Patrick from TechTV tries the “Switch”

“The biggest problem with switching isn’t the Mac or OS X. It’s when you have to deal with the Windows-centric parts of the world. If you can avoid them (most folks don’t need compatibility with odd applications in the office), you could be all set right out of the box with your Mac.”

The Slashdot thread about the article is also interesting

Yoz reviews Microsoft’s Three Degrees Beta, which is a new IM/chat/P2P/MP3 player designed for and apparently by teens.

Great quote: “As you’d expect, it’s all wrapped up in the kind of huge lurid skinnable UI that will have Alan Cooper wandering around the Redmond campus with a rifle.” (link via Ben)

Wired News: “The human gene pool should be incapable of producing enough idiots to financially support the vast number of spammers whose scat litters so many inboxes. ”

“…most spammers make money selling e-mail addresses to other spammers, who then sell those same addresses to others. It’s like the legendary snake eating its own tail. “

According to this Cnet article, I may someday soon be able to download my dreams and review them later (TiVo style) <grin /> (via Slashdot)

Wei-Meng Lee and Brian Jepson over @ O’Reilly detail how to convert your Laptop into a Tablet PC (cheaply!)

Today Doc posts about retiring an old “1980-vintage Panafax PX-100 fax machine”.

However, I have a bigger request. When will we rid the planet of fax machines entirely? I mean, technically do they really have a purpose these days?

It seems that the workflow for faxing is ridiculously wasteful for most fax transmissions.

Basically, I print something just so I can fax it. Why waste the paper? When all I really need to do is email or “remote print” the document.

Then if the receiver actually needs to use the content of a fax they would have to re-type it or OCR the page (Ugh!)

Please! What a waste!

Don’t we really need cheaper network-accessible remote printers? I believe this will lead to fax extinction!

Quote pulled from a Slashdot thread about Engineering
Careers Short-Circuiting:”The computer pond is shrinking, but
that’s because it’s been overstocked for quite a while. The talented,
smart, crafty, dedicated fish will always be in demand, the ones who are
simply looking for a paycheck will be walking an unemployment line.”

I’m not sure if this MPEG Movie is a real XBox commercial, but either way it’s just plain bizarre.

UPDATE: Well, I guess this is old news, because the commerical was banned in the UK back in June.

Oh man! It would be such a coup to route all my telemarketing calls through MIT’s new AgoraPhone

Sigh … Thanks to R-Studio, I was able to recover a corrupted disk partition on my laptop. It didn’t hurt that I had a recent back up too.