jamesb

Nope, no need for any extras or for Tablet PC edition, just need the right language (English is one of those languages, so you should be safe). What they will need is a Wacom tablet or similar. Details here - How to install and configure speech and handwriting recognition in Word 2003

The cloud is a nebulous marketing term which essentially means something is hosted on a virtual platform (usually) with high levels of scalability and redundancy. Often, with traditional 'cloud' computing the scalability goes to the level of buying hours on a system rather than renting a server, similar to the old mainframe methods. Of course, the term gets thrown around so much it is essentially meaningless. Your exchange server is probably not in the cloud as it is, I imagine, hosted in a static resource. Unless of course you've got your own private cloud, which doesn't have to be accessible via the internet at all. The safest thing is, if someone starts babbling excitedly about this or that cloud product, simply let them rant, calm them down, and make sure they get back to the home safely. Alternatively tranquilisers can help.

For extra effect, you can use the special new ergonomic 'not-a-tv' system. It involves, and here's the clever bit, getting rid of the brainwash box and doing something else.

There's the application, which requires you to have a certain level of responsibility and influence on IT stuff, then a test on your breadth of knowledge (general rather than specific technology) and finally you're expected to give a short presentation and go through an interview. Plus pay the registration fee (unless you're a BCS member) and application fee.

Talk to the BCS, have experience/qualifications. That's it really. Personally I don't put any of my professional qualifications down as letters after my name. If I get irritated with someone trying to claim expertise in a subject via e-mail or similar, I'll drop them into my signature, and on business cards I tend to have a discreet mention of them under my job title, if they're relevant.

I thought that was Dell and a few others, and quite a few years ago? I remember having to drive around with new motherboards to replace all of the blown ones.

You can pick up a PCI POST analyzer card fairly cheap, might be worth getting one of those and seeing if you can get a POST error. They're handy to have around anyhow.

Yep, I'm developing with it at the moment for one of our systems.

I've got Windows 7 with a touchscreen on my laptop - absolutely lovely to work with on the occasions I need a touchscreen. Have you tried it at all?

I rather like the look of Asus' version - includes a slideout keyboard, decent specs, Android, and the price is apparently going to be in the $400 region.

Anything that references wikipedia? Obviously anyone who doesn't get their info from wikipedia can't be a good source.

If you want something easy, and surprisingly powerful, have a look at Silverlight Lightswitch. Sadly it's in beta at the moment so anything you build with it is a development solution only, and not a finished solution but it's definitely worth a look. It can use an external database, or you can use the built-in SQL Express instance when you deploy. Also allows you to make an app available directly to client machines (running locally), on a client-server basis, or entirely web-based.

Enjoy the food, it's fantastic. Don't drink too much coffee, but do drink plenty of water and juice. Above all, take at least a half hour or so of downtime each evening where you're doing something other than studying.

Do people still play the National Lottery?

I've had mixed experience of these, some good and some bad, and it seems to often be down to the provider. I've had some very good 5-14 day courses with Firebrand, although they are intense. I've had some very poor experiences with another provider (don't want to name them on the forum, but happy to discuss them in PM), though that may have been because in comparison to an intense residential course the pace is a little slow.

It's to do with backwards compatibility rather than the actual version. A lot of software checks the version number, and will throw an error if it doesn't like what it finds. It's similar to the error that you can get with Flash 10 or above (some flash apps only check one number of the version and cry if they don't think it's recent enough). So the actual version is Windows 7, but the internal version number appears as 6.1 so that lazy developers can get away with not having to do proper version checking. Look at the NT 5 and 5.1 version number change, but I don't think anyone would argue that XP and 2000 weren't different versions. Version numbers are pretty arbitrary anyway. If people complain too much, I'm sure there'll be a hack along at some point to increase the version number to 7, or 8, or 42.

That's right. Can't let the plebs mock Big Brother, can we?

User interaction?

So is that the actual advert they put out, or has someone done a parody? I know I found one really funny one. It's amazing the parody stuff that people can come up with - YouTube - iPad 2 Advert

Apparently you can: Smash My Macintosh Classic on Vimeo

I don't regularly bounce my devices around the room (not that an aluminium chasses would really help with that anyway) and I'm not an executive who needs to have everything in shiny metal. Plus whether aluminium chassis which can conduct heat well enough to cause burns aren't really my thing. So one particular desktop range are reasonably well-specced? Then again, a quad-core machine starting at $2499 (Apple store pricing) isn't really my idea of being ahead of spec. My laptop's got a better proc than that, and was cheaper (double the memory too, and a better graphics card). Hmm, nope, not really seeing how that's well ahead of top consumer CPUs for PCs. Purely anecdotal - my grandfather who's an amateur computer user was quite capable of setting up his desktop machine, getting on the internet, and uses it to write his sermons when he gets invited to speak at the local church, among other things. Yep - same as the budget-designer type clothes (I mean lets be honest, if you want a PC along the lines of a proper designer label you'll go Alienware). Different isn't automatically better. It's arguable if they're really different at all in most cases. It's this sort of attitude that makes me feel like railing against them, the same sort of pretentiousness that people get about designer clothing, for reasons that are just as flimsy. Yep, quite true. Estimate from where, just out of curiousity? Wow. Samsung's become the whole market overnight. I'm still waiting for a decent reason for tablets to come along, at the moment they seem to be (mainly) overpriced toys and content consumers. Once someone manages to put something worthwhile on one, then I'll be interested.

No, not at all. See FaceTime is only in iPhone, every other phone for the last five years has just had plain old video calling, which works with every other phone with video calling, whereas Apple's is better because it only works with Apple products. Having FaceTime thus makes you a member of an elite club, whereas having plain old video calling just makes you one of the hundreds of others suckered in by companies which work to make their features and products capable of working with all of the other products in the market.

Did you mean unscrupulous here? I don't think many people have accused Apple of having scruples.

I doubt you could arrange a tax break which'd make it worthwhile giving away ALL of his £30 billion. It'd have to be a pretty good deal. Again, tax breaks are lovely, but you do need to keep some of the money to make any tax dodge worthwhile. If I gave away half of my salary each year, I'd get a great tax break too, but it wouldn't even come close to meeting the amount I'd be giving away. And of course, what goes for Gatesy would go for Lord Jobs too - if there's enough of a tax break to make it worthwhile, why isn't Jobs in on it? He's no longer head of Microsoft, he hasn't been for a long time, people set up campaigns calling him the anti-Christ, and handing over his personal fortune to charity isn't really going to help his old company any. Not really much in the way of a marketing tactic.

I deny it. I wasn't there. Wasn't me. Never touched 'em gov'na. A big boy did it and ran away. Amazon.co.uk: tablet capacitive Not quite half, but close, and a decent search could probably turn up a few more. I don't - I do however use quite a few Silverlight based sites and apps for work, and my own enjoyment. You've also lost newgrounds, and much other entertainment. Of course if you're one of those serious users who believe that the web should only be for purely practical purposes, and that a UI doesn't need any frills, then flash isn't of much use.