Apparently one of my best rants was my going away letter to AT&T. People still comment to me about it.
Any of you know of any other BBSes around? (in phone-dial-up form)
I guess every fax has a modem built in? ;-)
most probably you won't get > 32kbaud through a modem?
On the other hand, it gave me an idea for a completely redundant product that would probably sell a lot of units anyway. We need a cheap, sheet-fed scanner that plugs into your office Ethernet and has a little keyboard at the front to enter an email address instead of a fax number. The recipient gets a PDF of the scaneed-in image.
Make it one-step and I'll bet a lot of technology-ignorant people would buy one.
I got one....from Ricoh. Fax, printer, scanner, document server. We've cut our paper usage by a significant amount by sending PDFs instead of faxing and printing everything. I bitched and screamed about it for months....I used to regularly recieve 47 page faxes and only use one page of it. Now everyone in the company scans and emails everything. The down side is I'm the only one that knows how to program new addresses into the server. They simply refuse to learn.
Faxes aren't going to go away for a while because they're still standard ubiqutous and in laws. pdf's aren't quite there yet and not everybody in the world has a scanner.
This device needs to be dumbed down. As technology people we want to make it feature-rich, but that adds complexity. It must not scan, print, copy, etc. A single-function device. You feed it a document, enter an email address at the keyboard (which appears on a tiny LCD screen), and it emails the document.
Build with cheap Chinese labor and components, sell for well under $100, move zillions of units.
This device needs to be dumbed down. As technology people we want to
make it feature-rich, but that adds complexity. It must not scan,
print, copy, etc. A single-function device. You feed it a document,
This holds true for cell phones too.
Not thast I'm complaining -- no one said that I *had* to get a smartphone.
Hmm... slide, then one button for me on the Incredible. At the bottom of the screen, there's a Phone button that I can tap to make phone calls.
Unless I'm actually in an application, of course, then I have to tap the Home button to see the Phone button.
Tapping Phone gives me a numeric keypad for the number, with a slidy-thing up top for previously-dialed numbers that I could also press.
When I have to dial a phone number, I have to pick up the handset and tap out each number on the hook one-at-a-time.
Nines and zeroes are a pain in the ass.
Well, this is after I got away from tapping the hang-up key repeatedly to dial my numbers. Nines and Zeroes were really awful when I had to dial with that system.
How nice would it be to be able to crank-start your car when the battery up and died on you?
Or you need to make a phone call, but your cell battery is dead? Just crank it up!
They already have flashlights that you shake to light up. I think with a little clever engineering, it wouldn't be that difficult to add some kind of mechanical-electrical fall-back.
Crank Binder