But when compared to a low MPG petrol car, a Prius is more Eco Friendly.

No, it isn’t environmentally friendly at all. You should only say it is less harmful to the environment. If it was environmentally friendly it would in the least leave less pollution behind it, it does not. It still creates pollution and the manufacture of the car probably created more than a small engined petrol car. This is the whole point of my pedantry – you have been brain washed.

CEX still sell them so I imagine they would give you something for it, even if it is just store credit.

Failing that I would have it for my kids if you are local.

I say pay it, you might save Spain an early exit from the euro…

Recently traded my ZT-T 180 V6 auto in for a diesel 407. I miss it but it was the sensible thing to do as I am now driving 500 miles a week and the at best I only ever average 28MPG out of it.

The best ones were built at Longbridge after BWM got shot of Rover but before the cost cutting started in 2004/5 although some people swear that BWM didn’t scrimp on the sound proofing on the 75’s that were built at Cowley and therefore prefer them to the later MG Rover models.

The 1.8 and 1.8Turbo’s are the ones to watch for head gasket failures. The V6 engines not so much although the 2.0 V6 75’s have a smaller ooling system than the 2.5 litre V6’s which means if you get a leak they will quickly over heat.

Common problems/fixes on the KV-6 engined models are;

Fabled orange clip (something to do with fuel line)
Plennum Drains (keep these clear of gunk else the ECU will drown)
Cracked thermostat (poor design) if you ignore this overheating and HGF may result.
Cooling fan electrical problems (MK 1 cars only and easily fixed)
leaky boot / rear lights cluster
VIS motor failure (Varible inlet system) which controls airflow into the engine. These can be easily replaced, repaired with a soldering iron or just ignored (loss in performance which varies depending on which VIS went – there are 2 of them).

No real show stoppers that should put you off, but as my wife noted the car does become a bit of a hobby to keep it running in top form. In the 3 years I had it I had thermostat and VIS problems, the only other things were usual wear and tear – brakes, tyres etc.

There is a great online community of enthusiasts who will help diagnose and fix any issues but I would not recommend if you don’t want to learn about the car you drive!

I’ve enjoyed Beevor’s The Battle for Spain but cherry picked certain chapters rather reading from start to finish.

Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett was also good but not about the civil war specifically and also covers more contemporary issues and the history behind them.

If you read both of those you’ll really understand why some parts of Spain really hate others and how they are as bad as us Brits with our sectarian troubles.

I would;

1) Get neighbours on board and happy that you will be undertaking some pest control work.
2) Get some decent hollow point pellets.
3) Practice shooting with said pellets until you can consistently shoot a group no bigger than a 10 pence piece and be able to do so at different ranges.
4) Try using decoy pigeons on the ground to lure them out of the tree.
Decoys

I think the most important thing here is to make sure your neighbours understand what you are doing and why. Even if you do everything correctly and legally it will be a pain to have to deal with grumpy neighbours and the police.

I live in Aylesbury and know that there is are 4x tracks not too far away at Chicksands and Aston Hill. I’d love to give it a go but the last time I tried riding a 4x track at Aston Hill on my XC bike I scared my self….

I found doing the drop offs on the DH tracks frightened me less! perhaps I should give Chicksands a go if it is a good track to learn on.

STW 4X day anyone?

To be fair you are probably far safer (slowly) jumping some red lights in London given the often terrible layout and the fact that few drivers respect the advanced stop boxes reserved for cyclists.

When you read into the rare cases of a cyclist causing a fatality they are usually riding like a nutter and doing so on the pavement or in a zone shared with pedestrians.

There have been over 32,000 deaths on the UK’s roads in the ten years between 2000 – 2010 and a tiny fraction were caused by cyclists. A far larger percentage of the victims were cyclists.

My conclusion therefore is that if you jump a red light it is statistically your own life you are risking not someone else – although the driver who hits you might be a bit truamatised…

Bigger climbs than you usually get at the Gorricks but technically probably not all that different/difficult. The terrain also gets a little more varied and that does make it a nice place to ride.

I’m glad the STW hive mind is not running the country, it would make the current idiots look smart…

What TheBrick says ^^^^

My dad had them, then one day they disappeared then within 48 hours he could not see much at all as his retina had detached.

