sonofsanta

Only number 3 (With A Vengeance) is on there, which was the start of the diminishing returns. It'll be on telly at some point soon, I'm sure.

Right now I'd just say have a browse through the Humble Bundle Sale https://www.humblebundle.com/store/ and see what's dirt cheap - as good as, if not better than the Steam sale (which isn't on yet anyway). You get a Steam Key for everything, or you can often download a DRM-free installer to avoid issues with patchy internet. One of my techs was making a lot of happy noises about Divinity: Original Sin earlier this year. Witcher 2 is cheap on gog.com right now and well worth a play, although a bit risky if the kids might wander in - it definitely earns its reputation as a mature title* EDIT: same technician just said Grim Dawn was possibly his favourite game of the year though, even over Divinity. It's an ARPG by the bods wot done Titan Quest back in the day, and is £11 something on Humble *in the context of videogames, which basically means lots of ladies funbags on display, although the story and plot are actually mature and grim and well developed. None of that comes across when someone walks in the room and glances over your shoulder, though...

Please can someone pass the message on to @StevieM that I'm not talking to him again until he has at least Die Hard 1 & 2 watched, as the most exquisite and refined examples of the action movie genre. Some people.

Wasn't the only suspect update this month: KB 2553154, 2726958 clobber Excel ActiveX; KB 3011970 Silverlight, KB 3004394 Root Cert pulled | InfoWorld KB3011970 (Silverlight patch) has also been pulled by MS as it broke the DRM component. Personally I think the better fix would be banning DRM...

Good to see you acknowledge what is surely the greatest Christmas film of them all. As I saw posted somewhere recently, there are two kinds of people: those who recognise Die Hard as a Christmas film, and those who are wrong. Definitely going with Mini-Madvent Mega Monday Multi-Draw instead of Triple Draw Fridays then?

Ooh good shout - definitely the best carol.

Last Christmas by Wham Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon etc. Stop the Cavalry by Jona Lewie But really, it's not about any one song... it's about the incessant, inescapable barrage of festivity that gets me in the mood I bloody love Christmas me.

Oh yeah, standards matter, no-one can dispute that, although there's no benefit to having a cable of a higher standard than your equipment can support of course. And it can be worth spending a few quid more to get something with decent build quality (braided cable, sturdier connector housing etc.). But no matter how much you spend on the correct cable, the 1s and 0s either get there or they don't. My favourite Made Up Cable Claim ever has to be this one, though: SATA cables that improve the sound quality of your MP3s (£190 for a 40cm cable)

Oh. Wow. Not sure if that's better or worse than the £90 gold plated HDMI cable from the same brand, wherein the gold plating isn't the part making the connection (and there's literally zero difference between HDMI cables in terms of connection quality). No, no, you're right. The optical one is worse. That's a staggering level of Idiot Tax.

Jenson Button is racing at MacLaren next year. Thank heavens for that, would have been a travesty otherwise. McLaren announcement - Live! | Sky Sports

Das video ist private! Nicht so private jetzt. Do you have to be careful not to feed Will after midnight?

Oooh I get you - that's what we do already. £30 something for Server Std, £182 for Datacentre, etc. etc. I need more tea this morning, clearly.

I had no idea the sprites were based on actual clay models. Brilliant. Bet they'd be worth a pretty penny now...

Which pack? As best I can tell (and MS licensing is as clear as mud to me) the Enterprise CAL Suite includes some more server CALs (Sharepoint, AD RMS, more System Center stuff) but no server OS licences. If there's another way that might save me money, I'm all ears!

And I offered my opinion of Hyper-V, and you offered yours of VMWare, and that would all have been fine because we were both in positions to offer those opinions. Except you then made a statement about something you said you had no experience of - Never used it but I bet its really buggy - which isn't an opinion, it's just misinformation. On a technical forum answering technical questions, I don't think an expectation of facts is too much to ask for. Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but only Server CALs come under EES licensing - the server OS itself still needs licensing separately. There was a thread on just that topic last week. It's cheap as chips, still, something like £30ish for a Std licence, but EES alone doesn't cover you.

