You really do have to be careful when you sign up to one of those bandwidth-limited ISP accounts. It might be cheap, especially in these financially tough times, but you must ensure you don’t bust your way out of your monthly limit and run up some huge bills.
Fortunately, I’m with an ISP that doesn’t seem to mind how much data I pull through the network each month. That’s within reason of course.
But at the end of the day, he knows I am limited by having two ADSL lines and that I am a fair distance from the exchange. Think 1Mb per line and you’d be about right.
So you will doubtless be as amused as I was to see this usage log from my trusty TZ190 Sonicwall firewall. Apparently my main desktop computer had managed to download 16,777,215 Terabytes of data. And it seemingly did that in just 5 days 9 hours.
Yah boo sucks to the Acceptable Usage Policy - I think I have a backup of the entire internet now.
If you’ve ever wondered why it’s the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Scott McNealy and Eric Schmidt who are the successful ones who end up creating and running a hugely successful technology company and not you then I have excellent news – it’s not your fault. In fact, it’s an accident of birth.
I was reminded of this while browsing through Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink and generally considered to be a very clever bloke) as part of my research, such that it was, for next month’s Prolog – that is, the editor’s column in PC Pro. (more…)
Radio nerds celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings this week by bouncing radio waves off the moon. It’s a five second round-trip, even for a radio wave, so the conversations were rather stilted. But what an interesting tribute it was.
Will other technological milestones be celebrated in similar ways, I wonder?
Will the 40th anniversary of the internet’s creation be honoured by people bouncing emails off of Tim Berners-Lee’s laptop? Will we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the GSM network by routing SMS messages through Friedhelm Hillebrand’s mobile?
If there’s one PC peripheral that’s seen about as much change as the Queen’s hairdo over the past 20 years, it’s the keyboard. Sure there have been attempts to jazz it up with ergonomic layouts, wireless transmitters and models with flashy shortcut buttons, but by and large, if someone plugged a 1989 model keyboard into your PC you’d barely notice the difference.
The deathly pace of keyboard evolution is actually a barrier to progress, according to HP vice president Phil McKinley, who I met last week. “The keyboard is still a hugely intimidating factor for users,” he told me, referring especially to users in developing countries who haven’t grown up with computers. “It still has a System Request and Break key on the keyboard. When was the last time you touched the Break key?” he asked.
Processors, memory and hard disks go through numerous iterations each year; faster, smaller and shinier, while the humble plug remains as defiantly chunky as it is painful to accidentally step on.
The problem is one of scale; they’re on the end of every lead attached to every gadget, and built into every room across the country.
It would take so much effort and money to upgrade the standard that any politician would be mad to go anywhere near the idea of suggesting that maybe we think about upgrading. Wars and bank bailouts are much less contentious. (more…)
Father’s Day is this Sunday and, as the big day looms ever closer, there’s now little time left to go out and hunt for the ideal gift. Just turn to the PC Pro A List, then, for the perfect presents that you can rush out and buy before it’s too late.
Those with photographic fathers are spoilt for choice: there are superb choices available no matter what you’re looking for, whether it’s a compact, DLSR or video camera.
My recent blog post exploring some of the PC Pro team’s favourite retro game themes sparked plenty of debate – and a whole hatful of fantastic suggestions from readers. So here’s a run-down of some of your favourite gaming music:
The first clutch of responses perhaps gave away the age of some readers, with plenty of people citing C64 classics: Ryan Thomas reminisced about the superb music that often accompanied Ocean games, as well as the themes from Shadowfire, Parallax and Zoids, which is featured in this fantastic video, which crams 100 C64 themes in to frenzied, synth-filled 10 minutes and probably took weeks to assemble.
According to the BBC, the man who used to be in charge of listening to you, thinks all of us should be listened to a lot more. Not ‘listening’ in the sense of careful, attentive and responsive duty to serve: rather, listening in the sneaky, all-encompassing, watching out for bad guys style of listening.
I can’t help thinking that this is an echo of a dried-up, bureaucratic and increasingly irrelevant administration: reading the plaintive call of the uber-spook side-by-side with the quiet and simple statements of the man brokering the expenses leaks gives some idea of the error being made by the modern British civil servant.
A heated office discussion a couple of days ago has led to the PC Pro team coming up with our favourite video game theme tunes – but, as with any good list, it’s entirely subjective and open to debate. The resulting list is full of both obvious classics and hidden gems, and we’ve also grouped a few games from the same system or publisher together just to cram a few more tunes into our countdown.
So, take a look at our suggestions, tell us what you think, and post your own – and bear in mind that these are in no particular order.
Much like Wolfram Alpha, Google Squared - the company’s stab at “automatically fetching and organising facts from across the web” - has split opinion in the PC Pro office.
However, if there’s one thing we’re all agreed upon, it’s that there’s plenty of work to do on accuracy.
Search for “British royals” for example, and top of the shop is Prince William. Born on 21 June 1982 and (ahem) died on “28 August 1972 (aged 30) Halfpenny Green, Wolverhampton”. So not only did he die before he was born, but he somehow reached the ripe old age of 30. Perhaps there’s a time machine in the Midlands?
Directly beneath Wills is Prince Michael of Kent. Born on 4 July 1942, died on 25 August 1942. How he managed to grow that beard during that blessedly short life is a mystery.
You really do have to be careful when you sign up to one of those bandwidth-limited ISP accounts. It might be cheap, especially in these financially tough times, but you must ensure you don’t bust your way out of your monthly limit and run up some huge bills.
A heated office discussion a couple of days ago has led to the PC Pro team coming up with our favourite video game theme tunes – but, as with any good list, it’s entirely subjective and open to debate. The resulting list is full of both obvious classics and hidden gems, and we’ve also grouped a few games from the same system or publisher together just to cram a few more tunes into our countdown.
