WELCOME TO MY NEW POST IN HOW TO CHOOSE THE BEST CRYPTO-CURRENCY AND LEARN WHY. HI IN THIS POST WE WILL LEARN FROM 5 DIFFERENT CURRENCY WHERE WE CAN USE OUR FOR GAINING EXTRA INCOMES.I WILL START FROM THE LESS COMMON CONS TO THE MOST PROFITABLE ONES RIGHT NOW. 1.1 (NXS) MAXIMUM SUPPLY: 78.000.000 BLOCK REWARD: 110 BLOCK TIME: 5 MINUTES ALGORITHM: SHA 3 TICKER: NXS This coin can actually be mined by and,there not much information on this coin but the developer has work on many cool features like proof of state.

This coin may not be the most profitable but maybe when the peaple start understanding it it will reach higher price so it’s good if you want to save some coin for long term negotiation. 1.2 MAXIMUM SUPPLY: 84.000.000 BLOCK REWARD: 5 BLOCK TIME: 2.5 MINUTES ALGORITHM: SHA? TICKER: RIC This is exclusively mining currency so it’s really gone under the table has the benefit of proof of work it;s been established from 2014 and has low difficulty solo you can also go solo mining the market cap is actually really low but on the good side it’s very easy to mine so it might get more value on the future.

1.3: (HODL) MAXIMUM SUPPLY: 150M-500M BLOCK REWARD: 50 BLOCK TIME: 200 SEC ALGORITHM: 1GB AES TICKER: HODL. The good side of this currency is really low solo you can mine solo mining and get block rewards other good feature is that the coins get hoddle and pay you a very good interest rates of your coins.the bad side is that all you mine gets hoodle so you can’t really touch your coins but 365 dais after mining it.so this coin is only mining and has great potencial for a future.

How To CPU Mine Bitsend On Windows. I have a few server blades mining nexus at the. I have then downloaded a cpuminer and the batch file for solo mining but i.

1.4: (ZEC) MAXIMUM SUPPLY: 21.000.00 BLOCK REWARD: 12.5 BLOCK TIME: 3 MIN ALGORITHM: EQUIHASH TICKER: ZEC Even do this coin is new it had a very good start so it has low max supply but it has a very good market value.some of the mining goes back to the developers (founding reward) but i think they will go the smart way and reinvest for the zcash economy.this can be mined by and minable. You can si come mining benchmarks in the next link: 1.5: (XMR) MAXIMUM SUPPLY: INFINITE BLOCK REWARD: 9 BLOCK TIME: 3 MIN ALGORITHM: CRYPTONIGHT TICKER: XMR This coin is hugely popular Coin it’s been established since 2014 supports anonymous transactions,this coin is also minable so if you are mining you will have a lot of competition even so this will one of the most profitable coins to mine.you can si come mining benchmarks in the next link: I hope you like this post and that it helps you get a good extra income in bitcoin Follow For more Bitcoin Post. • Hash Rate 8TH/s (Batch 3) and 8.7TH/s (Batch 4). THE BIG QUESTION HOW CAN I CALCULATE MY PROFITS???

TOP QUALITY ITEM 1.2- Best miners descriptions downloads links and estimated hash/s and calculating Profitability. * Well going on with this tutorial i’ll be teaching how to calculate your profit from your hashrate and and how much hashrate to expect from recent mining programs with the gpu i presented you before. For ZCASH MINiNG BEST HASHING MINER WILL BE CLAYMORE v9.2 WITH THE HIGHEST BENCHMARKS THIS MONTH SOON TO COME THE CLAYMORE V9.3 VERSION. YOU CAN FIND IN IN THIS DOWNLOAD LINK () ON () AND FOR LINUX USERS ( LINUX ) MSI R9 390 THIS IMAGE IS FROM A REGULAR HASHRATE FOR A MSI R9 390X BETWEEN 300H/S AND 320H/S.LATER ON I’LL SHOW YOU HOW MUCH PROFIT TO EXPECT FROM THIS.

