I considered it absolutely ages ago when I was a very strict veggie but since I can’t eat nuts it wasn’t a goer.

I reckon it depends on how organised you are. I have friends who are vegan and I think they need to put a smidgin bit more meal planning in place. Another friend is thinking of it but since he can’t organise a drinking festival in a large building full of imbibing fluids he’s onto a losing game. I guess once you get the hang of it you’ll be ok. Make sure you get a source of vitamin B12. You don’t need that much but it is normally in meat and dairy.

Apart from that, if it floats your boat, go for it!

Am on atorvastatin (and lisinopril for bp) and it has reduced my cholesterol level from 8.1 to 4.7 at last check. I don’t think I have any side effects. Family has history of high BP and heart disease.

My LDL:HDL levels were wonky too but can’t remember the ratio.

I would talk to my doctor if I were you.

Onanism.

Damn. Forgot I did that last year. Have a PhD in it now 😛

Molecular electronics/chemistry 1992

I saw a core i3/5th gen available online in PCWorld t’other day for £299 or you could go for a 4th gen for £279.99. I’m a bit wary of the celerons. My sister was asking to replace hers on Sunday.

acer and lenovo

It won’t make the internet slow but your browser will wait a certain amount of time before it times out due to lack of a return address from the DNS request or seem slow if the lookup is slow. Especially pages with lots of different destinations. Once it receives the address it goes full speed.

I’ve got a 3-month freebie trial deal as I’m in Amazon Prime. I’m perplexed by them to be honest. They’re more expensive than buying a book, which you could understand by their length but I’m not sure £7.99 per month for a book is worth it.

Anyhow I’ve got Bill Bryson’s ‘Short History of Nearly Everything’ on in the car and it seems OK.

Anyone got any recommendations for anything else? I was thinking of the George RR Martin ones; they are about 34 hours each!

Was the question about the merits of 26″ vs. 650b vs. 29ers?

Just got the laptop back from the manufacturer. BIOS corruption apparently and they replaced the main board. Now much more stable, and am actually enjoying Windows 10. 🙂

@cougar – yes I know. We are sort of in the same business, remember? My DL980 servers are basically PCs with a superiority complex 😀

I’m just not willing to run memtest86+ indefinitely so that in some point in the future (which may be years) bit rot takes effect and I can go ‘aha!’. There has to be some point at which you say “enough is enough” and demand the manufacturer does something about it.

Memtest86+ first thing run, for 14 hours without issue. Still crashing, no errors shown in memory.

I think Windows 10 is OK and would love to use it more. If my effing machine wouldn’t just stop crashing! Keeps dropping with BAD_POOL_CALLER and no drivers in the stack apart from MS ones – NTFS.SYS last time and NTOSKERN the time before. I’ve raised a ticket with the vendor (HP) but I don’t hold high hopes. It may be the hardware, it was always freezing with Win8.1.

Apart from that this is the first Windows in absolutely ages I thought was OK. Still, I wish it was a Macbook Pro and I had bootcamp on there for my windows needs.

@juanking

You work for HP and I claim my, err, redundancy! 😀

I’m just about to jump into the same boat. Loads of redundancies at work and I’m about to leave in two weeks. Nothing in the pipeline yet but fancy a bit of time just riding my bike and getting fit.

At some point I’ll have to think about contracting or something, unless anyone in the Nottingham/Derby area needs a good UNIX/Linux man? 😀 😆

Telsa Model X. Cars to me are normally just things to get you from A to B, possibly with a bike attached, never really been interested in cars, but I’d love a Tesla.

Easily findable donkey pr0n, surely?

Allegedly. 😀

To the original question it is partly a matter of economics.

Should people who we *know* as free-loaders be made to do something?

I guess so, but not to take away needed jobs for others and also to provide them with a feeling that they’re a part of society.

How much money would you put into it? At some point you’d spend more money pushing them than they get in benefits. Then you’d end up with the Daily Wail and the rest of them bleating again. Though to be honest with their mindset I guess they would just prefer to use gas chambers.

