mockney piers

*sound of wooshing* Nope indeed, it was I what said those things, calm down dear. It is a bit of a grammatical horror though innit, and it has been used idiomatically and in a somewhat clich?d manner to characterise a poorly educated type for a very long time (plus the hard lads at school were a bit prone to usage when I think about it). I've no idea whether it was in Dickens or not, did Dick Van Dyke use it Mary Poppins? I was really just lightheartedly pointing out the gulf in your sentence: "isn't this thread about commenting on trends in the use of language that irk you [snip] it was commenting on a personal bugbear of mine" I'll remember to use the tags next time ;-)

If we're all getting pedantic then that was really just a bugbear rather than anything to do with trends. I'm pretty sure you'll find instances of that vernacular grammatical horror, characteristic of the underclass, in Dickens.

I actually quite like outlook 2010, which is a relative thing as I've always hated outlook, plus why would you use it at home, most isp emails don't do exchange, so any old pop/smpt compatible interface will do, I use the also free mozilla thunderbird But agreed, office 2010 is best given a wide berth. MS spend over a decade getting people used to an entire paradigm, then change it all drastically for the worse so it's impossible to find any of the functions. Idiots. I'm sure there's a saying about when something isn't broken... (and however bloated the last few office products have been, they certainly weren't broken)

16 bit? I don't think the licence for Office 3.0 would still be valid would it? Although if you could get a minecraft version of office to work that would be really cool*. *obviously cool defined by someone who thinks minecraft is cool, thereby probably making them as far from anything remotely approaching cool as it's possible to be!

You'll have to pay for office. Try and avoid those trial versions. Get a clean PC then get a teacher to buy it for you, it'll come in about 40 quid. I don't mind a bit of petty fraud committed against Microsoft you see, they do plenty well enough out of their software without having to charge us poor minkies a fortune. Personally I just use open office, it's free, does the job fine and doesn't ship with masses of useless bloat. http://www.openoffice.org/

"But I don't earn much money and can't afford those morals" You can either research something yourself or do what you're doing here, ask the advice of disinterested parties. Why go to John Lewis and kill puppies?

You went to a shop for advice then bought on line? I'd consider that immoral! My wife tried that when we took over an hour of the chaps time in a great pram/baby accessory shop in Peckham then surreptitiously demanded I check online prices for the product on my phone. I gave her the hardest Paddington stare I could muster before handing my payment card over to the chap. AS it happened he chucked in loads of little extras without us even asking as he'd taken a broody style shine to the mocklet and has given really good after sale service, something you never get from online. In fact some things i don't buy online because of the hassle factor when things go wrong. I'd rather go to richer sounds for a telly say. The previous time I bought a telly online I had a phone call the next day and the guy asked for 45 quid for delivery. I pointed out that it was free, and he said the extra 45 quid would make sure the telly would be on the van coming to SE London in the next few days. I pointed out that now I know there's one coming in the next few days that why shouldn't it be on there anyway, so he said 'yeah but you wouldn't want anyone dropping it or anything would you'. Long story short he realised he fucked up and my telly was with me free of charge the next day, but lets say afters sales support is non existent and I won't be doing cheapestbargainytypewebsite.com ever again. I did buy my PC from dell online because the reputable companies doing direct online sales are usually pretty good. Anyhow, as usual, I digress....

I do the eating thing too, 'oh well done *slurp* mocklet, you've *crunch* eaten loads'. Mind you, at the moment he's on the batch of chili, beef and veg stew I made him, and it is really nice!!

They can do, I never seem to suffer these issues, but I do tend to go for higher spec machines, uninstall crap that I don't need and regularly kill processes from startup, studiously avoid any sort of malware, annoying plugins, toolbars etc. I'm not a PC, neither am I an apple fanboy or booboy, I enjoyed my iphone until it first committed battery suicide, then committed functionality suicide when the iOS4 upgrade came out. But my iPad is a real guilty pleasure and it wasn't until the missus' 14 year old cousin came to stay a couple of weekends ago and hogged it permanently that I realised how dependent I've become on it for quickly checking emails and having a quick peruse of the usual sites when I get in from work, and how I resented having to boot up my PC. I will say that in my 4 years of working with Macs as a Quark chappie that I found they crashed randomly at least 4 times a day, maybe they're better now but it did rather put me off (in fact the missus' macbook did so too though it was a work one and she treated it with less respect than she would a mangy cur, so it was hardly surprising).

