Downtime

Another year older, another year nearer the grave. Yes folks, AOL has decided to announce that it will no longer support Netscape navigator. During the mid-1990s, a time when Downtime harboured foolish fantasies such as ambition, Netscape was the dominant web browser.
This was, of course, before Bill Gates discovered what WWW stood for and deemed it worthy of a mention in the second edition of The Road Ahead – the first edition famously made no mention of the world wide wait.
Shortly after this, Internet Explorer was bundled with the Windows operating system and crushed Navigator like Downtime crushes parking tickets.
This gave rise to the infamous “browser wars”, which, although not as exciting as Star Wars’ Clone Wars, could nevertheless have made a better premise for a Doctor Who Christmas special than the televisual abortion Downtime watched over the holidays.

Startling new evidence has emerged that the UK really does value its computer scientists after all. Steve Furber, a designer involved with creating the BBC Micro, has been made a commander of the British empire – a mere 27 years after the fact.
Furber lived a true Monte Carlo lifestyle that most of us can only dream of. He represented the UK in the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hungary in 1970, where rumour has it he calculated pi to 17,000 decimal places.
This is an exceptional feat considering that Downtime can only calculate pi to three places, namely, in the oven, in our mouth and in our stomach.
In 1978, Furber was appointed Rolls-Royce research fellow in aerodynamics, but he left after he was told he could not borrow the cars on weekends.

Danger, deception and desire are not normally words one would associate with the IT industry, still less with e-mail security. However, word reaches us that the publisher Mills & Boon has bolstered its e-mail and web security by merging its security systems.
The publisher, which specialises in romantic fiction, previously employed two service providers – one for e-mail and another for web protection – but it said neither measured up to the heaving bosom of its engorged standards.
Steve Smith, IS manager at Mills & Boon, said, “Having the two services under one roof is ideal. Since implementation, the service issues associated with e-mail and the web have reduced to zero.”
From the above quote it is clear that Smith has no involvement in the writing of romance fiction whatsoever, which is a shame. The company publishes romance stories in many settings, from bodily shenanigans in the medical profession to medieval tales with plenty of jousting.
The publisher does not, however, appear to have any books based on the exotic underbelly of IT support.

Marriage, so we are told, is what couples do when they have nothing left to talk about. Fortunately, technology has once again stepped in to fill the yearning void.
According to figures published in the Times last week, console sales have hit 7.4 million – equivalent to almost one in three silent, resentful households – surely an indication that the market for computer games is widening, although not quite as fast as the gap between husbands and wives.

If you fancy yourself as a cyber security expert, test your skills on Symantec’s Norton Cyber Smackdown.

The site currently has a dozen fairly elementary questions but Symantec says it will have 120 when it launches the full quiz on 10 January.

Most interesting question? How many people admit that they regularly surf porn sites? Answer? Some do. Surprisingly.

When alpha male Jeremy Clarkson, 47, revealed his account number and sort code in his newspaper column as a way of rubbishing the threat to the 25 million parents whose data was lost by HMRC, few could have accused him of not putting his money where his ample-sized mouth was.

Upon publishing his details, he told readers that all someone would be able to do with the information would be to put money in, not take money out. “Honestly, I have never known such a palaver about nothing,” he said at the time.

But Clarkson admitted he was wrong after he discovered a reader had used his details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.

“I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account,” he weeped wept like a big girl’s blouse in his Sunday Times column.

Downtime may end up in the Tower of London as a result of a headline that took all of two seconds to come up with.

Yes, folks, according to that beacon of journalistic professionalism, The People, Queenie has become addicted to the Nintendo Wii.

The report said that the system was a Christmas gift from Kate Middleton to her boyfriend Prince William, but after watching her grandson play, the monarch “begged to join in.”

The Queen played a simple ten-pin bowling game and was a natural by all accounts said the paper. Orders have reportedly been placed for Resident Evil 4 and Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, and for some two-player action with Phillip there is Metro City Racing, although arguments about who gets to drive the white Fiat Punto might lead to a fallout.

A career in IT is not generally conducive to an active lifestyle - outside of those late night Wii-bashing sessions. However, the Metro newspaper reported on one IT manager who has bucked the trend like no other by completing - gulp - 446 marathons.

Obviously this wasn’t all in one go, as if it was, IT manager Steve Edwards from Gloucester would be a mass of protoplasm by now. He once ran 87 marathons in a year even though doctors recommend two or three.

“I’m not too strict - I like my junk food and happily tuck into curry and pizzas,” he told the paper as he continued his journey on foot to Las Vegas to wish Bill Gates goodbye.

If you received a laptop this Christmas, be warned: they might not be the tokens of love and affection you think. Several Korean newspapers have reported that a laptop owned by a local journalist had exploded while it was in sleep mode. News channel YTN even showed pictures of flames and smoke rising from it.

LG Chem (which made the battery) has asked a third party to investigate the incident, although there was no indication that the battery had been to blame.

In 2006, Sony began recalling 9.6 million lithium-ion batteries because of fears that they could burst into flames. Still, given that heating bills are scheduled to rise it might prove to be a cheaper way of keeping warm this year.

If, like Downtime, you've been laid up with a succession of winter colds, flus and noroviruses, you may have missed your chance to see Bill Gates' spoof retirement plans video, screened at CES 2008. Well, now you can catch up with the rest of the world and watch George Clooney, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Jay-Z, Bono and others whittle down Bill's post-retirement options. Poor little rich guy...

