If you do switch I recommend you gradually move away from NTFS and FAT32. OSX can’t write to NTFS without third party software or some hacks, and FAT32 is a terrible file system to use for anything other than temporary storage or non-critical data.

I would ask why Windows is driving you crazy? OSX is not some mystical land of wonder and can and likely will also drive you crazy from time to time.

I’ve found plenty of things that I can do on my PC that I can’t do on my mac, but I suspect my work and hobbies are somewhat different to IA 🙂

If you do buy a Mac I recommend buying Cloner and learning how to use it to create a rescue boot disk and backup of work docs. Fantastic software which has saved me a lot of pain. EDIT – thats Carbon Copy Cloner.

Verses,

I ordered one of the T420’s which arrived today. It’s got a 1600×900 screen, but the viewing angles are not great – you have to angle the lid just right. If the lower res screen seems pretty good and the rest of the laptop is in good nick I’d probably say stick with it.

Mine has a 7200 rpm hard drive too and I’ve checked the battery and it says 93% of original capacity. The case on mine is definitely B grade. It looks like it has been chucked across the car park, but that’s ok; it will live in the kitchen where the kids have finally finished off my 2006 Macbook pro and I expect it will regularly get knocked off the table…

Next time you a child or an innocent party baby robin could have their lives face irresistibly altered

‘Irresistibly’? Really? That sounds like a good thing, a drunk driver must be a lot cheaper than a plastic surgeon…

You need:

I am sure I have heard about spirit possession in other religions.

Let me google it for you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_possession

The devil part is a Christian construct but stories of possession of people pre-dates Christianity. I am also sure Native American cultures also have many such stories and beliefs.

In fact its so widespread you either have to accept that its a common take on mental illness or its actually true 😯

EDIT: How would an epileptic look to someone with no knowledge of such things and limited education?

Pah, AmigaOS was where it was at, proper multi-tasking and multiple desktops in the 1980’s 🙂

I’m sure the real Windows 10 version number will be 6.4 and that’s because Microsoft have retained the same core code since Vista – which I found was quite decent and far better than XP.

Just stick to the car park and you’ll be fine…

If you are worried cycle up to the practice areas and get round the mini red run a few times. It’s great fun.

IMO stating that we helped create this mess isn’t a reason we should stay out, we are one of only a handful of nations that have the ability and expertise to really make a difference. ISIS however they came about are truly abhorrent and should be removed using suitable tactics and applied force.

I’d doubt it will come to us sending conventional forces though and I wouldn’t be surprised if the help the Iraqi army really needs isn’t already there is small numbers to be expanded once things become official.

But if we have to send conventional troops back in I really hope they have a clear mission, are properly supported by the government and not hamstrung with tight RoE and half arrsed policy like they were in the COB at Basra Airport circa 2007.

Remember this is illegal now – MOT & DPF rule

I think its been illegal for some time but they have clarified the MOT rules now so a visual check to ensure the DPF is still present is done.

This still won’t fail a car that’s had the contents of the DPF removed with the actual DPF kept as no emissions test is performed (only a smoke test on diesels).

As far as I can tell you risk a £1000 fine if you are caught driving a car with the DPF removed. That’s actually cheaper than repairing the DPF properly for most people so I’m not sure how effective a deterrent it is. Many firms still offer DPF removal on their websites.

i love how my daughter says ‘all by my own’ instead of ‘self’ its too cute to bother correcting her. infact we have started saying it like that too!

Mine said exactly the same thing, she’s 5 now and still does it occasionally, we thought it was cute and never corrected it.

She also says ‘On this day’ instead of ‘today’ but my 2 year old son is funnier. He pulled out his willy and announced his ‘wee-wee snake’ needed fresh air.

i got through to the second episode of season six and binned it off. I used to really enjoy it but it got so miserable and depressing that even trig couldn’t redeem it

Pretty much the same for me, I forced myself through the Irish episodes which were really really bad.

It’s almost like they let a different person write each episode, early on they started to try and give some depth to Jax and his lady Dr but that all went to pot pretty quickly.

