"There is no need for thousands of contracts to purchase common laptops and desktops," the OMB said in its order late last week."Therefore, OMB is prohibiting agencies from issuing any new solicitations and directing civilian agencies to transition their expenses for laptops and desktops to three existing best value government-wide acquisition vehicles."While the new PC purchases are put on hold, OMB said it would ask a group of experts selected by NASA to develop a way to reduce the number of contracts and purchase orders agencies hand out and figure out best practices for cutting the costs of new PC purchases.The team will also seek to develop templates for standard notebook and desktop PC configurations that meet the needs of most federal employees. Those systems could then, in theory, be ordered in bulk from a single supplier."Most Federal employees need just basic computing capability to get our jobs done, but we often have hundreds of options – or configurations – to choose from, which further fragments our position in the market," the OMB said.

"So, the Administration is now standardizing configurations for a majority of the Federal Government's basic laptop and desktop requirements."The hope is that a new purchasing plan will create a standard system and set of guidelines that agencies will be required to follow when they wish to cycle out their current PCs in favor of newer models.The IT spending issue is hardly a new one for governments on both sides of the pond, and this is not the first such campaign from the Obama administration to whittle down IT costs. A 2010 data center consolidation effort by the White House sought to create similar savings, but found little in terms of real-world cost cuts. We've asked why, using a Freedom of Information request that sought to learn the rationale for anonymising the imports data.That request's come back with a partial success: we've been told that a “potentially identifiable transaction” could have made it into the September 2015 import data save for the ban.We were also told that releasing the full document “...would have a substantial adverse effect on the proper and efficient conduct of the operations of an agency.” It's not clear if that agency is the ABS itself, which is bound to keep requests for confidentiality for import data secret, or another agency.

What we do know is that the ABS was happy to anonymise the data to keep the “potentially identifiable transaction” away from prying eyes.Which begs the question: what transaction took place in September 2015 that deserved anonymity?If the transaction was made by the government, this AU$114 million purchase for “Combat Net Radio and associated ancillaries” completed on August 31st sure looks interesting. If a final payment was due in August, that could be worth hiding.Or did something else go down in August that might have been worth keeping away from inquisitive eyes? Let's not assume this was a defence or intelligence matter: as we explained when considering the fact that laptop computer imports have now been hidden, this may just be a case of a vendor not wanting the price it offered for a big deal to be easily deduced.Microsoft has, for a limited period only, offered to pay up to £100 to convince UK consumers to part with their old computers in exchange for a Windows 10 device.

If a customer is willing to shell out at least £499 on a PC running Redmond's latest operating system, then the company said it would stump up £100 to encourage holdouts to upgrade.The cashback offer falls to £50 for Windows 10 devices in the £349 to £498.99 price range, and drops to £30 for new PCs carrying a price tag of between £249 to £348.99, Microsoft said.Customers wanting to take advantage of the frankly desperate deal will have 14 days to claim the cash following their purchase.Microsoft said it would take up to 28 days to validate the claim and customers are required to do the legwork by packing up their old laptops, desktops (including MacBooks and iMacs) and Chromebooks and sending them on to the software giant.Windows 10 device purchasers who cough up more than $599 can trade in a laptop and receive $200 from Microsoft. But, amusingly, fanbois who pay the same price for a Windows 10 device can swap out their MacBook for $300.Yup, it's official, Microsoft sees more value in Apple gear.Anyone interested in the deal has until 20 October to claim back the cash in the US. While here the UK, Redmond said the offer stands until 27 October.

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Something for the Weekend, Sir? I enjoy travel but I do not fly well – especially if the aeroplane’s wings are rusted, the tail has been attached with vinegar and brown paper, and the undercarriage is still sitting in the ditch it fell into at the end of the departure airport’s runway some 300 miles away.As you might have guessed, I am a big fan of the TV documentary series Air Crash Investigation. I am an expert in everything that could possibly go wrong, from insects nesting in the pitot tubes to bit-part actors in cheap gorilla suits dancing on the wing.Some in-flight medication is required to help me through the ordeal. Usually, I turn to a traditional herbal remedy derived from juniper berry oil and grain alcohol. To this, I add some carbonated water flavoured with a little quinine plus a slice of lemon.Five of those and a bag of nuts usually does the trick.On the occasions when work obliges me to hurtle through turbulent clouds at 550mph in a skinny metal tube piloted by a Roger Moore impersonator who’s had less sleep in the last 48 hours than a junior doctor on A&E, my apprehension becomes infectious. As the departure date grows closer, my wife picks up the grim mood.