SAPPHIRE RADEON RX 480 *IN THIS IMAGE WE CAN APPRECIATE A RX480 WORKING ATA BENCHMARK OF 235H/S TO 255 H/S SAPPHIRE RADEON OR MSI RX 470 AND * FOR LAST I’LL LEAVE A BENCH MARK FROM A RX 470 IN MY CHANGE A BY A SMALL PERCENTAGE IF THE MODEL IS 4GB OR 8GB BUT FROM EXPERIENCE I CAN ASSURE YOU THE BENCHMARK WILL GO FROM 215H/S TO 240 H/S I RECOMENDO OVERCLOCKING BY 100 THE CLOCK CORE FOR BEST RESULTS. ALSO THERE IS CPU MINING I’LL LEAVE YOU A LINK TO COMPARING CPU MINING PROGRAMS AND CPU MODELS. () * MONERO BEST MINER WILL BE CLAYMORE V9.7 YOU CAN DOWNLOAD FROM THIS LINK() ALSO I’LL LEAVE THIS PAGE WHERE YOU CAN FIND MORE TOOLS () ALSO IN THE SAME PAGE YOU CAN FIND A BIG VARIETY OF BENCHMARK SUMITED BY MANY MINERS () I’LL RESUME HOW MUCH HASHPOWER YOU CAN EXPECT FROM EACH MODEL R9 390 (860H/S-880H/S) RX 480 (760H/S-835H/S) RX 470 (725H/S-740H/S) THE BIG QUESTION HOW CAN I CALCULATE MY PROFITS???

What’s the difference between all these Indian breads then? I’m forever looking this up. Turns out that it’s difficult to build a consensus, so a quick search for the same query a month later might return a different answer. So I wanted to make my own guide here, with pictures to follow as I take them.

Definitely open to constructive comments and guidance on this piece! Rotis and chapatis are commonly (but not always) considered to be the same, with geographical region being more important than any actual difference.

That said, I gather oil is more likely to be involved in southern India. I’ve done my best to produce a definition here regardless. Roti Roti feels like the most basic, so a good place to start. It is unleavened bread, which means it does not contain any raising agents. It should be made from wholemeal flower, and is always made from wheat flower.

A disc of this dough is rolled flat, and cooked in a dry pan. Chapati Similar to roti. Wholemeal flour seems to be more of a requirement here. There’s a tendency to cook in a pan that is lightly greased, whereas a roti is always dry. Chapati should be flattened by hand, and is sometimes folded once or twice to give it two or four layers. Paratha A paratha is made from a number of layers of flower, and is well oiled with ghee, giving it substantially more flavour than roti and chapati. Naan Naan is leavened bread, so it is made from dough that contains yeast, and probably some dairy such as milk or yogurt.

Naan should be cooked in a tandoor. This makes it notably thicker and perhaps fluffier than the other breads listed here. Naan is usually served brushed with butter or ghee.

Let’s start this piece by making it absolutely clear that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not a cryptographer, a banker, or computer hardware expert. A couple of things have recently piqued my interest in BitCoin: the financial impact following the UK referendum on EU membership, and a I attended yesterday evening centred on “FinTech” (financial technology). Why I care about Bitcoin My highlight of that Product Tank talk was given by, Head of Product. Blockchain’s tagline is “Be your own bank”, and they provide a handy smartphone app which allows you to manage your Bitcoin wallet. A bank account where the currency is Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is like other currencies except not run by a central bank and here is where every article on the subject just falls apart because there’s too much to explain all at once. You could read on it, but that’s fairly terse. Or you could just try and catch up by osmosis, which I imagine is how most people cope. There is certainly a discussion to be had around “why currency is simply trust”. There’s a lot of talk about, negative interest rates and basic incomes. I’m finding all this very fascinating and there’s much to discuss surrounding all that, but let’s try and steer this back towards Bitcoin mining.

Following the UK referendum on EU membership, the British pound is now worth a lot less than it was compared with the US Dollar. Living completely inside either the Pound or Dollar ecosystems that doesn’t mean much (ignoring external market influences beyond the scope of this article) but outside of either of those systems it means a lot. If I had bought £10,000 worth of USD on the 22nd June, and sold them on the 27th June, I’d have made over £1,250. In order to spread risk then, it makes sense to hold funds in a variety of currencies. While I could buy US Dollars or Indian Rupees, Bitcoin holds a lot more interest, and one reason is that I had heard it is possible to mine them.

That’s the concept of putting your computer to work and being rewarded in Bitcoin. Not having to buy them, but instead putting assets to work behind the scenes to build a residual income. Sounds fantastic. So again I stress I’m no economist, but I can grasp that the value of the currency we exchange today is no longer based on anything other than trust, and it’s that trust and confidence in comparative currency values that influences comparative currency values. I’m happy that it is okay to allow new money to be created so long as it is done at such a rate as to not undermine confidence in the value of a currency.

