...scrabbling around with a torch to get into your car (and check tyres etc before setting off for work) when it's pitch black because the council's turned off the street light right outside your house!
Thankfully Kent County Council have decided to restore night-time lighting by using LED lamps, so this winter won't be a stumble-fest.
(On rural roads it makes sense, although they tend not to be lit in the first place. For residential areas though I'm far from convinced it's a good idea, especially as they're still left on in the evening - KCC's switching to LED means that longer term it'll cost the same as the half-lighting that goes on now).
BA's business class uses (heavily patented) ying-yang seating in order to cram in extra passengers - it has 8 abreast in its 777s, for example (2-4-2), whereas most competitors have 6 abreast (2-2-2) or even 4 abreast (1-2-1). As a result BA is doing very well for itself in terms of profits!
Sounds like a bargain in comparison to UK provider charges. Although Three offers "Feel at Home" free roaming in some places, in places where it doesn't (eg Canada), you'll pay $896 per 100MB. And no, that isn't a typo!
Calling a UK number. £1.40 per minute. Calling a Canadian number. £1.40 per minute. Texts to UK. 35p per text. Texting a Canadian number. 35p per text. Receiving calls from any number. 99p per minute. Receiving texts from any number. Free. Using internet and data. £6 per MB. Using voicemail. £1.40 per minute.
I'll be making heavy use of it in a couple of months when I'm heading to Seattle (and Alaska), it'll be far more convenient than buying a local SIM as I did last time I was in the USA.
I'm quite surprised that there aren't already similar agreements for people from the States visiting Europe.
The lesson here is that people who own a cool, overclockable GPU in a gaming laptop may want to overclock it. Goodness knows what came over them when they removed it, but at least they've seen sense now.
FWIW, the GM204 chip runs cool and is easy to overclock. I overclocked my 980M from 1,038 MHz (core), 1,253 MHz (RAM) to 1,228 MHz (core), 1,373 MHz (RAM) and received an 8% boost in my 3DMark scores. The GPU temperature didn't go above 70C either.
It makes a noticeable difference playing games at 3K, which is the native resolution of the panel.
For those who are unaware btw, if the chip gets too hot it'll simply downclock until it reaches a stable temperature. In some brands of laptop that happens at stock speeds, whereas others (such as the Clevo I have) have plenty of headroom. It's not the sort of thing that's going to lead to warranty repairs.
FWIW, the sort of laptops for which this is an issue (ie high-end gaming laptops) typically have graphics cards on MXM modules, they're designed to be upgradeable to the latest and greatest.
The *price* of those modules, however, means it's not something most owners will ever do...
The cheap and nasty Acer will throttle when it gets to 70C, overclocked or not.
The water outside here isn't frozen. I'm in the southeast of the UK, where we've had a generally mild, largely snowless winter - it's 8C as I write this, for example. Not that that matters, as most of us have central heating and the temperature indoors won't be anywhere near as cold as it is outside!
The 2nd-gen Maxwell chips are known to run cool and overclock well, be they laptop or desktop form (in fact, it's the same silicon - just with a few bits lopped off and a lower stock speed for mobile). A cynic would say they're removing overclocking as it'll impact on their plans to release slightly faster versions of the same chip later this year...
The 980M in my Clevo P650SG overclocks by 125MHz with ease - and it won't even hit 70C while playing games in that overclocked state either. When you're playing at 3K (there's also a 4K screen available), that extra 125MHz makes a noticeable difference.
Removal of overclocking from the drivers is irritating at best.
They *do* seem to overread compared with proper weather stations, if you look at wundermap - although that could be because they're sold more as a fashion accessory than a serious weather instrument and owners may not be siting them properly.
A Y-Cam Bullet HD 1080 takes decent quality pictures and supports FTP, but it's quite expensive as it's marketed as a security camera. It also makes a good webcam for outdoor use, such as looking into an enclosure at a wolf centre...
It's not *that* impressive - laptop i7s are 47W parts and they're doubtless *very* closely related. There are also some 37W quad-core mobile i7s, but they have low clock rates in comparison.
If you look inside one of the ZIP files you'll see there's a link to a Slovakian warez site (in particular, 3D Lemmings Winter edition). I can't verify if you can actually download from that Slovakian site though as it looks like it's subscription-based.
Yup, I know that global warming doesn't imply that my back yard will get warmer all the time. However, it's interesting to me at least that the warmest year on record here in the UK (records going back 350 years or so) coincides with the warmest year globally.