I’m used to seeing local kids running just a rear brake which makes sense. There is no way I’d let my kids ride on public roads/pavements without any brakes at all though.

If there is a good reason for doing it they need to keep off the streets and stay in the bike parks.

How do people afford these cars?!? I get there is credit, but the monthly repayments on top of an average fuel bill just sounds horrendous.

How much do you need to be earning for all this?

Since when have the RAF done anything remotely useful apart from bombing Port Stanley that Fleet Air Arm could not do 10 times better?

Plus it would get rid of all the bickering and waste spent on developing different fighters for both the Navy and RAF. **** knows why they needed Typoon…. could have just bought a load of F-18’s a long bloody time ago and given them to the Navy to carry out land based air space security and have a naval fighter to boot.

But noooo….. what we’ll have instead is a 4th generation canard design that has taken since the Mid 70’s to get off the drawing bored at a cost that’s almost the per unit cost of the F-22…. with an austere reduced capability to bomb people running around in the desert. All because we thought designing something with lots of electronics in partnership with the electrical engineering gods that are Italians made a lot of sense…. when say compared to Northrop Grumman on Lockheed. If you thought the F-35 development was shocking, you should check out the history of the Tiffie. Then to top it all off the according to the Indians the bloody French built a better plane by themselves, that is actually carrier capable.

Bwaarp. You are Lewis Page and I claim my £5!

Bwaarp,

You have a point, but don’t put too much credence into what Lewis Page says. At least his article was better than the brief note in todays Evening Standard i suppose 😯

That does not confuse me at all. What does confuse me is how the cost to fit £125 millions worth of electromagnetic catapult tech into a hull that was supposedly designed to allow for it unexpectedly rose to a projected £2 Billion. Surely not even the MOD could screw it up that much?

Still reverting back to the F35B from the F35C isn’t completely surprising. Back in late 2010 the F35B was looking likely to get cancelled. The USMC wanted it really badly though and they put a man in charge of that part of the project who has got results. It is now doing well in testing and UK Plc now own our first two test models and UK’s test pilots are flying them.

By contrast the F35C is having problems and is behind, there are problems with the design of its arrestor gear which for a carrier-borne aeroplane is a big problem.

I guess the big question is why are bothering with the F35 at all? Sure it is cutting edge and has stealth capabilities but there are combat proven aircraft already in operation with western Navies that we could have tomorrow at a fraction of the cost. The answer to that I think is that we have already piled a lot of money into the F35, BAE have a big stake in it, and there would be huge political fallout with the US if we pulled out altogether – especially if we bought the French Rafael or tried to build a naval Typhoon.

That Psychology A-Level is probably the one that causes you the most grief to get good grades in… and it sounds like you have no specific plans for it.

Remember you have options other than all or nothing if it gets that bad staying on top of the work load. It was the best advice I was given.

What subjects are you studying? I remember struggling with physics and maths and having a horrible time with them. After I was encouraged to drop them and just keep history and geography I really started to enjoy it.

If you are studying 3 or 4 A-levels why not look to drop to 2. You will still be able to get to university on that, although higher grades would obviously be needed to keep the UCAS points up.

Here’s a bit more info from 11 years ago, reposted on here: http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?s=e5b963fd2e8bc6dba447d8b4caeb023e&t=116104&page=2

Race is on to find buried ‘treasures’ – Spitfires worth £6m

ENCASED in containers for 56 long years they have quietly decayed away, their once shining propellors and wings gathering mould in their underground tomb. Outside the temperature is in the 90s as passenger jets take off in the shimmering heat.

The scene is Mingaladon airport, Myanmar, formerly Burma, and according to farmer and inventor David Cundall hidden 6ft under the airfield are 12 brand new Spitfires, abandoned in 1945 and now worth a cool £6m.

Mr Cundall’s dream is to excavate the crates, restore the Spitfires, and finally see them fly again.

The farmer and inventor first heard stories about the aircraft 20 years ago, but only started researching them in earnest after a friend and former Spitfire pilot met some American veterans who described digging a trench for the aircraft during the Allied withdrawal of Burma.

Through his own work at the public records office at Kew and by placing advertisements in specialist magazines Mr Cundall, who invents farm machinery for a living, has been able to contact seven eyewitnesses, who have confirmed the story.

