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A nine year-old girl in India named M. Lavinashree has passed the Microsoft Certified Professional Exam, becoming the youngest person to ever pull it off (smashing the record previously held by a 10 year-old Pakistani girl). The youngster has a long history of making records in her short life -- including reciting all 1,300 couplets of a 2,000 year-old Tamil epic at the age of three -- and now she's now cramming for the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer Exam. We'll be honest, this really takes the zing out of our biggest accomplishment at the age of nine: figuring out where in the world Carmen Sandiego was. "via Engadget"

I bet she took something easy such as the "XP exam" - I wonder what her American name will be when she answering phones for Dell, IBM or HP, maybe Betty or Alice. Yeah, at age 9 I was still trying to tie my shoes so I give her a tip of the 'ol hat.

The Death of The Copier: The Office of the Future -

The Death of The Copier: The Office of the Future -

...As seen from the year 1975

EXECUTIVE BRIEFING June 30, 1975, 6:43PM EST

"...Will the office change all that much? Listen to George E. Pake, who heads Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto (Calif.) Research Center, a new think tank already having a significant impact on the copier giant's strategies for going after the office systems market: "There is absolutely no question that there will be a revolution in the office over the next 20 years. What we are doing will change the office like the jet plane revolutionized travel and the way that TV has altered family life."

Pake says that in 1995 his office will be completely different; there will be a TV-display terminal with keyboard sitting on his desk. "I'll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button," he says. "I can get my mail or any messages. I don't know how much hard copy [printed paper] I'll want in this world."

Wow, he got that right!

More -

"...Getting there means finding the answers to a host of very complex questions.

Can desk-top terminals be made "friendly" enough so that executives will use them?

Should a lot of powerful machines be moved together with central libraries and thus break up traditional working relationships?

Will office systems get needed computer power by depending on the machines already in EDP centers doing accounting and financial work?

Says Pake's boss, Jack E. Goldman, Xerox chief scientist: "I don't think anyone can really know which is the way to go now."

If the office of the future is a collection of these electronic terminals linked to each other and to electronic filing cabinets, "it will change our daily life," Pake says. "

And this could be kind of scary."

Interesting to take a look back and see which predictions didn't come true and what unknowns at the time prevail.

It's All About Cutting Costs - More from 1975 -

"Costs in the office are running uncontrolled," declares Alan Purchase, senior industrial economist at Stanford Research Institute, who recently made a major study of future office equipment markets.

"Where office costs used to be 20% to 30% of the total in a company, they have now grown to 40% to 50% of all costs." Rising salaries and demands to process more information are growing at geometric rates. IBM says that the average secretary's salary is 68% higher, and the cost of turning out a business letter is 40% more than it was 10 years ago.

More important, Purchase says, "the current recession has brought a real awareness by companies that they have to identify and control office costs and improve productivity."

A Quantum Science Corp. survey showed that while the recession had forced a cut in overall office spending, it was also responsible for increasing text-editing typewriter installations. Nearly one-fifth of all offices surveyed, and 39% of the larger ones, either planned or had recently added automatic typewriters.

But the office's productivity problems have been developing for a long time. "Many offices are not even held accountable for productivity," notes David L. Holzman, Xerox' market development manager. "In studies we've made, 50% of all offices are just a part of the overhead."

Further, the shift of the U.S. economy to service-based industries (they will employ 47% of all U.S. workers by 1980) and the growth of clerical employees are colliding with soaring clerical labor costs, growing shortages of skilled personnel, and changing social attitudes... " - Sound familiar?

Culture Shift - Again.

"This climate is almost forcing the revolution in the office," declares Robert E. Verrando, marketing chief for Xerox' Office Systems Div.

But word processing is a tough sell, particularly since it so often changes the traditional secretary-executive relationship. "The biggest problem we face is the office wife," says Lexitron's Pugh. " She likes giving total loyalty to one boss, and he likes getting it."

Wow! how things have changed.

It's Deja Vu all over again...

