It’s not dead. However you have to be more careful with content. Also, its hard sometimes to tell between satire and reality since some media channels think “satire” just means repeating something whilst frowning.

This is pretty vague request. Most modern games are complex due to padding, Ubisoft releases are probably the worst offenders. In fact big open worlds are imho easier than their older linear versions, since you can often level up or out gear the difficulty.

Batman Lego and so on are probably a good choice if you want puzzles and simple stuff.

Not trying to refute it. Just pointing out the irony. Isolationism and nationalism is okay if it’s to support the brick and mortar retail sector. Now that your local shop has disappeared you suddenly realise that you live in a global unscrupulous economy.

You can turn this around to, what have physical shops and councils tried to do to retain your business?

Did trading hours increase or adapt significantly? No. Did parking charges decrease? No. Online presence? Only some. Public transport during weekends? Reduced. More relaxed returns/ product complaints? No. Did product variety or specialisation increase? No.

I don’t even buy that much, but going to physical stores in this country is something that 8/10 times I dread doing.

So if I buy my my toys from a uk local shop but manufactured by a sweatshop that’s okay. The balls on some of you.

From the article:

“There are now even more ways to shop from local bookshops: booksellers have developed websites, and adapted to offer ordering by phone, email and online, with home delivery often an option. We are actively encouraging book lovers to start their Christmas shopping early to spread out demand. Shopping locally and early will help secure jobs and support a thriving community high street.”

It is somewhat amazing that it takes a global pandemic for stores to adapt to the 21st Century. If only they had adapted a bit sooner…..

Any reason why I shouldn’t or are you just trolling?

1. Car value, however is plan is to resell it this should be sorted imho.
2. If he is a new driver, something similar could happen again, maybe wait some time before getting it sorted?

Polls, Polls……

With Joe on the other side I’m getting a 2016 déjà vu

It can get creepier. When Gmail started, they used to read your e-mails-was in user agreement, in order to get targeted adverts.

As far as the EU goes, all is far as long as it its part of the business practice/function.

Rough guess. They looked at all the grades in your cohort, calculated the normal distribution, and then normalised it with typical exam results. This depends on the course, but in my experience, assignment grades were always better than exams.

I would be very surprised if there was a fit for all method that every lecturer/university used.

People being obsessed with their mobile phones was already a thing before the smartphone era.

The only bit of Facebook I use is the messenger function, and occasionally specialised content groups related to hobbies. Have done for a while. If I want to know about someone’s life I’ll ask them directly.

Back on the phone to the senior engineer/manager and I asked for a replacement machine as this one is fubard but there’s no chance as apparently I am out of the 30day window (Mac was bought on 20th August), despite my protestations regarding the issues I have been having from new. Apple will not even collect the machine for repair, it is now up to me to drive to Carlisle and hand the Mac in for repair at an authorised Mac repair store which I plan to do on Wednesday.

If your problems started within the 30 day window are you not covered? I would argue, that the machine since the start hasn’t been working how it was advertised.

On the safari issue, I never use it, it was shit and google chrome worked much better imho.

You guys are funny.

Hope you have got your tenders in for the new customs system that needs to be built. They would have snapped your hand off, “three months, easy”.

Depending on the robustness, I suspect a specialist company would find it this easy. Its probably the paperwork and bureaucracy that would take the longest. In one of the collaborative projects I worked in, the data analytics took longer than they should, not because of the system itself-this had been ready for a while, but because the content/variables hadn’t been designated clearly. I mean from the info of the website every row data set is what:

“name” “region1” “region2” “region 3” “test result” “date tested” “date test result” “hospital detail 1” “hospital detail 2” “hospital detail 3”

I’m no expert in data science, but the method they used is just one step above from printing all the sheets and putting them into a binder to then count manually. This is why people are so frustrated, there is whole spectrum of options between what they did and a fully functional deluxe industry standard cloud database(as the ones described above). The data is not what are joe doe’s favourite colours, the data is concerning a global pandemic.