The aircraft were abandoned on the orders of Louis Mountbatten, the head of South East Asia Command, two weeks before the atomic bombs were dropped in August 1945, ending the Second World War.

Knowing exactly where to dig is the problem when work could undermine the stability of the adjacent international runway.

Another snag is that an Israeli competitor is on the case and has been given permission to make a search.

Mr Cundall, 51, who lives in North Lincolnshire, has been out to Burma six times and has worked closely with the military authorities. He said: “We have an agreement with the military that we have our share and they have their share.

“What we really want to do is restore them and have them flying again.”

Mr Cundall – who describes his hobby as “digging up crashed aircraft” – is working with Dr Roger Clark, the head of earth sciences at Leeds University to analyse data from a ground penetrating radar which has been used to survey the 10-acre site. The radar has shown up “boxed shape images” which Mr Cundall believes are the outlines of the containers.
He added: “The story I originally heard was that in August 1945 a group from a construction battalion were passing through Rangoon on the way to Singapore and they were asked to bury 12 planes – they actually questioned the order as it was so unusual.

“When I heard this many years ago Burma was a closed country. I advertised extensively and come up with seven eyewitnesses and 20 who know about the burials.

“Seventy per cent of the area has been searched, and another eyewitness who came along last year is positive he knows where they are and has sent me maps and an outline.

“However, the Burmese say we need more eyewitnesses to exactly pinpoint the place otherwise they’re not going to let us dig. They’re worried about undermining the foundations of the airfield.

“We also have a competitor, an Israeli pilot, who has paid a substantial amount of money to gain the contract to excavate the Spitfires. But his contract expires this month – and with a bit of luck we might be going back out in a week or 10 days.’’

Principal keeper of archaeology at North Lincolnshire Museum Kevin Leahy said the wings and fuselages were made out of thin aluminium and could have crumbled away – but if they were covered in grease and oil, or wax paper ready for a sea transit, they could be all right.

Mr Cundall needs more letters from eyewitnesses spelling out the exact location to convince the military. Anyone who can help is asked to contact him via the Yorkshire Post Hull office at Regent House, Ferensway, Hull, HU1 3PT or by e-mailing alex.wood@ypn.co.uk.

http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/View…ticleID=192571

09 May 2001

They are reported as being Mk 14’s on the guardian…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/14/david-cameron-spitfires-buried-burma?newsfeed=true

This is starting to sound like a late April Fools or the old rumours about decommissioned steam engines being stored in tunnels in the late 1960’s to form a ‘strategic reserve’ in time of war. That was utter BS too.

There is a bit more info on the telegraph website, but again it refers to them being buried in 1945 and them being Mk II’s, which just does not ring true.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9203822/Spitfires-buried-in-Burma-during-war-to-be-returned-to-UK.html

I would put the date of burial (if true) at some point in 1942.

In 2008 I used my 2007 Fuel ex8. I survived and enjoyed it, but did not win…

As a manager who frequently has to look at CV’s and interview people I would say no.

A 39 year old is less likely to hand their notice in on a whim to go and find themselves (have had 3 guys in their twenties do that).

They are usually more mature in attitude and have had life’s knocks and no longer think the world owes them something.

They were usually on the right side of the housing boom and are not looking for silly wages so they can buy a flat (also refer to point above).

They usually have a family at home and are all to happy to work OT or join me for a beer after work 😉

Never bother explaining your CV all the way back to when you left school, the past 2 or 3 jobs or 5 years is usually enough and to be honest if it runs past two pages it won’t be read anyway.

Good Luck.

My PC is similar spec to yours and an upgrade to an AMD 6850 which made a massive difference over the older Nvidia 8800gt card.

The reason I went with an AMD card was I knew my PSU was very weedy (Dell 350 watt) and the Nvidia 460 which I was looking at definitely needed a 450 watt+ PSU.

I reckon that’s going to turn out to be some crappy electric powered bike knocked up in the C4 special effects shed. Just like how all futurist soldiers in crappy sci-fi programmes wear downhill body armor.

I thought the programme was a good entertaining watch, it certainly wasn’t a proper history documentary as it only skimmed across what is a massive, and at times controversial subject.

