Man's best friend still smarting over
report
On occasion the more serious-minded coverage elsewhere in this
magazine enters Downtime's consciousness, and some of those stories
give us cause for concern.
This week we received a letter from a reader worried about the
front page story in our 9 January issue, "Watchdog attacked in
battle over ID cards".
The clearly sensitive and thoughtful reader wanted to know
whether the dog was OK, and was shocked that the piece itself
failed to condemn the attack.
Downtime is suitably shaken to hear of such callousness in these
pages and will launch a full inquiry.
BBC steals our identity with ID theft drama
While we are on the subject of ID cards, it turns out that we
are not the only ones imagining that things could turn nasty.
Downtime is heartened to report that the BBC is set to wade in too,
having commissioned a hard-hitting drama series intended to act as
a warning about where the government's ill-fated plans might
end.
The series, called The Last Enemy, is set in the near future and
has a storyline sprinkled liberally with grizzly murders, all of
which are carried out with the assistance of ID card theft. It has
been described as "apocalyptic" and "Orwellian", painting a
suitably bleak picture of what will happen if ID cards get the
nod.
The Last Enemy is scheduled to be broadcast later this year.
Downtime, for one, is looking forward to it.
End of an era as retailer takes hard line on
floppies
First Currys said it wouldn't sell conventional cameras any more
now PC World has announced that it will no longer stock floppy
discs once existing stock has been sold.
It seems we are all using memory sticks and e-mail now, but
Downtime is still struggling to come to terms with what looks like
the end of the floppy. It's not quite as bad as CDs muscling in on
vinyl, but it's not far off.
The first floppy was developed by IBM in the late 1960s, and for
a while 8in discs were the standard. By 1976, a 5.25in version was
on the way, and this held sway until as recently as the late 1980s,
when the 3.5in version arrived.
But now the floppy is nearly no more, as those hard-headed
rationalists at PC World are happy to explain.
"It is now increasingly standard for computer users to transfer
data via the internet or use USB memory sticks, some of which will
store the equivalent of 1,000 times the capacity of a floppy disc,"
said Bryan Magrath, the retailer's commercial director.
In fairness to PC World, it turns out that demand for the floppy
has plummeted in recent years, and 98% of all the PCs and laptops
sold by the retailer no longer have built-in floppy disc drives, so
most people clearly won't miss them.
But before they are gone for good from everyone's consciousness,
do please share any floppy tales from yesteryear with us.
The eco evidence is there in black and
white
And finally, here's this week's spurious IT-themed energy-saving
statistic for our eco age.
Google's nice clean home page may be easy on the eye, but all
that white uses about 74W of electricity to display, apparently,
whereas an all-black web page uses 59W.
This prompted one bored person to calculate that if Google
reverted to an all-black screen it could save about £40,000 a day
in electricity costs.
We won't bore you with the maths just take it from us that it
doesn't bear close scrutiny.
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