sr4hrh.org

 
Olympus E-420 (body only)
Olympus E-520 (body only)
Pentax K200D (body only) Sensor
10-megapixel Live MOS
17.3 x 13.0 mm
10-megapixel Live MOS
17.3 x 13.0 mm
10-megapixel CCD
23.5 x 15.7mm Sensitivity range
ISO 100 - ISO 1600
ISO 100 - ISO 1600
ISO 100 - ISO 1600 Focal-length multiplier
2.0x
2.0x
1.5x Fastest continuous shooting
3.5fps
6 raw/JPEG unknown
3.5fps
8 raw/JPEG unknown
2.8fps
4 raw/4 JPEG Mechanical image stabilization
No
Yes
Yes Viewfinder
95 percent coverage
0.92x magnification
14mm eye point
95 percent coverage
0.92x magnification
14mm eye point
96 percent coverage
0.85x magnification
Eye point n/a Autofocus
3 points
11 points contrast detection
3 points phase detection
11 points Live View
Yes
Yes
No Wireless flash controller
Yes
Yes
Yes LCD size
2.7 inches
176-degree viewing angle
2.7 inches
176-degree viewing angle
2.7 inches
160-degree viewing angle Price (body only)
$449.99
$599.99
$699

Today, Olympus announced the E-520 dSLR, the replacement for the E-510 and step-up model from its E-420. The feature set is very similar to the E-420, but for the extra dough you do get some significant capabilities, such as sensor-shift stabilization (including an updated system with a mode that accommodates panning while vertically oriented), a larger continuous-shooting buffer and a deeper grip.

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $449.95 - $990.08
View the latest prices for Olympus Evolt E-520 (with 14-42mm lens)

Olympus E-520 with 14-42mm lens.

The company also announced a new f4.0-5.6 9-to-18mm wide-angle lens (19-to-36mm equivalent), shipping this fall, though at $599 I think my idea of an “affordable consumer lens” and Olympus’ diverges a bit. Slated to ship in July, a body-only version of the E-520 will run about $599.99, while a kit with an ED 14-42mm f3.5/5.6 Zuiko Digital Zoom Lens (24-to-48mm equivalent) has an estimated street price of $699.99.

(Credit:
Olympus America)

Like the E-420, the E-520 incorporates the same sensor as in the higher-end E-3. It also seems to use the same viewfinder and LCD as its little brother, and also includes support for face detection (still unusual for a dSLR), wireless flash and tonal-range correcting Shadow Adjustment Technology.

Papadopoulos acknowledged that the nirvana of every customer or user in charge of their own data that lives in the cloud has challenges. Today, users cede control of their data to service providers like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. It’s not as easy for users to manage and move their data as it should be, which means users are generally stuck with the user experience and monetization schemes of the host sites. “It’s proprietary systems all over again,” Papadopoulos said. Over the last several years Sun has differentiated itself proprietary vendors, focusing on free open-source software and open standards.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos

Higher up in stack developers have more targets and more freedom to innovate below it, Papadopoulos said.

Click here for more from GigaOM on Structure 08.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

There will be a grid of a half dozen very large cloud infrastructure providers and a hundred or so regional providers, Papadopoulos said. It will also look more like the banking world, he continued, with customers willing to trust the service providers with their private data as they do banks with their money. It’s a question of when, not if, this scenario will occur.

Papadopoulos also advocated a free market in which all interfaces and formats are based on open standards; customers own their data, relationships, and metadata; and customers can extract, synchronize or purge their data unilaterally. This echoes recent efforts to promote openness and data portability.

Papadopoulos has predicted a “neutron star collapse of data centers,” meaning at some juncture it won’t make sense for businesses to build their own data centers. Instead they will contract for computing resources from hosting providers who bring “brutal efficiency” for utilization, power, security, service levels, and idea-to-deploy time.

(Credit:
Sun)

SAN FRANCISCO–Speaking at the Structure 08 conference here, Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos predicted that by the beginning of 2010 the majority of systems sold would be for Web, high performance computing and software-as-a-service applications. “We are going through this phase change in computing in a big way,” he said. He made a similar prediction last year.