Manley's paper explains how the various figures were derived. The early figures are subject to a good deal of approximation, but if you leaf through the paper you'll see various sources have been used to compile the data. By the mid 1700s records are accurate enough that no approximation is needed. Although it's a far from perfect way of doing things, it's the best we have. The CET series is the world's longest monthly temperature record series, FWIW.
"Before 1671 intstrumental readings are few; accordingly all values before 1671 have been rounded to whole degrees C. Regular thermometer readings began again in 1672. "
There's been a marked trend here in the UK for people to have warmer and warmer houses. The thermostat in mine's set to 18C (64F), as it has been for the last 30 years. Meanwhile my friends' houses get warmer and warmer - up to 25C in some cases (77F). There's a perinneal struggle in the office at work too, with my preference for the temperature to be set to 18C, while the boss would rather have 25C. So we have a compromise of 22C, which is still warmer than the neighbouring IT classrooms (yes, I work in a school). Those classrooms are set to 19C or 20C.
I work in a school. We've been through the whole "every pupil gets a computer" phase and it was a disaster - we used eeepcs running Xandros and initially there were complaints about how crummy the programs were. (IE people expected Office, but they got OpenOffice instead).
Then after a few days the breakages started - minibooks left in bags, being dropped, screens smashed, drinks spilt on them etc. So that meant that teachers couldn't rely on everyone having one any more and the whole point of them was lost. They stopped being used and we ended up getting about 30% of them back after the year was out, the rest were damaged or lost. It was an absolute waste of money and it still goes on with other schools today (those who are foolish enough to give tablets to all their pupils, anyway!)
We still use desktop PCs running Windows and Office, as it's what the real world uses (for now, at least). We provide access via UAG to our network for staff and pupils to access their documents remotely.
Google Docs, OneDrive etc are blocked for pupils. Chromebooks are pointless from our point of view due to Google Docs being blocked and lack of intergration into a Windows domain. They also don't run the programs which pupils use in school (which include some digital textbooks, additional educational needs programs, maths programs, Photoshop etc). iPads are beyond useless for our needs, as it's a faff to create spreadsheets or word process on them. Yes, it can be done, but a real keyboard and a decent PC make it much more pleasant.
So, like most schools around this part of the UK, we have several IT rooms with desktops. We have a media suite running Premiere (having phased out Macs a few years ago), a music suite running Cubase and a DT suite running SolidWorks. We have a couple of hundred staff laptops and a couple of hundred curriculum laptops, safely locked away at night.
We are looking at at BYOD implementation, but the powers that be aren't overly keen to have teenagers running around with expensive laptops, tablets etc. And there's the whole network file access issue, we can't add the machines to the domain so they'd have to go through the somewhat clunky UAG system to access their files. There's also the line of who has responsibility to ensure the machines accessing our network are patched and up-to-date, as we don't have the resources to look after people's personal equipment.
All in all, there won't be much change in the school where I work for the foreseeable future: Office and Windows look like remaining the main platform for a while yet. It's the same in the other schools in the area, Chromebooks and the like are simply not useful to the way that schools work around here.
WIndows 95 eh? At least that had 3D buttons which "pushed in" when you clicked on them.
Of course, the old Windows 95-esque theme is *still* there, even in Windows 10, but they do try and hide it from you. You can see it if you run Word, embed a Graph object (which borks DWM, so you get Windows Vista's Aero Basic instead). Change the screen resolution and bam, DWM completely dies and you get left with the Windows 95 style controls and theme. (Well, technically it's more like Windows 98 as it has the gradient-shaded title bar, but the thought is there!)
22 years ago at school we were all using Object Packager in Windows 3.1 to smuggle in arbitary EXEs - long before any of this current hoo-ha erupted. Of course, we were more concerned with smuggling in games rather than using it for spying...
The only surprising thing is that it's taken them over 22 years to realise that yes, allowing random EXEs to be packaged up isn't really a good idea!
I work in a school's IT department and we won't be touching Chromebooks with a 50-foot bargepole. We use a mixture of desktops and laptops running Windows 7 and Office 2013 - which costs far less than it would commercially. We also use SCCM to manage the 1,000 or so PCs and laptops (generic i3s and Core2 Duos from the likes of Lenovo and HP) we have in the school.
Data is kept locally and is backed up in various ways (ranging from blu-ray to SANs), with the data stored in various parts of the site. Nothing gets stored on the pupils PCs other than temporary data when they're using the PC - their work is all accessed from our network servers.