And as for the CIA angle…

Wow, I never get lucky like that

Just send me a cheque for £2000 and I’ll send you my ID that is connected to the payout 😛

What programs will she be running? Many creative programs are optimised for nVidia Quadro or AMD Firepro which you miss out on if you go with one of the cards more geared up for gaming and general use.

If you are not using programs that can use those types of graphics card you might not get much benefit from an extra card over the graphics that are now built into the i7 chips.

As Cougar say you won’t save much on a home build unless you really cut corners which I wouldn’t recommend for a machine that might be left on quite a bit rendering video etc.

If she will be doing this casually then I would just look at a system from someone reputable like Chilliblast: Chilliblast workstation

If you want more mainstream the I can vouch for HP workstations, the build quality is pretty good and they start at reasonable prices e.g. HP SFF workstation

Had it in two houses I’ve owned and eventually replaced it in both. I didn’t find it offered any advantages over heating with rads (apart from not needing to put them up) and the gas bills dropped when replaced.

If its for a house you are renting out my first thought is, if it works why worry, but my second is that it might put some people off.

Are you sure the connection is being dropped and the application is not doing something odd – like trying to initiate a new connection for a new day?

You can query the sys.dm_exec_sessions DMV to view what’s connected to SQL Server and when its connection was established.

/*DBA hat on*/
Sounds like an application problem, the servers fine…

/* Consultant hat on*/
SQL Server 2005 is out of mainstream support, have you considered upgrading to SQL Server 2014?

😀

I don’t go to church because “the man in the sky who wears a frock and has a beard” (God) and other peoples “men in the sky with frocks and beards” (Gods) seem to be the cause of most wars.

Also, church seems to be a paedo ring too. Another reason not to be involved with religion.

The irony is enough people taking that kind of view in that kind of manner has caused violence countless times. Nice one CHL 😆

So..

No obesity
No Graffiti
No litter

What’s not to like.

It reminded me of some computer game or another where at first everything seems perfect until you scratch the surface.

I can say;

“Well son, I joined the TA and was trained to sit underground whilst the bombs fell; to emerge unscathed and set up national communications for the civil authorities so that Ivan wouldn’t be able to beat us.”

Shame I joined the TA in ’97 when the threat from Ivan was all but gone…

I left in 2003, more in disgust that all the decent training had been cancelled due to adventures in Iraq rather than disgust with the war itself… but I could spin that my if one of my two ever phrased a question such as the OP’s.

…But as Ernie says, there is no chance of kids not thinking war is cool. As my four year old daughter noted the other day – everyone dies eventually so why get upset?!?

Meh… what are you going to do, it would take forever to mention all the nationalities that fought as part of Commonwealth forces. People know about it and that’s whats important. It’s all there in the history books and better quality documentaries.

Even some films. If you watch the end credits of the Battle of Britain it lists all the nationalities that had pilots killed in 1940 fighting for the RAF. It even lists 1 Israeli…

Crikey … could you lot answer those 13 questions first please.

Ok, so let’s go with what those questions are driving at and say that the Palestinians have no historical legitimacy to be a nation state. Now what? When does lasting a peace break out?

Are they all dead?

Dunno about all dead but assuming they would have been about 20 years old in 1940 they are not going to be very mobile now.

The BoB memorial flight used to have one of its aircraft painted in the colours of a 303 (Polish) Squadron.

Polish RAF pilots are remembered. Every time I drive past the Polish war memorial on the A40 I think back to standing there to attention freezing cold as an ATC cadet in the early 90’s.

Please explain why you want me to answer the 13 questions;

Are you looking to understand why its such a mess there and who has legitimate claim to the physical land? Or are you trying to justify actions taken by the IDF which are at best disproportionate and at worst war crimes?

The state of Israel has existed for over 60 years and is internationally recognised, it doesn’t really matter who was there before. There were 10 million ethnic German refugees that fled to East and West Germany after WW2, no one (their descendants included) demands they should be handed back their ancestral homes in the Czech Republic or Poland.

