Posts by Shaun 59 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Mar 2007
The Title says "12 of the best mice" - But not only did you manage to completely ignore anything made by Razor - That's like compiling a list of the 12 best F1 drivers and ignoring anyone German who drove a red car.
You also managed to list things which were not mice......................... Have you taken all your pills this morning?
????
Bill - Because M$ do make exceedingly good mices............
Well now that it's over I no longer feel the need to get up at stupid-o-clock on a saturday morning to download the latest episode so I can get my "battlestar fix" as early as possible...........
I loved/love the show - The darkness made it so much more refreshing than anything I've seen before - DS9 series 5, 6 and 7 nearly took us there, but never quite had the balls to go the whole way. Battlestar was about Genocide, and the fight for survival against an unrelenting and unbeatable enemy - If it wasn't dark and downright depressing at times (especially the secong half of series four - poor Dee :( ) it just would not have been the experience it was.
I am glad it had an ending - A lot of finale's leave enough scope for a sequel or direct spinoff - This didn't. The second half could have been a little shorter, with a lot less flashbacks, but the show has always put one thing ahead of the technology or even the plot - the charecters. We got to see them say their goodbyes, knowing that most of them would be ok.
Glad "The Plan" has been scheduled for the Autumn - gives me something to look forward to.
A slow, impractical car that looks like a Micra. Have I left anything out - Oh yeah - they're sticking a fraking French badge on it too..........
I can't think of anything more appealing.
And seriously - Lithium Batteries? On a concept car? Where's the fuel cell?
Anyone wanting to preserve their existing infrastructure need only complete Becta's FITS framework, them incorporate it into the school's SIP/SEF - That way you've proven that your system already meets the BSF spec, and you get handed a wad of cash to continue running your systems the way you see fit.
That's what our LEA is telling us anyway.
I've heard both positive and negative views from existing school techies who's schools have already started down the BSF route. For school IT Support staff this is either going to be a career maker or breaker. It's going to depend a lot on how goos your network really is, and whether your school's leadership team recognise that enough to fight in your corner rather than throw the cash at Dell/RM/whoever.
Interesting times........................................
Shaun - Blackfen School for Girls Network Manager.
SchoolTechies.co.uk is still up - but that's because it has it's own webserver on the LGfL's nice 100Mb fibre network.
Give Fasthosts the two fingered salute and host it yourself - There are plenty of schools with uber amounts of bandwidth.
I'd be quite happy to discuss hosting it. shaun at blackfen dot bexley dot sch dot uk
May I be the first 3DFX fanboy to say that we still miss 3DFX - If it's woeful mismanagement hadn't driven it into the ground, I think it would have saved us from the woes of an nVidia monopoly of the PC gaming market.
Yes ATI is still around - But for how long - It's parent company AMD is having trouble selling chips to the big boys, and I feel it's only a matter of time before nVidia throws some more cash in their direction for a little more IP.
I'm not saying that nVidia products are bad (Apart from their latest 700 series chipsets which are a buggy pile of ****), but monopolies always tend to provide rubbish support, and development slows without competition........
</end rant>
Try Trixbox (trixbox.org) - I was able to get it up and running with virtually no Linux experience, and it's running great. There's a good support community, and excellent documentation (Google for "Trixbox Without Tears").
Best of all it's free!!!!!!!!!
I'm planning on doing a fresh install of Vista this weekend, so wasn't overly worried if SP1 went horribly wrong.
Installation did take a while - and M$ are still incapable of making a progress bar that works - For god sake - how difficult can it be - a progress bar shouldn't go straight from 0% to 100%, nor should should an installation have three different progress bars when one would do the job. A progress bar has one job to do - show the end user how far into a job their PC is, so they know whether to just go make a coffee, or go watch the Godfather Trilogy. /end rant.
When I came back to my PC, everything looked normal apart from some customer feedback spyware doohickey. I decided to copy the 400MB patch onto my backup server, and something weird happened - it copied the file. It didn't spend three hours calculating how long it would take - it just copied in a few seconds. I've just tried the reverse - I copied a 1.3GB file from my server onto my desktop - It instantly said it would take 34 seconds, and it did. That alone is worth the hours installation, as if it carries on working will save me time in the long run. Well done M$ (yes I know it should have worked like that from the beginning but if M$ feel appreciated maybe they'll fix other things too - like why I'm using 1GB ram when I only have Firefox running).
