LosOjos

Big thread about this going on right now: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/av-multimedia-related/146561-4k-televisions-there-point.html

eBay selling them for £250 - £350

As @Arthur said, it's early 2008. A new logic board (from eBay at least) will cost anywhere between £100 and £300, ultimately leaving me a 2GB, 2.4/5 GHz Core 2 Duo machine and a total cost of £200 to £400 (including the other parts I need to buy), whereas @ict-direct have refurbished Lenovo T410s for less than £300 (i5 2.4Ghz, 4GB): http://www.ict-direct.co.uk/mobile-computing/laptops/lenovo/lenovo-t410-refurbished-core-i5-laptop.html

As @Arthur said, it's early 2008. A new logic board (from eBay at least) will cost anywhere between £100 and £300, ultimately leaving me a 2GB, 2.4/5 GHz Core 2 Duo machine and a total cost of £200 to £400 (including the other parts I need to buy), whereas @ict-direct have refurbished Lenovo T410s for less than £300 (i5 2.4Ghz, 4GB): http://www.ict-direct.co.uk/mobile-computing/laptops/lenovo/lenovo-t410-refurbished-core-i5-laptop.html

Yup. All these luxury cables are a waste of money; in analogue gear, fair enough, it really does make a difference (although I'd argue only an audiophile would be able to tell the difference between a decent piece of cable and a "luxury" cable). Problem is retailers are cashing in big time on that old analogue mind set of signal interference and connection quality and totally mis-selling digital connectivity cables. They either work or they don't; end of story!* * OK, I know when you get to certain lengths of cable, cable thickness becomes important, but that's quite a specific case

Well I got hold of a Snow Leopard DVD, tried to boot from it - nothing. Removed the RAM and got the constant beeping as expected, so there's some life in it but not sure if it'll ever run again. Going to try replacing the PRAM battery and putting a hard drive in it; thinking perhaps it just won't boot at all without a HDD present. Worst case scenario, I'll have spent £20 on parts I can resell and will have an SSD to shove in one of the many PCs in the house! Will then strip down the Macbook and sell it off as parts. I'm increasingly suspecting the logic board is fried and the cost of replacing it isn't worth it IMO, would rather buy one of @ict-direct's refurb i5 laptops for a similar price!

Is there anything sadder than watching your fellow man get sold a gold plated optical lead? http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/tv-dvd-blu-ray/tv-accessories/cables-accessories/sandstrom-av-gold-series-s2opt314x-digital-optical-cable-2-m-21948986-pdt.html

To be fair, I've found Curry Pc World's prices quite competitive lately. Not always the cheapest, but usually cheap enough that I'll buy from them rather than order online and wait. Perhaps they've finally realised that if they don't offer prices comparable to online, they'll go out of business! Some things they still rip you off on, especially cabling of any description, but appliances and electronics seem fairly priced now.

He's finished posting now, and made them all available as high res PNGs to download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/r4hjj10r4xdx2u3/DOOMART1993.zip?dl=0 I bet they would! They weren't little Warhammer sized things either, check out the size of them (and Romero's hair):

I'm sure a lot of you will already have seen these, but if you follow John Romero (@romero) on Twitter, right now, he's posting dozens of original sprite sheets, model scans and bits of trivia from the original DOOM in celebration of the 21st anniversary of it's release (10th December 1993) Here are a couple of tweets he's posted so far: Pistol Scans pre-editing Location concept sketches Super gory DOOMGUY sprites (Unused)

It's a marketing con, the Samsung won't be anywhere near that refresh rate in real terms: Fake Refresh Rates Conversion: Samsung Clear Motion Rate vs Sony MotionFlow vs LG Motion Clarity Index

Well both those articles are talking about the US market, there are still huge areas of the world who don't have the luxury of a fast, reliable internet connection, including large portions of the UK. So, whilst downloads might well be taking over physical sales in the US, I don't think you can apply the same rules to the rest of the world. In terms of my personal experience, all the major high street retailers I shop in still have huge DVD/Bluray sections, and I'd say they average about a 60/40 DVD/BluRay split - hardly a dying format

@mark80 - we didn't have a particularly strong KS2 intake but even if we did, our 3LOP was above national average so surely our VA should be positive too?

