TechArchive

Original article date: February 2000 There’s an age old problem that simply never goes away. Your hard disk always fills up. If you can remember the days when you had a 20MB hard disk, the thought of having a 4GB disk and still filling was probably shocking. But it still happens. There are a few [...]

Original article date: May 1998 Won the lottery? No, nor have I, but in common with most of the population I’ve wondered what I’d do if it happened. Actually, I reckon the answers are divided into two key areas. Firstly, there are the things I’d change to cope with the fact that time was now [...]

Original article date: November 1997 There’s a buzzword in medicine at the moment which is ‘clinical effectiveness’. It is accompanied by the phrase ‘evidence based medicine’. What it means is “treating patients in a way which has been shown to work”. Now you may be horrified to learn that this hasn’t always been the way [...]

Original article date: January 1998 Did you know that in the USA they have cameras in nurseries that transmit live pictures over the Internet so that concerned parents can view their kids with Netscape from their desks in work? One day in the not too distant future, (as a result of compression technology and available [...]

Original article date: March 2001 I discovered a fascinating product the other day, which could be useful for a lot of engineering companies looking to keep control while expanding. It’s called Citrix Metaframe. It works like this. Instead of every member of your company having a modern 800MHz PC running MS Office and all the [...]

Original article date: November 2000 The other day, I took the plunge and performed some fairly major maintenance work on my car. It hadn’t been running too well, but the problems were all bit non-specific so I was advised by a mechanic friend to strip the engine down completely. I took very careful note of [...]

Original article date: May 2002 Advertising is a proven strategy for generating sales.But advertising has to be appropriate. An ad for ice cream in an engineering magazine would be wholly inappropriate, and nothing more than a distraction. It sounds obvious, but it’s something the online community has been putting up with for a long time. [...]

Original article date: April 2000 One major factor that keeps many people from shopping on the internet is trust. Despite the fact that it is usually the banks who lose in credit card fraud, rather than the buyer, there is still the worry that the goods won’t turn up, or that the company may pass [...]

Original article date: April 2002 I recently thought I might upgrade my laptop’s hard disk. Then I spotted a rather nice USB external drive. This one was 10GB, beautifully small, and even featured a carrying case for when it was not plugged into the PC. If the promise of plug and play is to be [...]

Original article date: July 1997 Have you ever asked yourself what your communications cost? You could say for a letter, it’s 2p for the headed paper + 1p laser + 3p envelope + 26p stamp + writing time; for a fax it’s 5p for a phone unit per page + writing time; for an email [...]