I'm sure there will be horror stories about this patch - And I may well have been led into a false sense of security only to get my head chopped off at any moment, but for the moment M$ still have at least one moderately happy customer.
I had the exact same thing with my Sony UX1N1 UMPC - Vista business ran fine for the first few hours - The novelty of having Vista on a pocket sized device was great.
The novely soon wore off - Having more than 50% of my system resources being taken by a clean OS install (I never use the OEM installed OS - I never trust what "extras" they've decided to install) was simply unacceptable - It made gaming impossible :)
So I managed to install Windows XP (Which wasn't easy on a device with no built in CDROM and a USB CDROm which wasn't recognised by XP setup) and havn't looked back. Command and Conquer Generals works brilliantly on the little touchscreen, as does Civ and Quake3.
I do like Vista - My Gaming rig at home has been running it for a year now, and has only just started to feel like it needs a reinstall. My 1.8Ghz P4 bathroom media center has also been running Vista 24/7 for over six months now without any problems. It's far more stable than any other pre-SP1 M$ os I've ever used since 3.11 :)
I guess we now know what Billy G is doing with all his free time :)
Seriously though - This is the Register - They post pics of giant BSOD's and we laugh because it's funny. If M$ decided to use a V1 console to demo their hardware, then they're clearly more stupid than we think.
Seriously - this is funny - either laugh, or go get a sense of humour transplant.
This sounds like a good way to test that big honking railgun they've just developed.........
Surely there should have been a contingency for this kind of scenario - If I was spending a few million dollars of a spy sat, I'd have some kind of automated self destruct built into the system - Even something as simple as a few pounds of explosive strapped to the outside so that it explodes during reentry.............
Paris - because she likes secret video cameras..........
We've been working towards this target for almost two years. All secondary schools needed to have a VLE by 2008 and an MLE by 2010.
Most of the London Schools went with Fronter for the 2008 target, as LGfL got us a deal.
The MLE is down to our respective MIS providers. Capita have been developing their portal for quite some time, but as this is Capita, it's both costly, and there are always reliability issues.
Serco on the other hand, have provided this functionality for years (http://www.sercolearningsolutions.com/schools/products/mis.htm), but scrapping one MIS system in favour of another is costly and time consuming (Implementation and training).
As If us School techies didn't have enough to do..................
So Samsung have finally caught up with Sony's UX1N1 - That's had the 1.3 for almost a year now.
Any reason why you've pictured the Q1T instead of the previous Q1 Ultra?
For my money, I'd still go for the Asus R2h - You get way more in the box. But as I was spending work's money, I got the Sony, as it's a lot smaller, and actually makes sense as a UMPC (It's mobile, and has a keyboard).
Any of the three are still nice toys (I bought all three for my IT Support department). However, all three are way too underpowered for Vista - Even when all the nice GUI features are turned off, the mighyy Sony still struggles, and takes way to long to boot. And with all the nice graphics turned off, you're missing the point of Vista.
Just my oppinion.
If airlines were to adopt a Person weight + Luggage Weight = Price policy, then surely that would eventually mean that fat people would simply leave their luggage at home. Holidays would be ruined by the sight of fat people bathing in their opaque pants, or worse having to sit next to a fat naked bloke on the plane!!!!!!!!!
I say we ship all the fatties out to Japan, and let the "Research Ships" deal with them.............
This is bad. For most cars this will be fine, but imagine if you've just spent 35K on a Monaro, or worse 100k on a new Ferarri. If the EU are insisting that all cars have these features, does that mean that manufacturers won't be allowed to fit an off button?
I vote we send Jeremy Clarkson to Brussels with an AK47...............
In three years Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned, Afterward, they fly with a perfect operational record.................
Anyone else getting a feeling of de ja vu?
I've just finished rolling out our new Meru wireless network around our school - I've had one teacher make slightly negative comments about it, and that's it. The rest of the staff haven't been taken in by the BBC's scare mongering, and my IT budget keeps going up every year.
I know schools like mine are in the minority, but they do exist.
Good luck to all the school techies out there who are not as fortunate.
Shaun
- A school Network Admin somewhere in the south east.
I've had dreamscene and hold-em since February - What is the point of this article? Have they since been removed?
Dreamscene was a nice idea, but running at a decent resolution is way to cpu intensive.
I do like the poker game though.
Looking forward to more extras, if that's what this article is about.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
