benefit/tax credit/call it what you will that is paid to the household rather than an individual, and I'll include pensions in that. Personally I think it's a bigger crime that we pay child benefit, maternity pay, pensions, bus passes, etc as a single claimable benefit open to anyone regardless of circumstances. Cutting child support for someone whose hit the magic £26k benefit mark but paying it to a working couple earning £40k a year is wrong.