The week in your words: 21CN, net TV and Facebook

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Posted on 30 Nov 2007 at 17:22

The future arrived this week, with British broadcasters clubbing together on the internet, the government committing itself to single handily saving the internet and PC Pro... erm ... joining Facebook. Amid the din of history actually happening, we take a look back to see what our ever stoical readers have made of it all.

First up then the news that staff at PC Pro have been told to hunt out their one respectable profile pic and stop referring to it as "Fadbook", after the magazine joined the terrifyingly popular social networking site. A headlong rush into the future not entirely embraced by kelv23.

"I've never really understood why it's so popular. I'm quite happy having all my personal info stolen the old fashioned way...."

...Old fashioned way?

"A government cock up," suggests JStairmand.

Burn the burners

Which brings us nicely to the news that the UK government, which keeps our schools running, hospitals beeping and cars covered in parking tickets, can't be trusted with a CD burner. Or at least that's what the Lib Dems think; they want the government to hand them all in to prevent a repeat of the child benefit database fiasco. BornOnTheCusp liked it... a lot.

"I work in the defence industry, and don't have access to CD writers, USB ports etc on any PCs I might use. If I want to burn a CD, I know who to ask, and ditto with memory sticks. Standard procedures for Brand X companies, why not the customer government as well?"

Why not indeed? Amnesia10 thinks he knows.

"Civil servants don't do common sense ever!"

"Actually, some do, but the amount of common sense tends to be inversely proportional to the grade," notes christ1an, with what we hope was a very wry grin.

Given that the information was lost in the post maybe we should just be taking away their envelopes instead?

Broadband summit

And while we're talking about the government, competitiveness minister Stephen Timms has clearly had enough of watching his Euro 96 YouTube highlights reduced to slideshows by abysmal broadband speeds, and invited the UK's leading telecoms executives around to sort it out. He should have just popped on to our boards and had a word with Royread.

"Until the government puts investment into the infrastructure nothing will be done as the task of fibre everywhere is beyond the scope of one organisation. Incidentally, some years ago a BT engineer working on the green cabinet near my house said there was a scheme to put fibre as far as every green cabinet. What has happened to this idea, another rumour I guess."

It was indeed because now BT reckons it has a better idea, a 21CN network which will roll out next year and apparently offer 24Mb/sec speeds.

The only problem is BT's forgotten to tell anyone how it really works, especially the ISPs. richard_neil was unimpressed.