sonofsanta

Surprised at the troubles with Ricohs; 3 of our 4 copiers on site are Ricoh and they're excellent, both reliable and user friendly. If they do break down there's a very good service level agreement on them - something like 4 hour response time, 95% first fix within 2 hours, 98% uptime in a quarter.

This is why legalising drugs would be an excellent idea - because once all the usual suspects are legal, the ones that we understand the effects of and know how to manage & treat, people aren't driven to these new and unknown substances. Prohibition was never a great idea anyway, but is completely and horribly flawed when factories in China can churn out molecules on demand via internet order. The way the law works - it's legal until we specifically ban it - can never keep up with how quickly we can create chemicals now. The law is so specific, in fact, that just changing the chirality* of a banned molecule makes it suddenly legal. *in brief: the arrangement of atoms, almost like a mirror image of the original molecule. They are sometimes referred to as left-handed/right-handed.

They're an American thing, I think, not really made their way over here as far as I've heard. Not that I'm particularly in a place to hear about these things, I suppose. BORN TO BE OLD.

Turnout in 2001 was <60%, and no-one in Westminster batted an eye. Low turnout will never bother any politician; if anything, it probably gives them carte blanche in their own minds to do as they please, as no-one is taking any notice. Spoiled ballots, on the other hand, are counted, are more likely to be recognised as a protest vote instead of apathy. EDIT: source is http://www.ukpolitical.info/Turnout45.htm

That music video is the single greatest thing I have ever seen. And I was present for the birth of both my sons. Honestly, it's cheered my day right up. Absolutely perfect.

It doesn't matter what poison you choose, you need to practice moderation: getting hammered like this is just Norse-sense

There is a lot of good stuff in the EU -- Leia & Han's twins! -- but it was all too detailed and full, I reckon. There was no way they could honour all that stuff and still have space to tell the story they want to tell (or any story except a bodged together mish-mash of 30 years of tie-ins) so I can understand why they did it.

Disney out and out said that anything Expanded Universe is now no longer canon, so Kyle Katarn has been relegated to fan-fic level

We had that discussion in the office, one of my techs said that Wookies are long lived. The internet reckons ~400 years, so understandable that Chewie still looks good. That, or it's Just for Men. In other news: Everything We Know About The First Star Wars Spin-Off Film, Rogue One

Not even remotely a hoax. We bought one here to use with my Nexus 4 in lesson demonstrations, and it works surprisingly well for cardboard + plastic lenses + 2 year old phone not meant to do the job. It makes me happy because I don't get any motion sickness from it, and if I'm alright with Cardboard, I'll definitely be alright with all the fancy-pants proper systems out in the next 18 months

True, but I was thinking in terms of a full refresh - the 600 series was all new from the mid-end up, the 900 series is all new from the mid end up (if you count the 750Ti, which is the same architecture). AMD have spent the last few generations introducing one new chip at the top and just shuffling everything else down and rebranding it. And even then, GCN1.2 is still only a refinement - Kepler and Maxwell were all new designs. There should really be a GCN 2.0 by now, except AMD don't have the R&D resources anymore. Hopefully the HBM stuff works out for them. I love AMD. I'm British, I always love the underdog! But they have been left behind in CPUs, and they are in very real danger of the same happening in GPUs at the moment. As it is they've already fallen back onto their CPU strategy of "cut all the prices!" They can't be making much money on selling the big R9 chips at the prices nVidia are forcing them to sell at.

Bloomin' 'eck - had no idea the costs had spiralled that high. Still, I'd argue that the economy can recover on a faster timescale than the Planet Earth can. Where's Captain Planet when you need him? He'd get my vote.

The knee-jerk reaction against nuclear is the most annoying thing about the Greens. Reluctance to build more nuclear has meant we've built more coal/gas plants and polluted the atmosphere much more. Nuclear waste isn't ideal, no, but it's a much less pressing issue than CO2 emissions at this point. In terms of CO2, nuclear is as green as wind power, and more green than solar. Arguments about Fukushima - where a design three generations old withstood an earthquake ten times more powerful than it was designed to handle, and a tsunami on top of that, without melting down catastrophically - are particularly irrelevant to our nice, stable continental plate as well. I still can't fathom why Germany stopped building them as a result except that it was a convenient excuse for something they already wanted to do.

