As a first choice, I recommend getting an anthology of some kind. The problem with getting a novel of some kind is that if it turns out you don't like it, you're stuck with it regardless, whereas an anthology of short stories means that if a particular story is dull, it doesn't matter because you won't be reading it for long. I recommend The Mammoth Book of Best New SF, which is a collection of short stories that gets released each year in around August/September (most recent one is number 24), and is inexpensive, but also a very dense book, and the quality of the stories is consistently good. I also liked The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF from the same publisher (worth it just for Cory Doctorow's "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" and Alastair Reynolds' "Sleepover").

Novel-wise, I'd recommend virtually anything by Ian McDonald, who largely specialises in SF with a third-world setting. His book River of Gods could be described as a kind of Gibson-esque cyberpunk set in India, although that really doesn't give it justice as this makes it sound derivative when it's anything but - he's also produced a great book of short stories in the same future India called Cyberabad Days. Adam Roberts is also an excellent author, and I'm very fond of the sci-fi work of Richard Morgan, particularly his Takeshi Kovacs novels. Charles Stross has also been mentioned elsewhere, and I'd recommend his work. If you're not put off by hard SF, Alastair Reynolds is an excellent author, especially House of Suns and the Revelation Space series.

I sometimes think it would do better if it had been named FreeOffice. OpenOffice was my induction into the world of FOSS when I didn't want to shell out for a copy of MS Office (I went on to discover Thunderbird and Firefox, before moving from Windows to Ubuntu), and for all we like to talk about the importance of free-as-in-free-speech, the free-as-in-free-beer angle is what gets a hell of a lot of people using FOSS in the first place, and the name FreeOffice would emphasise this.

I've got a Dell Mini 10v and it's an awesome machine. I previously had an Asus Eee PC, and while it was fine for what it was, the Xandros-based distro that shipped with it was utter crap, and the keyboard and screen were just too small to be that much use. My Mini shipped with Windows XP, but I installed the netbook edition of Ubuntu Lucid and that works really well. It's powerful enough for most of what I do, including fairly heavy-duty web browsing, mucking about with various scripting languages, and the odd game of Homeworld on occasion, yet it's small and light enough that I can just slip it in my bag and go. It's actually by far the single machine I use the most, in preference to my 2008 MacBook and a bigger, more powerful Dell laptop.

This. Much as the cloud is an annoying buzzword, there's a lot to be said for moving what you can to one of these services if you haven't got the time to maintain it yourself. Google Apps is a solid, inexpensive, reliable and powerful solution for email, and if you're rushed off your feet, it makes sense to offload everything you can get away with.

The company I work for is just over a year old (although the parent company is somewhat older), and is a UK-based e-commerce business selling veterinary supplies and medicine. The senior developer was the sole IT guy until I joined at the start of September, and another developer joined us in November. We do all the systems administration, desktop support and web development for the company, and there's a total of ten people at present. Not sure what their profit margins are like, but I see the running total of the sales every day, and sales tend to average around £6,000 a week, so turnover is almost certainly above the £1 million mark.

Granted, they have the parent company's resources to fall back on, but they very deliberately kept the infrastructure entirely separate from the parent company. Conceivably there's one or two people in the parent company who we could call on if necessary to help, but they'd probably only really be of any use for desktop support or network problems - the parent company's IT infrastructure is mostly Windows Server based, while all of our critical systems run on Ubuntu Server (we use Google Apps for email as well). Otherwise there's no-one else we could really call on for help. So it can be done - however, we're in the very lucky position of not having to deal with any kind of legacy infrastructure, so we're free to make the decisions ourselves. I can imagine things might be a lot harder in a longer-established company.

Oh, I was more than willing to spend the time picking up Doctrine, but it wasn't my decision - the senior developer made that call. I personally find the shift from writing PHP to writing SQL queries can be quite jarring when you do so regularly, and in general I'm a fan of ORM.

I'm a relatively new web developer (three months into my first full-time web developmment job). We're a PHP shop and are using CodeIgniter to build our new ecommerce store, and despite the fact that I'm still quite new to PHP and this is the first time I've ever used CodeIgniter, I haven't had any particular problems with it. Seems like a pretty decent framework and the documentation is OK. We were talking about using Doctrine with it as well, but in the end we decided not to bother, since we'd have to learn Doctrine and CodeIgniter at the same time, which was a bit more of a hassle, and we couldn't really spare the time. That said, I prefer Python, and I'd like to have used Django.

