We know you want a pro-friendly medium format digital camera — so do we — but they’re awfully expensive, aren’t they? You might have to think about dropping as much as $30,000 one of these babies if you’re the discerning type, but Mamiya is trying to convince you that you can save a few thousand dollars and still get results. Enter the DL28 digital camera system, which combines the body of the well-established 645 with Leaf’s Aptus-II 6 digital back. It’s got 16-bit capture, a 12-stop dynamic range, an ISO range of 50 - 800, and a fancy 3.5-inch touch screen at price of $15,000, appropriate for cash-strapped professionals and financially comfortable hobbyists — unless Nikon has something to say about it.
The LaCie product roof has been raised to 7.5TB with the new 5big Network — an Active Directory and gigabit Ethernet-friendly array of storage drives that supports several RAID configurations for up to five hot-swappable hard drives. You can try it on in four different sizes — 2.5TB for $899.99, 5TB for $1,399, or the aforementioned, bar-raising 7.5TB for $1,899. In keeping with his sixteen year relationship with LaCie, the renowned Neil Poulton applied his HAL 9000-inspired design to the product, winning him another Janus de L’industrie award. The only problem with the HAL motif: you really, really don’t want your RAID storage device to drone on about how its “mind is going, Dave.”
We knew it would be going down, but the formal announcement has finally been made: MSI′s Wind will soon be gracing store shelves at Best Buy. As early as “right now” if you′re lucky enough, the 10-inch netbook can be procured at your local BB (no word on Future Shop), and we’re told that it’ll pack a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, Windows XP Home Edition, a 10-inch WSVGA (1,024 x 600) display, GMA950 graphics set, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 120GB hard drive, 3-cell battery (sigh…) and a black or white motif. You might expect to just snag one real quick like for $399, but don’t expect to leave without being hassled for one of those Product Replacement Plans. Fun, fun! Full release is after the break.
The Toshiba E105 has been sneaking around the fringes for a few days now, but apparently it’s not just announced — it’s available for purchase. That’s right, the oddly familiar looking 14.1-incher can be had at Best Buy for the totally reasonable price of $1,199.99, packing a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo, a 1280 x 800 TruBrite LCD display, 4GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and an Intel 4500MHD integrated GPU. The Satellite also sports 802.11a/b/g/n, an HDMI out, Vista Home Premium, and that all-important fingerprint reader (just remember, this increases the odds of someone cutting off your finger). The laptop is available right now online, no word if it’s on store shelves yet.
Maybe you don’t think of them as gadgets, but Best Buy is adding musical instruments to its entertainment repertoire at roughly 85 stores nationwide.
(Didn’t I just see you at Best Buy?)
The stores will cater to novice and professional musicians and carry brands such as Fender, Gibson, Roland and Drum Workshop.
The Best Buy in Pembroke Pines, FL, for example, features a 2,500-square-foot store-within-a store with more than 1,000 guitars, bass drums, keyboards, recording equipment and other instruments and accessories.
The Best Buy in Pembroke Pines will have five to seven trained musical instrument specialists and will offer guitar lessons (for all of those Guitar Herodudes who want to play for real).
There also will be drum and amplifier rooms to test equipment.
Best Buy had offered a smattering of beginner guitars and home-recording equipment, but now it wants a bigger slice of the $7.5 billion U.S. musical instrument market.
Best Buy sure looks to be aiming high with its first Insignia-branded GPS units, which will apparently not only pack all the expected run-of-the-mill specs but two-way, Dash-like communication as well. That desirable feature will be included on both the 4.3-inch NS-CNV20 and 3.5-inch NS-CNV10 models, each of which make use of that cellular connectivity to provide real-time traffic information and access to Google Local Search, among other things, all of which will be free for the first year (no word on pricing after that). In addition to a larger screen, the $499 NS-CNV20 will also give you some built-in Bluetooth, but if that’s more than you need, you can save a $100 and opt for the $399 NS-CNV10. Look for both to go on sale October 19th.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned over years (aside from the fact that Segway users will always be looked at strangely), it’s that Best Buy’s inventory systems are famous for turning us on to forthcoming wares. Just this year, strange part numbers in its stock system have correctly predicted the arrival of new MacBook Pros, the Nikon D90 and an unlocked US 3G Touch Diamond. Now, we’re feasting our eyes upon the latest snippet from Future Shop’s (Best Buy′s Canadian sibling) inventory system, which shows a half dozen new Mac placeholders for French and English language machines. Unfortunately, “Apple Mac” is about as vague as it gets, but we wouldn’t be shocked one iota to see new MBPs surface in the near future. C’mon stock system — don’t let us down.