Cloud access is something we work against for pupils, as it's an excellent way of them wasting time with Flash games etc - kids are very inventive when it comes to playing games (I know, I was exactly the same at school in the 90s!) and it's easier to curtail games on our system than it would be with Chromebooks.That's leaving aside the privacy situation, which doesn't fill me with joy: on a personal level I won't put anything of importance in the cloud, as I simply don't know who'll have access to it. Whereas data on my own network here is much easier to keep tabs on...
No 4.0GHz (stock) P4 was ever released. Note the fact there is only one sample in their database and it's only appeared in 2011 - years after such a chip, if it existed, would have been released.
At best it's a lone engineering sample. At worst, it's just a hack someone's done.
...I bought one on eBay 7 years ago (with PS/2 connection) and I'm using it on the fourth PC I've owned since then, a brand-new Haswell-E build. It's still as clacky and tactile as it was back then. The only slight snag is no Windows key, but I don't really miss it.
22 years ago I first used a buckling-spring keyboard, the one that came with an IBM XT. That "Model F" keyboard was (and is, as I kept it) built like a tank and, if anything, it's even clackier than the Model M. Sadly it won't work without expensive adapters on a modern PC. The layout is odd by current standards (ctrl is where caps lock is and vice-versa).
That old XT keyboard gave me the taste for "clacky" keyboards and over the following decade I got thoroughly fed up with the spongy, lifeless keyboards that became the norm. I then found out about the Model M, looked into getting one from Unicomp but thanks to import duty, VAT and delivery the cost was over the equivalent of $170 - way too much to spend for me! So I snagged an old second hand IBM model M on eBay for a fraction of the price, cleaned it up and I've been using it ever since. Hopefully PS/2 keyboard ports will continue to stay on motherboards for many years yet!
Slashdot Mirror
...scrabbling around with a torch to get into your car (and check tyres etc before setting off for work) when it's pitch black because the council's turned off the street light right outside your house!
Thankfully Kent County Council have decided to restore night-time lighting by using LED lamps, so this winter won't be a stumble-fest.
(On rural roads it makes sense, although they tend not to be lit in the first place. For residential areas though I'm far from convinced it's a good idea, especially as they're still left on in the evening - KCC's switching to LED means that longer term it'll cost the same as the half-lighting that goes on now).
...by British Airways (BA).
BA's business class uses (heavily patented) ying-yang seating in order to cram in extra passengers - it has 8 abreast in its 777s, for example (2-4-2), whereas most competitors have 6 abreast (2-2-2) or even 4 abreast (1-2-1). As a result BA is doing very well for itself in terms of profits!
Just looks like the PDO's flipped back to positive to me - not exactly a mystery!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Sounds like a bargain in comparison to UK provider charges. Although Three offers "Feel at Home" free roaming in some places, in places where it doesn't (eg Canada), you'll pay $896 per 100MB. And no, that isn't a typo!
Calling a UK number. £1.40 per minute.
Calling a Canadian number. £1.40 per minute.
Texts to UK. 35p per text.
Texting a Canadian number. 35p per text.
Receiving calls from any number. 99p per minute.
Receiving texts from any number. Free.
Using internet and data. £6 per MB.
Using voicemail. £1.40 per minute.
http://www.three.co.uk/Support...
Seems eminently sensible to me.
Here in the UK Three already allows you to use your contracted minutes and data allowance in some countries, including in the USA, at no extra cost.
http://blog.three.co.uk/2013/1...
I'll be making heavy use of it in a couple of months when I'm heading to Seattle (and Alaska), it'll be far more convenient than buying a local SIM as I did last time I was in the USA.
I'm quite surprised that there aren't already similar agreements for people from the States visiting Europe.
It's the third one I've had - and none of them have failed. They've all become outdated long before any failures had time to pop up.
Hurrah!
The lesson here is that people who own a cool, overclockable GPU in a gaming laptop may want to overclock it. Goodness knows what came over them when they removed it, but at least they've seen sense now.
FWIW, the GM204 chip runs cool and is easy to overclock. I overclocked my 980M from 1,038 MHz (core), 1,253 MHz (RAM) to 1,228 MHz (core), 1,373 MHz (RAM) and received an 8% boost in my 3DMark scores. The GPU temperature didn't go above 70C either.
It makes a noticeable difference playing games at 3K, which is the native resolution of the panel.
