I hate when large companies overcharge for a product/service. Some of my favourite examples of this are BT (British Telecom) and their extortionate broadband prices and every mobile phone network in the UK.

One of the companies guilty of this is of course Microsoft. I know this is just stating the obvious but what I was surprised to find out is by just how much Microsoft rip Europe by.

In Thailand Microsoft Office costs ��30, that's around � Microsoft Office sells for �.99 in the UK. I have no problem with paying for software but I have a big problem with paying a needless �.99!

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OK I couldn't resist the idea of having a go on one of these E-Skateboards so I have just made my order from one from eBay. Admittedly I have wanted one of these for some time but they used to cost much more than they are worth in my opinion, now that you can get them for £50 off eBay (plus £20 P&P) I was prepared to part with my money.



The board travels at around 8 MPH which is fine by me as I'm not after something fast otherwise I'd travel on my normal skateboard which has not seen the light of day for some years now. The only down side to this board (apart from the fact that stunts are out of the question) is that it's so huge. It must be three foot long, tis a small price to pay for an aid to laziness however

It'll probably arrive this week so expect a full report when it does

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You hear of people buying LCD monitors only to find they have a dead pixel. Well beat this, I have 4 dead pixels, 1 dead sub-pixel, around an inch square of damaged pixels and intermittent horizontal lines flashing across the screen.

What did I do to deserve that? Needless to say it's going back the sooner the better.

On the plus side this thing is huge! going from a 17" CRT screen to a 19" LCD screen makes so much difference. In case you don't know CRT's are measured from corner to corner of their case. LCD screen's are measured from corner to corner of their screen so my 17" CRT screen was really around 15".

The display is great, the 16ms response time is fine and the contest and brightness are easily settable to my likings. All in all this a great screen for it's price especially if you take into account that it comes with DVI, something I see as very important There is of course one major draw back. My two Linux penguins and centre satellite can no long sit on top of my monitor .

I can't wait till I get a working one lol

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At last the 8th is here, the day you have all been waiting for I'm sure Ubuntu Linux 5.04 "Hoary Hedgehog" was released today and is available from the newly updated Ubuntu website which has had a lovely graphical/layout makeover.

I'm downloading as I type and will running hoary on my home machine in around 7 and a half hours when I get back from work I can't believe I have to wait that long lol.

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As of Tuesday April 12th XP users will no longer be able to block SP2 so if your running an XP box and don't want SP2, get ready to have it forced upon you becuase Microsoft are giving you no say in the matter!

Here is what Microsoft have to say on the matter:
Because of these significant improvements, Microsoft views Windows XP SP2 as an essential security update and is therefore distributing it as a "critical update" via Windows Update (WU) and the Automatic Updates (AU) delivery mechanism in Windows. Microsoft strongly urges customers with Windows XP and Windows XP Service Pack 1-based systems to update to Windows XP SP2 as soon as possible?

Personally I think this out of order, many people I have spoken too do not wish to use SP2 for various reasons.

Source OSnews.com IT Observer

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