Further out into the future, Papadopoulos expects that the technology infrastructure industry will be similar to the energy industry. In past presentations, he has called this transition the Red Shift.

Papadopoulos also laid out a map (see below) of the current universe of cloud computing in terms of increasing virtualization and consolidation across various categories: processor, operating system, language, and application services. Over time, the categories will fill out more especially as more languages and applications services or platforms rise up. Papadopoulos pointed to two Sun projects, Dark Star and Project Caroline. Dark Star is about software infrastructure designed to simplify the creation massively scalable online games, virtual worlds and social networking applications. Project Caroline is a hosting platform for developing and delivering Internet-based services. It’s not clear why the Sun research projects are positioned at the far right on the chart, and players such as Google, Joyent, and Rackable are missing.

Because we’ve increasingly been engaged in the definition of the desktop experience for some of these consumer electronics products, however, we’re now in a position to actually start engaging with those upstreams and investing in that desktop experience….

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has historically been very, very deferential to what we call our upstream communities - GNOME, KDE, and so on - in the definition of the desktop experience. Our view, very strongly, is that they hold the real expertise in defining that. And that, as a distribution, our primary job is to be a very efficient conductor of their good work into the hands of users….

Mark Shuttleworth addresses a range of interesting things in a recent interview, but there are two, in particular, that strike me. First, Mark acknowledges the obvious: The
Mac is a superior usability experience. Second, however, while placating his upstream developer communities, he also notes that improving on their work is going to be critical to beating the Mac:

And so we started to build out a team that will focus on the specific user experiences…, and our goal, very simply, is to make sure the Free software ecosystem can deliver a Mac OS-like experience, or an experience that will compete with the Mac OS. We see Apple as the gold standard of the user experience. We believe that, while it can be a challenge, the innovation inherent in the Free software process can deliver an experience that is comparable and in many ways superior.

To beat the Mac for usability, the emphasis can’t be on developers. It has to be on users. Too often open-source developers forget the user. I’m glad that Mark has not.

commentary

Mark is a wonderful diplomat, but I’m glad to see that he also recognizes the deficiencies of his upstream communities, even if he would never articulate it like that. Put baldly: The upstream developer communities that he references are developer communities, often without the expertise or interest in developing an average user-focused experience.

“We know we can have TCO, but need NetWeaver enhancements. There’s a very close link between the TCO of Business ByDesign and NetWeaver. The TCO is not so much hardware; There are too many processing steps in our hosting. We can continue to do manual steps when first upgrade Business ByDesign from 1.0 to 1.1, but it’s not predictable in way where every client got it at once and in the same way.”

We also debate whether Microsoft is open to a union with Yahoo after the parting of ways.

Larry remarks on AMD’s lack of transparency about its chip fabrication plans and product roadmap, and I recap my visit to JavaOne, where I met rocker Neil Young and interviewed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz about his plans for JavaFX and cloud computing. Schwartz has a good plan, but getting developers on board will take some heavy lifting.

In this week’s EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan and I discuss the latest news from SAP, Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, and Microhoo. At SAP’s Sapphire conference this week, company executives explained the delayed rollout of the new on-demand enterprise suite, Business ByDesign. SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said that the total cost of ownership (TCO) equation on Business ByDesign and the upgrade procedures weren’t good enough:

10-inch screen Rechargeable battery 1024×600 resolution
1GB internal memory
Auto photo resize
Rechargeable battery
SD/MMC/MS/XD card reader, USB memory slot

8-inch screen
800×600 resolution
1GB internal memory
Auto on/off function
Auto photo resize
SD/MMC/MS/XD card reader, USB memory slot

Each of the models feature Samsung’s Starlight Touch Controls, which integrate the onscreen display (OSD) and disappear from the bezel after 10 seconds of inactivity. The two Wi-Fi enabled frames, the SPF-85V and SPF-105V are optimized for use with Windows Live Spaces for photo sharing. Also, these two frames come with Samsung’s InfoLink feature, which offers the ability to receive RSS feeds from USA Today and Frame Channel.

