Some of the blokes I used to work with could handle a lot of grot, literally to farm-yard levels.

It was too much for me though, I am very clean living and Playboy was about as far as I wanted to take it, not very filthy at all I am afraid…

Your motherboard is fine for any modern card, there is a chance that your CPU might be a bit under powered to fully utilise any of the more powerful cards though.

I don’t use Zwift but from what I can gather a £150-£200 card (RX-470/480 or Nvidia 1050Ti or 1060) would be more than enough.

Another point to watch is your Power Supply Unit. The older and more powerful cards often pull a lot more juice than the more recent cards and need to be plugged directly into the PSU. If you only have something like a 300Watt PSU you will likely need to upgrade that at the same time.

The newest RX 460’s and GTX 1050 (entry level gaming cards) should pull all the power they need direct from the motherboard but I don’t know if they will handle the ‘ultra’ settings in Zwift or the resolutions you might want to run it at.

EDIT – I am clearly a slow typer…

Just a thought on the xbox etc. I played video games alot as a tennager – C64 then Amiga, so not quite the same. I did however have to have a Saturday job to pay for them.

Who is paying for the Xbox, XBox live, games, and even electricity? If you are then simple solution is he needs to get a job if he wants anymore. Having said that getting part-time work as a teenager might be difficult these days?

I play on the PC’s and XBox with my 5 & 7 year olds, it’s good bonding time and I am amazed at what they build in Minecraft and other construction type games now. My 7 year old has started editing JSON files to create giant creatures in Minecraft; so there can be a positive side to video games.

Look on the bright side; teenage preganacy rates are way down…

As a teenager I quickly got bored of swimming and Judo I’d previously done. My dad dropped me off one evening at the local Air Training Corps unit and I never looked back. Shooting, hiking, spot of gliding and later on sneaking off with girls when on annual camp… oh, see my first point…

I’ve done this event a few times, always enjoyed it. Unfortunately it starts near Harefield/Denham and rides out to Wendover rather than the other way around;

http://www.bucksoffroadsportive.co.uk/

Looks awesome, would love to visit that part of the UK on bike or foot. Well done on doing it as a race!

Whilst I have met many lovely people from Scotland some of the most wound-up people who seemed to have a problem with everything also came from there.

I mean this one time when I was guiding in Spain all I did was ask for their English telephone numbers, the torrent of abuse I got and the lectures on Sir Alexander Graham Bell being a Scotsman were simply shocking 😳

After the umpteenth wine about the BBC always being on about England I had to correct them and point out the BBC were always on about London, not England – and that the Sky telebox in the house was set to the London/SE region 😆

I think Big Chris might be looking for you…

Interesting to see the table with the banding on.

After doing a speed awareness course around 10 years back my view shifted and I’d now argue that there should be no Band A for speeding where there are 20 & 30 mph speed limits. This is due to the simple reason that these are usually areas where people (and baby robins) live and pedestrians/cyclists are very common.

People doing 10 mph over the limit on the dual-carriage ways/motorways, Band A makes sense.

Just my 2p…

Meh, my thoughts are that if content creators, create good content, they could still make a profit even if they released it under a Creative Commons Licence. The key would be to ensure it was available via an easy-access and good quality method – we’re almost there with that now – Spotify and Netflix for example…

…But DRM still suck’s though – why can’t I easily watch content I’ve paid for on my Linux Desktop without having to dick about with browser plugins? It’s almost pointless so why bother?

I digress, the monthly budget that covers our access to content is now approximately;

£25 Unlimited Broadband,
£6 Netflix,
£7 NowTV,
£8 Amazon Prime,
£17.50 Mobile Phone contract which includes 20Gb data and Spotify.

So £63.50. At the peak of our Sky TV membership we were definitely paying more and getting a lot less of what we actually wanted.