Let’s be honest — after sinking a few large on a new HDTV, a few hundies on some overpriced cables and even more on HD programming, you weren’t about to cough up another month’s paycheck for a decent TV stand. For the 48,600 customers out there who purchased one of four different King Pao Enterprise TV Stands (likely sold and distributed by Studio RTA), you now have a product known for tipping over and ruining lives. The E Series, Fierro, Madison DLP and Madison 3000 — all of which were sold at Best Buy and other big box retailers from May 2004 to August 2008 — have been deemed unstable and unfit for use in your living room, and it’s suggested that you cautiously remove your set and wait for a “repair kit” before it does the removing for you. Godspeed.
Now that OLPC has met its One Laptop Per Child goal (in uh, Niue) it’s time to go whole-hog retail. According to Matt Keller, OLPC chief in EMEA, OLPC will resurrect its Give One, Get One XO program in late November with the help of Amazon’s big retail guns. Prices haven’t been disclosed nor has the nimble Sugar or pokyXP OS selection. But if history serves, we’ll be looking at $399 for the Sugary pair just like last year.
Update: As it turns out, OLPC says that a dual-boot XP and Sugar OS XO will be shipping in the “next month of so.” Happy pappie?
Here’s the surprise of the century: Windows XP runs excruciatingly slowly on the OLPC XO. We’re shocked, simply shocked. The folks at Laptop Mag got to kick the tires on this fruit of the XO and Microsoft partnership, and while to their credit they’ve manage to build a computer that works and runs real-world applications, it’s not a pretty sight. Sure, most of the hardware is (or will be) supported just fine, though Sugar’s mesh networking is absent, but boot time off of the 4GB SD card is 1 minute and 24 seconds, and once booted into XP you don’t have access to the data on the XO’s 1GB of internal storage. Internet Explorer 6 took a mere 5 seconds to start, but Word 2003 takes 42 seconds of thumb twiddling. Even more disconcerting is that the system is pretty much locked to running one app at a time, since things just get too sluggish after that. The upshot of this is that the OLPC folks are considering a new edition of the original machine with more RAM and a new processor, but we certainly feel sorry for kids to who this existing machine will be their first taste of computing. Well, only a little bit. Back in our day…
Zemanta notified me to tell me that Zemanta’s Firefox plugin now works with Movable Type. Woohoo! They said, "Just wanted to drop a quick note that we released a new version of Zemanta today that adds support for MT 4.1. Only through extension for now, but plugin will follow in a few weeks." I was a little peeved that their initial launch included Wordpress and not MT so I actually posted a thread to their forums asking when Zemanta would be available for Movable Type. They promised me support for MT was coming and indeed it has!
What Zemanta does is simply monitor the text in your blog draft and then go out on the web (connecting to Zemanta’s web servers) to find relevant/related images, articles, and tags. I guess you could call Zemanta a blogger’s "cheat sheet" for quickly finding relevant articles, images and tags. Until now, Zemanta only worked on Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted Wordpresses from version 2.0 onwards. But as of today, Movable Type 4.1+ is supported. Speaking of Movable Type, the latest version of Movable Type v4.15 was expected to be released 2 days ago (May 19th), but was delayed until May 28th. Bummer. Can′t wait to upgrade, since MT 4.15 has some cool new features and performance enhancements. But I digress…
Below is a screenshot of me testing it on Movable Type 4.1 while pretending to blog about Michael Jordan. Click for full-image where you will see the Zemanta Firefox plugin seamlessly integrating into the Movable Type interface. From the Gallery I was able to hover my mouse over an image to see a description, copyright info, source, etc. and then simply click on the image to have it inserted into my blog post. Same thing with related articles and related tags. As to whether I’ll actually use Zemanta on a regular basis remains to be seen. I prefer uploading my own images to the blog server rather than "hot linking" to outside images. But I’m going to try it for awhile and see how it goes.