I guess I shouldn't trust reviews. It just seemed to me that if email and internet is all you want then aim low. But probably wise to buy a which guide or something beforehand to get a good model (i randomly plucked that one from a 'best cheap netbooks' list). Mind you my iphone had a 6 hour battery life after about 6 months of use, so clearly Apple hasn't necessarily got the hang of things either. iPad is still pretty good after almost a year though, but it doesn't get especially heavy use. CAn you pick up iPad 1s cheap, they're good at email, they're ooookayyyy at internet.

Long battery life, light, quick start up. Just get yourself something like this. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004HZG2O2/ref=asc_df_B004HZG2O23449594/?tag=pgelec-13-305-21&creative=22110&creativeASIN=B004HZG2O2&linkCode=asn Samsung ?239 It really doesn't sound like PR is going to be playing Crysis 2 or do video editing, so why bother with anything more expensive/heavier/more powerful/flashier?

Compression. Large physical size != large digital size. This is usually done by using paint or photoshop or gimp or somesuch to scale down the quality of the photo.

Tribunes? I'm sure Sulla had one or two of them tortured, but I'm sure it's not enough of a problem in modern Brittania to worry about. Seriously though, I wouldn't give it a second thought, the car wash in the car park probably generates more noise than the Hamlet crowd.

It was a desperately boring fight wasn't it, my baby has a mobile that rotates above his bed with two things spinning in proximity but never quite touching, and I can vouch that it is positively mesmerising compared to that 'spectacle', and also neither of the spinny circles are twats. Mind you neither did either of them get into haydn wassername's pants either.

"We generally try to split tasks equally, then spend equal amounts of time accusing the other of not holding up his/her end!" Ha ha, spot on Saffron, that's our house too!! :-D

I doubt comeonjeremy was ever uttered with any belief, it think it was more of a comeonjeremy

I'm going with talk show. I'm sure it'll be even worse and more short lived than Ian Wright's woeful effort.

For the 98% of people who aren't comfortable with the ins and outs of SDRAM vs DDR/2/3, ram hz, motherboard fussiness and balancing ram, I'd say buy a solid system by someone reputable with enough power to do what you need to do well, and be happy with that. Forget about upgrading. In your case PR your requirements are pretty limited if it's just browsing and email. Get something modest, light and well built, you probably won't need to spend more than ?180-250. You really don't need a powerful processor, but make sure you have enough RAM to make your OS run smoothly. If it's windows 7 you need at least 3GB, ideally 4GB. If you go with a linux based laptop you'll get away with less and consequently get it cheaper.

I imagine that they were probably used to help preserve the food rather than as anti scurvy tool else tens of thousands of sailors over the next three hundred years mightn't have died. Actually if you've read Nathaniels Nutmeg there's a bit on there about how a British sailor made the connection between fresh fruit and scurvy, but they got shipwrecked and his notes on this got discovered about 400 years too late. But I guess you're right about the Thai chili I was just wondering if their might have been some native strains in eastern Asia, washed up across the pacific or something, it's just hard to imagine their cuisine without it. I guess garlic lemongrass, lime leaf and pepper would have sufficed.

Can't beat a bit of chipotle in my book. It's like black pepper or salt it goes with just about everything.

Chilis do originate from the Americas and the European introduction coincides with that of tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco, syphilis and the rest of them. Chile is just a homophone, it has nothing to do with the peppers. I can't really comment in the history of the chili in curries as I only really discovered curry in the late 80s and became something of a chilihead shortly thereafter. I would say that there has been a huge growth in fetishising chilis over the last 10 years or so though, i never really saw it as a cultural phenomenon in the way that it has become now. The naga actually has a rich tomatoey flavour that can enhance a dish when used sparingly, but my tummy doesn't seem to tolerate them well anymore. Id recommend dorset naga avoidance, eating them falls into the macho fetishist culture side of things. That said I did have a bit of an absurd habanero based chili sauce yesterday at a BBQ that weighed in at a very silly 750000 schovilles, and it was surprisingly nice, much nicer than the famed dragons blood which I can't tolerate any more either. Does anyone know if the birds eye chili existed at all in Thailand before the sixteenth century as it's so integral to so many of their dishes now.

He used to wind me up, so I didn't read him particularly often. He does occasionally surprise me with minor bouts of good journalism (on that rare occasion he's practicing journalism rather than opining). I however know nothing about this incident nor care enough to find out. A little pr?cis anyone? And Loz, I expect better from you.

You can achieve the same effect using thus google mashups site of rising sea levels http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=51.4921,-0.0625&z=5&m=9

IBD - Oh you do have it? My name? It's Antoine de Saint-Exup?ry.

That's a little bit disturbing.