The biggest shame I thought was the fact that the actual flying of the Lancaster was over and done with very quickly, and after showing him fighting to get the DC3 airborne they then did not go into any detail about difficult and dangerous getting a fully laden heavy bomber airborne was.

If you actually watch wartime footage of Lancasters, Halifaxes, or Stirlings taking off with 8000 lbs of bombs and fuel for 12 hours of flying it must have been terrifying. Many aircrew died on take off as a tyre blowout or engine failure could easily seem them crash and burn before they had even got off the ground. Very different to the clip of the BBMF Lanc practically leaping away from the ground!

Redfordrider,

I agree with you about military leadership up to a point. IMO the armed forces do possess some very good leaders, but because of the disciplined structure it can be easy to just rely upon the legal authority a little too much.

This will only get people so far and I can think of two simple reasons for this;

1. There are many job roles within the military were a junior rank has to exert authority or direction/influence upon a person with greater rank.
2. In it’s purest form (the battlefield) leaders who are despised or seen as dangerous can be easily ‘got rid of’. You only have to look at reports of ‘fragging’ within the US military during Vietnam for evidence of this, and I have little doubt that it happened (perhaps more rarely) within the conscripted British Army of WW1 & 2.

Military leadership can definitely be very different from corporate leadership but I would in no way look down upon it or say that military personel don’t need to develop or possess good leadership skills. In fact in these times of increased commitments and reduced headcount it is probably more important than ever.

My point in my first post, I guess, was that the OP should not look to the military to solve his lack of influence in an office environment.

A copy of how to win friends and influence people might be a cheap and easy way to start.

I did some military leadership training during my time in the university OTC and later on with the TA. Useful but very different to the usual skills you need as a middle manager in a corporate environment.

My current company sent me on some management training where we were tested and put through various scenarios. It revealed that the one thing the military training had left me with was a set of skills that are useful in times of crisis and useful to have when decisive action is needed quickly. I was told never to use them in day to day management unless I wanted to be hated!

I have experimented with this and I can confirm that people stop wanting to be your friend when you are very blunt and forceful with them 😆

The answer is to do with;

1) Gravity
2) Wave Harmonics
3) Whirlpools
4) Electronic induction

and maybe gyroscopes or Nazi scientists or something.

An interesting read on this type of stuff is “Hunt for Zero Point” by Nick Cook for the nazi anti-gravity, and “The Scientist, the Madman, the Thief and their Lightbulb” by Keith Tutt on perpetual motion machines and numerous claims by people to have built them.

I work at a company who has a very casual dress code, but I still prefer people to turn up to an interview in a suit and tie. However I have offered jobs to people who ditched the tie and jacket.

The few that have turned up in jeans, trainers, and baseball caps have never impressed and usually have something else very wrong as well as showing no respect.

I would wear a suit and tie and ask when you get there if you can take the jacket off if it is warm (feeling uncomfortable in an interview is never great).

@Elf, replacing the HD in an older MBP gives a nice performance boost too. I went from the 120Gb drive in my 15″ MBP to a 500Gb drive and the laptop was noticably snappier despite it being only 5400rpm, not 7200rpm.

The transfer rates on a newer drive with higher density platters can be much faster simply because more data can be written or read from a platter on a single spin of the drive.

6 months later and my HD now has 160Gb on it (when I replaced it was 90Gb of 120Gb) full. So, in my case putting a larger drive in does mean you hang on to more junk because you can.

Swapping the drive was not difficult and using Carbon copy cloner only took an afternoon. Just remember which screws go where!

Yes, I might be there. I need to see what I can get from the training or conference budgets. I will likely be at the free Saturday, and maybe the crappy code games if they run that again this year. It was good for food, beer, and networking last year.

Depending on what you are going to do with the data you extract from the DWH learning some SSIS might also be worth while.

I’ll also add that you might find it helpful to keep an eye on Simple-Talk[/url], and SQL Server Central[/url].

Some good blogs and twitter feeds are written by people like David Ballantyne, Pinal Dave, Kimberly Tripp and Brent Ozar to name a few if you get really into it.

Learning good SQL is well worth the effort. The language is not going to disappear any time soon (despite ORM’s and NoSQL). It is one that evolves rather than being made redundant overnight.

