PCIN.net Update

From Silicon.com:

Take a look at your keyboard. Is last week’s lunch still decorating the space bar? What about your phone? Does the earpiece look as greasy as a spoon in a truckers’ café?

Office equipment harbours millions of germs - with telephones, keyboards and mice particularly fertile breeding grounds for nasties, claims IT equipment cleaning company PROtech IT Hygiene.

The average office desk is capable of supporting some 10 million microbes, said the cleaning company, and there are nearly 21,000 microbes per square inch in the average office.

From USA Today:

Greenpeace gave Microsoft and Nintendo abysmal rankings Tuesday on their efforts to phase out toxic chemicals from their game consoles.

Nintendo became the first company to score zero out of a possible 10 points in the Greenpeace ranking of 18 leading electronics companies. It provided no information to consumers on the substances it uses in manufacturing or on its plans to cut hazardous materials, the environmental organization said.

From MSNBC:

In 2003, Los Angeles Times photographer Brian Walski caused an uproar when it was discovered that his picture of a British soldier yelling at fleeing residents in Iraq, published prominently by many U.S. newspapers, had been altered.

Walski had combined two snapshots taken moments apart of the British soldier urging residents to take cover as Iraqi forces opened fire. This digital alteration is one of several in recent years to cast doubt on the old saying that the camera doesn’t lie.

Some researchers are worried that digitally altered photos could alter our perceptions and memories of public events.

From InfoWorld:

A flurry of blogs and news items on the Internet last week suggested that young Internet users are increasingly relying on instant messaging, texting, and social networking sites to communicate, often via mobile devices, and almost to the exclusion of e-mail.

One of those blogs, by Chad Lorenz at Slate, even asserted that “e-mail is looking obsolete,” under the headline “The Death of E-Mail.”

But the reality is much more complex. Some market reports and analysts predict that e-mail accounts will continue to grow as other messaging modes gain popularity and as use of the Internet expands globally.