Finally I get to the point of this section. To mine Bitcoins you need electricity and beefy computers.

I have solar panels and some handy computer gear lying around. How hard can this be?

Making it difficult If we could all print sheets of £20 notes at a material cost of a few pence, cut them up with scissors and have them accepted as legal tender, the economy would fall apart. There’d be no trust. £20 today would be worth less tomorrow.

So it can’t be easy to mine a Bitcoin. If I was awarded a Bitcoin for simply clicking a button in a computer application, Bitcoins would be worthless. But Bitcoins are far from worthless. Today (28th July 2016) a Bitcoin is worth £501.60. It needs to be difficult to earn even a fraction of a Bitcoin. Pointlessly hard.

Briefly, in order to mine a Bitcoin a computer must perform millions of millions of mathematical computations. That takes time, electricity, and the hardware costs money. In order for Bitcoin mining to be worthwhile, it needs to be possible to make a higher value in Bitcoin than your hardware and electricity expenditure. Again with a solar energy surplus, some good computers and with a single Bitcoin being worth £200 more now than it was at the turn of the calendar year, I thought I was in a strong place to start. Measuring your mining speed Mining a single Bitcoin all by yourself is basically impossible.

I was told that yesterday, and 24 hours later I believe it. The alternative is joining a shared pool of miners, who all work together and divvy out the rewards in proportion to the effort put in. When I describe the economics of that, the concept of solo mining being pointless should clarify itself.

My main desktop PC has a quad core i7 with hyper-threading (exposing 8 virtual cores) running at 3.7GHz. It’s a few years old but it certainly does the job. I never have to wait for the CPU. It turns out that if I dedicate all 8 of those cores to Bitcoin mining, I can achieve a speed of about 2 million hashes a second.

A hash is a mathematical calculation. Minimum Electra ECA Transaction on this page. If you care and want to know more.

Anyway, 2 million per second sounds like a lot. I had heard that actually a graphics card is rather better at this hashing business than a CPU. It sounded strange, but it’s got something to do with polygon rendering in 3D video.

Anyway it’s true, and as luck would have it I love to have loads of monitors hanging off my PC, so I’ve got an AMD Radeon R7 200 something or other and it can do about 175 million hashes a second. That’s right! It’s getting on for 90 times faster than my CPU!

And here’s the best bit. For reasons that are rather dull I’ve got two machines of similar specification, and when it is sunny, easily enough solar energy to run both of them.

So I should be able to purr along at 350 million hashes a second for free. This was going to be easy money. Reality Typically a mining pool will pay out when you’ve earned 0.1 Bitcoin.

Remember that’s about £50. So I’d need to earn around £50 before I’d see any return. At 350 Mh/s (Mega (million) hashes per second), do you know how long that would take? Really though, what’s your guess?

Maybe that would take an absolute maximum of a kilowatt to run and a kWh would cost you 15p if you didn’t have the benefit of solar panels. It would therefore take 333 hours (nearly half a month) before it cost £50 in power, so clearly one needs to earn 0.1 Bitcoin in less time than that.

What was your guess then? The answer is, that running constantly at 350Mh/s, it would take over 1,500 years to earn 0.1 Bitcoin. Now I’m renowned for a lack of patience, but I suspect most people wouldn’t wait that long. How can it work, then? I was surprised that my GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) was 90 times better than my CPU at this business. It turns out it is possible to buy apparatus designed for Bitcoin mining. “Antminer” is a common choice – a brand that has a evolutionary series of products purely with Bitcoin mining in mind.

I looked into this. Here’s a table comparing my two existing PCs and various Antminer products. Rig Power consumption (watts) Gh/s (giga-hashes per second) Power cost to earn £50 Hardware cost at today’s prices Time taken to earn £50 2 PCs 900 0.35 £1,773,900 £0 1,500 years Antminer S1 360 180 £1,380 £18 3 years Antminer S3 366 400 £631 £65 1 year 4 months Antminer S7 1,200 4,700 £176 £350 41 days Antminer S9 1,375 14,000 (!) £68 £2,400 14 days Maybe my figures are based on some less than accurate estimates. Still, unless I’ve got something very wrong here, this is bonkers.