Good Luck and feel free to drop me an email if you get really stuck.

BEB

What’s been said about it being easy but hard is very true.

I have seen some terrible coding done in T-SQL by people who should know better. If your company has a DBA a chat with them about what it is you are doing is well advised.

Infrastructure teams especially those that don’t ‘get’ SQL Server get miffed when they have to put a database onto a server with 16 CPU’s and 32Gb of Ram when because the coders did a poor job on the design and don’t know to ensure good table relationships, create useful indexes or think about column statistics.

W3Schools is good to get started, then one of the dummies books and then ‘T-SQL Querying’ by Itzik Ben-Gan for the language and Christan Bolton’s book for how the SQL Server DB engine works and can be tuned.

Once you have that lot mastered give me a call, I’ll probably have a job for you 🙂

I work for a company that was a start up about 10 years ago. The mentality of those days still has not left some people, which can make life interesting at times.

As this is a search engine I imagine the company will be internet based and it’s product mostly IT based. My advice is to find one really good IT engineer rather than 2 or 3 average ones to help you build and develop it.

If you are also hosting your own site, don’t spunk lots of cash going for 99.9% uptime. Stick to aiming for 98%, the extra kit required for that last 1 or 2% really costs. If your product is good people won’t mind if the site is down for a few hours at random times.

With regard to the Intel/AMD thing on laptops, an AMD chip-set does not necessarily mean a bad thing. It is true that in terms of pure CPU performance you can’t touch the intel i7, but on laptops equipped with AMD chipsets the graphics power is often streets ahead of the intel chipset, which is great if you like games.

To be honest though neither really matter a great deal these days for an average user, especially if all you do is browse the web, watch movies, and listen to music.

I’m still using a 3 year old desktop that is slower than that latest AMD and intel CPU and it does everything I need from graphics and video editing to playing Call of Duty etc.

If you can’t upgrade the Ram I wouldn’t bother. I have a similar spec Powerbook with a G4 cpu. With 512mb it was horribly slow on Tiger, with 1.25Gb it’s usable, but still slow compared to a modern cheap laptop /netbook.

It gets used for kitchen web browsing and running alpha-baby.

There are more than a few ways to answer this, as simply put there are several ways in which the Nazi’s might not have ben defeated. But since we are talking about this country let’s concentrate on events in 1940;

1. GB negotiates peace after the fall of France: Lord Halifax instead of Churchill replaces Chamberlain and negotiates a weak deal for GB which sees the USSR receive no British aid later on in the war and the possibility of the Royal Navy guaranteeing the safety of German shipping.

The outcome may well have been the defeat of the USSR, but ironically the British Empire staying around a lot longer, albeit pro-German and with Nazi sympathies.

2. Germany actually manages to successfully invade & subdue GB in Sept 1940. Mosely would have been a puppet PM, Edward back on the throne, and lot’s of undesirables made to disappear.

The outcome may have seen the bulk of RN working for the Kriegsmarine and a strong German invasion of the USSR, probably later, 1942 perhaps? This would almost definitely have seen the USSR defeated. Remember the German reverses at Kursk etc in 1942 were made possible by British Intelligence passing the Russians the entire German Battle plan. Couple that with the resources of much of the British Empire to be tapped (the Indian army was massive) and no material aid from the USA to the USSR.

The comments about killing non-blond blue-eyed or Caucasian babies’ are also disingenuous; the irony of the third reich is that during the war the German population swelled with people from the East and occupied western Europe. There were many slavic people amongst them, even to the point were they were put in German uniform. Whilst the Nazi’s definitely had a racial heirachy in mind, it was only certain peoples they sought to completely exterminate, the rest were seen as resources to be utilised.

I’m just glad it turned out the way it did. Even if I was here my marriage to my wife would definitely have been illegal under the race laws that a BUF government led by Mosely would have passed… and I doubt that 70 years later they would have been revoked, or the Jim Crow laws in the Southern US states for that matter.

I just ran the test 32bit edition on my late 2006 MBP which has a 2.16 Core2Duo CPU 3Gb of 667Mhz Ram and an upgraded 320Mb hard drive and 10.6.8.

The score was very similar to yours. The laptop seems to run fine and snow leopard feels way quicker than Tiger used to.