"This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all.

"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"

They probably didn't build the computer themselves, either. Nor install a smartphone mod. Defaults rule. (via @wtfcuk)

Also from 2006, but just as relevant today. It will be interesting to see how the big analysis firms will handle the fact that Acer says it's going to do a fire sale of millions of machines that were part of something that's almost inventory fraud in Europe.

"Perhaps the most futuristic proposal is EPFL’s Guardian Angels, which will use computing and imaginative energy research to 'create the ultimate smart device that will assist humans from infancy to old age'. The guardian angel will 'scavenge for energy' from its environment, for example by tapping the heat and movements of the human body, said Adrian Ionescu, project leader."<br />
<br />
Faintly scary.