Anyhow – this is not good news for Sky etc, they are now getting less of our money per programme/film we watch. So regardless of streaming legally or not, the existing media companies need to get with the times unless they want to be like Blockbuster Video. Blockbuster refused to adapt for fear of cannibalising their store foot fall by offering DVD-by-post or streaming; until someone else did it (better).

Not this old argument again. If you make a copy of your mates DVD without him knowing it’s highly unlikely to be looked at as a criminal offence the same way as taking his bike would be – he has lost nothing.

In this example you would have committed a civil offence and I know of no sane copper who would treat it otherwise. It would be left up to the copyright holder to seek a civil case against you; assuming anyone could be bothered to report you and the IP holder wanted to spend the money on bringing it to court…

Whilst the movie industry is keen for people to think pirating copyrighted material is a criminal offence, it mostly isn’t – in the case of examples like the above.

The law does make provision for those running a cottage industry infringing on copyrights and IP to be prosecuted as criminals hence the arrests linked to – and if you read that article you will see in the case of selling Kodi boxes it still being tested – the law is that grey in the areas of IP infringement.

Also, just to be noted one of the most pirated TV shows ever is also the most successful – Game of Thrones.

How does this make sense?

The few people I know who use pirated content are also big TV/Movie buffs and spend more on DVD’s/Netflix/Sky/Cinema than the people I know who don’t ever pirate stuff – like me; I have Netflix and only bought 3 films last year on BlinkBox. I haven’t bought a DVD/Blu-Ray in years and went to the cinema only the once last year for star wars.

My answer is no, the extra money will just disappear without giving any extra value. There is massive waste in government spending, pouring good money after bad is not the solution.

What we need is a new kind of leader to shake things up, he might have small hands, but they would be beautiful, so beautiful that they would seem like the biggest hands; wonderful hands even, so amazing they would just take away all your concerns, it will be amazing, incredible even, you’ll see…

Nice build.

Generally speaking AMD are the better brand, they support their cards with updates for longer than Nvidia and make an effort to support Open Source drivers for the Linux OS. Nvidia Linux drivers are just the windows driver with a wrapper and force you to taint the kernel – in effect you might compromise system security by using them.

AMD’s support for tech such as OpenCL has also been way better. On top of that it’s less likely that AMD CPU’s could provide backdoors for government agencies or weak crypto unlike the Intel management engine and less than random number generator.

You can also take the view that AMD’s older stuff isn’t as poorly performing or inefficient as is often reported, it’s just that some features the hardware supports isn’t widely used or AMD fell foul of tricks to hinder performance on systems using their components – there has been plenty of examples in the past.

These are not things a typical user or gamer would other babout but if you are into proper geeky home computing or political activism of any description they might be…

Edit, just to say I use Intel and Nvidia at the moment ?

You can buy a windows 10 licence for 20 quid or so

Watch out for these, they are often grey market or product keys sourced from a companies MSDN subscriptions. Microsoft have a history of locking some product keys which may prevent re-install or upgrades at a later date.

Depending on the desired games Linux can work out as a good option to keep costs down.

£600 won’t go far for a gaming system if you need keyboard/monitor/mouse etc. unless you are prepared to compromise on something. The GPU is more important than the CPU however e.g. a £50-£60 CPU can work quite well with a £150-200 GPU.

My bet is that the Ryzen CPU will probably be over £500 alone given that it directly competes with Intel CPU’s that cost £1000, so don’t expect a massive reduction of CPU’s at the cheaper end of the market.

Personally I like Scan.co.uk and have only ever had good service from them; but I have never purchased a complete system as I prefer to build my own.

What type of games are you looking to play? Some CPU/GPU combinations are more important for some games/genres than others.

Just helping to organise one now. Saturday afternoon shooting clays then into London for curry and drinks. We may find a club afterwards.

My own was a very quiet affair; curry and beers with a few close mates. My life only really changed after kids came along, the days of all night benders and being on the ‘pull’ didn’t survive much past university as my first job was shift work and I had a mortgage/bills to pay.

