The BBC are reporting on PC World’s decision that when current stocks are depleted, they will no longer stock floppy disks or drives. It appears that only 2% of new desktops and laptops the high street retailer sells now comes fitted with a drive. While I always knew that the fitting of an FDD was becoming less standard, the figure of 2% was quite a surprise.
It’s obvious why the media has declined, 1.44MB is ridiculously small now that we are accustomed to 2Gb and 4Gb flash drives and since the bloat of many data files (Microsoft Office please take a bow) has risen dramatically, some documents and files won’t even fit onto a floppy any more. Dell started to drop floppy drives from their machines in 2003 and Apple did it even earlier.
The floppy won’t die completely for many years yet. It will disappear from the mainstream but niche applications will need them for quite a while. For example, one of our factories has a robotic welding machine which can only store its programs on 3.5″ floppies and upgrading the computer system on it would be prohibitively expensive.
Still PC World’s decision is yet another nail in the technology’s coffin and no doubt other retailers, both online and bricks and mortar will follow suit in the coming days and months.
Well, I can’t let today go by without at least mentioning the release of Windows Vista. According to Microsoft, this will be more secure, feature rich and easy-to-use than any previous version of Windows. They said that about XP and we have had hundreds of critical patches to fix the gaping security holes in it so I won’t hold my breath on the security front.
I’m never an early adopter so I will not be switching to Vista for the forseeable future and I won’t be switching the companies’ desktops to it any time soon either. Some of our hardware won’t take it and we’ve only recently reached the point where XP is on all the machines (Here’s a tip: shop floor or office machines being used for just one or two tasks don’t need the latest and greatest, especially if they are not internet-enabled! Don’t believe the hype!). I’m also amazed at how many different editions Microsoft thinks the world needs. No longer do we have just home and pro as in the XP world. It seems we now need six, count ‘em, six editions: Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate. That’s not going to be confusing at all is it?!!
For now I’ll keep an interest in some of the reviews and debate in the blogging community and the tech sites to see how the launch goes and what the world thinks of the new Microsoft creation.
The BBC are running a Reporter’s Log of ‘A Day With Vista‘ (although the guy they’ve chosen to write it is a Mac user).
TechGage has a performance comparison between XP and Vista.
More information on Vista from Microsoft.
Via have announced their smallest motherboard yet, the ‘Pico-ITX’. The board measures only 10cm x 7.2cm and has onboard video, ethernet and audio, although some connections are by pin headers only which is not surprising considering its size. They are forecasting models which include both video in and HDTV out.
I’m a big fan of Via’s EPIA range. I use their Mini-ITX boards in my home servers running Debian as they are well suited to a home network environment. They are small, quiet and have very low power consumption (in the region of of 20W) and you can install your favourite flavour of Linux on them and dedicate them to particular tasks. I have one dedicated to file and media serving, another is a dedicated mail server and a third is just for testing things out on.
Via also released a Nano-ITX which size-wise sits inbetween Mini-ITX and the new Pico-ITX but it was always hard to get consumer-level products and I suspect this willl be the case with Pico-ITX as well. It will be aimed at the embedded market and the vehicle integrators. Still, I look forward to seeing some interesting projects built using the new format.
More information on the Pico-ITX release here.
More information on Mini-ITX products and projects at mini-itx.com and linitx.com
Sony have today announced the launch price for the Playstation 3 in Europe. The next-gen console will cost £425 in the UK and €599 in the rest of Europe and already there are arguments developing over the difference in regional pricing.
At todays exchange rate (1.517 €/£), €599 works out at £394.85 which means that the UK is paying 7.6% more than the rest of Europe. The situation gets worse when we take VAT out of the equation. The UK price is £361.70 + VAT and in France, Germany, Italy and Austria who have a 20% VAT rate, the pre-tax price is £329.04 so the UK is paying 10% more on the pre-tax price!
Worse is yet to come, since the US price for the 60Gb version is $599 before tax which at today’s exchange rate (1.97 $/£) equates to £304.00 which means that we ripped off Brits get to pay 20% more than the Americans!
Every time anything is launched worldwide, British customers are made to pay more. In this instance Sony should be very careful since at £425, the PS3 is £245 more expensive than the Wii (£180) and £145 more than an XBox 360 (£280). Is it that much better than the XBox to justify its price?
I don’t think So.
We’ve been having a problem in the office this week with emails bouncing back from one of our clients in China. We have our own mail server which sends all outbound mail via our ISP’s authenticated SMTP relay.
When I originally set the server up I had all mail being sent directly but we had problems with our mail server somehow getting on to a spam blocking list operated by SORBS who, to cut a long story short require a $50 donation to get your IP address delisted and will not get into any discussion about how you were blacklisted in the first place so in my opinion are a bunch of extortion racketeers.
Returning to my current problem, the Chinese ISP of our client has the IP address of our ISP’s mail server blacklisted by ‘cblless.anti-spam.org.cn’. So I found myself looking for a way to route all outbound mail through our ISP’s mail relay except for email bound for our Chinese client.
Fortunately, our mail server runs postfix……..
Continue reading ‘Multiple Email Delivery Routes.’
I recently discovered an open-source virtual machine which when installed on your Windows or Linux box allows you to install and run a variety of guest operating systems within a ‘Virtual Machine’. As I am typing this on my Windows XP system, I have OpenSuse 10.2 running in a window on my second monitor. I have allocated 512Mb of my 2Gb of Ram to it and it is running very smoothly.
Check it out. It’s very cool and potentially very useful!
I’ve had a blog here before but never found the time to do much with it so I though it was about time to persue it with a little more conviction! Hopefully you’ll start to see more posts here from now on.
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