None of them make any sense based on a typical UK electricity tariff of 15 pence per kilowatt hour. Even if they could be entirely funded by solar energy and we ignore the capital outlay on that solar rig, the S7 would take 6.5 years to break even, and the S9 nearly 2 years. In conclusion then, if you have infinite free power (you’ll probably need A/C too), you can steal the custom hardware, and you can afford to wait forever for a return, Bitcoin mining might be worthwhile. Otherwise it isn’t. Continuing my general clear-out, it’s time to sell my last speakers. I used to run a sound system, and what’s for sale now was the “small” rig, or as a DJ monitor rig at larger events.

It’s a bit home-brew, so I’m not expecting to get much for it, but the components are high quality and it sounds good. The bass units The bass units are 12″ ATC drivers that were originally specified for Hill Audio M4s. The boxes have good casters, sturdy grilles, wooden skids and can be stacked as shown above to make a neat little bass reinforcement unit. The drivers are 12Ω and wired in parallel, making each cabinet 6Ω. They have two 4 pole Speakon connectors on recessed back plates, and the drivers are wired between the A terminals. The B terminals on both connectors are looped together.

I usually drive these boxes either with one channel of a Crest Audio (CA) CA9 per box, or in parallel combined onto a single CA12 channel. The mid-top units The mid-top units can be pole mounted as shown above. They comprise of a Motorola Piezo and a on a passive cross over. The Beyma is an astonishingly accomplished driver, which means these little tops can be used as full range cabinets. These mid-top units present an 8Ω load.

These mid-tops also have two 4 pole Speakon connectors on recessed back plates, and the drivers are wired to the B terminals. I usually drive these boxes with a CA6.

How powerful is it Well, technically I suppose the tops are 200W RMS each and the bins about 600W each. A CA6 on the tops can deliver 400W to each top, and a CA9 around 800W to each bin. You could probably call it a 2K system if you wanted to think about it like that. What’s it like to use? The rig is fairly manageable – I can pick up and stack or load the bass units by myself. It’ll all fit inside an estate car.

The casters on the bins make it all easy enough to trundle around. How much do you want? It’s very hard to value these things. At my house in Woking, Surrey. Are you selling amps / signal processing too? I’ll probably look to sell some amps and signal processing once the speakers are sold, but shifting the speakers is my priority as I want the space.

I’m selling my Roboscans! After many years of careful ownership – really – I’m selling up my main scan rig. They’ve not seen any gigs in the last couple of years and various changes in my lifestyle mean that they are unlikely to, so here they are for sale. There are 12 in all, and 2 large, wheeled flight cases with lots of handles, good casters, caster brakes etc. I’m happy to sell Roboscans separately, but the whole lot has to go so the more you buy, the better the deal.

I’m looking for £69 a scan, or £350 for six with a flight-case. Or £600 for all 12 with both flight cases. There’s also a big plastic tub full of spare parts that I’ll chuck in when the final unit sells. All mirrors are in good condition with no cracks. All units have working bulbs, and come with a mains lead.

They do not come with DMX leads or controllers. All motor functions work: pan/tilt, colour wheel, gobo wheel, rotating gobos and effects wheel. The last time I used these, everything worked on all of them. The units are of course old and used and their condition reflects this. They are sold as seen, with no returns, but I’ll be happy to go through and test them with you when you come to collect them. The scans are in Woking, Surrey. This article details the benefits of updating the firmware on a Pioneer DJM 2000.

It’ll also explain the differences between a DJM 2000 running the latest firmware, and a DJM 2000 Nexus. It should be very useful if you are trying to decide whether to buy a DJM 2000 or a DJM 2000 Nexus, or if you already have a DJM 2000 and want to better understand the benefits of upgrading the firmware. An introduction to the Pioneer DJM 2000 I recently acquired a DJM 2000 running version firmware 1.27. It’s about 5 years old, but in good condition. Still a very nifty piece of kit.

My last mixer was a DJM 500 and the game has really moved on. From a purely non-musical perspective, consider that it has a touch screen and 6 network ports!

So a four channel DJ mixer. It can support turntables on two of the channels, and all channels support analogue and digital line in. It can perform the duties of a network hub between up to four CDJ devices, and even connect to two computers for seamless transitioning between DJs at a live event. It has a send/return loop and a midi interface. There’s a huge amount of potential with all this, which I won’t go into now, but suffice to say this hardware is ready to combine traditional live DJ duties with more creative musical experiences normally restricted to audio studios. From the top view then, this is more or less a traditional four channel mixer with an effects unit shoved in between channels 2 and 3 above the cross fader.