10-inch screen
1024×600 resolution
64MB internal memory
Auto-rotation function
802.11b/g wireless photo frame
Rechargeable battery
SD/MMC/MS/XD card reader, USB memory slot
InfoLink free information service (news, weather, stocks, USA Today) Frame Channel service that gets more than 400 channels of news, sports, cartoons, and more

Digital photo frames. You love ‘em, I love ‘em. Well, actually I’ve only ever seen one in use before and that one was broken. Call me old-fashioned (or just old) but I guess I’m just not at the point financially where I can justify the price.

8-inch screen
Built-in wireless feature optimized for use with Windows Live
800×600 high resolution
64MB internal memory
Auto-rotation function
802.11b/g wireless photo frame
Rechargeable battery
SD/MMC/MS/XD card reader, USB memory slot
InfoLink free information service (news, weather, stocks, USA Today) Frame Channel service that gets more than 400 channels of news, sports, cartoons, and more

Samsung SPF-85H

Samsung SPF-105V

Apparently I’m slowly moving into the minority on this. On Wednesday, Samsung announced four new digital photo frames.

Actually, I don’t think I’m at the point morally. I mean come on, I don’t think I could sleep at night after spending $200 on a picture frame. Digital or not.

(Credit:
Samsung )

The 8-inch SPF-85V: save this one for the small, cute pics.

Samsung SPF-85V

Samsung SPF-105P

The SPF-85H and the SPF-85V will be available September 1 for an estimated price of $129.99 and $199.99 respectively. The SPF-105P will be released on October 1 for $199.99. The SPF-105V is slated for November 1 for $289.99.

Some AT&T wireless customers in the Midwest and Southeast are having trouble accessing 3G and EDGE data services on certain handsets, the company confirmed Thursday.

Problems were reported as early as 6:30 a.m. EST, according to Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman. Siegel was not able to say how many subscribers have been affected or what exactly is causing the problem.

The problem doesn’t seem to be affecting subscribers in the Northeast or the far West, Siegel said. And the outage has not affected any voice services, so customers are still able to make and receive phone calls.

He also couldn’t specify which specific handsets were having trouble accessing the data network. He would only say they were smartphone handsets. Some users on blogs and message boards have reported that the
iPhone, Blackberry, and Palm Treo have all been affected. Siegel also said that some laptop users who have AT&T’s PC wireless cards have also had trouble accessing the 3G and EDGE data networks.

“We are working to identify the cause of the problem as quickly as we can,” he said. “And we apologize for any inconvenience to customers.”

commentary

In my view, you shouldn’t discount limits imposed by the physical world too much. While movies consume plenty of bandwidth on the Torrents, their quality and the effort it takes to download them–paired with the ready availability of modestly-priced, full quality movie rentals–means that they aren’t that attractive for a lot of people. Certainly music lends itself far better to downloads–legal and otherwise. And the apparent impact on the recording labels has been proportionately greater as well.

But excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices.

But, at the same time, the cost of putting toner powder on a page of paper and the time associated with putting all those pages on a copier glass will no longer be a defense in a world where “If it can be copied, it will be copied” often seems to rule.

What would seem a more germane concern is whether pervasive e-books lead to pervasive trading and copying. DRM, my other beef with a lot of today’s e-books, inconveniences legitimate users as much as it retards piracy. So I think we can take that off the table a solution that’s either desirable or especially effective. Today, the economics of photocopying and the restraints that time and space put on physically giving a read book to the next reader sharply limit the amount of duplication and trading that can take place.

I’m a bit skeptical about this particular concern. From my perspective as a consumer, one of the problems that I have with e-books today is that I have to buy a $400 device and then still have to pay almost as much for the bits as for the dead tree version even though many of the costs associated with printing, distributing, and inventorying physical books are eliminated.

A lot of the dynamics associated with creating, producing, distributing, and purchasing books are considerably different than those of music than those of movies. Electronic distribution creates possibilities. Impulse purchases from the living room and ready availability of the longest, “long tail” work are just two.

