sonofsanta

Slowly but surely our entire repro room has moved onto Ricoh machines. Repro lady loves 'em.

Whilst I agree that the Wii U was a bomb all round, forgive me if I hold off on the doom-mongering. We've been here before with Nintendo--repeatedly--and yet they always manage to reinvent themselves and astonish everyone. The console market was already declared dead, post-Atari, when they came in and resurrected it single-handedly with the NES. The N64 was going to kill them because it didn't have CDs. Probably still one of the most fondly thought of consoles though, right? The GameCube was going to kill them because it couldn't stand against the PlayStation. They tried to do what everyone wanted to do--appeal to hardcore gamers with exclusives like Resi 4 and a console built to be a straightforward games machine--and it was pretty much the low point. What saved them then? Doing the weird an unexpected and coming out with the DS, which was huge. What propelled them to the top of the last gen? Doing the weird and unexpected and coming out with the Wii. Yes, a lot of purchasers never bought another game--but as others have said, the key thing there was that the hardware made money from day 1. That was unheard of, IIRC; consoles were always a loss leader and you made your money back on licensing costs from 3rd party publishers. Don't underestimate the size of the war chest built up with the Wii. And Pokemon has never stopped printing money for them. Sega were riddled with debts when they gave up on hardware. Yes, the Wii U has been a wash, as has the 3DS to an extent; both feel like Ninty were playing to the market (3D! iPads!) instead of doing what they wanted to be doing. And that's why all the pronouncements about what Nintendo should do or where they've gone wrong are all empty and useless: because historically, listening to the market is what has hurt Nintendo most. Doing their own weird Nintendo thing is what has made them great. So I'mma leave 'em to it and sit back and see what they come up with, and hope it's weird and what they really want to do. (I do want that new Zelda game though. Might have to buy a Wii U specially )

How could I forget Diablo 2! A friend and I used to leave the pub early so we could go home and play. Multi-shot Amazon with freeze arrows <3 Civ 4 is also taken as read for PC games, right? The genius of having "Enter" be next turn, just there, in the corner of the number pad, so you only have to reach your thumb out from your mouse and oh god is it really 3am? Alright fine I'll go to bed. When this next technology is researched. Oh, only one more turn till that building is finished. Wait a minute, war? Oh Gandhi, you've really done it now...

I have only ever sold/traded one game in my entire life (the Mario Soccer one on Wii) and that was only because I wanted Super Mario Galaxy badly enough and was otherwise broke. So I still have, and all set up in my man cave, and in the order I got them: Amiga 500 (not a console, but I used it for gaming): Sleepwalker was my favourite game, but I also love the various Lemmings games, Wizkid, Pinball Dreams/Fantasies (fun fact: as made by DICE, the Battlefield people) Gameboy (proper breezeblock one): Pokemon Blue ftw. N64: Ocarina of Time is the most magnificent game of all time and I will fight you if you disagree (unless your contender is Majora's Mask). Goldeneye and F-Zero X are also obviously brilliant and the loss of many youthful hours. Jet Force Gemini was fun at the time, as were Body Harvest and Space Station: Silicon Valley, although not a one of them has aged well at all. Gamecube: was the console I had at Uni and so probably single handedly dropped me from a first thanks to all the marvellous multiplayer games. Smash Bros + Mario Kart obviously the best there, although I still play Super Monkey Ball and Wario Ware now. Pikmin is also amazing. Hours also lost to 1080 Avalanche and Metroid Prime 1 & 2. DS: Professor Layton. Metroid made my fingers hurt. Can't remember anything else off the top of my head, particularly. Dreamcast: Skies of Arcadia, as @Tesla well knows I have lost count of how many times I have played that game. Second favourite game of all time. I loved Shen Mue back in the day as well, though it's not aged well either (and I never did get into 2). And Crazy Taxi! It was so wacky! And had real songs on the soundtrack! So much fun, and so very, very, 1990s (even though it was probably ~2000/1). Likewise Jet Set Radio which has one of the greatest game soundtracks of all time. Wii: Smash Bros + Mario Kart again, but I have to say, I've still got a real soft spot for Wii Sports & Wii Sports Resort. They're just so perfect and simple. Mario Galaxy is also as perfect an expression of joy as has ever existed in this life. Metroid Prime 3 the perfect end to the trilogy. Xbox 360: has lots of games I enjoy (Assassin's Creed 2 + Brotherhood, Gears of Warses, Test Drive Unlimited, Fight Night Round 3, Enslaved) but the only thing that stands out is the Mass Effect trilogy (1 had the best story, 2 had the best game). It's as if games found a higher baseline of quality but lost the towering peaks of obssession for me. This may be more related to how my life had changed by that point--no longer the teenager with hours to play into the night, but a grown up with a job and a family. Alas. PS3: NetFlix. All it's ever used for.