As a result, just before I set off for the airport, my wife will insist that I leave her a sheet of paper listing all my IDs and passwords for online banking, pension and life insurance, “just in case”, before wishing me a nice flight.It’s like the opening scene of an episode of Columbo.They tell me that flying is safer than other forms of travel but this hardly addresses the problem. I am not scared of travel, unless of course you mean travelling a vertical distance of 20,000 feet while surrounded by disintegrating aeroplane components. I am simply scared of heights and the idea of falling down them.Travelling by train, and its reassuring proximity to the ground, suits me fine. Although trains are noisy and uncomfortable and jostle about a lot, you can stretch out, make use of a toilet whose door is wider than your hips, and get some work done. Nor are you told to switch off and store away your laptop every time you leave or enter a station.Best of all, when you arrive, you’re usually within a walk or a short taxi jaunt of your final destination rather than stuck in a fucking field 30 miles in the middle of nowhere.

Indeed, the only challenge with inter-city train travel these days is ending up in an aisle seat, which means you have to plead with the surly stranger in the window seat to let you use the power socket located some 18 inches under the window – assuming that he or she is not already using it.This leads to some tense moments as you lean across the stranger’s lap to plug in your laptop cable. The stranger at this point will always offer to plug it in for you and will always then be utterly incapable of doing it properly.The clanking and scraping and wiggling of your precious plug (replacement cost £59) against the aluminium casing of the power socket makes you squirm in your seat as the stranger does his or her best to snap off the plastic earth pin in his or her clumsy attempts to insert the plug while being utterly unaware that he or she is a complete moron.The stranger stops and looks at you pointedly, whereupon you realise you have been saying all this aloud.A few seconds later, the plug is safely inserted and you are left in peace to get some work done during the remainder of the journey, punctuated only by the occasional harrumphing of your travelling companion as your laptop cable rubs against his or her knees.

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Of course, trains don’t take you everywhere you want to go, and hanging around station platforms for connecting trains is boring, wasteful and, during the winter months, cold. So you can easily imagine how keenly I look forward to self-driving cars: door-to-door travel, comfy seat, warm interior, great music, everything within easy reach, all your gadgets on recharge, and not having to keep checking every 10 minutes whether someone has stolen your suitcases.If the self-driving car manufacturers could add in a coffee machine and a means of taking a piss (how come no one has done this yet?) it would be perfect.One objection to the democratic nirvana of self-driving cars is that it would take the pleasure out of driving. That’s nonsense: no one enjoys driving.

OK, people say they are keen motorists but what they actually mean is that they enjoy pointing a car along an empty road in the countryside surrounded by lots of scenery that they are not supposed to be looking at because the Highway Code and the rules of common decency expect them instead to be watching where the fuck they’re going.That’s not driving. That’s just twiddling a steering wheel, roaring the engine on every climb and jamming the brakes on at every corner, causing your passengers to coat your leather trimmings with projectile vomit. A child of 18 months could do that – and produce their own projectile vomit too, come to think of it, which means they can even multitask better than most adult drivers.Yet as soon as you put a motorist alongside other motorists, collectively known as “traffic”, they hate every second of it. But since traffic is where 99 per cent of all driving takes place, I humbly suggest that this is what driving really is: repeatedly nudging forward a few feet and stopping, walled in on all sides by your fellow fuming nose-pickers, and only occasionally breaking away and getting your car into third gear for a few seconds before having to slow down at the next traffic light, junction or roundabout.

I would very happily sacrifice the dubious pleasure of this driving experience by sitting in a car that did all that stuff for me while I did something else, such as read or sleep or watch a film. That said, I might still opt to take over the controls to drive down a motorway for five of your Earth hours than watch another Ben Affleck movie, but at least I’d have a choice of how to dispose of some of the limited material existence left to me while I remain on your puny planet.Sure, there are safety and reliability issues that will continue to challenge the autonomous car engineers, and I’ve certainly made fun of them myself. One by one, these will be fixed, and it could be that self-driving cars will become an everyday reality much more quickly than anyone expects.I can see self-driving cars on public roads long before Amazon gets the OK to deliver parcels by drone, for example. Indeed, this will happen long before Yodel ever gets around to finally delivering my Amazon parcel that went missing two years ago.

For the first time, however, I have begun worrying about what might happen in the wake of a self-driving accident – not in terms of the accident itself but the insurance liability. If someone drives into me and neither of us were “at the wheel”, as it were, who settles the bill for my panel-beating?For that matter, will motoring insurance actually mean anything any more when it’s the car, not the occupant, that’s doing the driving?The industry is way ahead of me on this, with Volvo’s president, Håkan Samuelsson, stating last week that his company would accept full liability for accidents caused by its cars while running in autonomous mode. Mercedes-Benz and Google have muttered similar pleasantries, one imagines between clenched teeth.Already I can see the caveats and “oh buts” peeking out of their jacket pockets. Volvo, for example, says it plans to release a fleet of a hundred XC90 SUVs onto the streets of Gothenburg by 2017… except you won’t be allowed to drive them in snowy conditions.

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