flyinghaggis

Yeah, that was my worry as once the initial hype died down most players seemed to have quite a negative opinion of it generally.

Was thinking about adding this to my Santa list! Is it still worth getting on PC? What's the verdict of everyone who'e been playing it?

I did notice that WipeOut is available in VR next month though so that might change my opinion https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/8/16755226/wipeout-vr-playstation-vr-ps4-omega-collection

I keep feeling tempted by Playstation VR but having spent a bit of time playing it at my mates I'm going to give it a miss for now. The resolution of the headset feels too low and pixelated, the field of view is narrow and the head/move controller tracking with the camera is kind of janky. It's not helped by the fact that the PS4 really isn't powerful enough IMO to drive VR games in terms of the CPU nor the GPU. It's a pretty epic experience playing games in VR but the technology isn't quite there yet as far as I'm concerned.

The obvious answer to this question is that you should buy both an Xbox one and a PS4! Plus a switch for the Nintendo exclusives and portable play Just noticed that you can get a PS4 pro with a game for only £300 right now. That's only £75 more than the base ps4 and is £150 less than the Xbox X. Seems like the best option IMO if you cant decide. There isn't really much between the PlayStation and Xbox overall especially in non pro/X varieties. The switch is cool but I wouldn't want it as my only gaming platform unless you already have a gaming PC or another console for the major releases.

Picked up an Anker Vertical Ergonomic wireless mouse in the sale yesterday for £10 as I've been finding I'm getting pain in my hand/wrist from using a regular one all day. Hopefully this will alleviate it or at least allow me to mix and match between this and a regular flat one to vary my grip and position.

Yeah, the Google timeline brings it into very sharp focus just how much information they actually have on everyone. I think concerns regarding just how much information these tech companies hold about us are perfectly legitimate. At the end of the day a private US based company having access to all that information about individuals all over the globe seems entirely inappropriate. Especially when you think about just how much of that data is held by such a small number of incredibly large and powerful companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. The issue at the end of the day as others say is that giving up some of your privacy can quite literally make a huge difference to your own productivity and being able to keep on top of things. Being IT experts I'm sure we could all build our own servers/connections, run open source software and OS's on our laptops, tablets and phones. However all of that comes with a huge overhead in terms of the time to manage and update it. As others have said it's just easier and outright more convenient to have all of your services/data like files, mail, calendars, apps, etc within a single ecosystem maintained and continuously updated/improved by a vendor. Maybe it'll change in future but as of right now everyone pretty much has to make a Faustian pact with either Apple or Google! Pick a poison.............

Had a look at one in my local store but it didn't seem noticeably easier on the eyes than a regular tablet to me so I have a feeling that, like you say, it wouldn't get much use if I bought one. Probably better just to get a regular android tablet from first impressions. I did cave into the sales frenzy and buy an Amazon fire TV stick for £25 though. Fed up streaming prime video to my Chromecast over a Google chrome tab and dont want the hassle of Amazon underground on my phone!

I notice there are some pretty good discounts on the Kindle Fire Tablets and E-Readers. I've been mulling over buying a dedicated E-Reader (like the PaperWhite which is currently on offer for £80) for reading tech guides and books. I thought it would be easier on my eyes than staring at a screen for hours on end since I spend enough time doing that at work. I'm not sure whether an e-ink reader is actually any better than a glossy tablet like the Fire tablet which would be more flexible since it can handle videos/apps/etc. Has anyone else bought a Kindle PaperWhite and if so would you recommend it? Or does it make more sense to just get a 7-8" Android tablet?

Amazon to make multiple Lord of the Rings prequel TV series ? The Register

Has anyone had a chance to try FileStream with Google Team Drives. I'm specifically wondering about how it handles offline files in Team Drives as I'm concerned about data protection implications if staff take an offline copy of all the files in the school's shared areas onto their personal laptops/etc.

To be fair you can also spec it with a mobile GTX 1060 6Gb which, looking at a few benchmarks, means it's pretty much up there and on a par with the Geforce 980 I currently have in my desktop. Still as much as I like it (and even taking into account it could probably replace my desktop PC) it's impossible to seriously consider it given that price tag !

Taken in isolation, compared to business pricing, I'd agree the rates seems reasonable at first glance. The problem is that Adobe went from offering a one-off site licence for the school on CS5 to an annual per-device licence for Adobe Cloud. This would have meant annual cost went up by a factor of 10 in the transition to Adobe Cloud if we'd rolled it out to all the locations we previously had CC5.

It's really frustrating as it's basically forcing us to move away from Adobe software as the standard for web/photo/movie/DTP. We used to have Creative Suite 5 on all computers throughout the school whereas now we've had to limit the install to just a couple of labs to keep prices in line with what we were paying previously Adobe seriously need to review this as they're pushing educational establishments towards cheaper competitors (and free alternatives).

