Now we’re talking. DPReview is also covering the 8700, an update to the 5 megapixel 5700. It looks like the basic design is pretty much the same as the 5700, though the command dial on top makes me hopeful that this camera will actually aproach easy to use. The 5700 is a great camera but a PITA to operate.
The 8700 looks good, but is bulky. I have a feeling that the 8400 (or whatever replaces the 5400) will be more my style.
DPReview has some details about Nikon’s D70, which I have already ranted about. It will indeed be $999 for the body only, and a whopping $1299 for a body/lens combo. It looks absurd when you compare it to the Canon $899/$999 price points.
Now that Nikon has released some specs, we can at least start estimating when they’ll start showing up on the street. Canon went from announcement to on the shelf in a matter of a month or two, but Nikon is famous for announcing stuff that is still six months out. I hope that Nikon has ramped up production and is ready to pull a Canon and start shipping Real Soon.
The specs do look pretty decent: 6.1 effective megapixels, which means that it probably does not use the exact same chip that is in the D100, just a similar one. I am saddened to see that the camera only supports USB1.1, though a real photographer will take the CF card out and put it in a USB2.0 High Speed/Firewire card reader. I am quite suprised that the camera industry hasn’t embraced the higher speed interfaces yet.
I also like the ability to simultaneously snap a RAW file and a JPEG. That can make management/thumbnailing/making a contact sheet quite easy. It looks like the D70 will also support i-TTL, which should make flash exposures with digital cameras easier.
Hopefully Nikon is announcing the D70 now so that in a few weeks at PMA they can say “we’re shipping next month” and make everyone happy.
At least from the pictures, it does look like the D70 looks/feels a little beefier than the Canon Digital Rebel. The Digital Rebel is a solid camera, but includes a lot of curved lines and is silver to differentiate it from the higher end digital cameras. Luckily the D70 is black, and looks more like a beefed up N80 platform than an N75 platform (which is A Good Thing).
I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for Nikon. I really want them to do well with this, they just have a tendancy to shoot themselves in the foot.
Via Russ on #mobitopia, CNet is reporting that TiVo has picked up Strangeberry. JRendezvous, Strangeberry’s GPL’d Rendezvous code, lives on at SourceForge as JmDNS.
I didn’t even realize that there was anything left of Strangeberry beyond a splash screen at a dot com address. Needless to say, expect Rendezvous support and other fun stuff in TiVos down the road. TiVo announced that they were working on rendezvous support last year at CES, though not owning a TiVo, I’m not sure if the tech has wandered in to production yet.
The Oscar nominations were announced today. I was excited to hear that Lost in Translation racked up a nod for best picture, best director, best actor in a leading role, and best original screenplay.
Entertainment pundits think that LotR is going to take best picture, but I think that LiT is going to walk away with at least one Oscar, probably best director, with best actor or best original screenplay being an added bonus.
My Symbian points to an EMEA Canalys report stating that over 2 million Symbian devices sold in Q42003.
DPReview cites a PMA press release that pegs the total number of digital cameras sold in 2003 at 50 million.
Expect these numbers, along with camera phone numbers to go up significantly in the coming months.
I’m hunkered down in front of the NASA TV stream waiting for Opportunity to bounce down.
Update: We’re rollin’ around on the surface of Mars!
Jack Hodgson in #joiito made a good observation: both Gore and Arnold made an appearance at JPL, but only after the successful landing had been confirmed.
Chris Davies has scripted some PHP that grabs a thumbnail image from a 3GP video. The cup of tea lives on! I agree with Chris, it would rock if TextAmerica were to incorporate something like this instead of the canned ‘this is a video’ graphic.
Excellent work, Chris!
Slashdot points to two stories by El Reg and ZDNet, which both report that the new Pentium 4 core (dubbed Prescott) will have an even longer pipeline than the previous P4 core, which had a longer pipeline than the previous core…
Intel isn’t helping the Megahertz myth any. Now granted, the Prescott core is currently set to ramp up to 4GHz (and may go beyond it), but I suspect that AMD will be able to push through similar benchmarks at a clock speed of 2-3GHz.
Anandtech has more information about the Intel roadmap and the AMD roadmap.