There’s already plenty of folks working to make WiFi as ubiquitous as possible, but a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge seem to think they’ve devised one of the most efficient solutions yet, although it’s not without its share of hurdles. The basic idea is to turn a sometimes frowned upon activity into an acceptable one, by making it safe for individuals to share their home WiFi with neighbors and passers-by. To do that all-important latter bit, the researchers propose that the guests would only be given access to a “tunnel” to a single, trusted point on the internet (as illustrated above), with a firewall offering further protection. That, obviously, wouldn’t work unless everyone (including the ISPs) played along, and the researchers some ideas about that as well, even including the possibility that municipalities pass laws requiring ISPs to support co-ops. In other words, don’t bet on it showing up overnight. [Warning: PDF link]
Tom, please visit www.yourwifiinternet.com. New technology launching in days, not months. T1 speed portable wireless internet, up and down with no degradation of signal for $19.95 a month and VOip for additional $9.95 a month, router free. It will change the communications industry forever. $13 billion invested, about to go public, expecting 250 million customers first year and 150,000 employees. Coverage tested 65 miles from NOC through buildings and trees and 20 ft underground. ISP’s will embrace the technology or disappear. Cable, DSL, satellite will be like vinyl records to an IPOD. Check it out. www.T3wirelessinternet.com
In any event, the website lists the following accolades:
Financial Backing – Investment capital was secured in 2003 with seven USA-based investment bankers.
Approved IPO– In 2004 the USA Government and Securities Exchange Commission approved the IPO*.
Testing Successful - Testing of ͉ mobile wireless Internet service (with 128-bit encryption) has been 100% successfully completed.
Developed soft and hardware - Very well known and highly respected wireless electronics company has developed and tested the chip.
Ahead of Competition - It is believed that competitors can′t develop comparable technology without 3+years and billions in funding.
Rolling out SOON! - Service is scheduled to roll out in early 2008**
Blanket Coverage by 2008 - By the end of 2008 the WiFi Corporation plans blanketed WiFi coverage of all Canada and USA.
Worldwide Coverage Coming - Within 12-months of North American opening, plans for worldwide WiFi service begin.
Easiest to set up – ability to broadcast the Internet connection signal via repeater towers from one central NOC (Network Operations Center).
Requires far fewer towers – ability to broadcast signal to distances of 30-miles from tower without degradation.
Best Coverage &ndash due to ability to transmit signal through buildings, forests, and up to 20 feet underground.
No Bottleneck – maintains at least a T1 connection both UP and DOWN without degradation regardless of the amount of simultaneous users connecting.
Most Secure – signal is secured with 256-bit SSL encryption so no firewall hardware is required.
Most for the money - T1 connection is projected to be only $19.95 per month. Business class up to T3 service will also be available.
Telephony - First class VOIP telephone service will also be offered for a fraction of the cost of competitors. Current projection is $9.95 per month.
Mobile - Oh yes, and did I say MOBILE! No dish required here. Imagine a mobile T1 connection.
$19.95 for a wireless T1 and even inexpensive T3 wireless speed available? Sounds like it could be WiMAX. Intrigued, I checked it out some more and discovered the following:
In 2003 the initial funding was secured with $13,000,000,000 (13 billion) being pledged. In 2004 the IPO was approved by the Securities Exchange Commission. At this time the company is in the quiet period before going public and word has it that they plan to begin the roll out of the service in the first quarter of 2008. No questions can be answered regarding the IPO until the actual launch of the service.
$13 billion? Seems too good to be true. How can $13 billion be pledged and no one has heard of www.T3wirelessinternet.com. There aren’t even any backlinks on Google to this website. Something seems fishy in Denmark.
