The Fax Refuses to Die
Consider what a fax machine actually is: a little device with a sheet feeder, a terrible scanning element, and an ancient modem. Most faxes run at 14,400bps. That is just over 1KB per second -- and people are still using faxes to send 52 poorly scanned pages of some contract to one another. Over analog phone lines. Sometimes while paying long-distance charges! The mind boggles. If something as appallingly stupid as the fax machine can live on, it makes you wonder how we make progress at all. It just goes to show you: Bad technology generally is not the problem; it is the people who persist in using that technology rather than embracing far superior alternatives.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/why-the-fax-machine-refuses-die-171308
PC at Price of Textbook
There is growing interest surrounding the Raspberry Pi Foundation and their promise of a PC that will cost just $25. We have seen how the OLPC has struggled to deliver a $100 laptop for developing countries, and yet Raspberry Pi is confident in delivering the $25 PC by November 2011. Eben Upton, director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, explained that the $25 price point was decided upon because it is the cost of a textbook so it made sense. The foundation has also realized that the $35 PC with more RAM and a network port is going to be the most popular device by a significant margin. Something we did not realize is that Raspberry Pi not only intend to make this PC work through a HDMI and DVI connection, they also want it plugged into old analog TVs just like kids managed with in the 80s. It also means you do not need an up-to-date display in order to start playing with this device.
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/why-a-25-pc-because-its-the-price-of-a-textbook-2011091/
Raspberry Pi
Game developer David Braben has developed a tiny USB stick PC, Raspberry Pi, that has a HDMI port in one end and a USB port on the other. You plug it into a HDMI socket and then connect a keyboard via the USB port giving you a fully functioning machine running a version of Linux. The cost? USD 25. It uses a 700MHz ARM11 processor coupled with 128MB of RAM and runs OpenGL ES 2.0 allowing for decent graphics performance with 1080p output confirmed. Storage is catered for by an SD card slot. It also looks as though modules can be attached such as the 12MP camera seen in the image above. We can expect it to run a range of Linux distributions, but it looks like Ubuntu may be the distro it ships with. That means it will handle web browsing, run office applications, and give the user a fully functional computer to play with as soon as it is plugged in. All that and it can be carried in your pocket or on a key chain.
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/game-developer-david-braben-creates-a-usb-stick-pc-for-25-2011055/
Area Man Knows All The Shortcut Keys
Catalog copywriter Roger Turlock knows all the keyboard combinations that execute a computer's common commands. "You can just hit Command-P to print, you know," Turlock, 38, told a coworker who had just gone through the labor-intensive process of printing via the word-processing application's pull-down File menu. Turlock not only knows the shortcut keys for the programs he uses at work, but also for programs on his home computer. "Lot faster. Just Command at the same time as the letter P. Command-Q to quit a program," Turlock said. "Command-X for cut. Command-C for copy. Command-V for paste. It takes one second to learn a combo," Turlock said. Turlock insisted that his knowledge of all the shortcut keys, though an anomaly among his peers, is no special gift. "It takes one second to learn a combo, then you have it," Turlock said. "People use these commands every day, and for some reason they never learn the shortcut. Amazing. It's so simple. Open Apple-S. Save. There you go. Done and done."
http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-knows-all-the-shortcut-keys,1566/
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