If you make it clear to your clients that you are at college, and will at times be unreachable, it could well work.

Most clients you get will be working in the business world, where it's not unusual for people to be out of touch for a couple of hours, because they're in a meeting with someone else.

I wouldn't go hunting for contracts with people who want applications that will be a major form of income, but in most cases if an application is down for a couple of hours because you're in class, they'll deal with it.

When contracting, you need to manage your clients, and that includes making sure they know when you're "work hours" are.

Well the ones I was responsible for when working IT in a primary school were definitely touch sensitive: SmartBoard 600 Series

It may not be common place in the US, but as I said, they're in almost every primary school over here, and in a lot of them there's one in every classroom.

How long will it be before the gizmos appear in classrooms, and as teaching devices in businesses?

In the UK there's already similar devices in most classrooms - certainly every one I've seen recently. They're whiteboards, which are touch sensitive, and calibrated to a projector pointing at them.

In most cases I've seen they're largely used so the teacher can draw on whatever they're showing from a computer (often Powerpoint presentations, or a demonstration of how to use a computer). In a few years time I can see educational software houses catching on, and adapting their interfaces to make use of them as well though.

Good for you. Go and read the next story.

I on the other hand hadn't heard about this, and even if I had, the comments (apart from these ones) are quite interesting.

which leads me to wonder if your firm is capable of making a great game

He was responsible for Elite. I think that he can make great games isn't really in question.

If he's into the Lego series of games, you probably don't have much to worry about. I have 20+ year old friends who've managed to get well over 40 hours of play out of the Star Wars one, and are still nowhere near having done everything can.

There's also the fact that they're 7, so surely they can deal with a bit of repetition. Just the fact that he was able to play the *demo* for a week probably says something about his attention span.

One of the things that has bothered me with services such as Steam (even though I am accepting of it) is the birth to death piece. If I get tired of a game and wish to resell it, there should be a mechanism by which I revoke my key and the new owner of the media gets a new one. Of course, Valve makes no money on a second hand sale and doesn't want to deal with the headache.

Something tells me Valve will be the first to do something constructive about this, rather then just whine to the media.

It really wouldn't be very difficult for them to do something like allowing you to transfer your license to another user for a small fee (say £5) - that way you can sell your copy of the game on ebay, and where you would usually charge postage and packing, you charge the transfer fee instead.

I think people are blowing this out of proportion, but in 5 years of using MySQL, I've seen it happen twice.

Once was on a personal site I didn't really care about, the other time was on a site getting tens of thousands of requests an hour. As other people have said, there really is no excuse for dying like that.

FO3 isnt really great as a melee character, i give you that.

And why would anyone expect it to be? It's set in a world where the majority of people are packing guns, lasers, and rocket launchers. I can't imagine Iraq is much fun if you decide the only way you're going to go into combat is by hitting people in the face either.

The 42.3% is taken from the average of all the broadband connections, but it doesn't tell us how many of those with sub 2Mbit connections only bought that kind of connection.

The ONS get sent statistics on what the customer has bought, not the actual line speeds, so no, it's probably not something to worry about, especially since a large proportion of people are probably on the free services they get with their TV or mobile phone contract.

I've never really wondered that. The OEMs are buying Windows licenses in batches of several thousand, on a regular basis.

It's standard business practice to give discounts to customers who provide you with a large, regular, income.

Those who act suspicious know what they are doing is wrong.

Not necessarily. Most people look worried while walking through a security check, because they don't want to be the person who gets pulled out of the line, one of the tests used is apparently to look for people who look to confident.

At a glance, I would say no - at the moment it looks more like technical infrastructure for new themes, rather then a full blown new look for the software.

MythTV really is meant to be for watching and recording TV, there's a clue to that in the name. For what you describe XBMC, especially with some of the newer high resolution themes, is easily a better choice.

I'd be pissed off.

Everyone else can tell me where the local dealer is without me having to pay them for the information ;)