I had an ultra cheapo Mpow bluetooth headset which worked OK on my phone but every time I tried to connect them to my PC I had issues with trying to enable both the audio and microphone simultaneously. When I configured it as a headset with mic enabled the audio quality went to low rate mono. I could get it working OK in stereo as headphones but not when combined with the mic. Has anyone else experienced similar issues? I ended up binning the wireless in-ear ones as they were really heavy and uncomfortable but I always wondered if it was just that particular headset or I'd done something wrong when setting it up?

The 5" pixel 2 looks a lot like last year's model with massive bezels and I don't think they've updated enough to justify the £630 price tag. The pixel XL 2 looks good but it really is a bit of a phablet and I personally wouldn't buy a phone that wide as I find it uncomfortable to hold. Why is it buying a 5" handset these days so often means having to settle for an inferior phone Also, no headphone socket which I guess we kind of expected but I didn't think Google would try and mug us for £160 for some wireless earphones! The Chromebook looks nice but again hard to justify spending that kind of money on a chrome OS device even now that it can run android apps. What's everyone else's thoughts as I only skimmed over the product line and didn't watch the presentation. Anything else interesting that I missed ?

I normally use my PS4 Wireless Headset when gaming on my PC. It comes with a USB dongle you can connect to any laptop/PC and you can get them for around £50.

We've just heard back with pricing for Altaro but it's looking considerably more expensive (as in nearly double the price) than Veeam? How did others find the Altaro pricing compared with Veeam?

Spent a while today sitting playing it and have fired up most of the games to give them a try. The rewind feature is really hand for getting past difficult parts of games! Was at a friends yesterday so we spend most of the time playing multiplayer stuff like Streetfighter 2, Starfox, Mario Kart & Contra I've spent most of today playing Zelda, Metroid and Super Mario World. It's a fantastic bit of kit even if it is literally just the same hardware Nintendo released last year in a different plastic shell with a different emulator on it. I know you could put together a retropie setup for less with all the SNES games (albeit illegally) but being able to get an official quality piece of kit designed as it is with two controllers for £80 is still a bargain IMO. I just hope they make enough of them this time round though knowing Nintendo I doubt they will.

The fear I had is that increasingly we're seeing ransomware attacks which are also network worms. So in addition to running on a client computer they also actively look for exploits which can allow them to infect other computers on the network which could potentially also include the backup server depending on it's connectivity. Likewise if the backup server can be compromised how long before ransomware attacks become 'cloud-aware' and actively look for connections/logins to things like Azure/AWS/etc in order to target them as well? I realise that's a bit of a doomsday scenario but it's certainly possible to the point where I don't feel confident having disk-only backups that are running live on networked servers. I think there's still a need for some-kind of offline backup as part of a disaster recovery scenario. I'd wondered if a cloud based backup might be an alternative to offline but I do worry about it being accessible in the event a backup server with access to it is compromised by a trojan/ransomware/etc. Do you guys think a backup to disk then cloud solution is suitably secure or should there also be some kind of offline disk/tape factored in as part of the strategy?

We've also been looking at Altaro just so we have something to compare against Veeam which is looking very expensive and like it might be overkill for our backup needs. Altaro mentions Azure cloud backup if you get the unlimited plus edition but if you don't have that can you backup to other cloud/offsite storage just as easily with the standard/unlimited version or is it just Azure? I haven't checked on pricing, and I'm not at all familiar with Azure, but I'm guessing other cloud storage providers will be cheaper than Microsoft Azure? In terms of on-site, off-site, cloud backups what's everyone doing these days? I guess we'll initially backup-to-disk on an on-site server but we'll also need cloud/offline backups of some variety in addition to this to protect against hardware failure/ransomware attacks/etc. Not quite sure what the most resilient and cost effective setup would be at the moment

We're looking to do something similar here. It's not setup yet but my first thought was to create a custom Active Directory Task-pad and give computing staff permissions to enable/disable the accounts https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2816.how-to-create-custom-mmc-and-add-taskpad.aspx

PC for me as well. I've played the beta on both PS4 and pc. It looks so much better graphically on PC plus mouse aiming is obviously the way to go. I had the original on PlayStation and just couldn't get on with the controls. Blizzard BattleNET support also should make multiplayer setup and chat a breeze as well.

You're probably right. Even if not I'm sure it's something they can fix in software. Just slightly awkward when it goes wrong in front of a worldwide audience! It's definitely going to make for some interesting times if/when we start seeing ARM chips powering laptops running MacOS.