So I read up some more…
With opening as a publicly traded company, the ability to broadcast the Internet connection signal via repeater towers from one central NOC (Network Operations Center), broadcast to distances of 30-miles without degradation of the signal, transmit through buildings, forests, and up to 20 feet underground, maintain a T-1 connection both UP and DOWN without degradation from the amount of simultaneous users connecting, and having managed to secure the signal with better than 256-bit SSL encryption where no firewall hardware is required, we believe this WiFi Corp. will quickly become one of the fastest growing Corporations in the history of the Internet, and quite literally, will be able to make the statement
Still not convinced, I decided to check out the YouTube video on their website:
Watching this video and all the hyper claims of cheap wireless high-speed bandwidth, you′d think this company was the Second Coming of the Internet. But oh if it’s true, Glory Glory! The video claims that the solution is WiFi and WiMAX on steroids. Ok, that’s not telling me much.
The website certainly didn’t seem like it had $13 billion invested into it - very amateurish, so I dug a little deeper and discovered it’s actually an affiliate site for ItsYourNet.com. I check out ItsYourNet.com and their web design isn’t much better. Once I saw the "As Seen on TV" logo, I lost respect for the site. It must be a gimmick was my immediate reaction. Still, I click the join now link just to see if they charge anything. It’s free to join, but they offer a ton of affiliate-related services, including commissions for getting people to sign-up for their wireless T1 or T3, domain registrations, web hosting, VoIP, and a 3D reality thing.
The site definitely is affiliate marketing driven, which makes me wonder if ItsYourNet is truly behind this "supposed" wireless T1/T3 Internet that can travel 65 miles or if there is yet another unknown company’s technology that ItsYourNet is selling via affiliate. Sure enough, I read on their website, the following:
ItsYourNet has aligned itself with a WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) Internet Service Corporation.
After more than five years of coding and field testing, this Corporation has developed a Wireless Internet technology so dynamic that we believe it is destined to become the sole surviving Internet Service Provider (ISP) worldwide.
Wow, the sole surviving ISP worldwide? Talk about hype. Regardless of their hyperbole, this is still very intriguing since they claim this year they will go live in Texas, California, and Washington state, as well as a nation-wide rollout planned. We’ll know soon enough if this is hype or for real. So Texans, Californians, and Washington staters, let me know when you can get your inexpensive wireless ͉/͋ access on. If it’s true, it might be time to for all of us to trade in our slow-poke EVDO wireless cards.
Hi Tom, Clarification on T1-speed wireless internet for $19.95 a month or T3 speed for about $70-150 a month. Itsyournet is a marketing company with exclusive rights to market the wifi corp technology globally. They do not receive any of the $13 billion investment. Affiliates sign up free and forward and mask their site i.e. www.t3wirelessinternet.com or www.yourwifiinternet.com. ISP’s can′t go direct to itsyournet. They must sign up through an affiliate. Affiliates make commissions and overrides on two tiers, not mlm or network marketing but close, a two tier direct sales program. Isp’s will embrace the technology or have a very difficult time competing, probably disappear. An additional $9.95 a month for VOip, this will heavily impact the cellular industry. Everyone should know this by now. The total $29.95 per month is commissionable at $8.00 per month to affiliates which is huge if you are signing up ISP’s with thousands of customers. The following weeks will prove to be very interesting, and lucrative for some of us. Go to www.yourwifiinternet.com and sign up free, no obligation. Then go to your back office to get more exclusive info.
Readers who tuned in before CES already got the details on the Marantz VS3002 HDMI switcher, but we’ll recap really quick before we move to the pics. Six inputs and two parallel outputs, HDMI 1.3 and RS-232. And lookee here: there are six HDMI inputs and two outputs around back! This is priced at $349 and will ship in February.
If the idea of a receiver is just too lowbrow for you, Marantz is introducing their new AV8003 and MM8003 processor/amplifier pair. It’s a nice couple: HDMI 1.3a (four in, two out), Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD MA, DeepColor and Audyssey to get things dialed in; the amp kicks out eight channels at 150-Watts. Both available Q2 2008, prices to be determined.
Look out Guitar Center and Sam Ash!
The website certainly didn’t seem like it had $13 billion invested into it - very amateurish, so I dug a little deeper and discovered it’s actually an affiliate site for 