For those who are unaware btw, if the chip gets too hot it'll simply downclock until it reaches a stable temperature. In some brands of laptop that happens at stock speeds, whereas others (such as the Clevo I have) have plenty of headroom. It's not the sort of thing that's going to lead to warranty repairs.
FWIW, the sort of laptops for which this is an issue (ie high-end gaming laptops) typically have graphics cards on MXM modules, they're designed to be upgradeable to the latest and greatest.
The *price* of those modules, however, means it's not something most owners will ever do...
The cheap and nasty Acer will throttle when it gets to 70C, overclocked or not.
The water outside here isn't frozen. I'm in the southeast of the UK, where we've had a generally mild, largely snowless winter - it's 8C as I write this, for example. Not that that matters, as most of us have central heating and the temperature indoors won't be anywhere near as cold as it is outside!
The 2nd-gen Maxwell chips are known to run cool and overclock well, be they laptop or desktop form (in fact, it's the same silicon - just with a few bits lopped off and a lower stock speed for mobile). A cynic would say they're removing overclocking as it'll impact on their plans to release slightly faster versions of the same chip later this year...
The 980M in my Clevo P650SG overclocks by 125MHz with ease - and it won't even hit 70C while playing games in that overclocked state either. When you're playing at 3K (there's also a 4K screen available), that extra 125MHz makes a noticeable difference.
Removal of overclocking from the drivers is irritating at best.
They *do* seem to overread compared with proper weather stations, if you look at wundermap - although that could be because they're sold more as a fashion accessory than a serious weather instrument and owners may not be siting them properly.
A Y-Cam Bullet HD 1080 takes decent quality pictures and supports FTP, but it's quite expensive as it's marketed as a security camera. It also makes a good webcam for outdoor use, such as looking into an enclosure at a wolf centre...
It's not *that* impressive - laptop i7s are 47W parts and they're doubtless *very* closely related. There are also some 37W quad-core mobile i7s, but they have low clock rates in comparison.
If you look inside one of the ZIP files you'll see there's a link to a Slovakian warez site (in particular, 3D Lemmings Winter edition). I can't verify if you can actually download from that Slovakian site though as it looks like it's subscription-based.
Yup, I know that global warming doesn't imply that my back yard will get warmer all the time. However, it's interesting to me at least that the warmest year on record here in the UK (records going back 350 years or so) coincides with the warmest year globally.
In Manley's paper it refers to a reference from 1702 of a thermometer graduated in inches. There's your answer!
Manley's paper explains how the various figures were derived. The early figures are subject to a good deal of approximation, but if you leaf through the paper you'll see various sources have been used to compile the data. By the mid 1700s records are accurate enough that no approximation is needed. Although it's a far from perfect way of doing things, it's the best we have. The CET series is the world's longest monthly temperature record series, FWIW.
"Before 1671 intstrumental readings are few; accordingly all values before 1671 have been rounded to whole degrees C. Regular thermometer readings began again in 1672. "
Here's a link to the paper on the Royal Meteorological Society's website:
http://www.rmets.org.uk/sites/...
...it was the warmest year in the CET (Central England Temperature) record, which goes back to 1659.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ha...
There's been a marked trend here in the UK for people to have warmer and warmer houses. The thermostat in mine's set to 18C (64F), as it has been for the last 30 years. Meanwhile my friends' houses get warmer and warmer - up to 25C in some cases (77F). There's a perinneal struggle in the office at work too, with my preference for the temperature to be set to 18C, while the boss would rather have 25C. So we have a compromise of 22C, which is still warmer than the neighbouring IT classrooms (yes, I work in a school). Those classrooms are set to 19C or 20C.
I work in a school. We've been through the whole "every pupil gets a computer" phase and it was a disaster - we used eeepcs running Xandros and initially there were complaints about how crummy the programs were. (IE people expected Office, but they got OpenOffice instead).
Then after a few days the breakages started - minibooks left in bags, being dropped, screens smashed, drinks spilt on them etc. So that meant that teachers couldn't rely on everyone having one any more and the whole point of them was lost. They stopped being used and we ended up getting about 30% of them back after the year was out, the rest were damaged or lost. It was an absolute waste of money and it still goes on with other schools today (those who are foolish enough to give tablets to all their pupils, anyway!)
We still use desktop PCs running Windows and Office, as it's what the real world uses (for now, at least). We provide access via UAG to our network for staff and pupils to access their documents remotely.
