Submission + - Why the Fax Machine Refuses to Die (infoworld.com) 1
snydeq writes: "Deep End's Paul Venezia waxes befuddled on the ongoing existence of the fax machine. 'Consider what a fax machine actually is: a little device with a sheet feeder, a terrible scanning element, and an ancient modem. Most faxes run at 14,400bps. That's just over 1KB per second — and people are still using faxes to send 52 poorly scanned pages of some contract to one another. Over analog phone lines. Sometimes while paying long-distance charges! The mind boggles,' Venezia writes. 'If something as appallingly stupid as the fax machine can live on, it makes you wonder how we make progress at all. Old habits die hard. It just goes to show you: Bad technology generally isn't the problem; it's the people who persist in using that technology rather than embracing far superior alternatives.'"
This IS a good reason to use the fax: (Score:1)
A facsimile has legal precedent; a faxed copy of a signed contract has the same legal weight as the original document. A scanned PDF or email with a JPG signature or whatever isn't going to work the same way in court.
It is also dead simple to use and relatively cheap.