The fact is a superior military force belonging to a democracy is acting in an overly aggressive manner and possibly committing war crimes; history has shown us that the way forward involves compromise and a willingness to talk to those who would sooner you are dead. Arguing that the Arab nations poisoned the well (so to speak) forcing Israel to deal with a belligerent refugee population misses the point. Egypt didn’t want 700,000 refugees in 1948 and they certainly don’t want the 1.8 million that has grown into regardless of if they are the same ethnicity or not!

Understanding the history is great and useful but it won’t solve this problem as even Judge Judy couldn’t tell 1.8 million people that their ancestors lost a war 60 years ago so they need to forget about it – they still need somewhere to live and a viable economy to sustain them.

But those 13 questions are irrelevant in the context of recent Israeli actions.

Let’s say that someone in the IDF did end up on trial for committing a war crime such as deliberately bombing civilians. His defence would rest on proving he believed that he was attacking combatants and that lives were at risk if he didn’t attack. Not if the Palestinians had any real historical claim to be treated as a nation.

Wonder what have I done wrong in this life …

Upset a few posters on another thread? 😆

Not sure if its illegal but any training I’ve ever had to do for an employer has always been on the job.

That being said, I can think of plenty of jobs where you would have to get a qualification in order to do the job, and no one would pay you to do it.

I suppose the best way to look at it is would this training enhance your long term career prospects and does it result in a recognised qualification? That would steer how I view it. I would also talk to them about providing you with facilities where you could watch the videos since you don’t have a decent home connection – or they pay for you to be hooked up 🙂

The 1.6 HDI has a reputation for turbo problems if not properly serviced regularly.

However, I have a 407 1.6 HDI now on 98k miles.

It runs nicely but its had:

Remap to 138 BHP
EGR bypass as part of the remap
DPF innards removed and deleted on remap

The belts are due this year (10 years old or at 144k miles).

If its the right price with the right history it’ll be fine.

wow this thread is still going… who would have seen that coming 😉

Try taking your BWM back to the dealer after 6 weeks with a burned out clutch… it really is possible if you drive it *that* badly 😉

Everything is subjective and everyones needs are slightly different. I’d recommend trying out mac ownership but don’t feel bad if it doesn’t work out.

I found owning a mac for proper computer work led to me being more of a computer expert than I already was; once I needed to scratch beneath the surface of OSX I was into the world of BASH and plist configuration files etc. Unfortunately spending time learning (or relearning) BASH was wasted for me as I really needed to be learning PowerShell for work…

I’m actually typing this on my 2006 macbook pro that has travelled all over and is now retired to being the kitchen computer – it is often on all day streaming music etc and has been rock solid since the original HDD died about 4 years ago. But saying that Macs have better life span than Windows machines isn’t quite true. If I wanted to get a modern operating system running on this macbook pro Linux would really be my only option as Apple dropped support for this hardware a while back (yes this is an Intel Mac) so OSX Lion was as far as this one could be upgraded. Which is ok provided you don’t want to run anything that requires Mountain Lion as a minimum. I might be able to get Windows 8.1 running on it, but its probably not supported on this macs version of bootcamp due to EFI issues or something…

Also with regards to older hardware (regardless of it being Apple/Dell etc) Windows and Linux are much better option to keep it going – you can get both in x86 (32 bit) flavours that will run well on 2GB or less RAM. Try running Mountain Lion or Mavericks on only 4GB and pretty soon you’ll notice the amount of paging going on if you are trying to run a few programs at once.

I’ve also had better stability from a Windows Vista workstation (Dell XPS 420) than I did my last mac mini when I first bought it. The damn thing was not a happy bunny until I did a complete reinstall of Mountain Lion and reapplied all patches.

The one really great thing about Apple hardware is its resell value – if you buy one and don’t like it you won’t lose much money. The chap who bought my mac mini off me paid more for it than a brand new one – all because I upgraded it to 16GB of Ram and he didn’t want to do it himself or pay the extortionate amount apple wants for a pre-upgraded machine. Mental I know…

I have gone back to Windows. For me Win 8.1 works better than the latest OSX, main plus points for me are HyperV and being able to run SQL server management tools and visual studio etc. And games, lots of quality games…

If my work had different leanings away from .net and SQL server I could get by with an iMac and just boot camp for games and the odd program not available in OSX.