Just pop it in the dishwasher, totally overrated hype that laptops and dishwashers don’t mix. Just take the battery out first of course…

Sorry, I must have my head in the sand. I thought Lyme disease was understood by the medical world – is there some disagrement on diagnosis and treatment?

Did you never see the Simpsons episode when Homer spots a Gummy Bear he can’t resist?

scrap it, let the Aussies, Candians, and Kiwi’s etc. fund their own head of state, the freeloaders 😉

Link to story on NASA scientist saying stuff about discovering life within a decade (8 years left…)

Space.com Link & this more recent one link 2

Filed under their search-for-life section

NASA seems to think that we’ll be finding signs of life within a decade and will have proof within 30 years. Who am I to argue – I believe they mean microbial rather than Spock.

I tend to think that even if intelligent life comparable to our own evolved, or will evolve elsewhere there is probably a good chance we are too late, or too early to ever know about it.

Erm, numerically our military is pretty small. There’s not much left to cut if the government still wants to support international operations, and even then we have stepped back a lot in recent years whilst the focus has been on Afghan and Iraq.

The NHS and pension budgets also dwarf the defence budget. So yes it could help but given the way things work you soon be looking for something else and would have zero capability to do anything other than what the police and coastguard could manage.

1 – cut waste;

If the NHS was Walmart there is no way it would pay what it does for software licences, or IT consultancy rates. Collectively the NHS is massive and should really have the clout to dictate what it will pay. Instead (as I understand it) each trust negotiates it’s own purchases so lose the ability to collectively threaten to take all the business elsewhere if a vendors prices are not keen enough.

I know that prior to 2010 the NHS in England & Wales did have a half-decent agreement with one large software vendor. Then a new government talked about making cuts to save money and got rid of whatever department a previous government had established to manage these kinds of things.

So a saving of some centralised salaries meant that some NHS Trusts faced massive software licence fees (well in £ millions) when the old centrally negotiated agreements that previously covered them expired.

Speaking of software one of the key reasons the massive-super-expensive-project got so super-expensive was that the vendors were trying to please each hospitals requirements. They were not dealing with a single customer so no surprises it completely failed – I went to a fascinating seminar on that.

I’ve been told it’s not too dissimilar with how drugs are purchased and some are now a lot more expensive than in the past. I don’t know if true but certainly sounds plausible.

So;

An accredited person can ask you for your name and address.

It is an offence to not give it to them.

They have no powers to detain you (apart from PCSO’s who can detain you for 30mins to wait for a propper-copper).

It is an offence for an accredited person to say or act like they have powers they do not.

Hmmm… I can understand why they followed him back to where he probably worked.

Anyhow, Gentlemen carry handkerchiefs, clearly this was a simple misunderstanding and he’d already given it to a lady to ‘grolly up’ in?

I have a 1440p 32 inch screen. Pixel density is similar to a 24 inch 1080p screen. But since most films only go up to 1080p it would be of limited benefit.

You should look at screen type and possibly refresh rates, if you will also use it for gaming.

IPS screens have generally the best colour reproduction.

Not sure about BT, but I find that if I use OpenDNS (208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220) or Google DNS (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) as my DNS servers most nonsense from Sky Broadband stops – this is the stuff where some websites just don’t load but you don’t get the message saying it is specifically blocked.

I also use PIA on my phone and personal laptop; like Tor that stops all the nonesense, but then means you usually have an IP address blacklisted by Netflix and Amazon prime video etc.

The whole thing is mostly nonsensical as 5 minutes googling tells your teenagers how to get around most of the generic blocks.

My youngest recently turned 5, and my oldest is now 7 and my wife now has a job as a teaching assitant, so the days of needing childcare are thankfully well behind us. At one point part-time care for the pair of them was over £1k.

Somehow we managed, in the big scheme of things it wasn’t for long…

…but that taste will stay with you forever 😉

If it did not come with any cloning software you can use a Linux boot DVD or USB to use the DD command to clone a disk.