Should we spend £1,000,000 to save £100,000?

Also aren’t unemployment benefits something like 2.5% welfare budget with the majority being pensions and the fraud within the unemployment benefits down to less than 1%?

You can’t increase the memory on a PS4; it is fixed. Did you mean the internal hard disk?

You can replace the internal hard disk so it stores more games. You can’t store games on external hard disks, only backups and media you want to play on the PS4.

Replacing the hard disk is fairly easy. You need a laptop drive under a certain thickness (most are unless you want very large capacity ones). SSDs also work (fast).

Can we stop calling economics a ‘science’. It clearly isn’t. If it was then the bankers who caused the economic crash would have easily seen it coming by the mathematics.

Perhaps we could have a new degree for economics? Bachelor of Makingitallupaswegoalong perhaps?

Come on this is Hollywood. I’ve read the book and liked it but can you imagine them putting in how he *really* got food into the film? (Don’t want to post spoilers).

I’m wondering if it is going to be like ‘I, Robot’ – title is the same but the story varies wildly.

bruneep – Member

How many kittens can you get in a phone box?

nah, 3004.65 kittens

😛

Ah the typical right-wing ‘victim’ whine. I hear that a lot. If I’m being right wing that is the right way to do it. Suggest you get that fireman’s ladder and come off the horse, it doesn’t become you.

If I have empathy with poorer people then I’m a hypocritical socialist. If I don’t then I’m attacking and a hypocritical socialist. Make your mind up.

The “discussion” came about because you believe that you are better off due to a tax reduction. Yes, you may see the value of the headline figure being higher but unfortunately like all governments what they give with one hand they take away with the other, hence the VAT comment and suddenly it strangely became an issue of salaries and not the overall tax burden.

No thanks, unfortunately I’m not in your area. I’ll most probably have to cut back on one of the manservants, or perhaps rent out a street or something. 🙂

PS let me know when we get to the ‘had to get up before we went to bed and lick the road clean wi’ tongue’ part. I like that bit.

I’m currently on minimum wage.

And by end of October I’ll be on less than that. As in nothing. Poor you, earning money, you rich person having much more money than me.

So… that means I should be a right-winger! Yay! Sod the poor, kill the asylum seekers, destroy anything which doesn’t give me money, me, me, me, me, me… MY MONEY!

Am I doing it right?

Anyway, looking at the 29p pasta or the 45p pasta to keep eating, any opinions other than starving?

Currently about £65,000 pa. although most probably redundant soon. How much do you earn sbob?

Yes, I would pay more tax if it meant that the VAT that poorer people have to pay (and therefore a higher proportion of their income) was reduced.

Note that lowering the top level of income tax was actually a Libdem policy that the Tories hated until they saw that people liked it.

It hasn’t, you’re just thick. See semi-literate poster Junkyard for confirmation.

Yep, that nice tax bill coming down. Everything much cheaper, like they haven’t done anything like put VAT up or anything like that….

Went to a Buddhist retreat many moons ago; had been meditating for quite some time. I found that if you keep at it things get better. Even at the retreat the week started a little difficult to clear my head. At the end of the weekend it was much much easier.

Keep practising. Don’t beat yourself when your mind wanders, just note it then get back to your main focus (breathing etc.).

This is a strange position for MS to be in. While I think Windows 10 is pretty decent (although it really could do with some UI coherency work) a part of me does think ‘karma’ in the way they have behaved in the past.

The hawkers will have to consider HTML5 soon. Chrome is going to stop autoplay on flash as of today apparently. That’ll mean my laptop won’t be so hot!

The iPhone interface confuses me and it isn’t easy to find stuff unless you know exactly what you want.

I dislike what appears to be auto-repeat on an album unless I’ve touched the wrong bit (and can’t find the same button again).

