flyinghaggis

Currently got a MK5 Golf GTi which I've had for a couple of years. Averaging about 30mpg at the moment even with town driving so pretty happy with that. MPG isn't too big a deal for me at the moment as I only do about 4000 miles a year. Probably just aswell seeing as that only works out at just over 300 miles to a £65 tank of super unleaded! http://www.parkers.co.uk/imagecache/file/630/archive/VW/Golf%20GTi%20(2005%20on)/08_Golf_GTI.jpg Used to have a Civic Type-R but sold it as I found that it did my back in due to the seats and driving position in it being rubbish. Loved the gearbox and still miss that rev happy VTEC engine though! The chassis, steering feedback of the GTi are miles better than the CTRs though. @ TeddyKGB - thought I unrecognised the name from uk-mkivs.net. The Internet's a small place!

I've been considering one of those to run alongside my 20" Dell Ultrasharp 2007WFP. Soooooo tempted but struggling to justify spending nearly £500 on a monitor. I still want one though What's the verdict on it then? Worth the cash?

We've got the same issue. Generally most pupils profiles are pretty small (<10Mb) but there are a few problem apps on the network (mostly Adobe, Macromedia and Ulead ) which literally bulk up a pupils/staff profile to around 40-50Mb if puplils run them. Would be good to know if there's any way around this though I'm guessing without doctoring the program installers registry settings or writing fancy logoff scripts there probably isnt a solution other than the obbious which is to regress back to mandatory profiles?

Cheers for the info everyone :-)

I've been learning to snowboard for the last 3 months now and was contemplating buying my own kit as so far I've just been renting at the dry ski slope I've been learning at. Couple of quick questions :- 1) Whereabouts is the best place to buy kit from. Should I buy it online (which will presumably be cheaper) or should I take the time to go to a shop which will give me a chance to try on the kit/etc? Hopefully now should be a good time as it's near the end of season! 2) To get started I'm going to need to buy a snowboard, bindings, boots and a helmet. A pair of more substantial gloves probably wouldn't go amiss either as I've shredded through my current pair after falling so much and holding onto the rope tow! What kind of board/etc would people recommend for a beginner? I've had a look there are loads of different brands at a variety of prices but TBH most of it looks pretty similar to me! 3) Are there any good snowboarding forums out there that would be worth checking out for additional info? Any recommendations or suggestions for the questions above would be appreciated! TIA

QFT!! Definitely agree 100%. I think MS should really be looking at using the 'home' version of the OS as a testbed for new features that people would find useful but where if issues creep in it doesn't take down an entire business network! At the end of the day if a program crashes once a week on my home PC it's not the end of the world but that same crash once a week on 500 PC's at work would be completele and total disaster! If anything it's logical that the 'business' client version of the Windows OS should be a step behind and less fully featured than the home version. The fact that most business/schools are quite happy to stay with XP just goes to prove that point. There's also the problem that MS want to release a new version of windows every 2-3 years but this just isn't a realistic figure in a work environment due to the time taken (and cost) to test and update software (and potentially hardware) for a new OS. I'd much prefer to see MS perhaps update the home version every 3 years and the 'business' version perhaps only every 5-6 years. Something like that sounds a lot more logical and realistic than what they're currently planning which is a new windows version every couple of years!

Nvidia FTW In fact I'm planning on NEVER buying an ATI/AMD card again in the near future at home or at work. This is because they left beta-testing code in the driver that broke all of the open-GL dependant apps (of which there were loads) at our school for users without admin rights, so everyone at work apart from IT!, and didn't fix the problem for at least 3-4 driver version updates nor did they ever admit to the error That's unbelievably sloppy for a company the size of AMD and show's just how little testing/design they put into coding their drivers. In fact we still get all kinds of weird graphical glitches on the ATI cards such as black bars on the windows shutdown screen that aren't a problem on Nvidia or even intel onboard PCs. That and we've had problems with a lot of the older ATI chipset based cards in our school dying whereas we've never had a single failure in any NVidia based model. To top it off they try and bundle crapware (earthsim!) with their driver releases and I've had numerous issues with driver updates. ATI/AMD Graphics cards (software drivers in particular) are complete and total rubbish IMO! NVidia/Intel cards on the other hand quite simply just seem to work

It's not bad value but but AFAIK its based on older tech and is outperformed by the 8800GT which is faster and requires less power. The 8800GT card below is probably a better bet IMO :- £123 Novatech NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB SLI PCI Express Graphics Card - Retail : nov-88gt5

I once found an ceramic egg cup someone had put inside to support a CD drive where the mounting brackets in the case were broken

That's abysmal given the price of the Prius. You could buy a diesel familty hatchback the same size that's more efficient for around £5k less. Hell even my Golf GTi does over 30 mpg! I've still to be convinded that petrol-electic hybrids are anything other than a gimmick that we'll look back on and laugh at in a few years time! The extra weight/cost of the batteries and electric engine seems to instantly negate any benefit they offer IMO.

'Good Kids' is just another way of saying 'Bad kids that haven't been caught yet'!

Most of the reviews I've read suggest that they're not any more efficient or environmentally friendly than a modern diesel engine. Most of which these days can all average around 50 mpg in a small family hatchback. Another thing that's always puzzled me is surely the batteries will need replaced every 5 years as eventually they'll lose they'll ability to hold charge? Given the price of a single car battery I'd expect you'd be looking at around a 4 figure sum to replace all of them in the Prius?

