Touchscreens vs. dead tree information sources

More randomness:

From a digg discussion about newspapers:

Yes, there is something quaint and nostalgic about someone driving around the neighborhood unnecessarily burning hydrocarbon fuel and polluting the environment just to fling a package of over priced processed tree cellulose on your door step. And if your local newspaper is anything like mine, the majority of the content is advertising and what little “news” there is is blatantly tainted by the biased political views of the writer and editor.Goodbye print media. Like all things, this too shall pass. But I don’t think I’m going to lose any sleep over it.

Thanks to Python guru Chris Calloway of Tri-ZPUG, there will be a really active Zope/Python user group in Houston. The domain hasn’t yet been bought, but the Python meetup will be next Tuesday.

here’s a flash video of the HP Touchsmart. Wow! Every household needs this one. Interestingly, in a usability workshop in 2000 I attended, about 10 groups worked on use cases and personas for this type of product. We thought long and hard about how this information appliance would work. I seriously have to wonder whether the usability group that conducted the seminar (the Cooper group) had performed this kind of exercise for the sake of their Compaq client. I do remember one requirement they gave to us: the appliance should cost no more than $300.