For a long time IT professionals have been spoken of as the very zenith of amateur athleticism. But, alas, it is not so.
According to Bupa’s corporate healthcare assessment of the sector, one in 10 senior employees in IT admitted to smoking, while almost a quarter admitted to leading a sedentary lifestyle by failing to take exercise at least once a week.
Bupa found that 61% of all senior level IT employees had a high body mass index, scoring more than 25.
If the Bupa survey tells us anything we did not already know, it is that IT professionals are accomplished liars. Downtime does not believe for a second that only one in 10 IT staff smoke.

The self-appointed consumer champions at Computing Which? have declared Bebo the best social networking website, as explained in the following video report from Reuters. But what Downtime wants to know is, if Which? is so into social networking, how come it left the choice down to just one reviewer? Doesn't it have any friends?

Oh dear, oh dear. Another day, another data security issue in celebsville. Following on from news of BBC Top Gear car hack Jeremy Clarkson's touchingly naive approach to data security, publishing his banking details in a newspaper column, now another esteemed BBC Jeremy - Jeremy Paxman - has got his knickers in a twist, so to speak.

The pants in question come from the nation's favourite underwear supplier, Marks & Spencer. In a leaked private email to M&S boss Stuart Rose, Paxman claims that M&S "pants no longer provide adequate support".

Neither, it seems, do Paxman's IT advisors. Private email? No such thing!

Hungary is well known for its ancient folklore and tales of mythical monsters. Even the slogan for the tourist board translates as, “Come for the goulash, stay for the werewolves.”

But now it seems Hungarian scientists are taking the wolfman concept a stage further by working on software that analyses dog barks to help people to better recognise basic canine emotions.

Speaking in his human form, Hungarian ethologist Csaba Molnar told Reuters that a possible commercial application could be a device for dog-human communication.

Molnar said the research provided further proof that different types of barks convey messages humans can understand even if they had no experience with dogs or mothers in law.

A man who sold pirated computer games, films and music to fishermen in exchange for a box of crabs has been fined £3,000.

The 61-year-old intended to sell the copied discs for cash, but the fishing crews proved tight customers and did not open their wallets. Wanting to offload the hot property quickly, he settled for fresh crabs as payment.

His premises were later searched by the police, who found more than 200 discs containing illegally copied games.

The story was developing as we went to press, but Downtime understands that the fishermen involved with buying the games will face a disciplinary herring.

Fraud is a terrible thing, and identity theft an unpleasant experience. Unless of course it happens to Jeremy Clarkson.

“OK, so Jeremy Clarkson is a bit of a prat, but he is not wrong. With your sort code and account number the only action anyone can take is to pay money into an account. Not withdraw. Not even get a balance,” says reader Gary Gowans.

“Jeremy Clarkson’s bank presumably accepted a fraudulently signed Direct Debit notification from whoever set this charitable debit up. So the bank are at fault for not verifying the signature properly. Although, I guess Clarkson may have a fairly public signature, which may make it easier to copy.”

Downtime finds it astonishing that anybody would want to defraud Clarkson, unless it was, in the great man’s words, one of those “onion selling ne’er-do-wells” or a dog-eater, or perhaps somebody from those parts of America “where people have started to mate with vegetables”.

Poor Jerome Kerviel. As if it wasn't bad enough that he had family problems, might have 'lost his mind a bit', has been found out as a fraduster and was perhaps the cause of the recent crash in the stock market, the Metro newspaper also reports today, 25 January, that "Kerviel's Facebook page had 11 friends before the scandal broke - but this was down to four last night." When the tough times come, you know who your real friends are, eh?

I was editing a story this week about how Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity is implementing business intelligence software that will help it understand where donations are coming from.

It helps them target fundraising by understanding where donations come from.

I could not help but think how useful this would be to our political parties. They seem to get into awful trouble by forgetting about being given money.

The good thing for the political parties is they could probably save money benefiting from the synergies between their donation databases and the police national criminal database.

It’s amazing what you can learn about the use of technology by taking a stroll down the high street. On such a safari this week I saw at first hand two technologies, which made me question the appropriateness of advanced technology for technology sake.

On the first hand, nestling in a corner at a local supermarket, was the Money Star. This clever piece of kit converts change into real money via a token which you get converted into cash.

Is this useful? Well it is so useful I am writing a list of uses and even splitting it into business and user benefits.

Business benefits

1 - 7.9 pence profit for every pound converted.

2 – A good supply of small change for the tills.

User benefits

1 – Hours of fun for children and workers in very dull towns.

2 – Homeless people can convert copper to silver and not be embarrassed when they buy Special Brew?

Then came a more advanced technology being paraded by some local constables. Mobile CCTV. I suppose it does what it says on the tin.

But is this useful?

Just looks like a way to cut costs. One mobile CCTV camera can do the job of several permanent CCTV cameras. But what are the chances of the mobile CCTV camera being there when a pensioner gets mugged?

Now I know that those of us working in the IT sector have not always been known for our social skills, but surely that perception is changing now we're firmly in the 21st century and even Jennifer Aniston and Kylie Minogue are dating online? Perhaps not, given the existence of this quick Friday afternoon spot-the-slasher quiz, "Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer", on malevole.com. While it's not as gory as Sweeney Todd, it's somehow far more disturbing. As is the fact Downtime only scored 6/10... Let's hope Jen and Kylie have better luck judging a man's true worth by his online profile..!

As we are all learning, 28 January was Data Protection Day. We in Britain won’t know too much about it because it is a European thing dreamed up last year by the European Council. Besides, the continentals have had ID cards since forever, and we haven’t.

Then again, perhaps it's just another excuse for the French to take yet another day off work...