Laptops are crippling millions

[Martin]

Laptops are crippling millions with back problems | the Daily Mail

Laptops are crippling millions with back problems

Booming sales of laptops have led to a surge in the number of computer users with back and muscle problems, experts have warned.

Girls as young as 12 are being diagnosed with nerve damage caused by slouching over screens, a group of leading chiropractors said.

Millions of others are at risk of "irretrievable damage" to their spines, necks and shoulders because of poor posture when using laptops, it was claimed.

Back specialists say as many as four in five patients have chronic nerve damage caused by working on portable PCs.

The problem is being driven by falling prices and the increasing availability of wireless technology, which makes portable computers more attractive.

Laptop sales in PC World went up by more than 25 per cent last year.

In addition, laptops used at work are not subject to the same health and safety regulations as desktop computers.

This makes it more likely they will be used incorrectly.

A common problem is perching a laptop on the legs so users stare down at the screen and put strain on their necks, spines and legs.

London-based chiropractor Michael Durntall was among those calling for more research into the issue.

He said he had seen dozens of Xrays showing signs of degeneration in the joints of regular laptop users.

Mr Durntall added: "Mothers bring in their 12-year-old daughters suffering back pain and when they arrive I can see their slumped posture straight away.

"I also see many people in their twenties and thirties with a dowager's hump - a rounding at the base of the neck - after only a few years of looking down at a small screen while sitting slumped on a chair for long periods."

Rishi Loatey, a chiropractor from Wembley, North-West London, said he often treated back and neck pain caused by using a laptop on the move, such as on a train.

Nicola Hunter, a physiotherapist and occupational health specialist, said that hand and arm pain similar to repetitive strain injury was easily induced by resting wrists against the edge of a laptop.

She added: "There's evidence that it stops the nerves and tendons moving as they normally would, and this can cause nerve injury."

There are more than five million laptops in circulation in the UK.

They account for 70 per cent of all computer sales, according to PC Pro magazine.

The problem of laptop-related pain is yet to be properly examined by the Health and Safety Executive.

The HSE merely advises users to follow guidelines for general computer use, but take more breaks.

Chiropractors recommend the use of a docking station, which links a laptop to another screen and keyboard, or a stand which raises the screen to a higher level.

Laptop sales should go through the roof with this one...

Asus stuns Computex with $189 laptop
Tuesday 5th June 2007 - Asus chairman Jonney Shih sprang a surprise during Intel's Computex keynote today with the announcement of a $189 laptop.

The notebook measures roughly 120 x 100 x 30mm (WDH) and weighs only 900g. We saw the notebook boot in 15 seconds from its solid-state hard disk. The huge auditorium then burst into applause as Shih revealed the astounding price tag. Dubbed the 3ePC, Shih claimed the notebook is the 'lowest cost and easiest PC to use'. As the crowds rushed the stage, we sneaked off to the Asus stand to take a closer look.

The notebook uses a custom-written Linux operating system, much like the OLPC, though unlike the OLPC, Asus has chosen a more conventional interface. The desktop looked fairly similar to Windows and we saw Firefox running on one 3ePC. A spokesperson from Asus told us that the notebook would come with "an office suite that's compatible with MS Office", though he refused to confirm or deny whether that meant OpenOffice.

He claimed the 3ePC would be available in all areas of the world, not only developing nations. The low price comes from some interesting design choices, primarily the flash-based hard disk. A disk of today's standard capacity would cost more than notebook itself as we saw with the 32GB Samsung disk, but Asus uses a 2GB disk. We were not allowed to touch the 3ePC so couldn't tell how much of this is left after the bespoke OS is installed.

The CPU also remains a mystery, though Shih said the version on show did have 512MB of RAM. Another version will be available for $299, but nobody could tell us what the difference between the two models is.

Source

Hmmm, I don't feel any dumber...


Is the Internet dumbing us down?
New book argues that YouTube, Wikipedia and Web 2.0 will ruin our culture
June 18, 2007

Andrew Keen wants to start an argument. And his new book “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture” shows that he knows how to do it. A relentless attack on the beloved Web 2.0 touchstones of user generated content and “the wisdom of crowds,” Keen’s brief polemic is a strident one-sided, archly conservative view of how Internet culture is evolving — or, in his view, degenerating. Even as it hits stores it has already been smartly dissected and thoroughly condemned by blogosphere luminaries ranging from Dan Gillmor and Jeff Jarvis to Lawrence Lessig.

After such a drubbing, clearly no sensible Internet columnist should touch this book with a 10-foot pole. Yet it deserves a look for several reasons: Keen knows the technology and doesn’t make the purely technical blunders that usually discredit other doom-saying commentators. Keen is a fearless writer willing to take conservative positions in a field that’s overwhelmingly liberal. And finally, while Keen’s arguments are extreme and biased, they will also be heard — because they reflect real public concerns about the impact of the Internet, too often downplayed by the reigning digerati.

Keen’s original subtitle, simplified before publication, sums up his argument: How the democratization of the digital world is assaulting our economy, our culture and our values. He looks at the various user-centered Web activities that epitomize Web 2.0 — YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, blogs, file-sharing and so forth — and ties these, variously, to loss of accuracy in news and information, the declining quality of music and video, the troubled economics of the content industries and even an erosion of original thinking (as students use Google to create “cut-and-paste” term papers).

More Is the Internet dumbing us down? - The Practical Futurist - MSNBC.com

[waltky]

Unreg wrote: The desktop looked fairly similar to Windows and we saw Firefox running on one 3ePC.

Firefox 3 will be released Tuesday
A new version of the Firefox Web browser is scheduled for release Tuesday with improvements in security, speed and design.

Many of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve bookmarks. The new version lets Web surfers add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new "Places" feature lets users quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but haven't bookmarked. There's also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list — similar to what's already available on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 browser.

Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn't disrupt the log-in process. Firefox also will start blocking rather than simply warning about sites known to engage in "phishing" scams that try to trick users into revealing passwords and other sensitive information. The new version adds protection from sites known to distribute viruses and other malicious software.

The list of suspicious sites come from Google and StopBadware.org, a project headed by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities. Security researchers who need access to problem sites can manually turn the feature off. Firefox 3 also offers speed and design improvements — the back button is now larger than the forward button, for instance, because people tend to return to a previous page more often, said Mike Schroepfer, the project's vice president of engineering.

Firefox is the No. 2 Web browser behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It comes from Mozilla, an open-source community in which thousands of people, mostly volunteers, collectively develop free products. Mozilla has been developing Firefox 3 for nearly three years and has been publicly testing it since November for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

Its supporters are organizing launch parties around the world next week, and Mozilla is trying to set a world record for most software downloads in a 24-hour period. Microsoft is currently testing Internet Explorer 8, while Opera Software ASA released Opera 9.5 on Thursday.

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