It’s quite simple really, the best way to kill a thread is to state an indisputable fact.

The fact that it is quite hard to find a fact, no matter how solid, that no one on STW will dispute is actually quite hard, does make this premise somewhat disputable and therefore not really a fact.

Therefore, just posting some random nonsense or even just invoking Hora is the best way to kill a thread?

Any power kites?

Nope, they are all in Africa.

Aylesbury. Train into Marylebone in under an hour.

Whilst this is true the 1.5 hours door-to-door is a bit of a struggle unless you live next to either one of the train stations and work within a 5 min walk of Marylebone. Houses in Aylesbury have also gone up a lot over the past 5 years; if you find a 4 bed one for £200k, there will likely be a catch – although there are a lot of new builds with shared ownership options.

However, leaving early in the morning Tring is only a 15 minute drive and has trains that get into Euston in 40 minutes.

Don’t bother looking for a 4 bed in Tring, it would be well above £200k. You might in Milton Keynes or Luton though, both of which have stations and trains into London. MKC to Euston is around 35 mins I think and there is plenty of riding not far away, it’s probably the OP’s best bet.

Avoid the AMD Opertons for Database Servers. Every Intel Xeon since 2011 has been a better investment – despite being able to uses lot’s of cores almost every database engine still benefits from fewer faster cores.

If your main apps are coded for Windows using .Net then SQL Server tends to be the DB Engine of choice. If you are considering this then the Intels make even more sense as it’s licensed per-core, as is Windows Server 2016. Less of an issue if Linux/PostgreSQL is where you are headed.

Given the workload descriptions given thus far, a relational database might not be best fit. But if you do go with SQL Server it offers FileTables and/or a Remote Blob Store which is great for use-cases where the storage of photos or documents is needed and keeps the files out of the database, but controlled by the database. Placing large binary files directly into a relational database is usually a recipe for disaster however hence, many NoSQL type solutions that can be a better chioce – depending on what you need to do.

With regards to size 30TB is big potatoes in database land. I work for a multi-national and we only have a couple of Data Warehouses bigger than that – but then we are not stuffing them full of jpegs…

We pay about £300 p.a. for ours I think.

It’s for the communal parking areas and green-spaces. It feels like a bit of a rip off as it is calculated on how many parking spaces you have on the leasehold communal car park. We have one space and a garage, but get charged for 2 spaces. The cheeky buggers haven’t cleaned up inside my garage – ever! And we have no grass in our communal car-park where as other bits of the estate do. It’s an outrage…

It has proved it’s worth with anti-social ‘social’ neighbours. Any dumped crap or graffiti and they deal with it. They also have all the contact details for all the landlords and seem to be able to use the right legal threats to make annoying things stop happening once notified.

We recently changed something and now the company reports to a governing body made up of community minded residents, so all’s good. Other than my garage…

How much does a person cost NHS in his/her entire life?

The solution might be simple but it depends on whether people are opened minded about it.

I think once you tip 70 you become part of the demographic that become very expensive to ‘keep running’.

If you don’t use your GP much then as a ‘bloke in your mid-30’s’ demographic your average cost to the NHS is around £1000 per head. I think it’s 3 times that for the 70-74 years old’s and twice again for the 85+ group.

Logan’s Run?

Flaperon on here is supposidly a pilot. After seeing him struggle with a Garmin GPS I’d hate to watch him conduct the pre-flight checks 😯

Rich_s Fancy a a 3GB R9 280X to play it on for cheap? You’ll need to turn the speakers up as the coil whine is a bit loud but it works and is a Vulkan compaitble card 😛

Hmmm… if this drops below £20 on Steam I think I’ll get it. I still have Doom 3 to complete… and I think I picked that up in 2006!

Our house is 5 years old. Other than the trickle vents in the bathroom we don’t really open them as we’ve found it better to open some of the windows a fraction with the catch on during the the day.