I run both Intel and AMD hardware, but have considered myself an AMD boy since the early Slot A Athlon days. (I did a writeup for the Athlon 800 and also my Tornado 1000 case at Next Dimension Hardware a few years ago)
Via Amy’s Robot Link Factory, The Mercury News:
Bill Janklow, who dominated South Dakota politics for three decades as governor and then congressman, was sentenced to 100 days in jail Thursday for a car crash that killed a Minnesota motorcyclist and ended Janklow’s career in disgrace.
I actually thought that the system was working when a senator who runs a stop sign at 71 mph, killing a motorcyclist, is actually convicted of the crime. After 30 days, he will be leaving jail for up to 10 hours a day to do community service.
I remember NPR coverage of the trial. A woman testified that she had been virtually run off the road when the Senator came flying down that stretch of road a few days prior to the deadly accident. I remember thinking at the time, “he’s going to find some way to get out of this.” Well, he did.
I wonder what the average jail term for second degree manslaughter is?
BBC:
Nasa’s Mars Rover Spirit has stopped sending useful data and mission scientists are unable to send it commands.
That bites. I’m sure that NASA is working around the clock trying to reestablish contact. Still, it’s dissapointing news.
Thanks to James Robertson for the pointer: The Baltimore Sun is offering a ton of new feeds. He has added several to his aggregator, and I’ve added several to my rawdog instance. I did the same when Yahoo and the AP started producing feeds, and unsubscribed from many of them after suffering from information overload. When the BBC unleashed a bunch of feeds, I only subscribed to a few: mostly business, tech, and a little local UK news. They’ve proven quite useful.
I think that I’ll audition these feeds from the Baltimore Sun and probably end up voting some off the island.
The Unnoficial SUSE Faq is quite useful.
Photography giant Eastman Kodak is to slash up to 15,000 jobs worldwide over the next three years.
Things are not looking good for big yellow.
Andrew O at The Register has managed to dig deeper into the Symbian Scripting story. Aparently Nokia likes Python more than Perl for its scripting, and is tinkering with the idea of releasing a Python build to a very select few developers.
Another interesting tidbit from the story is the mention of MobileBasic, which runs as a MIDlet on top of the JVM. At first glance, MobileBasic looks a lot like OPL. Aparently it has a very simple to use syntax for accessing URLs over the web. I wonder if this will work properly on something like a 3650 (given the MIDP sockets issues it has)? I’m also curious about how easy it would be to do something simple like this in OPL, as I would rather use OPL for a simple task like this.
The five lines of code in the article above make me think that simple XML over HTTP web services would ROCK if it were that easy to get data from a source over HTTP. Of course writing an XML parser for OPL or MobileBasic would probably be non-trivial…
Still, it has my brain juice flowing!
Update: It looks like Ewan and the OPL team got some great press today in another article at The Register. Woohoo!
This story at OSNews reminds me of my pre-Ultrasparc gear that I’ve got kicking around there house. There is a Sparc 5 or two running Solaris, and a Sparcstation Classic (same size as a Sparc IPC) running OpenBSD. I think that one is under the desk somewhere, I’m not 100% sure.
Older Sparc (and UltraSparc) gear is getting cheaper and cheaper. I bought most of my gear through Ebay, but RetroBox also has a nice Sparc section (server and workstation) with some good deals.
Via Infoworld, MySQL Administrator looks like a great way to administer your MySQL databases. A lot of people use PHPMyAdmin, which is quite good and gets the job done, but this is downright sexy!
Nintendo Co. Ltd., after months of hinting it would roll out a new game product in 2004, on Wednesday took the wraps off Nintendo DS, a portable video game system with two screens, one above the other.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this will rock.
Happy birthday, Russ!
Here is the news that we’ve been hearing rumors about:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Cingular Wireless has made a formal offer to buy AT&T Wireless Services Inc. (NYSE:AWE – news), in a move that would create the largest wireless service in the United States, a source familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.
It will probably take some time to find out the exact sum, but sources say that Cingular is offering cash. Things could get quite interesting.
The broadband connection to the house was down most of the day, and I think it was a flaky cable on my end that caused the problems. I’ve got it working for now, but probably need to re-run and re-crimp some cable. It’s been an interesting day, and I’ll try to get a roundup together soon.