Next thing we know the excel spreadsheet is not backed up into the network and opened from a USB drive.

P.S. Please look at this PHE website and tell me that this is all built on Excel:

You could use excel to classify the data in the parameters given. Its easy to write a script in whatever programme/language to import data from excel. As I said earlier, excel is good at being a jack of all trades, however for this case it should not have been used.

I’m getting far too wound up about this mess issue….

I’m no IT expert but haven’t there been a lot of problems rolling out such systems in the public sector?

I know for a fact that fire rescue has no central/national database and neither does town planning. All their data resides at the local level on a hotchpotch of paper and electronic records. It also make FOI requests problematic because they can claim compiling the data imposes an unreasonable cost.

On town planning, I would suspect its a way for local authorities to hold more power. On fire rescue I have no idea. A challenge that such systems would face is dealing with hystorical standards of how data was compiled and stored, that could be a massive ball-ache. I don’t think this applies in this case, since I assume they are being sent consistent .csv files. Given the time and money, this blunder seems completely unreasonable.

It’s possible that whoever had custody of the data didn’t know about the row limit;

IMHO it seems incredibly sloppy not to check.

Isn’t the whole point that trying to have one centralised database for the entire country was a completely stupid idea in the first place?

I wouldn’t say so. Make “region” an additional category/variable within a centralised database and you can separate regions. In my experience its much easier to extract data from a bigger dataset, than making two semi dependent datasets into one big database.

to OP, Excel is not a bad tool, but it seems they hadn’t taken into account its limitations. Which is a flop at a very basic level.

The way it works with data:
1. You have your interface to interact with the program/enter unprocessed data.
2. Unprocessed Data analysis and (processed and unprocessed) organisation.
3. Data storage(processed and unprocessed).
4. Data exposition/interrogation (for example, how many infected per region).

Excel can do all of the above in one package, however it does not excel at any of them.

My academic twitter is suggesting R.

R and excel are not mutually exclusive. Whatever you do with R, the data has to be stored somewhere, this is where they may have made the mistake.

Exactly what Bails says, you can have the most fancy cloud whizz bang system you can think of, the very, very first thing people will start doing is extracting data into Excel so they can make pivot tables.

100% this, I’ll never understand the current circlejerk elitism towards some of the basic MS tools.

Excel has a row limit of 1,048,576 per sheet. That’s one unwieldy spreadsheet! I wonder why PHE were even using excel and not a proper database?

Or just put a check to use another sheet/file when full? (putting aside the questionable choice of using excel)

This time they are going straight for the ultra batshit candidate, because they don’t need anyone’s permission to install her.

The track record on supreme court justicies of Trump doesn’t show this. However we will see.
In addition, stacking courts is not a new thing:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-obama-idUSKCN1110BC

The appointment of conservative justices is an election rallying call for Trump to the evangelical right, and any genuine attempt by Democrats to disrupt the process is a boon to him.

So far his picks have been somewhat like for like, in terms of judicial behaviour/ideology. Scalia was a textualist, so is Gorsuch(Garland was not). Kavanaugh, whilst being more conservative than Kennedy, still finds himself voting both ways.

Good purchase, the 1070 is a solid graphics card.

Facebook was instrumental, albeit indirectly, in facilitating both the rise of Trump and Brexit. Without its ability to personally target propaganda (based on data scraped by a third party app) in a manner which meant that anyone who might object to the content never even saw it, it’s almost a certainty that neither would have happened.

Big tech using personal data of users to make money has been happening for a long time. Way before the 2016. Be honest, if Hillary would have won the elections and Brexit would have failed, none of you would give two flying shits about it. On the other hand, its good that a significant percentage of the population has finally (although maybe too late) woken up on this topic.

Social media as a whole maybe one of the biggest cancers on modern civilised society.

As others have said, find out what software will be used. Universities many times tend to offer software suites to be isntalled in private pcs or to use remotely. From my experience, Apple systems had little support with these (unless you go down the parallels route), and most software packages worked only on Windows, or had only Windows license.

