flyinghaggis

It must be near impossible for anyone under 21 to afford to drive at all these days regardless of the car. I've heard several friends say their sons have had annual quotes of around £2000 just to insure relatively modest cars (Ford Ka's/etc)!

It certainly is! Just pre-ordered mine Had a look at some of the other tablets but for the price/spec nothing comes even remotely close. The lack of SD card slot is annoying but given it's my first forray into the android ecosystem I hopefully wont miss it too much.

I'm guessing when folks say it should be cheaper than an ipad they mean the Windows RT ARM based version of the tablet? Based on the specs (lower resolution screen,etc) of the device it should definitely be less expensive than a iPad (<£400). IMO it NEEDS to be if they want it to have any chance whatsoever of grabbing a share of the market. I can see the appeal for techies like ourselves but I doubt whether the general public will be willing to pay ultrabook prices (>£800) for an x86 based tablet?

Google Nexus 7 price, details confirmed in pre-I/O leak ? Reg Hardware Sounds like a really nice tablet for £130 if the specs and price are to be believed?

My personal feeling is that 11" laptops (with a 1368x768) resolution are the best compromise for most uses. That way your get netbook form/portability with the performance/resolution of a regular laptop for around £300-400. As you've noticed supply seems to be an issue most manufacturers are dropping them in favour of 11" tablets or pricey 11" "ultrabooks". No idea if it's any good but I notice that Sony do a 11" Vaio E Series which looks like a decent alternative to the X130e? VAIO E Series : VAIO & computing : Sony

True but on average the ability/intelligence of children as a whole from one year to the next wont really change. Plus it's not like they can really make exams exactly equally difficult from one year to the next anyway. There's always going to be complaints that exams have gotten easier/harder. I still think that assuming pupils are going to have a similar average spread of ability from one year to the next and banding them based on this is a fairer way than the current system and makes it easier for employers/universities to guage an applicants suitability for a role. It also give the pupils/students something to strive for rather than lumping 30-40% of pupils in the same grade bracket when clearly there's going to be a significant difference in their abilities. In fact rather than "dumbing it down" to grades A-C why not put a pupils exam percentage score on their certificate and possibly even add/combine it with where that score puts them in the overall percentage of that entire yeargroup in the UK as a whole?

It strikes me there's basically 2 schools of thought regarding the purpose of pupils sitting exams. That they should either :- a) Show pupils have achieved a set level of ability OR b) Differentiate and band pupils based on their ability More and more the system seems to be gearing itself towards a) but my personal feeling is that we should be focussing more on trying to differentiate pupils based on their exam grades. Ie. For any given year 20% of pupils should get A's , 20% get B's ,etc. Regardless of whether pupils are getting smarter or exams are getting easier if they aim to keep these percentages on target then it would, to my mind, give a fair and balanced assessment of a candidates ability.

Actually I've just sat down to watch the surface keynote speech and I've gotta say I really love the look of that windows 8 pro tablet! Ive still got reservations about battery life and pricing but if they can crack those 2 issues then they could really be onto something! If that kickstand and type cover work as well as they appear to they might just have rendered traditional laptop form factor obsolete overnight. To quote a certain other company I'd even go so far as to say it might even be "magical and revolutionary" The only problem I see with it is that I'm not sure how well it will work if you want to sit with it on your lap on the couch? The kickstand doesnt look like it will work the other way round to raise the tablet at a comfortable angle for typing on the on screen keyboard plus that would put the keyboard at the wrong side of the device?

Back on topic .... I think pricing is going to be the critical factor here. There's a real sense that when it comes to tablets we're entering a brave new world where mid range models can be had for £200 and "premium" kit like ipad's & tegra 3 equipped Android tablets goes for £300-400. As other have said MS needs to be careful here as these are the expectations joe public has when it comes to tablets as things stand just now. If they want punters to pony up nearly a grand for a Windows 8 Pro tablet it had better be awesome! I also wonder how many people will want to buy a Windows 8 RT tablet once they realise it doesn't run any exisitng Windows x86 applications? Battery life /pricing are two key factors for schools where users typically wont be able to charge the devices thoughout the day. It's going to be a hard for us to sell the concept of them to teachers/management if Windows x86 tablets only have a 4-5 hour battery life and cost upwards of £600 when current expectations are that tablets should cost half as much and run for twice as long.