Google Docs, OneDrive etc are blocked for pupils. Chromebooks are pointless from our point of view due to Google Docs being blocked and lack of intergration into a Windows domain. They also don't run the programs which pupils use in school (which include some digital textbooks, additional educational needs programs, maths programs, Photoshop etc). iPads are beyond useless for our needs, as it's a faff to create spreadsheets or word process on them. Yes, it can be done, but a real keyboard and a decent PC make it much more pleasant.
So, like most schools around this part of the UK, we have several IT rooms with desktops. We have a media suite running Premiere (having phased out Macs a few years ago), a music suite running Cubase and a DT suite running SolidWorks. We have a couple of hundred staff laptops and a couple of hundred curriculum laptops, safely locked away at night.
We are looking at at BYOD implementation, but the powers that be aren't overly keen to have teenagers running around with expensive laptops, tablets etc. And there's the whole network file access issue, we can't add the machines to the domain so they'd have to go through the somewhat clunky UAG system to access their files. There's also the line of who has responsibility to ensure the machines accessing our network are patched and up-to-date, as we don't have the resources to look after people's personal equipment.
All in all, there won't be much change in the school where I work for the foreseeable future: Office and Windows look like remaining the main platform for a while yet. It's the same in the other schools in the area, Chromebooks and the like are simply not useful to the way that schools work around here.
WIndows 95 eh? At least that had 3D buttons which "pushed in" when you clicked on them.
Of course, the old Windows 95-esque theme is *still* there, even in Windows 10, but they do try and hide it from you. You can see it if you run Word, embed a Graph object (which borks DWM, so you get Windows Vista's Aero Basic instead). Change the screen resolution and bam, DWM completely dies and you get left with the Windows 95 style controls and theme. (Well, technically it's more like Windows 98 as it has the gradient-shaded title bar, but the thought is there!)
Blimey, get with the times!
22 years ago at school we were all using Object Packager in Windows 3.1 to smuggle in arbitary EXEs - long before any of this current hoo-ha erupted. Of course, we were more concerned with smuggling in games rather than using it for spying...
The only surprising thing is that it's taken them over 22 years to realise that yes, allowing random EXEs to be packaged up isn't really a good idea!
I work in a school's IT department and we won't be touching Chromebooks with a 50-foot bargepole. We use a mixture of desktops and laptops running Windows 7 and Office 2013 - which costs far less than it would commercially. We also use SCCM to manage the 1,000 or so PCs and laptops (generic i3s and Core2 Duos from the likes of Lenovo and HP) we have in the school.
Data is kept locally and is backed up in various ways (ranging from blu-ray to SANs), with the data stored in various parts of the site. Nothing gets stored on the pupils PCs other than temporary data when they're using the PC - their work is all accessed from our network servers.
Cloud access is something we work against for pupils, as it's an excellent way of them wasting time with Flash games etc - kids are very inventive when it comes to playing games (I know, I was exactly the same at school in the 90s!) and it's easier to curtail games on our system than it would be with Chromebooks.That's leaving aside the privacy situation, which doesn't fill me with joy: on a personal level I won't put anything of importance in the cloud, as I simply don't know who'll have access to it. Whereas data on my own network here is much easier to keep tabs on...
No 4.0GHz (stock) P4 was ever released. Note the fact there is only one sample in their database and it's only appeared in 2011 - years after such a chip, if it existed, would have been released.
At best it's a lone engineering sample. At worst, it's just a hack someone's done.
...I bought one on eBay 7 years ago (with PS/2 connection) and I'm using it on the fourth PC I've owned since then, a brand-new Haswell-E build. It's still as clacky and tactile as it was back then. The only slight snag is no Windows key, but I don't really miss it.
22 years ago I first used a buckling-spring keyboard, the one that came with an IBM XT. That "Model F" keyboard was (and is, as I kept it) built like a tank and, if anything, it's even clackier than the Model M. Sadly it won't work without expensive adapters on a modern PC. The layout is odd by current standards (ctrl is where caps lock is and vice-versa).
That old XT keyboard gave me the taste for "clacky" keyboards and over the following decade I got thoroughly fed up with the spongy, lifeless keyboards that became the norm. I then found out about the Model M, looked into getting one from Unicomp but thanks to import duty, VAT and delivery the cost was over the equivalent of $170 - way too much to spend for me! So I snagged an old second hand IBM model M on eBay for a fraction of the price, cleaned it up and I've been using it ever since. Hopefully PS/2 keyboard ports will continue to stay on motherboards for many years yet!