So what does that touch screen do? It handles administration, midi control, settings etc.

At first it seems bizarre that a mixer needs this, but much as we now take games console internet updates as being completely usual these days (remember the initial weirdness of the PS3 being online?!), it makes sense. But it also allows for some live DJ uses: 7 band cross fader Yes – chop two tracks together in seven chunks of the audio spectrum. Easy high-hat or kick drum swapping right there. Live effects control Use one finger to quickly control the base frequency and oscillation period of any of the built in effects. Updating the firmware See my. If your DJM 2000 is still running version 1.x, you’re in for quite an upgrade!

Benefits of firmware version 3 DJ benefits • Beat Slicer – a brilliant tool that allows the DJ to sample and remix on the fly. Great for creatives. • Improved side-chain effect – add a whole bunch of filters to the built-in side-chain and control these with a single finger on the touch screen. I saw a good example of this in use where the gate effect was triggered by the existing (old) track, and applied to the incoming (new) track. This fade in effect sounds great! Engineering benefits • Peak Limiter – billed to “eliminate distortion and clipping even at club volumes”, that’s certainly good news given some of the DJs I’ve worked with • Auto Standby – turns itself off after 4 hours of inactivity. CDJ / Rekordbox benefits • Quantize effects – if you’re using Rekordbox, the mixer can use the BPM information to ensure that all the effects (including the awesome beat-slicer!) are locked in time with the underlying track.

• Sync master – using the DJ link, the DJM 2000 can optionally enforce exact BPM matching between any or all CDJ 2000 NXS players. What’s better about the Nexus? All statements from here onwards assume we are comparing a DJM 2000 with firmware version 3.20 with a DJM 2000 Nexus running the same firmware. So far as I can tell, there are no feature differences.

That makes sense, right? The differences must all be in the hardware. The are some cosmetic changes. The three Effect Frequency potentiometers in the middle of the mixer have silver knobs on the Nexus. The row of beat selectors beneath them are lit by white LEDs on the Nexus (red on the Mk1).

In functional terms, the Nexus sports Pioneer’s “P-Lock” fader caps which cannot be easily removed and therefore are more likely to stay in place during enthusiastic use. Whether or not the Nexus also has the more durable fader assembly that sits at 90 degrees to the surface of the mixer so as to be less prone to damage due to spills and dust, I don’t know. Either way for studio use, neither of these advantages concern me. The Nexus also has higher quality digital converters on its output stages. The Nexus has a 32 bit D/A converter.

I can’t find that specification for the Mk1 so perhaps it is only 24 bit. Both sample at 96 kHz, have.

Note: I’ve done this using Windows 10 in January 2016. Before we start here, if you want to know more about the DJM 2000 in general,. Begin by getting the mixer to display your current version. To do this, while the mixer is on, press and hold the Live Sampler button to the left of the touch screen. Choose “Version Number” and it’ll display it.

Naturally I didn’t take a photo before the upgrade when I was on version 1.27, but here’s the end destination – version 3.20! – available for both PC and Mac. Just in case it is ever useful, I’m got a mirror copy of the Windows firmware updater for version 3.20. Extract the zip file. Then we have to establish some kind of communication between the PC and the DJM 2000. All the guides I’ve read suggest that the DJM 2000 should be connected directly to the Ethernet port of the PC you are using. Apparently it has its own DHCP server and will create a private network if you set your PC to look for a DHCP server there.

I tried this and couldn’t get it to work. I’d like to think I know my arse from my elbow in that realm at least. So instead I connected the DJM’s “Computer 1” port to my LAN while the mixer was off. I then held down both the beat effect and remix effect on/off buttons while switching the mixer on. My router accepted a DHCP request from the DJM and assigned it a local IP address. I could see that it was listening on port 58003.

The mixer’s display said it was waiting to receive an update. Then I ran the executable file in the downloaded zip file. I permitted network activity on any network to that application. It detected the mixer and uploaded the new firmware. The mixer presented a bar chart on its display which tracked progress. After that, I turned it off and on again as instructed, and hey presto! Version 3 was loaded.

Now you’re on the latest hardware, I bet you’re wondering what you’re missing out on by not having a DJM 2000 Nexus! The difference might not be as great as you’d expect.. Last weekend I journeyed off with some old friends for a weekend of curry and cars. What a weekend it was! Naturally I began proceedings on Saturday morning with more than a hint of a hangover, so put in a can of beans on toast and awaited the arrival of Ste, my taxi driver for the weekend. It was pretty cosy in there.