On the plus side for macs I quite liked the app store and simple utils like cloner that were much better to use than similar tools in windows land.

Just don’t get a Mac mini if games are important…

DCS World is what you want. It’s a free download either from the website or Steam.

It comes with an SU-25 frogfoot and a TF-51 mustang (training version, no guns).

You can then buy extra aircraft; the Flaming Cliffs 3 add on is less of a study sim than Falcon 4 BMS, the A-10C add on is even more so.

The really cool thing is this is a current platform with loads more add ins under development. BAe Hawk, Typhoon, FW-190 etc shoudl all be out later this year and there are now a few helicopter modules too.

So how big will a 4k film be file wise?

Will they fit on a blu-ray?

Excuse my ignorance, but we’re still watching on a 32″ CRT with a normal DVD player; not even Blu-Ray!

Well this is the problem isn’t it. The industry on the one hand wants us to move away from physical media to the point that your film collection is cloud based. Then on the other hand they want you to buy kit that would require 40GB files to be streamed…

I think compression technology has some way to go before most of us can have our cake and eat it as it were. Mind you, I remember quite a few mates rushing out and buying the latest 50″ plasma’s with surround sound only to sit there watching poor quality pirate films 🙄

We’ve got 4k monitors on some of the hot-desks in the office. I always try and get one of the 1920×1200 screens instead but today I used one of the 4k ones….

My eyes got used to it eventually and it was faff resizing fonts but the ability to have 4 VM’s displayed at 1920×1080 each on the same screen was impressive.

Tomorrow I’m going in early to get one of the 1920×1200 screens, I can keep it a nice distance away!

I’m speaking generically here: The same goes for the majority of software and operating systems. A company (even a small one) should budget on what keeping IT systems up to date will cost them and have a plan to follow so the funds are there to do it and nasty surprises are kept to a minimum.

Doing it this way and staying not too far behind the latest release ultimately costs less than than trying to milk old licences for as long as possible and then perform an expensive/disruptive upgrade.

The problem is that no of the vendors work in step so it feels that as soon as you have upgraded one part then you need to start planning the upgrade to the next whilst now discovering that you have compatibility problems with your clients or vendors who have not yet upgraded.

It makes sense for companies to nudge you down the subscription route; I think we will see that happening more and more as they then get a continual income from you and you are always in support and able to install the latest versions.

An old Diesel Pug from around the turn of the century (non-turbo 306 or 406). Cheap to run and repair.

I was in a similar situation with basic road bike, mtb shoes etc. last year.

My fastest 25 miler time was around 1:09. One of the experienced TT riders reckoned I would benefit most from getting my position on the bike right and losing some weight. He reckoned that sorting that would see me get down to around 1:05 and then if I wanted any chance of dipping under 60 minutes I would need to be a lot fitter and have a proper TT bike.

I remember overtaking a rider who had all the gear but was looking down so his streamlined helmet was like an air-brake sticking up in the air…

I’ve gone back to just riding around my local trails this year, much more relaxing 🙂

I would see if you could negotiate at least 1 day a week working from home. If the job was really ace, I would take it but be open to the possibility of needing to move once you have settled in and decided that’s where you want to work.

My office is approx 55 miles by road from home, but as I’m often working from clients offices up and down the country the predictable 1 hour commute is usually a nice change 🙂

From a programming point of view I think its impressive. I remember getting doom to run on my Amiga circa 1994 which was an achievement but it ran really slowly as was a CPU intensive game and the Amigas graphics chip-set was well past its sell by date and no good for 3D or planar type graphics.

Fast forward to 2010-11 and I got Doom running on an Amaiga Emulator flawlessly – even better than a 486 back in early nineties. The emulator gave the Amiga the power of an 060 processor running at > 100Mhz!

You don’t do these things to play these old games, its just because you want to see if you can 🙂

I now have Doom on my XBox 360 should I want to feel nostalgic; it usually last for about 5 minutes before I go and load a modern game….

Where have all the hedgehogs gone? They should be eating them.