Yes, Apple, thin is sexy... but not always practical Recently there has been an IT media frenzy on the subject of Apple's new iPad Mini. What's it for? Does it go against the better judgment of the late St. Steve? Does it make the iPod Touch redundant? In amongst all this, Apple has made another technology decision that I think in some ways is more important, yet it has hardly been noticed. The new version of their desktop all-in-one, the iMac, no longer has a CD/DVD drive. I use an iMac and I love it. You only have to see one of those huge, shiny screens to get all excited. It is a superb product. And I probably would buy one without a CD/DVD drive - but I would resent it. The reason they've done it is, as far as I can see, is primarily to make the computer wafer thin. It does look stunning because of this, but the fact is I can't get too excited about the difference in depth. In the end, I look at the front of my computer. As long as it doesn't stick out b...

The sad remnant of my diskette collection I was watching the first series of 24 the other day on my mission to use Netflix to catch up with the good stuff I never saw the first time around. At one point someone needs to get information from one computer to another. She puts a black rectangular object into a drive and uses this to pass the information. I swear this is true: for just a moment, I thought 'What's that?' It was, of course, a diskette, something that was central to our computing lives only a few years ago and yet, to all intents and purposes, disappeared off the face of the planet more rapidly and completely than black vinyl records ever have. I had a sudden wave of nostalgia for floppy disks and diskettes. At one point I ran the PC department of a certain large airline whose initials include B and A. We genuinely did get those old hoary misuse stories of the 5 1/4 inch floppies. People really did occasionally staple them to a report. And one user really di...