MS products aren't always perfect, no. But I can't think of a single Hyper-V bug I've suffered in production. *nix is hardly perfect either, is it? Doesn't mean I should disregard all of VMWare just because it runs on Linux. Each product has to be judged on its own merits, and IME Hyper-V is reliable and effective and more than meets my needs as a single site secondary.

Hyper-V is plenty for schools. Been running it on 2008R2 for over three years now, and 2012R2 is much improved (Hyper-V is probably the fastest moving part of Windows Server at the moment). Can't see why you'd waste money on VMWare for a school sized deployment - though, to be fair, I think their licencing has changed since the last time I looked at it. I mean, why bother with facts when you can just make stuff up based on nothing but biases and hearsay?

New wireless & new PCs this summer, servers due for replacement summer after that, then just an ongoing program of new PCs, plus LED projectors & new edge switches when budget allows. Actually all sort of boring for me now. We've already done everything in the five years I've been here - servers, oodles of desktops, core switches w/ VLANs, moved email to Office 365, cashless catering, new finance system, new MIS server, Windows 7, Office 2010... - so once the wireless is replaced, I've sorted everything and I'm starting to repeat myself. I am lucky to have SMT that a) have faith in my decisions* b) give me an actual planned for budget each year. *The fools! Mwah ha hah!

Ooh, tough choice - it could be John Lennon's Happy Christmas (War Is Over), it could be Jona Lewie's Stop the Cavalry for its dubbadubbadumdums... but I think for sheer sing-a-long-ability, I'm going to have to go with Wham's Last Christmas. Last Madvent, I won a great prize, But the very next day I gave it away This year, to save me from tears I'm keeping it all for myself (myself)

LG TVs are great, I have two at home. And honestly, >£1k on a TV is just silly IMHO; that's some serious early adopter tax. Those are the sort of tellies that are half the price in six months. I'd go with the LG at £900.

Not at all. My FTE is 115, I just added 180 licences. I did have that conversation with my reseller early on, before we were both on the same page. Things cleared up once I sent the part code over and he realised it wasn't on his price list for this month; once he got it sorted with MS his end we were good to go. Our number, like yours, is higher due to shared mailboxes and staff that have left but are only disabled/not yet deleted.

So... anyone cleverer than me know how to use Powershell to add the new tenant:OFFICESUBSCRIPTION_FACULTY licence to everyone who has the tenant:STANDARDWOFFPACK_FACULTY licence assigned? Before I start cludging my way through with CSVs, which will invariably involve missing someone... Nevermind, worked it out myself replace the word "tenant" with your school's tenancy. You can check your licence SKUs with Get-MsolAccountSku Connect-MSOLService -Credential $adminCredential $AccountSkuId = "tenant:STANDARDWOFFPACK_FACULTY" $OfficeSkuId = "tenant:OFFICESUBSCRIPTION_FACULTY" # get users $users = Get-MsolUser -all | where {$_.isLicensed -eq "True" -and $_.licenses[0].accountskuid.tostring() -eq $AccountSkuId} # assign licence for each user foreach ($user in $users) { Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName $user.userprincipalname -AddLicenses $OfficeSkuId Write-Host $user.displayname "granted Office licence" -f green }

Not heard that - way I figure it, the person sat right in the middle gets a lovely image, anyone even slightly off-centre is getting a distorted image as part of the curve becomes flattened from their perspective. Of course the real reason curved TVs exist is because they invented curved displays and needed to justify the R&D, plus the addiction to trying to create new product categories just in case they take off massively. See also: smartwatches.

The 770 will support 4k but it won't run games at particularly high settings/frame rates at that resolution. You'll either need to dial down the settings a chunk (won't need AA at least!) or run at 1920 x 1080, which will scale up nicely. I had no idea 4K TVs were getting so cheap already. My kneejerk reaction was "no point, too expensive, early adopter tax!" but looks like we're already past that point. So may as well (curved TVs can DIAF though, only of use to single men in their bachelor pads I reckon)

Flashes ain't no guarantee you've found the right device if you've already found one unexpected mystery machine device, that's why I reckon you need a laptop with you doing the pings so you know when you've found the right one. Shouldn't take too long if you make yourself an engineer's cable: Get a network cable Snap the plastic clip off one end ??? ProfitEasily switch between patch ports without fiddliness