Not a PC game, but I distinctly remember and thinking it was photorealistic and we were done with graphics.

I was 12 years old, I had no critical opinions, I just enjoyed the pretty game with the funny talking skull intellectually I know now that 1 is a better game, but I will always love 3 for reasons of nostalgia, and will never dare play it again in case I shatter the illusion.

LeBlanc to be Top Gear co-presenter - BBC News Yes. Matt LeBlanc, Joey off of Friends.

Games that stole the most time: Duke Nukem 3D and the build editor. I even bought a book on it from The Works or similar discount bookstore. I still have the theme tune as my ring tone (the proper MIDI one, not the Megadeth cover, as wonderful as that version is). Red Alert, including hours spent tweaking rules.ini. I intend to set Hell March as my ring tone when I get round to tweaking it in Audacity to shorten the intro Theme Hospital has probably been played through a good dozen times. Dungeon Keeper almost as often. Stars! You could never have a monitor big enough. I knew the map of GTA1 off by heart. And I had the Monkey Island trilogy in one big box that I got cheap from PC World because it had been water damaged. The smell of paper gone mouldy from water always reminds me of the Monkey Island 3 manual and takes me straight back to days of El Pollo Diablo and friends.

It sounds like... ...it's a free version of Windows 10 for them. Although practically speaking, devices always come with Windows anyway, so it's not as useful for students as Office is. Be useful for me if they'd extend it to staff, mind you.

After the Shape the Future debacle? Not a lot

LCC are notorious hereabouts for running outdated software (Win 2k + Office 2003 for the longest time) and there was a good period of time where everyone knew not to connect LCC removable media because it was guaranteed to have Conficker on it. The spokeswoman tried to hide behind "it was a zero day attack" but that's only the vector for penetration, and you could still prevent/limit the actual payload using everything in this thread. Defence in depth!

Yeah, I think the "offline for a week and using pen & paper" may have cost them more in the scheme of things. It may or may not be relevant that their IT is outsourced to Serco. Any conclusions there are your own to draw.

And if you want to know why all of this is a good idea to implement: Lincolnshire County Council computer systems restored - BBC News

I would like to say that Microsoft can't be so stupid, but the way they pulled Shape the Future at zero notice after running it for just long enough to make its way into everyone's budgetary plans... I'm going to assume the worst, for now. We may go perpetual Windows 10 in Summer 2017 if the figures quoted above are correct--and the implication from the DfE document was that all the discount would disappear, so that price doesn't seem unbelievable. I'm sure there will be a cloud equivalent, priced to pull us in, but I don't want to run everything in the cloud. I don't mind running my email in the cloud on Office 365, because email is inherently an internet thing anyway, but a domain controller isn't. They're clearly not equivalent.

Really? That reads more like First they cancel Shape the Future at zero notice, then they muck around with EES... all the goodwill Microsoft had engendered in me is swiftly evaporating. I shall wait and see, but I am not best pleased. Microsoft can, on a whim, utterly destroy my budgetary plans, and I don't much like it.