That’s not to say that costs go to zero–nowhere close. And there’s a legitimate concern that buyers may naively assume that they do. An earlier post on this topic: Digital distribution isn’t free. But costs are lower–and the prices should reflect that.

An article by Edward Wyatt in the New York Times discussed how the Amazon Kindle e-book reader was stirring unease at the BookExpo America trade show.

The software application is meant for managing the production of large-scale video projects. Final Cut Server enables automatic cataloging, viewing, and annotating of video, and is available for both the
Mac and PC. It is integrated with Apple’s video-editing software, Final Cut Studio.

The product was announced a year ago, was originally supposed to ship last summer, but was delayed.

Apple’s tool for media management, Final Cut Server, is now available, the company announced Tuesday.

Final Cut Server pricing starts at $999 for one server and 10 licenses, and $1,999 for one server and unlimited licenses.

The Linux Foundation, led by Jim Zemlin, has issued a statement in favor of the Linux kernel developers’ position. It’s unclear why the kernel developers decided to speak out now, though the Linux Foundation indicates that the developers have been subjected to a steady barrage of questions on the topic for years. Apparently, they finally got sick of it.

Insisting that they have “repeatedly found them to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses, and the greater Linux ecosystem,” today the Linux kernel community has started petitioning for open-source modules and open-source drivers for the Linux kernel.

Such modules negate the openness, stability, flexibility, and maintainability of the Linux development model and shut their users off from the expertise of the Linux community.

It has been a long time coming. I wrote about closed-source device drivers for Linux back in 2002 [PDF]. Even then the idea of marrying proprietary device drivers to an open-source kernel was blasphemous to some, though it was also the only reason others were willing to engage with Linux. Some hardware companies persist in believing that their device drivers must remain closed for competitive advantage. It is unclear as to why….

commentary

Regardless, this statement from the Linux kernel developers arguably won’t change much, but at least it signals an influential community’s preferences. Will the hardware manufacturers listen?

Facebook chose a Sunday afternoon, when much of the tech blogger corps was pleasantly enjoying real life (we can hope), to start rolling out its previously announced instant-messaging client. That’s likely no coincidence: this is a major new feature for the social-networking site, and debuting it on a weekend afternoon probably ensured a smoother integration.

On the flip side, this could spell doom for those hours you whittle away on Facebook at the office all day. If your boss hasn’t blocked access to the site yet, browser-based instant messaging could be the final straw.

The new addition to Facebook likely won’t have the impact of drawing new members or “converting” people from other social networks. Where it will make a difference, however, is on the amount of time that members spend on the site, which can make a big difference for advertisers.

Facebook has earned criticism from some performance monitoring firms for unreliability, and the Techmeme set is notorious for not cutting companies a whole lot of slack–remember when Google relaunched Blogger late in 2006? After “Beacongate,” Facebook doesn’t need another PR debacle.

A Facebook employee told me in the days before the launch that it was “a big challenge” to get ready to roll out Facebook Chat to the site’s 67 million members. Because of that, Facebook has opted for a gradual rollout rather than a large-scale launch to all members at one time. The in-browser client, which lets members of the site talk to their Facebook friends who are logged in, is still not live on many Facebook accounts–mine, for example.

In that respect, the launch of Facebook Chat is much like the history of Facebook itself. The service famously started in a Harvard dorm and was limited to students with Harvard e-mail addresses before gradually rolling out to other universities, then companies, and finally the general public.

Considering the site remains the toast of the town all over Silicon Valley nearly a year after the launch of its developer platform thrust it into the spotlight, it looks like they’ve been pretty successful in spite of that caution.

And as an extra precaution, the debut version of the application is extremely light. There is no support for external IM clients yet, though the company has said it’s exploring Jabber support. For now, that means it probably won’t be pulling chat-friendly Web users away from their existing services (the AIMs, Yahoos, and Google Talks of the world) and clients like Meebo and Adium. Yet.