Posts by z0mb13e

Ok then...

Definitely meant for their own sys admins. After all how many of us are dealing with massive web apps?

Proclaiming it as the way things are going to be is as stupid as insisting that all sys admins or developers have business skills.

Just like the real thing...

FPP MP sim - you control your MP - only just like in the real world they do whatever the hell they want and ignore you...

Failing that how about a simple house of commons wack-a-mole? Yes it teaches you how the house of commons works - the MPs try to avoid the issue at hand, be that a direct question or a big stick...

Wabbit season...

Anyone else get the feeling that IT folks (from sys admins to casual password guessers) are being manoeuvred into the firing line more and more these days?

The ship is being built as we speak...

to take the politicians, middle management and x-factor contestants to their new home planet... (and yes, probably telephone sanitisers too)

Too pricey...

My local blockbuster has been running a '4 films for 4 nights for a tenner' offer for a while now - not sure if this is the same in all stores, but the £2.50 a rental is cheap enough to keep me coming back...

Streaming has it's limitations and from personal experience the quality isn't as good as DVD, it's a pain in the arse to get onto my projector (I have tried various media streamers/solutions on and off for the past 10 years and found them all wanting - including the supposed silent PC options). I am willing to give the boxee box a go if the price point is low enough, but I doubt Virgin Media will have a player on there. If they do stream HD content then I would quickly hit the 'fair use' cap imposed by my ISP.

And that ladies and gentlemen...

is what is wrong with politics. A bill gets passed into law without any real scrutiny, without regard to the 20,000 odd members of the public that sent letters to their MPs. The bill is passed by a tiny fraction of the house and then they say they will figure out the details of implementation later?

While it is a sweeping generalisation and I try to avoid them unless for comedic value. I feel compelled to state that MP's and politicians are a bunch of fucking stupid, short sighted, self serving pointless waste of MY FUCKING TAX!

Soz about the rant... fingers crossed for a hung parliament - at least they will all be too busy bickering amongst themselves to pass any more legislation...

Change? Not really...

As the sole IT bod for a SME, things change all the time - currently setting up virtualization but this is just another way of doing IT. As a whole the only thing that worries me is that I will be outsourced and end up working for an IT service provider - might be better, might not... but then things change right?

The UK, cheap?

Thats the main reason I haven't bothered to buy a blueray player - the high price of both player and disks.

I picked up a DVD player that does upscaling and has a hdmi for less than the price of two movies on blueray... not the hi-def fest that blueray provides but good enough compared to the current output of the majority of UK broadcasts.

Blueray should have been an evolution rather than a replacement. We expect quality to get better as technology improves and I for one am done with paying a premium for that. I will buy a player when the cost < £50 and the disks < £10.

"I'm a PC and I can't afford Windows 7"

Yup, it slows down after a few months. And it slows down if you leave it on for a few days - resorted to a USB key for the 'speedboost' feature to make it a 'bit' quicker.

And cost is a big factor - it just isn't worth it when you have XP... as mentioned above - bring back the pre-release pricing for good... or make it so cheap that buying it is a no brainer. Oh and bin the stupid versions - one version, one price.

People recoil in horror when they ask me to fix their computers and I say a reinstall is the quickest option and it turns out they don't have the disks so I tell them it will cost £x to buy a new copy of Windows - they just go out and buy a new PC 90% of the time...

Aw...

...cute kids doing a good job! Well done...

Can we have working HD first?

Can we have working HD first? Cause I'm still waiting for ubiquitous HD to make proper use of the current capabilities of my TV...

Part of the PSU?

Perhaps the standard PC PSU should be able to monitor the power consumption as part of some 'green' standard.

If that data can be logged in the PSU to be sent to a bit of monitoring software running on the PC (when the PC is running) that can in turn provide SNMP data then monitoring desktop power consumption becomes part and parcel of normal monitoring...

Keeping up with the times...

Hence why the BCS is seen as irrelevant but so many in the IT world...

ad-hoc replacement

Same... replace when needed - that is to say, replace when a machine dies.

I keep hearing about desktop virtualization as being the next big thing but all the desktop virtualization products I have seen involve a tiny box that does the KVM over IP type magic which cost more than the average business desktop with an OEM licence. Given that I keep a spare machine ready to roll and can swap out desktops and users can carry on working with little more than a pause to download their profile, plus a reimage takes a couple of hours. Trying to justify the expense of a decent server(s) to support desktop replacements that cost more than desktops, not to mention the cost of the OS licences just isn't going to wash.

I have one Win7 machine to test all our weird and wonderful apps work ok - they don't, nor do the HP all-in-one laser printers that we bought less than 3 years ago. I don't think the users could cope with a) a change in the desktop & b) the concept of running XP on top of Win7 just so they can run a few of the apps that ran perfectly on their old system or to scan a document...

HD for the rest of us?

Anyone else get the feeling that HD on freesat and freeview will just limp along for the next few years until all the main stream channels catch up on producing the majority of their content in HD?

Makes me wonder why HD TVs are being pushed so much when (unless you are willing to pay the £30+ for sky HD or be dicked around by Virgin Medias billing department) there is so little content.