Course PreRequisites - Straight from the horses mouth?

Training is naturally a little bit more complicated than gambling and so needs to be taken seriously. And at the least, as seriously as knowing the health of the horse you are gambling on when gambling on a horse race.

So that there is no confusion about the pre-requisites for Microsoft courses that people may wish to attend. I offer a link to the site of Element K. One can use the information on this site to confirm their understanding of what they need to bring to the party in order for everyone to enjoy themselves when attending a course.

If you perceive something that conflicts with the information given by Element K, then you should worry because the latest Microsoft training material is designed around an educational strategy.

This is new to technology training from Microsoft and to be applauded, however, for this strategy change to work the educational offerings should be free of marketing and if the two get cross contaminated then we are in real trouble!

There are two main risks associated with such freedom of information.

The first is that it will scare the planners when they think of the time and cost involved in doing things correctly.

The second is that they will act on the fear and make the wrong decisions.

Be strong and enjoy the benefits of information sharing. This is what democracy is all about after all, isn't it?

Back to the future

This is a fantastic site. I am not sure whether you are up with this kind of thing but the acupuncture points used in Chinese medicine have been exploited to good effect without the use of needles, for thousands of years.

See Yin Yang House for the details.

If you learn better by being shown rather than by reading about things then look up EFT on the Internet. There are an increasing number of people willing to invest in learning and then helping others understand what is available! Gary Craig is one amongst many such nice people out there!

What hotels are there in this area of London?

I found this cool map when I was trying to locate a hotel near a customer site I will be working at in the near future. Very useful, you can zoom in and out and it changes hotels shown on the map also puts their names in a list on the right. Now thats something of a GISa (Google Is Special application) or (Graphical Information Systems applied) both work for me ;-)

Interactive guide to Hotels in London

You may not need it if your from London, but if your from outside then finding a hotel can be interesting. We were just chatting during a course this week and it's amazing the types of places people end up in when tryng to save the company money.

TechNet Virtual Labs: SQL Server 2005

Time to update your pre 2005 Data Warehousing knowledge to post 2000 Business Intelligence.

Microsoft have produced freely available virtual labs to help and you can download them, amongst other useful material, at TechNet Virtual Labs: SQL Server 2005

This is what I call learning support ;-)

Immediate benefits from moving onto a 64bit AMD Platform

"Will my software be limited by the same memory constraints on a 64bit machine as when on a 32bit machine"

Fair question! The reality is that when using a 64bit machine on an AMD chip the operating system, which is common to both the 32bit and 64bit persona's of the machine, does not capitalise the space allocated to the windows application execution environment.

This means that even without utilizing Advanced Windowing Extensions (AWE) you can access up to 4GB of memory rather than having to rely on 3GB and what can be stolen from the OS temporarily.

Go to 'tell me more about AMD use of memory' to get further details and there are lots of links therein to increase your knowledge about the subject area.

Three cheers for Microsoft Learning Support

Moving a whole world from procedural coding to Object Oriented principles takes a lot of things, not least of which is training.

However, while schools and colleges try to achieve government set targets and companies outsource resources rather than investing in them, Microsoft offer a hand of friendship to the poor worker/ learner.

If your interested in following a career in programming using the latest tools and techniques, or your the parent of a child who asks you where they can learn how to program, or your a teacher looking for assistance in helping your children but cannot afford the hefty prices that are sometimes charged to get your own skills up to date, now you have somewhere you can go!

Head for learning help from Microsoft where this fantastic company has kept alive the idea that they started with knowledge sharing with Encarta many years ago. Now they are sharing their resources with you so that you can learn about the latest software development techniques at your own pace.

Get your dirty machine clean and fresh again

Ever ended up with an unstable machine that you can't just blow away and re-install, due to time constraints? Well yo would be amazed at how often you come across this kind of situation now that computers are in widespread use, as are Beta versions of very enticing products!

The nice people at VMware have come up with tools that can help with a solution. You can save the complete machine as a virtual machine. Blow away the contaminated machine and then transfer the good bits back at your leisure.

The tools are made available free to you by Vmware. Download VMware Converter and use this to convert your current machine into a virtual machine and store it somewhere safe, a new external hard disk is much cheaper than a replacement machine, which I have seen some desperate users resort to.

Then go to Download VMware Server to load the newly created virtual machine, having restored your machine to its factory installed state.