One thing I couldn't see on the site is do you get to download the pay-to-view lessons if you buy them or do you still have to view them directly on the site?

Them were the days! I still remember getting a Creative Dual-speed (300Kb/s) CD-ROM drive and a 16-bit Soundblaster Multimedia kit for my old 486 DX2-80Mhz for Xmas/Birthday one year when I was in my teens. Think it cost around £250 at the time and I was absolutely over the moon being able to play 'Magic Carpet' and 'Dark Forces' on it Those games both rocked! (That is once you spent several days trying to load the DOS drivers into upper memory so you could free up enough of the 640k base memory to launch them. And obviously setting all of the DMA, IRQ interrupts, MIDI, etc in the sound config file ) I was also amazed that a single CD could hold twice as much data as my Hard Drive!

Watched about a third of them so far. They seem really good! The examples are all really well chosen and it's much nicer being able to sit and watch it than having to read through a book and try and run through the examples yourself at the same time.

It think it was called 'Pole Position' or something like that? Wasn't there a male and female detective who went around racing and solving crimes? Kind of like scooby doo meets knight rider! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_Position_(TV_series))

I'm not so sure M$ will bring out a blu-ray drive for the xbox 360 as IMO they'll struggle to sell it if Sony cut the price of the PS3 to around £250. Any add-on drive is likely to be over £125-150 so I think given that people will just buy a PS3 or standalone player instead. That and you're still stuck with the conundrum that most xbox360's dont have HDMI out which I think is required for 1080p blu-ray playback. I can also see MS trying to focus attention on their on-line movie rentals which makes me think they may not be that keen to promote blu-ray.

Maybe we should make exam tests more like 'who wants to be a Millionaire' gameshow to prepare pupils for their future. Then you could have lifeline's that depend on the mobile phone. Like 'phone a classmate' or 'ask the internet' I'll take a 50/50 on the answer to that question

What are students going to do on mobile phones that they can't already do given access to school-owned computers/latops and old fashioned pen/paper?

Yeah, just being cheeky! There's not much in it really TBH but the intel Core2 chips have a slight performance edge at the moment over the AMD X2s.

That's because they're not as fast or energy efficient as the Intel Core2Duo's

Cheers for the reply's fok. £6kish works out round about the same as the 3com spec we were looking at and the HP looks like a better unit. Hopefully it'll play ball OK with the rest of our 3com switches if we go down that route! In fact it's looking like 3com might not be the networking powerhouse that they once were as there seem to be holes in their product range (which suggests they're struggling to get new products on the market). That and there's talk of them being bought over by a Chinese company which concerns me when it comes to getting support for it in future. I'm definitely of the opinion that HP would be the better option at the moment.

We're just about to add a couple of sites to our existing campus which will require at least an additional 2 fibre connections on our main core swich (currently full). We've also got a new blade chassis (on gigabit ethernet connections) that's hanging off a switch connected to the current core switch. Obviously this is far from ideal so I was thinking given this expansion now would be the ideal time to start looking at a replacement core switch so we can return to a full star network topology with all of the servers hanging directly off the main switch. In terms of connection we'd need the following as a minumum :- *At least 14 Fibre Connections (to cope with current servers and uplinks plus future expansion) * At least 10 gigabit ethernet ports Currently all of the switches on our network are 3com (a mix of 4900s and 4400s). If we needed to I think we might be able to buy additional stacking units but given current developments (and likely future ones) on the site I think that a new core switch would be the better more future proof option. I was thinking about something like the 3com modular chassis below fitting with a gigabit module and a fibre module :- 3COM 3C16894-UK 3Com Switch 7754 4-Slot Chassis Bundle http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/detail.jsp?tab=features&pathtype=purchase&sku=3C16894 it's difficult to predict what options we might use in future (VOIP,PoE,80211N) but does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives to the 3com above and are there any features we should be looking for in particular? Would a modular option be the best bet or are stacks perhaps untimately more flexible? Any recommendations/advice would be appreciated? TIA

There's also no way to audit what software is installed on a computer and whether the licence covers you to use that software for teaching. For example what happens if a teacher brings in laptop loaded with software that it loaded with programs that are only licences for 'home/non-public' use and then runs them for pupils to use/see? Then there's the issue of what happens if a teacher brings in a laptop full of personal/illegal material and copies it onto a network share. Also what happens if another user(staff or pupil) browse's onto their laptop or hacks it when they're on your network and steals that users personal files/data? Tech support could also be a massive drain on resourses. How can you be expected to troubleshoot problems and make things work when you have hundreds of computers with different OS's, software and hardware configurations all of which you have no control over whatsoever? It's one thing if it's a locked down laptop provided to the staff by the school specifically for school-use but as far as Im concerned there are far too many issues to allow even staff to bring in their own computers into school and onto the network. And don't even think about the possibility of letting pupils bring in their own PCs!

I think the main issue was the way the original poster phrased the thread and subsequent replies. It's tone came across as very confrontational and closed-minded. They would have been better simply posting 'technical reasons not to deploy open office alongside MS Office and associated security risks' rather than complaining about the internal politics in their school.