I’ve had intermittent connectivity today.  I think my cablemodem wanted attention.

DPReview:

Thanks to forums contributor ‘Andreas P’ for spotting this, a Taiwanese technology website is currently running an article about the difference between CCD and CMOS sensors. On this page they have a copy of a Sony sensor road map, on it is the ICX 456 sensor, it’s 2/3″ in size (8.8 x 6.6 mm) and has eight megapixels (a pixel pitch of 2.7 µm). The box on the roadmap is marked ‘1H03’ (first half ’03) which would make it available for manufacturers looking to release some prosumer cameras before Christmas this year (a new Sony DSC-F717 or Canon Pro 90 perhaps?).

Phil: I can’t see this being a good thing, we’re already seeing higher noise levels from the five megapixel 1/1.8″ sensors. I’d rather see manufacturers putting more development into lenses, dynamic range, automatic white balance and improved image processing, there are some things you can’t cover up with more megapixels.

Jeremy Zawodny:

Don’t argue with a self-proclaimed database expert about MySQL. It’s just not worth it. I thought it’d be entertaining but it’s more draining than anything else.

With some quick coding and JSTL, Russ has put together an RSS feed for the links in #mobitopia.  He also tweaked the IRC links page to include comments.

TheServerSide notes that JPublish 2.0 has been released.

Update: Yes, I’m a little slow.  🙂

ExtremeTech:

IBM and Infineon Technologies AG said Tuesday that they have reached a key milestone on the way to commercializing magnetic RAM as early as 2005.

At the VLSI Symposia taking plane in Japan this week, IBM and Infirnon said they will announce that the two companies have jointly fabricated a 128-Kbit Magnetic RAM (MRAM) core on a 0.18-micron process, the most aggressive use of lithography to date to fabricate an MRAM.

Russ got the #mobitopia IRC Links page up and running.  So far today, my favorite links are:

• Sean Brandt is blogging JavaONE keynote via GPRS
• Erik Hatcher must have been involved in the java.net thing somehow, given his entry.  Very cool stuff.
• Java.net of course
• Java.com too.

Newsforge notes that OpenMOSIX 2.4.20-3 is out.

I4U:

Sony Japan announces (raw translation) the Qualia 016 (Q016-WE1) small digital camera.

It’s a cute little camera, but can it really cost 380,000 yen?  That’s like three grand US.  Quite silly for a 2 megapixel camera, no matter how tiny it is.  It still has to be larger than a piece of Memory Stick Duo.

I just wanted to let everyone know (this is mostly for the googlers in the house) that Red Hat 9 installs just fine on a Toshiba Satellite 2545CDS.  It’s a 333MHz K6-2 processor, so don’t expect it to be fast or responsive, but it works.  I’m having PCMCIA IRQ issues (I haven’t been able to make any of my PCMCIA cards work yet), but hopefully I’ll get the resolved.  If not I might try Gentoo or NetBSD.

The IRQ issues could also be hardware related.  We shall see.  At bootup, it was kind enough to tell me that I should really try passing pci=biosirq to the kernel.  Tried it, no luck so far.

Next step is to get some flavour of Linux back on my friend Adam’s IBM thinkpad.

Can’t.

Focus.

Eyes.

Joi:

If only the guy in Memento had a blog…

Core News notes a sad thing:

We will be stopping all orders until we can get this straight.

An official webpage will be setup explaining the details shortly. Until then, those who have ordered will be getting a computer abit slowly as the missing parts will be coming from what different places have in stock etc.

Please allow us some extra time.

I’d be really bummed if this great thing is squashed by lawyers.

LWN notes that Richard Stallman will be speaking at George Washington University on June 12.  I’ll try to get out of work and check it out:

When: Thursday June 12, 6:10pm
Where: Phillips Hall, Rm 415
The George Washington University
801 22nd Street
Washington, DC

Christoph Cemper, who I’ve recently started reading, has some great linkage this afternoon:

• Ars: Intel ships its 1 BILLIONTH processor.  Dr Evil: “One BILLION processors.”
• TechDirt: Dot-com is making it into the Oxford dictionary, baby!
• BBC News: The CIA uses 5 year old technology.

Thanks for sniffing out the links, Christoph.  Keep it up, man!

Mental note [via Derek Willis]: look into Aggreg8, a Mozilla Firebird extension for reading RSS feeds.  Judging from the version number (0.0.1), it’s alpha-fantasic, but definately worth checking out.

Of course, I’ll probably never be a two-paned aggregator kind of guy, but it’s worth a look.

Update:

Here’s a thumbnail with a full sized image.  The user interface is clean in appearance, but the flow definately needs some work.

OSNews:

FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE is now available. Release notes for all five architectures, here.

The Register reports on rumors of Apple wanting to buy Roxio:

Apple is in talks to buy Napster, Mac rumours site LoopRumors has claimed, citing “reliable sources”.

Well, not Napster per se but Roxio, the CD burning software specialist, which itself acquired Napster’s assets for $5 million after the peer-to-peer pioneer declared itself bankrupt last summer.

The Register:

For the first time, networked storage accounted for more than half of worldwide storage revenue in a quarter, IDC said. The networked products took 53 percent of the $4.8 billion in storage sold during the first quarter. This compares to the 42 percent of the market owned by direct-attached systems.

Rick earlier this afternoon pointed to SharpPrivacy, an OpenPGP implementation in C# over at code project.  It’s open source too!