@Cougar

Dune is set in Arrakis, a giant and unforgiving desert planet with massive sandworms, at the same time its also where the most precious resource in the Galaxy is collected, Melange, or “the Spice”. Melange effectively gives the user massive cheats, also a substance essential for intergalaxy travelling. The novel starts with Duke Leto Atreides, of the House Atreides and father to the protagonist, being given the Governorship(of some sorts) of this planet. The blue eyes are one of the physiological changes associated with Melange and its routine consumption. Hence the Fremen, the inhabitants of Arrakis, all have these blue on blue eyes. As expected, much of Fremen culture is shaped by the fact that there is little water available.

I will stop here since any more will reveal parts of the plot, that you may or may not remember.

If the finances are right, have you looked at going private?

If you can upgrade to 16gb ram it should make a noticeable difference. Nowadays everything likes to hog ram. On my work laptop-which was used for similar stuff to yours, the upgrade to 16gb ram was night and day.

You can’t take a capitalistic approach when they are the main benefactors of the license fee. Want to watch discovery channel live on Amazon? Pay the license. Want to watch a TV channel that is originally broadcasted in Spain? Pay the license. The outdated model in which it operates is just too easy of a target for clickbait headlines.

P
Part 4 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it an offence to use or install TV receiving equipment to:
Watch or record programmes as they’re being shown on TV or live on an online TV service, including programmes streamed over the internet and satellite programmes from outside the UK, or
watch or download BBC programmes on demand, including catch up TV, on BBC iPlayer without being covered by a TV Licence.

Partner is a nurse. From what I’ve seen it depends on the hospital. She used to have somewhat random shifts at her previous job, now in a different hospital they come in chunks of day shifts and chunks of night shifts.

The joke comes when they are x nurses down and she is asked to perform a duty above her pay grade, or those pesky hand overs that always seem to happen late.

**** no. Dune is just about readable, by God Emperor, it’s shockingly bad, the least said about Chapterhouse* the better.

That’s interesting. I think the biggest downside of the dune books is the very awkward pacing.

Which is why its being split into two movies.

Did not know that, thanks for clarifying!

As someone said, I think this would have been better as a miniseries, the first three books, Dune to children of Dune would be good for this. There is too much in the Dune book to digest in a 2h to 3h film, which probably means they will bring only some of the core elements (spice, worms and desert) and forget much of the rest.

Would have prefered Paul and Chani to be more on the mature side-even though at the start of Dune, Paul is a teenager.

On the other hand, very happy that non-star wars sci-fi is getting some attention.

As others have said, I don’t understand how the LBS messing should be at your expense.

They haven’t figured out how to make a battle royale out of it.

In all seriousness, its very niche. Also, the videogame industry is in a strange place at the moment.

Pretty sure the reports were that it was very quite from March until July and trade was suffering, can’t think why that might be

Snowdon 22nd March: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-51994504

Bit late by the time you driven to Cornwall! how do you know how busy it will be when you are booking?

What is your cut off for rammed, how many people per square metre?

“Common Sense” is a vague way of the government shirking responsibility

Dont be so easily manipulated by their spin

Reports of hotspots being rammed started in March. Its now September, I think its enough time to get a feel for it.

I guess you haven’t come across WAP-CardiB… the song you posted is just another carefully crafted “make it rain” song. I do think the lyrics have become more blunt and direct, less metaphors and less play on words.

Its not about having it both ways, its about some common sense. If you see somewhere is rammed and know its going to be rammed, pick somewhere else to go, which from other threads it seems there are plenty of other places with capacity for this.

I dislike crowded places, never really went to pubs and working from home has been adopted by the company I work for. Therefore staying within guidelines has been really easy. However I can understand how people that like all of the above are really struggling.

From my experience growing up in Spain, tower fans are shit and always break. The simple and cheap fans on a stand last the longest and are most effective. However you are just moving air; so it gets to a point where the fan doesn’t do much.

Just remember how much effort it took to save those 20k. That alone should stop you from spending it wildly.