For what seems like years now I’ve been touting the death of the floppy disk drive; when CD writable drives were released I was one of the first proclaiming that there would be no need for the ridiculous storage capacity of a 1.44Mg floppy disk.The same was true when Zip drives came along, then the 120Mg floppy and the proliferation of other floppy disk ‘replacements’ that have hit the market and so not wanting to break with habit I’m doing it once again now that the age of affordable removable flash media is here.

With many of us using wireless networks and high … Read the rest

At the time of writing we’ve just started engaging Iraq in military action and with the majority of our population interested in how our soldiers are doing or what Saddam Hussein is up to, accurate up to date information is more important to us now than ever.Of course the Internet was designed to assist the exchange of information and years from its conception it still aids us with this particularly well and some of the busiest pages over the coming weeks will be the Internet news sites as people check out what is happening from their desks at work or studies at home.… Read the rest

Going off on a slightly random tangent, this week I thought we could talk about Easter Eggs.Not of the chocolate gift variety we’ll all be receiving next month but rather an endearing name for a hidden piece of code that’s entered into an application at the design stage by a member of the programming team.The reasons for doing this is usually that most of the time a programming team is completely anonymous, for example, nobody knows the names of the individual people who sat down and created Windows XP; we just refer to it as being created by Microsoft.By inserting adding a small piece of code that is only accessible if you know … Read the rest

This week I will dedicate to a letter I recently received from one of my readers who is experiencing problems with an intrusive file that she picked up whilst browsing the Internet.

I recently subscribed to a Newsgroup, and when I next returned to my desktop I found a new icon entitled “Private-Archive”.When I clicked on it out of curiosity I discovered that it led me into a hard core pornographic site and said that, if I did not wish to view such things, I “should leave the site now” which, of course, I did.My problem is that the icon now refuses to … Read the rest