So here we are in 2008 facing another slope on an economic down-cycle. I have learned not to panic and don't participate in recessions. I have also learned we all get what we deserve - always. "LINK"


Yes things have changed. My Dad, a former Xerox exec, got to live through the days of fat expense accounts and the knowledge that no one got fired for buying Xerox, not any more no manufacturer gets that luxury or security.
I remember telling customers way back in the early 90's - "One day you'll be able to print to your copier" this was usually met with a "Whatever" response. I can also remember when a simple printer installation could actually take a couple of days, now you just run the install wizard and click "Next" "OK" and "EXIT".

Now we're in the age of offering "Solutions" when in fact the winners are the ones that provide the answers.

The paperless office still is not here, but the typewriter is gone.
People still base business decisions on the contents of a piece of paper, we still print a huge percentage of our e-mails, many documents actually begin their life at the printer and we still require customers to sign leasing papers.

Greg is right don't panic and don't participate in recessions. Take care of customer and in the end you'll make it through the tough times.

and yes things have changed..................

Cable Management 101

If you work with Ethernet cables and you happen suffer from OCD life eventually is going to suck for you. At some point you are going to have a 12' run and 16' of cable, so what do you do but bust out the zip ties and try to hide 4' of cable by routing it up over and around everything in sight. Well these guys have taken cable management to an art form "LINK"

I on the other hand don't happen to suffer from OCD nor do I have any zip ties.

Tasers Are So Much Fun

The engineers at Tazer, maker of numerous possibly-lethal "nonlethal" weapons, have added a new item to their arsenal.

If it prevents someone from actually getting shot, I'm all for it. (That's assuming that this thing is any safer than what would normally come out of the barrel of a shotgun.) The research I'd like to see done: Does putting "nonlethal" weapons in the hands of law enforcement make them more likely to use them in lieu of, I dunno, tackling people and handcuffing them?

From the product site:

"XREP is a self-contained, wireless projectile that fires from a standard 12-gauge shotgun. It delivers the same Neuro-Muscular Incapacitation (NMI) bio-effect as our handheld TASER X26, but can be delivered to a distance of up to 100 feet, combining blunt impact with field proven TASER NMI....

The TASER XREP launch velocity is approximately 300 feet per second....

Another innovative and unique feature of the XREP nose is the reflex engagement electrode. A normal reaction to the pain of a projectile impact is for the subject to grab at the impact site. If the subject tries to grab or disconnect the XREP projectile, the reflex engagement electrodes complete a circuit allowing TASER NMI to discharge from the Nose Electrodes, through the subject's body, out to the hand that grabbed the XREP. This creates a significant spread that allows the XREP pulses to affect a large body mass, causing overpowering Neuro Muscular Incapacitation....

In fact, if the subject even grabs the tether, a live hand-trap wire makes a connection and the NMI effect is delivered through the hand, preventing the subject from letting go. If none of the preferred electrodes are in contact, the XREP delivers its impulse across the front electrodes, creating a painful stimulus to distract, disorient, and entice the subject to grab for the XREP making a hand connection, or to move in reaction to the pain which can help the cholla electrodes on the main chassis to engage. "LINK"

Now granted 300 fps is not what you would call blazing fast but just imagine the fun you could have with a taser shotgun. Thwapppp taser dart to melon the suspect stops and wonders "What in the hell is this fireworks looking thing stuck in the side of my head?" and then as he grabs it sit back and watch as hilarity ensues.

And courtesy of You Tube is a bunch of taser videos. "LINK"

Photoshop?

An iPod vending machine running on an XP (at least it's XP Pro) OS. If MAC wanted to impress they would have loaded on a Millennium box.
"LINK"

New Technology

"The Wife" came home from school the other saying that she needed to have some class pictures printed out. No problem just give me the media card. Lo and behold she throws this thing down on the table, what the...... didn't they used to call these things droopies or something. It doesn't matter what you want to call it because we don't have a computer in the whole house that'll read it.