The iTunes interface seems OK but when I choose an album sometimes it just doesn’t play and appears to be waiting forever to stream.

Once the free trial finishes I doubt I’ll continue. It’s good for listening to stuff you think you may like though but don’t want to splash out on in case it’s crap.

@petefromearth

Yes Office365 is a subscription. You may get a cheap starting price but you must keep paying to use it. If you don’t the software doesn’t let you do much.

Costs £5.99/month (personal – 1 computer), £7.99/month (up to 5 PCs/macs)

EDIT: here’s the relevent MS web page. https://products.office.com/en-gb/compare-microsoft-office-products

F1 theme is Fleetwood Mac, no? A track from the album “Rumours” I think.

With what?

Itself. The control panel is now all whitish and yet the device manager is the same as in Windows 7 and 8, as an example. Two different UI thrown at each other. Mac had this issue for ages with certain finder windows being brushed metal and others flat as another example, and it wasn’t until Yosemite that they finally pulled their fingers out and fixed fully. The variances within Windows 10 are much greater, however.

The biggest change by far is the service model rather than purchasing new OSes ever few years. That’s huge (although as will be pointed out, not a new idea).

I will take what our cousins across the pond call a ‘raincheck’ on that. If income drops there will suddenly be a requirement for Windows 11. This is Microsoft we’re talking about. At some point I do expect the service model to turn to a rental model, a la Office 365.

I have now got Windows 10. Colour me…. nonplussed.

The start button has reappeared with live tiles to the right and the ‘all apps’ menu item basically takes a vertical view of the windows 8 ‘all apps’ (that thing you could use to view every app and not the ones pinned) in alphabetical order, as opposed to the hierarchical menu structure of old.

The Windows 8 kernel was pretty decent, they’ve most probably tweaked it somewhat. The control panel stuff looks a bit new but the panels etc under it (device manager etc.) are all the same.

I haven’t played with Edge yet. People say it’s snappy but it appears to be a universal truth that all browsers eventually go to bloat. 🙂

Based on the hype (and MS is reknown for that) I was expecting… something more and different, a complete UI overhaul perhaps making everything consistent. Perhaps updates will add more as they come along. It just seems a little unfinished.

Still, it works. And it doesn’t appear to be as much of a memory hog as Mac OSX Yosemite.

H.264 is a standard codec. I thought windows media player would do it.

What’s its container? What’s the extension – mp4, avi, mkv?

Otherwise VLC will play it. VLC will play *anything* I’ve thrown at it.

EDIT:
Here’s the link for the Windows VLC download (free): http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.en_GB.html

Saw Sky noos at lunch. While he acted like a right berk he was 100% correct when he was talking about Cameron, Boris and Salmond.

I’m sure it is something to do with Big Pharma. Must be.

Use lots of letters like ‘z’ and ‘q’ and ‘y’. That makes is sound sexy.

Project Zyquad

Project Qwijibo

Companies Update to New Technologies?

I got an email from espares too, with a £10 off £25 spend. I’ve got a dyson DC39 animal and could do with a second pre-filter while the first is being washed so I need something to add in another fiver.

To be fair they have been a bit of a godsend – I’ve fixed the washing machine, freezer, got bits for the oven etc. over the past few years which has saved me buying new stuff.

An aside.

Am really jealous of peoples’ ability on this thread. 🙂

I think Gideon said that there was to be a green paper on the future of pensions.

I guess things are going to be unsustainable if the majority of people are elderly, but at some point things will go bang as you can’t keep getting more and more young people in to support the old as they age too.

Due to working in research then IT I have four pension pots which aren’t due to give me a massive amount. I’m also thinking about draw-down instead of annuity as the rates are rubbish and I’ll be long dead before they would have paid me half of the funds’ value. I’m 48 now and would like to retire at 60 latest (IF I manage to keep in work!).

It would be nice if there was a central way of having a pension which travelled with you so different companies would pay into it. One which could be held at a very very *very* long arm’s reach from a government.