I've had numerous Sky engineers out to look at it. Last guy improved it somewhat with new LNB, but it's still sketchy in anything but clear blue sky. Have had similar experience in the past; I avoid Sky at all costs (the missus insisted this time as we can't get Virgin, 12 months with it has convinced her to ditch it!)

Try changing this: #000000 to this: #5F604C Only white colour I see is "PrimaryForegroundColor", so you could try changing that too. Trial and error

Or a single HVD (once they can make, print and sell them for less than £30 a piece!), which will of course mean another new disc player! - - - Updated - - - Wrong thread?

It's easier to force adverts via streaming though, as 4OD proves; you can't even fast forward past them! They still produce and commission the shows, they still decide when/where to make them available, they still charge you a subscription to access it - I can't see any reason they wouldn't want to do it to be honest. Plus it'd mean Sky can stop relying on satellites which you can't get a signal from if there's anything more than mild drizzle!

We're trying to get to the bottom of an issue with our Raise VA. In English, Raise is reporting we have a significantly negative VA, yet we were 6% above national average for A*-C and 5% above for 3 LOP - I can't understand for the life of me how we can be both above average and have a negative VA

I agree and I've been saying it to anyone who will listen for years! The only way I can see TV going is all on demand; on certain dates, new content is released (e.g. new episode of Gotham every Monday), from that point it's up to you when you watch it. No more TV schedules beyond release dates. In fact I think the main reason we're not already there is that we have an awful network infrastructure in this country. Should have scrapped HS2 and invested the money in the network infrastructure, would have been exponentially more useful to everyone. IMO of course

That's the problem with tech - like cars, you just have to accept it'll lose 50% of it's worth in six months, otherwise you'd never buy anything!

I recently bought a 4K TV - I love it, and I have to say even 1080p content looks better to my eyes, though how much of that is down to the TV upscaling and just the fact that it's LED (as opposed to LCD) is hard to say. The way I see it is this: I generally only aim to buy a TV every 10 years. My old TV had died, so it was time for a new one. I went for 4K so that I am relatively future proofed. As has been said, there's a sever lack of 4K content right now - Netflix do some, but you need a compatible TV and minimum 15MB broadband connection. I have a home built Steambox so I have played a couple of games in 4K and they do look better, but a lot of them don't have 4K textures so you're still not getting the full benefit. Also, I really think 4K is pointless on anything less than a 40" screen - to my eyes at least, I can't tell 1080p/4K apart on smaller screens. Picture quality is about more than just resolution though, you want to be looking out for refresh rates, colour reproduction, noise. Personally, I was unimpressed by the cheaper LG and Samsungs - I got the impression they'd really skimped on the panels to cram as many features in for the price as possible - though Samsungs upper-range were great. I went for a Panasonic in the end because we got a good price on it and I loved the picture, but I thought Sony were great too (this is in the <£700 range) In a nutshell, buy 4K if you don't plan to buy another TV in the next 5 years (by which point I reckon it'll be in to the mainstream), buy 1080p if you do.

I'll just be glad if I don't get given a job to do in the pub on the last day to be ready for first day back!

Mockaroo - Random Data Generator | CSV / JSON / SQL / Excel Just stumbled across this, really useful when your testing a new system or want to share some data with someone but need to anonymize it first. You can produce random data sets with a custom field set (from a wide range of options) and output in EXCEL/CSV, JSON or SQL. It also has a REST API, so you can build it straight in to your applications if you want to

@Jenis - haha yes, although you'd be surprised how often I see spreadsheets almost entirely manually calculated! Plan is to show advanced use of 'IF' formulas (i.e. chaining together, using AND/OR, using output as input to other functions), going over VLOOKUP & INDEX/MATCH, the pros and cons of both, dynamic charts, conditional formatting... basically anything you can do to make your analysis sheets as automatic as possible. To be fair, it's probably going to be pretty basic stuff to many people here (the nature of this forum means it's generally the more IT savvy who come across it), but at local DM meetings I'm always shocked at how much unnecessary manual calculation my peers do. Did have to laugh at the FFT conference last week - one of their directors, during a talk on Progress 8, said "don't even attempt to do Progress 8 calculations in Excel - it's impossible unless you're superhuman". Well, best put on my cape and over-pants then

I'll keep you posted Going to pop over to our techies after lunch, see if they'll let me jump on a Mac for half hour to make a bootable USB, also see if they have an old HDD knocking about I can use for testing, so may have an update as early as tonight