Interesting Facts

According to a survey carried out by Littlewoods.com, only 33% of parents in the UK read their child a bedtime story. (Some parents said that their children would much rather watch TV, play with toys or computer games, but 13 per cent blamed lack of time for not reading to them and 9 per cent said they were 'too stressed'. I was read to regularly, and it was part of my bedtime routine, in fact three quarters of the parents surveyed said they were read to every night of the week as children.)

Windows 7 has been banned in Germany! (Motorola has been granted an injunction against the distribution of key Microsoft products in Germany. The sales ban covers the Xbox 360 games console, Windows 7 system software, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, claiming that Microsoft has infringed two patents necessary to offer H.264 video coding and playback. . So as the patent wars rage on, I write this post on my now illegal operating system, waiting for a knock at the door as they come to confiscate my computer.)

Sony has said it will stop selling floppy disks in Japan from March 2011. (Strangely they are still sold in their millions, but no one is quite sure who's buying them. Maybe people with really old computers.)

Alan Turing was a mathematical genius who worked at Bletchley Park during WWII, helping to create the Bombe that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines. (Unfortunately he lived in a time of intolerance and misunderstanding. He was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. He was convicted and given experimental chemical castration as a "treatment" and was told he could not continue to work for the UK Government. Two years later he killed himself. Now, thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous government apology.

According to the "Video Consumer Mapping" study, adult Americans spend an average of more than eight hours a day in front of screens, be it televisions, computer monitors, cellphones or other devices. (It found that people aged 45 to 54 averaged the most daily screen time at just over nine-and-a-half hours! Something to look forward to then.)

The tiny South Pacific nation of Niue is the first nation in the world to issue laptop computers to all its children. (It's part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. Every primary and secondary school student has been given a little green laptop, with wireless connection to the Internet. Not only that but inhabitants have free internet access! I'm moving to Niue!)

Greek sponge divers discovered the oldest computer in 1901. It is a 2,100 year old device and may have been used to calculate the dates for the Olympic Games. (It's called The Antikythera Mechanism. I'm very glad the name didn't catch on, otherwise PC World would have a very long name.)

An Ofcom report shows that more rural homes in the UK have broadband internet than urban dwellings do. (59% of rural households have broadband compared to 57% of urban homes.)

The next generation of chip will pack more than four hundred million transistors into an area the size of a postage stamp. (That is of course computer chip, not french fry chip.)

The UK civil service lost 25 million child benefit records. A Junior official from HMRC in Washington, Tyne and Wear, sends two CDs containing password-protected records to audit office in London through courier TNT, neither recorded nor registered. It goes missing. So what do they do? They send another one! However the public is not told that their bank details, national insurance numbers, addresses and date of birth have been "mislaid" until 21st November. Now that's a scandal.

Research done on a supercomputer has proved that a Rubik's cube can be returned to its original state in no more than 26 moves. (I just removed the stickers and reapplied them.)

According to Netcraft , an independent technology reviewer, there are now more than 100 million websites on the internet! (Counting only domain name sites with content, they tracked the growth of the internet since 1995 and say of the 100m, around 48 million are active sites that are updated regularly. When it began observing sites through the domain name system in 1995, there were 18,000 web sites in existence.)