The new screen on the 15" model sounds amazing. 2880 x 1800 pixels!!! One of the new articles seemed to suggest, worryingly, that when the laptop boots it displays at an effectively scaled down half res of 1440x900 and then only "retina enabled" applications will be shown at the higher resolution. Doesn't sound like Apple have really had a chance to update OSX to cope with increased screen res in time for launch unfortunately. Makes for a nice glimpse into the future though

Servers have been down again since about 5pm today unfortunately as the number of posts on the thread below show! http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4064636470?page=590 I would go off on a rant about it but this guy pretty much puts across how I'm feeling right now The clip below may contain one or two expletives so probably one for headphones rather than speakers!

I'd stay away from the E6600 as it's pretty dated. i3 is definitely the way to go unless costs are really tight.

Server Status - Diablo III Looks like Asia is the only realm up. I reckon all the Koreans/Chinese have got EU/US accounts (rather than their own) to farm items on the auction house and that's why the servers are overloaded

Nah, it's free to play. Mind you Blizzard have setup an official Diablo auction site for online items which you can buy/sell for real cash. Blizzard take a 15% cut on everything sold though! Some folks on the battle net forums have been saying they've gotten conected but I think they're telling fibs. All i'm getting is "error 37: server busy".

Nah, just one server for each continent (EU, US, ASIA) as far as I know so not really like WOW. In fact think of every game as being an "instance" since it's not really an MMORPG Still getting an erroer saying the servers are busy so haven't managed to get online yet. Guess I should have expected that as there's probably about a few hundred thousand trying to connect at the moment!

90 minutes to go assuming Blizzards EU server doesnt fall over! Anyone else on here going to be logging on tonight at launch?

Yeah, pre-ordered it by signing up for the annual WOW subscrition. I've been playing the beta for the last couple of weeks and it was great fun. Didn't seem radically diferent from Diablo 2 in terms of gameplay but no doubt it'll be a blast. Can't wait for the servers to go live......

Off-hand do you know what sort of price we'd be looking at annually for a 10Mb leased line or would it vary wildly depending on the area/distance? Even a ball park figure would be handy for reference. I'm suspecting that even though they might not be thrilled with the current ADSL remote access setup they'll quickly lower their expectations if it costs the earth to get something substantially better!

These new Geforce cards are sounding really nice. Not tempted yet as the only games I'm playing on PC at the moment (Warcraft and Diablo 3) seem to run OK on my current GTX470 but it's good to see Nvidia making improvements in performance and power consumption. On a side note what's with the GTX 690 pricing! I mean it's more than TWICE the price of the GTX680 :eek:How does that work when it's basically 2 680's on the same card. Surely it should be more around the £600 figure in line with the old GTX 590?

The site's about 5 miles away and there's no line of sight unfortunately.

We have playingfields that are away from our main campus site which are primarily used by the PE department and the admin staff there who maintain the place. At the moment the only IT kit up there is a couple of laptops and a printer which are netorked together using a slowish (3-4 Meg) BT ADSL Router. At the moment the laptops are setup to connect to our main site and log on in the same way that staff would at home (via Microsoft TMG/UAG). There's been talks of expanding the amount of IT kit there so I've been contemplating what would be involved in setting up the site with direct access to the network here. This obviously raises the question as to whether the ADSL line would be fast enough , should we have some kind of server/domain controller at the site and what other hardware will be required? What kind of setups are others here on the site running in terms of wide area networks?

MPs to get free iPads at taxpayer's expense - Telegraph Not sure what to make of this! I guess in some ways it's more secure than giving them laptops though. All they need to add now is an expenses App

IMO for home users Microsoft's built-in firewall and Security essentials AV are more than enough. If it wasn't for the AV providers throwing money at OEM's like Dell/HP to bundle their software with new computers and PC world trying to make a quick buck punting them with every new PC they sell I'd be surprised if they had any home-user market share left whatsoever!

Maybe I'm getting jaded but I cant recall Intel releasing a new architecture which offered so little improvement on the previous generation in terms of the benchmark scores. At stock speeds there's virtually no change in most apps compared to Sandy Bridge. I know it's a minor change primarily to a new 22nm process, HD4000 graphics and that power efficiency is better but I'd hoped for at least some CPU performance gain....

I guess MS probably want to hedge their bets by producing a device to rival IOS and Android tablets as full Windows 8 slates don't really seem to be there yet in terms of battery, weight and price. Maybe "disaster" is too strong a word but it's the lack of group policy and legacy software support is certianly disappointing. Given time these things could improve though.....