SteveBentley

Project Gutenberg is definitely worth a look - gutenberg.org

I have much more sympathy with the idea of finding alternative words for blacklist and whitelist, on the grounds that it implies white=good, black=bad, than I do with nonsense such as banning blackboard, which is a descriptive term of a board which is black.

I'd have liked to have had a netbook for notetaking when I was a student - I can type faster than I can write, and it has the added bonus that I'd be able to read it!

We got one with a device (I think it was a camera charger) where the cable itself had a US style plug on it, going into effectively a travel adapter, but one designed for that specific plug. That meant that the wire exited at 90 degrees to the wall. Incidentally IEC leads used for computers are not the same as kettle leads - the plug at the applicance end is subtly different, and the plug will have a 13A fuse for a kettle.

We tend to discourage students from charging their laptops, not least because it gets us around the PAT test type issues.

I can imagine the headache that produced!!

Not entirely sure what my plans for the weekend are, but they may well involve a visit to the pub in the next village which has recently relaunched as real ale pub (and wine bar), with 9 hand pumps, one of which always has a Weston's cider on it. It was Weston's Old Rosie last time I popped in, which is lethal stuff... it goes down far too well for 7.3%

Presumably by "work on" he means "take to bits"

Thanks for those options, the Dell I'm looking at has the edge on pricing on both of those - the list price of those HPs looks a bit ambitious!

Cheers Simon, I've got a couple of questions you might be able to help with: Does the stand detatch, or will it be suitable for looping a security chain through? Is getting inside them to do RAM upgrades and hard drive swaps (when out of warranty) as much of a pain in the backside as I'm anticipating? Cheers!

Has anybody got any experience of these beasts please? Dell Studio One 19 Desktop For reasons too ridiculous to go into, we need some machines with very small footprints, but with a decent spec (so not just the guts of a netbook bolted to the back of a TFT). These Dells (the basic, non-touchscreen model) seem to fit the bill but it would be nice to have some reassurance that they're not junk!

And if you're prepared to share the material you make with it Which is a little... awkward for some things you might want to do with it, although it appears the licensing changes in September.

You might want to be aware that the online assessment side has some scalability issues with some VLEs. With our Blackboard installation here, getting a whole class to take a test simultaneously is generally a disaster because. I'm told it's not possible to load balance the assessment components across several servers like it is with the rest of Blackboard (because of session integrity issues) and so tests have an embarrassing tendancy to grind to a halt.

Given that it is an open source product, I'm sure the "Firefox folks" will welcome his contributed patches if he cares sufficiently to fix it.

The site appears to have been coded by somebody called "Jimmy", who helpfully included an image from his own hard drive on COMPUTER PRODUCTS LIMITED - Photo

Show the product at BETT or similar. If it's good enough, people will, when asked, give it as a personal recommendation which is probably worth much more than a recommendation based on having received some freebies.

ITV, Ch4 and Ch5's have always paid their own way (from advertising) in terms of distribution networks and transmitters, although since the introduction of UHF the transmitters have been co-sited with the BBC (the BBC and the IBA owned roughly half each), for both economy reasons at the transmitting end and so that most people would only require a single aerial, as opposed to the previous 405 line system where BBC(1) was from one transmitter and ITV from a different site entirely, requiring a seperate aerial. The Freeview network is actually several seperate networks, and the license fee only pays for the BBC's bit AFAIK.

To misquote Shakespear, 2B or not 2B, that is the question. Channels that are on Astra 2B are receivable Europe-wide and will either be encrypted, shopping channels or paying through the nose for Europe-wide programme rights. Astra 2D has a beam with a very much tighter footprint aimed at the UK and Ireland. This is where you will find the BBC and most of ITV (although a few regions are on 2B). Whilst you can pick it up in Europe with a big enough dish, it seems to placate the rights holders for movies, sport etc that it is only UK-wide coverage and so FTA is "safe".

Debatable really, digital can look and sound great, or it can look terrible when the broadcasters try to shoehorn in too many channels so they are each at a very low bitrate. You can either have a modest number of decent quality channels, or a load that look crap. Very much like DAB radio - where several services are in mono so they can cram in more stations.

The only compelling reason to go for Freesat rather than Sky is that Freesat has ITV HD. Incidentally if you go into add channels on a Sky box you can add the other ITV regions - Westcountry is a much higher bitrate and resolution than the other versions, which are generally pretty poor. Ironically, the reason for this is that they're using the satellite transmission to feed some of the analogue transmitters now they've closed Westcountry's studios and merged it with HTV (as was) and it wasn't worth getting a proper circuit back to London put in for the length of time those transmitters will be on the air for.

A Sky box with an expired/cancelled card in it should still work for getting the FTA and FTV channels.

Are they still Lexmarks in disguise?

But that says nothing about kids applying it themselves!

Would be nice if Five News knew how to spell "Exclusive"!

Add "why it takes longer for a PC on a domain to boot up/log in than your machine at home" to your what's happenning behind the scenes bit.