Judging by the pattern nVidia have used recently and the chip in the 980, the 1080 (if that's what they call it, and the snowboarder in me hopes they do) will be the bigger Maxwell chip that's currently in the Titan X, but at a more sensible price, so any reading you do about Maxwell now will be good to know for next gen. This is the same pattern they used with the 600/700 series - the 680 was actually a small chip in the flagship card (GK104), and they held back the monster chip of the same architecture for the 700 series (GK110). 900 has a similarly "small" chip (the GM204 - the "04" at the end tells you its class) and the Titan X is based on the bigger brother, GM200. The 1100 series will probably be a wholly new architecture, but Maxwell is a good 'un and there's no particular need to wait.

That was true around the AMD 5000/6000 series and the nVidia 400/500 series that were their contemporaries (the Fermi chip), but nVidia's current Maxwell chip is an absolute stonker for power efficiency. AMD's current problem is how long it's been since they last released an actual new chip, not just a refinement of existing & lots of rebrands; I think it was the 7000 series three years ago. An interesting chart I saw this morning, showing how AMD's market share is tanking at the moment: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/nvidia-shows-signs-of-strain.43294/page-161#post-1828480 [ATTACH=CONFIG]30181[/ATTACH] (click for bigger)

I don't want to get excited. I don't want to get excited. I don't want to get excited. I can't get hurt again. But Han bloody Solo! I'm getting so excited.

Good to know I'm not the only weak-willed person on these forums, unable to resist the lure of the shiny shiny

Also from his Twitter: Maybe next time!

The Dragon launch of two nights ago was incredibly close to landing the Falcon rocket for recovery; SpaceX managed to get a plane in the area to record the touchdown. That it can get this close is incredible - it's like trying to catch a wooden spoon dropped from the second floor on the palm of your hand. They're mad geniuses, the lot of them.

Sounds like the first draft of the Matrix sequels, tbh. $10m at a dollar a time for a "reserved space in the Symbol Matrix Data Object Universe" might take a while, I'm thinking. I don't reckon he'll hit that in a month... Anyone worked out what the Christian angle actually is, beyond "I'm a Christian"?

Even so, would you trust them to develop a secure and reliable system? Pound to the penny they forget to renew the security certificate the day before the election and it all breaks anyway, judging by most government websites.

This article is simply staggering. Meet the e-voting machine so easy to hack, it will take your breath away | Ars Technica "shoup", incidentally, is the name of the company at the time the device was installed. So that's "abcde" to connect to the network, "admin" to get into the admin account, and the company name to open the database and start fiddling results. As a commenter on the article points out, flaws like these aren't deliberate backdoors; they're so unbelievably awful they can only be incompetence. It makes you wonder what the certification process actually consisted of beyond "it turns on. Great, we're done!"

To finish this thread off, then, here are the documents I ended up using for testing: Battle of Agincourt.docx - this Wikipedia article reformatted as an 18 page colour document, mostly text with some images and colour text. A good basic document for comparison's sake, similar to student work. OfficeDoc.docx - a 2 page office document i.e. pie charts, cheesy stock photo. The images are sharper and more colourful than Agincourt which is useful in spotting problems with print resolution. CUPS test page - very handy for spotting problems with printer resolution (especially the spoked black wheel - look for how big the black blob in the middle is, when detail can't be resolved, and any Moiré patterns in the spokes) and colour gradients. Datacolor's test image - very handy for us because we use a Datacolor Spyder to calibrate our IPS monitors, so we could check accuracy. The black scale at the bottom right - the set of grayscale squares - was useful for spotting how laser printers crush the blacks. I'll write up a separate post with impressions of the x451dw (including scans of prints), @newpersn, but in brief: very impressed, particularly for value and simplicity (changing the inks is hilariously easy after dealing with belts and fusers). Contrast is a little lower than a laser but that's because the laser crushes the blacks, and the OfficeJet Pro X is more accurate in that regard. It's colour balance was a bit off, but that's nothing that can't be corrected with a colour profile if it's that important. The dithering pattern is visible, but is less distracting that the crosshatch pattern of a laser, so I'd say that the x451dw is better for images than a laser, if you're thinking about your art department.

And as this test proves, blogs have bugger all visibility at the moment. Hopefully something to be fixed when @ZeroHour shifts everything over to SkyNET, or whatever the platform is.

I think you'll find I'm an inverse Katie Hopkins, judging the toffs from my gutter down here