We bought the 5 year CarePack with the printers, which is an all in service agreement, and all goes through Landscape. Having bought the printers & warranty, we now pay the click charge per mono/colour copy and get all the inks and other consumables included. It's all in. Devolving the capital purchase of devices + warranties over five years made this cheaper by far than any other the other leasing options, and even if we'd gotten it on a finance agreement it would have been cheaper. The devices are as sturdy as any laser I've ever seen--the build quality is excellent, the paper trays etc. are all really solid. If anything, the ink cartridge mechanism makes them more student proof, as people aren't pulling out toners and drums to try and clear paper jams. Regarding Arena... we were with them before (after they bought out a local company) and we found their service got steadily worse over time we were getting completely the wrong toners sent to us (as in, needed an A3 Cyan, got an A4 black), deliveries were taking up to a fortnight (when they used to be next day), we were having to replace broken printers with completely different models because they couldn't get parts... YMMV: we all know the difference a good account manager can make, and our troubles may have been because ours was an adopted contract, but I was glad to see the back of them here.

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Tribble Customer Service: EDIT: this joke already makes no sense now the thread title has been corrected. Bah!

Ha, yes--I have a pair of HP Brocade fibre switches that require a specific version of Java running on XP to administer. I live in fear of any configuration problems.

Oracle deprecates the Java browser plugin, prepares for its demise | Ars Technica Except, of course, it's not all balloons and Bucks Fizz for us, is it, 'cos we'll still have to find a way to run this garbage--garbage that will now stop receiving security updates--in order to support random Maths packages from 2001 that one teacher refuses to move from. I should be delighted. Instead, I am scared.

For cost, an HP OfficeJet Pro X451dw; inkjet, but running costs were about half what we were paying on laser. If it's high volume, an X555 is more capital but cheaper running costs. Tipping point was about 2300 pages per month. For quality, the laser HP M651 is actually colour accurate. Gorgeous quality on plain paper. I am not actually a HP shill, it's just coincidence that two printer threads have come up so close to each other and I actually have useful advice for once instead of just sarcasm.

Switched ours over in October half term, at the end of a 5 year managed contract. Swapped everything out for the new HP OfficeJet Pro range of inkjets--chiefly because, over 5 years, it saved us 40% compared to continuing our existing contract, something like £50,000 (we were spending ~£20-£24k a year by the end of the last contract). Quality is not quite as shiny as laser--mostly a lack of contrast, which bothered Art and nobody else--but they're fast (55pm/70ppm), reliable, easy to support and maintain, and as cheap as 0.44p/2.9p per mono/colour click (0.6p/3.5p on the lower end device). Given that they're mostly used for internal homework and/or using paper before it goes in the bin, the lack of contrast was a compromise we were happy to make (resolution and colour accuracy are excellent, it is just the depth of the blacks). We've got them on a 5 year managed print services agreement with Landscape, who have been excellent so far, and were marvellous in the setup--they helped me set up Web JetAdmin and provided me all the details of the printers (serial etc.) so I could prepare the printer configurations to be automatically pushed to each printer as it was connected. In the end, all we needed to do at each printer once it was physically unboxed and connected was tell it its IP address; it got everything else from the print server. We invested the capital to buy the printers outright as a cheaper option overall, but I know finance is available. We also still have--as we always have--a handful of older Brothers still lurking in low volume areas that nonetheless need a private printer e.g. Heads of Year. The threshold was something like 300 pages a month, I think--below that, we make do.

I can't find a higher res version of this image, and I don't think I'm brave enough to stick it up in my office anyway and let out the deep, dark secret of my entire professional career, but:

Policy & Request form from our school, which has been in place coming on 4 years now, approved by governors twice (i.e. it was re-approved after two years) and has never caused any trouble: Closed Circuit Television Policy V1.1 June 2014.docx Appendix 1 - Request Form.docx We have three designated people for a school of 1200 pupils & ~150 staff, for 15 cameras all situated outside purely for crime reporting. Practically speaking the site manager (one of the three) always comes to us anyway, so it's me and one of the technicians who know how to use it. Any footage I export, I keep in a TrueCrypt volume.

This is my scheduled task: No "start in" parameter set, because it's starting TASKKILL, which is in system32, and then identifying TrusteRevalController.exe solely as a running process without needing to know the path.