Apple's biggest problem is that unlike in the past where their products were kept secret, their products are available before they are even announced because they rely on the supposed trust of their Chinese factories.

As soon as Apple realises this blunder and brings manufacturing home the better. I don't want to know what the next iPhone will look like until the keynote speech and all the hard work that goes into it to woo the public.

Zoostorm laptops are available without operating system and come with all the drivers ready for you to load Windows of your choice, etc.

The s sounds pretty easy to guess, could it by student? This would allow for different categories of staff and students based on that letter.

At my university it was abc0 where the abc were the student's initials and the 0 being the increment. I was jfc3.

10 years ago, business were just embracing the Internet. A lot of companies were letting go of Novell Netware and placing baby steps out there on the net.

In those last ten years, a vast amount of services we used have been forgotten. Does anyone still use MySpace or Lycos for instance. In a couple of years the names like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and the like will be replaced by something more social and closer to the needs of the people.

In business, the idea of a computer on every desk will become a computer in every hand as the needs of computers become that of a personal experience. I can see a merge between the home and business more likely to happen where you have one device for your company that works equally well at home. Less requirements for being in a physical building give way to home based working or virtual office cubicles.

I can see the power being moved back to the client-server model which served us well until the advent of the PC. Now with the PC market beginning to wane, the client-server will become more the tiny box you plug in that gives you your wireless signal and virtual desktop environment as well as the connection to your ISP.

There will still be a need for someone to set these boxes up, so the sysadmin/network engineer becomes a similar role to the technical support engineer who drives to a location to repair a computer.

Perhaps there will be a direct connection with the brain in 10 years time, so you think what you want to do and the computer relays the images and audio as synaptic responses to and from the brain directly. That way there would be no need for a tablet or gestures of the hands or fingers. The potential for zombies would be more of a problem though!

Employers go offshore for one reason, the cost of hiring people and the subsequent saving in wages. Why go to the expense of hiring someone that costs $xx per hour when you could pay someone in a different country that much a month. It is the customer that ultimately loses out. Speaking to people in other countries that are simply reading a sheet of paper and not listening to the customer, often in an accent the customer can't understand makes both ends angry and in some cases the operative commits suicide. What is a life to the faceless employer? - one where the workers will never meet anyone who works for the company. The company doesn't even know how their customers feel because they have become insulated from the customer since every call is handled by the call center. Personally, I can't wait for the automated system that radically replaces call centers with a small box in the company, it means jobs will be lost but the customer will finally be happier. After all, which employer really cares about their staff and not about how much money they make?

I'd say the best portable computer for Ballmer would be the chair computer ;)

Of course, if you have SP1 as your initial XP CD, download SP2 and the latest autopatcher bundles before you start.

Make sure you are behind a firewall or physically disconnected from the internet when reinstalling SP1. Upgrade to SP2, the slipstream all the patches from the latest autopatcher bundles and your computer has theb latest XP patches on it ready to hit the net.

http://autopatcher.com/