Greater Minds

Gadget lovers are so hungry for digital data many are carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks full of paper in "weight". "Virtual weight" measurements are based on research by California Institute of Technology professor Roy Williams. He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper. If digital hoarding habits continue on this scale, people could be carrying around a "digitally obese" 20 gigabytes by next year. "Britain has become a nation of information hoarders with a ferocious appetite for data," said Martin Larsson, general manager of Toshiba's European storage device division. read more

To ISD, IT Support services, IT Planning & Management and whom else it might concern: Over the four years I have studied at Salford University I have seen major improvements to the facilities that are available to both academics, as well as students. That is from both, the software and hardware point of view. Well done! I do sincerely hope that at least some of the suggestions came from the students' population and so it enabled you to move closer to the expectations and the capabilities that are desired in this day and age. The purpose of this email is to make the case for a new application, which at this moment is not available through the university PC terminals. Yet it would significantly enhance knowledge accessibility, on-line experience and not only that it would further improve the on-line threat protection to the network. I am talking of the Firefox 1.0 web browser, which after a long period of testing was recently introduced in its full official version

What a great film after a along time. "Originally conceived as a hand-drawn project, this spectacular comic book-style adventure is another triumph for Pixar's brand of computer-animated magic. Focusing solely on human characters for a change, this centres on Mr Incredible (voiced by Craig T Nelson), once one of the world's foremost superheroes, now an insurance agent living incognito in the suburbs (thanks to a super-litigious society having turned doing good deeds into an invitation for a lawsuit). But duty eventually calls and soon he's squeezing himself back into his old costume and fighting crime on the sly. With the Incredible family's talents incorporating everything from super-stretchability and amazing speed to Herculean strength and invisibility, the animators are given plenty of scope to dazzle, and they really go to town. As in his debut feature, The Iron Giant, writer/director Brad Bird instils his characters with genuine personalities, emotio

The number of Europeans with broadband has exploded over the past 12 months, with the web eating into TV viewing habits, research suggests. The total number of people online in Europe has broken the 100 million mark. he ability to browse web pages at high speed, download files such as music or films and play online games is changing what people do in their spare time. A study by analysts Jupiter Research suggested that broadband was challenging television viewing habits. In homes with broadband, 40% said they were spending less time watching TV. more  (bbc.co.uk)...

'Blog' picked as word of the year 2004. Blogs proved useful to many during the US election The term "blog" has been chosen as the top word of 2004 by a US dictionary publisher. Merriam-Webster said "blog" headed the list of most looked-up terms on its site during the last twelve months. BBC Reports

Sometimes I carry the conviction that when it comes to computers I know it all... However, I quickly find out my limitations when something goes horribly wrong. In those circumstances I end up looking like these two. Three hours and a couple of cups of calming herbal tea later I finally got it back up and running again. So I hope. So if you find any problems on this site than I am almost certain that the problem is not on your side =:o Let me know...

I have been annoyed by the speed of my laptop for some time now. Not that I'd have the fastest machine on the planet but I also couldn't come to terms that my recent memory upgrade had no effect. One would expect that 512MB will shift things around in a bit faster fashion. A revelation came to me this Friday when I picked up a copy of PC PRO mag. How many network drives have you mapped on your PC? Heureka, we are home... Your pc will automatically look for mapped drives every time you wish to open or save a document from within the dialog window. Considering that I mapped Memory Stick drive on a remote PC, a couple of FTP servers and others the operation was taking some considerable time. Although, that's not to say that I changed my mind... it is time for a new machine... January here we come.