And very, very loud. Ideal for a 120 mile journey on a Saturday afternoon. I did try many times to chat to Ste about the car. He told me all about it in great detail. Sadly it was like one of those nightclub conversations where I caught the odd syllable while nodding and smiling a lot. Suffice to say both the engine and Ste were happiest bouncing off the limiter and the car was rapid, light, and insanely grippy in the bends. The other car in our convoy was an old favourite, Ian’s S50B32 powered E30.

Following a lively curry we stayed the night at the frankly terrible Mount Pleasant hotel in Malvern. I had a room with a view. In the morning I topped up the can of beans and curry with an appalling fried breakfast and we jollied off to Shelsley Walsh, firing on all cylinders. Then came the cars. Oh the wonderful, wonderful cars.

Here’s my favourite. How good is that? What do you think about this?

These all followed us into the car park within minutes. It was hilarious.

What I enjoyed most was the obvious respect shown for motoring heritage. There’s nothing quite like an immaculate, unmolested MkI Golf. So it wasn’t all comedy. Let’s try and fix things, starting with that Golf. There were plenty of RS representatives.

Ste summed up this amazing MkI Escort carrying an RS Cosworth lump very well: “This is a beautiful conversion. It’s really tidy and a great combination of car and engine. However it is four wheel drive, and that makes me very sad indeed.” Then I found RS500 number 159 and time stopped. Once I’d tidied myself up we headed to the paddock at the bottom of the hill sprint route, where some interesting kit was waiting for us. We walked up the hill. It was knackering.

We should have taken a car like the sensible folk. Ian even stretched the old girl’s legs But entertaining as that was, the comedy cars really were the highlight for me. This Volvo had a T5 engine under the bonnet.

And one in the boot. This thing was powered by something insane – probably a Porsche engine. Went up the hill like a rat up a drain pipe! To finish off, some more photos from the paddock. All in all, an amazing day out. At £7.50 a ticket, great value for money and highly recommended!

All 106 photos. Any photo both here and on the all photos page may be clicked to view a high resolution version. This is the second winter I’ve put winter tyres on the. It’s also the second winter we’ve had the.

Last winter it didn’t snow properly; this year, we’ve had a proper dollop! This situation quite naturally raised the question that I’m sure was on the nation’s lips this weekend: is four wheel drive on summer tyres better in the snow that rear wheel drive on winter tyres?

Admit it, you’d love to know, wouldn’t you?! Initially I thought I’d take the Impreza out, so I brushed the snow from its nostrils. Last year we had a one inch coating of snow one morning and I recalled it being the superior vehicle. Certainly it’s a lot of fun. With all four wheels properly locked together with a mechanical centre diff, and a limited slip diff at the rear, it goes where it’s told and it oversteers on the way. Brilliant, brilliant fun.

It doesn’t stop too well though. Or corner well off throttle. I think the Impreza does better than many other cars on summer tyres because it’s light (just over 1,400kg) and the four wheel drive system locks the wheels together in such a way that even off throttle, wheels don’t slip as much as they would otherwise. So let’s take out the BMW next and see how that goes. Just look at those tyres! What a machine! The 330d of course suffers from terrible snow woe.

There’s really not much weight over the driven wheels, but the car is heavy at nearly 1,700kg. Changing velocity is therefore a challenge. Winter tyres make an amazing difference. Pulling away isn’t as easy as it was in the Impreza, but after that, the 330d is better. Its ability to put the power down on snow and ice is simply remarkable when compared to its attempts on summer tyres. There have been years where we simply couldn’t get it off the driveway! That was easy enough today, but it also gathers pace very smartly indeed on snow.

Braking though, is where there can be absolutely no doubt that the BMW is the better car to be in. Despite a near quarter-tonne weight penalty, the 330d stops and even turns while stopping significantly better than the Impreza.

It also has DSC (dynamic stability control) which means that if you don’t want to go oversteering everywhere, it’ll look after you. Not sure why you’d want to do that though. So in conclusion, if I knew there was no one else on the road and I wanted to bop about on the snow for a bit of fun, I’d choose the Impreza. If I had to hill start on the snow, I’d choose the Impreza.

For everything else, otherwise known as real-world driving, the 330d on winter tyres wins hands down. I can only imagine how good the Impreza would be given winter boots!