How about a copy of DOSBox and a load of old DOS games? There are numerous sites where you can get abandonware or shareware games.

Actually, the overwhelming majority of owners of these companies are other companies within this group. I used to work for the company at number 31 until very recently, and they held very substantial investments in many other companies on the list within their investment funds. It's true to say there are many individual shareholders (I got shares through the company's share award scheme), but the individual shareholders are a very small proportion of the total - the lion's share is held by other institutional investors. Also, I don't know how it works elsewhere in the world, but certainly in the UK with most pension arrangements you don't actually directly own the shares in your pension plan, instead the pension provider owns them as a part of an investment fund, and you merely own units within that fund (for a unitised pension, which most pensions are nowadays), so the company still owns those shares.

Relevant story: Until this Friday gone I worked for an FTSE-100 insurance company, and I was the DSE (display screen equipment, basically making sure people didn't have problems with their monitor, keyboard or mouse) assessor for several teams I was a member of in the past. One former colleague had a prosthetic left hand, and could therefore only type one-handed, and also had to use the same hand for her mouse. She could actually touch-type surprisingly well, and was a pretty fast typist, but when she did her DSE assessment she reported aches and pains in her hand. Obviously this was a cause for concern, since she was having to move her hand a lot more than most typists would, and had to move it a long way to use the mouse. Normally this would be something I could manage within the area simply by advising them to take regular breaks, and slow down if they experience pain, but I was concerned that she was at greater risk of developing RSI, so I referred it to the Occupational Health and Safety department for assistance. They concurred that she was at greater risk of RSI given her circumstances, and recommended that she take more frequent breaks than usual - every half hour instead of every hour. Still, the fact that someone with only one hand could touch-type fairly fast means that there's not really any excuse for those with two hands.

I'm not so sure. While I too would like to see at least one of the big parties supporting digital and civil rights a lot more than they do, the cynic in me makes me worry that any contrary stance adopted by the opposition would probably seek to portray these as things that benefited whatever group they were vilifying at the time (be it the unemployed, immigrants, criminals or single mothers) unfairly at the expense of others, and there are certain sections of the media that seem to love to portray these as a bad thing. The No to AV campaign a few months ago was probably the most cynical, underhanded and intellectually dishonest political campaign I have ever seen in this country, and I suspect a campaign pledge against digital and civil rights would be equally bad.

In my personal experience it's very scary how many people do not understand the significance of civil rights and merely see them as something that is used to justify not treating criminals more harshly. The government's e-petitions website is full of deeply unpleasant petitions proposing to limit people's human rights in various ways.

Don't see any reason why not, as long as the stars aren't too close together. I would, however, suggest that a solid shell is unlikely and an actual Dyson sphere is more likely to consist of huge numbers of free-flying space habitats, or satellites (possibly even free-flying solar-powered computers, known as a Matrioshka brain). It would definitely make sense to put it in a binary system since you'd have two sources of light. However, I'm guessing in this case the encapsulated star would have to be extremely small - possibly a white dwarf, neutron star or black hole. Which suggests another possibility - perhaps it's some kind of shield, preventing a catastrophic event such as a gamma ray burst from harming life in the galaxy.

I'm in the same boat - I work for an FTSE-100 company and while my time to the login screen isn't too bad, time to get to a usable desktop is often upwards of five minutes, and it's been worse in the past. Record was over an hour (that was when they first introduced an application called EG Work Manager and it brought the Pentium 2's they were using at the time to a standstill).

I'm by no means an expert on running thousands of Windows desktops (Linux is more my bag), but as I understand it our home directories and settings are hosted on a file server of some kind and every time we log in, everything has to be downloaded from them over the network - we cannot access our C drives at all. I've noticed that loggging in is often faster if you log in at different times - guessing this is because loads of people come in between 8 and 10 am and log in, so those are the times when the servers are under the biggest load.

I have heard the suggestion that there may have been an attempt by someone within News International to destroy their data, which was held at a data centre in Chennai. Source: Channel 4 news, but also found this link: http://www.information-age.com/channels/it-services/news/1635983/hcl-denies-news-international-data-destruction-claim.thtml

The Queen has no powers other than ceremonial ones. She can in theory refuse to sign a bill into law, but I don't believe she has ever done so once it has been approved by Parliament. In practice, the Prime Minister actually runs the country. As the official head of state, the Queen is quite useful in terms of ceremonial duties - her and her entire family can be sent here and there to carry out all kinds of goodwill duties while the Prime Minister gets on with their work. And the royals do make a lucrative tourist attraction.