Webonaut

On the anniversary of the barcode, it struck me waiting in line in Sainsbury's that this scene - of aisle after aisle of supermarket soldiers steadily bleeping products - will seem quaintly odd in historic films of the future. I don't think we as old people will bemoan the loss of it though, however nostalgic it makes us. It cannot be long before we can walk through a single scanner with our shopping basket brimming full and it simply give us a total - perhaps detecting our loyalty card at the same time (if we are laissez faire enough with our personal information to have one) and debiting us after confirmation of the cost. Whether the technology that delivers this is RFID tags or something else. I don't believe we'll all be home shopping by then either, as there is something about picking up your own produce that will mean people will continue to want to do their own shopping, however much they bitch about the inconvenience. Estimated time of death? 2013

Yes, I know - I HAD to use IIS for this job, and as you are probably also aware .htaccess files do not work outside of Apache - so how to rename my .php files to .html and still get the code to run? Used to be that you had to set up a ISAPI filter to do this, but if you've updated IIS and / or PHP recently you'll realise that you are pretty much required to use FastCGI (the latest PHP installer gives you the option to not use FastCGI, but breaks everything horribly to punish you). SO once you've upgraded IIS to FastCGI and installed the latest PHP you need to do the following: - Go into that dreadful IIS manager thing - Right click your web-site and go into the Home Directory page on the properties - Hit the Configuration... button and under mappings edit / create an entry for .html - "Executable" should point to c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\fcgiext.dll - All verbs (unless you're especially wanting to lock it down) - tick Script Engine and Verify that file exi