Much more after the link. Pocket sized, manual controls, wide-angle, decent zoom (3.8x), and a fast lens. It looks like it just might be the ultimate travel camera.Every so often a camera comes out that stands out from the rest.
The Canon S90 is one of those cameras. I've already used a prototype, and it was impressive. No one has seen production samples yet; the S90 is slated to ship starting in September 2009 to those who order it today.
The S90 beats Canon's own flagship G11 at its own game. The S90 has the same oversized sensor as the G11, but adds a faster f/2 lens, direct control rings and a bigger LCD in a smaller, lighter package for less money.
The netbook of ebook readers?The world of ebooks is about to start a new chapter with the arrival of the cheapest digital reader on the market. Asus, one of the world’s biggest consumer electronics businesses, confirmed last week that it is planning to shake up the market in the same way it did when it launched the first netbook — the low-cost alternative to the laptop.
Asus claims its ebook reader will be cleverer and more versatile than the current crop available from companies such as Sony and Amazon. It aims to unveil the device before the end of the year, according to Jerry Shen, the company’s president — and it may not be just one device, either...
Unlike current ebook readers, which take the form of a single flat screen, the Asus device has a hinged spine, like a printed book. This, in theory, enables its owner to read an ebook much like a normal book, using the touchscreen to “turn” the pages from one screen to the next. It also gives the user the option of seeing the text on one screen while browsing a web page on the other. One of the screens could also act as a virtual keypad for the device to be used like a laptop. Whereas current ebook readers have monochrome screens, the Asus would be full colour. The maker says it may also feature “speakers, a webcam and a mic for Skype”, allowing cheap phone calls over the internet.
Bring it on!
When cheap and simple is just fine:What do all of these technologies have in common?Phone: Net-based calls can be laggy, and they sometimes drop out in mid conversation. But they can also be free—even international calls—and it's easy to turn conversations into shareable MP3s. Skype now accounts for 8 percent of international calling minutes, and the service added nearly 38 million users in the second quarter of 2009, a 42 percent increase over the same period last year.
Books: Amazon's Kindle can't display complex graphics, and paper still has much higher resolution. But the device does store hundreds of titles in a slim package, ensuring that you always have access to whichever Philip K. Dick tale you're in the mood for. The Kindle is expected to generate $310 million in revenue by the end of 2009. Barron's estimates that annual sales could reach $2 billion by 2012.
Television: Its content may not be hi-def, and you're stuck watching it on a computer screen, but Hulu lets you catch recent television shows and popular movies whenever and wherever you want. For free. No wonder it has 40 million unique viewers—up from just 7 million a year ago.
Computers: On paper, netbooks might seem like crappy toys. They have almost no storage, processing power, or graphics capability. What they do have, though, is accessibility: Cheap, small, and light, they let you connect to the Internet from almost anywhere. Netbook shipments were up sevenfold in the first quarter of 2009.
Compare these qualities with those of the MP3 and the Flip, and a clear pattern emerges. The attributes that now matter most all fall under the rubric of accessibility. Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we've stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we're now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price. Is it simple to get what we want out of the technology? Is it available everywhere, all the time—or as close to that ideal as possible? And is it so cheap that we don't have to think about price? Products that benefit from the MP3 effect capitalize on one or more of these qualities. And they'll happily sacrifice power and features to do so.Read the whole thing.
Good advice found in the Bible. Who would have guessed?Deuteronomy 23:25-26 reflects the limits on altruism:
When thou comest into thy neighbor’s standing corn, then thou mayest pluck ears with thy hand; but thou shalt not move a sickle unto thy neighbor’s standing corn.
It’s O.K. to take a bit of the owner’s produce for sustenance; but to ensure that what is taken is not for commercial purposes, the taker cannot use machinery (a sickle) that would raise his marginal productivity and thus raise his output beyond what might be for immediate sustenance.
The owner does have some protection, but he is also supposed to charitable. This seems like a pretty reasonable compromise between altruism and property rights.
Believe it or not, it might be the recession:It seems the recession may be good for your health. A new paper by Stephen Bezruchka in the Canadian Medical Association Journal confirms that economic recessions in the 20th century actually led to declines in mortality. The author points to factors like increased leisure time and healthier lifestyle and eating habits.
Law school can be a bigger financial risk than many students realize:Below school No. 28 (University of Southern California), a graduate has a less than one in five probability of starting his or her career a large law firm. If 80% of law school applicants are convinced that they will make that 20% cutoff, three out of four are destined to be disappointed. With these numbers, does it really make economic sense to go to the highest-ranked school one can get into? In many cases, the answer is no.I know several of my classmates who are less than satisfied by their choice to attend law school. Unless you have a strong, compelling reason to go or can get into a top 14 school, there's a good chance that the expected value of getting a law degree will not justify its cost. Particularly in these current economic times.
An equally important question is whether to go law school at all. A ranking of 50 law schools by the percentage of students who either flunked out or are unemployed or unaccounted for nine months after graduation includes many schools in tiers 2, 3 and 4 of the 2007 U.S. News rankings. Thus law school does not guarantee lucrative, or even gainful, employment. Moreover, overreliance on the U.S. News rankings can be damaging to a law student's financial health.
The MiFi is great for what it does (it's a portable Wi-Fi router that gives a 3G cellular Internet connection to anything that links to it) -- allowing laptops, iPod Touches or anything else with Wi-Fi to link to it and surf the web from anywhere. Still, unless you have a strong need for mobile data connection for your laptop, the post recommends simply buying an iPhone instead.
Sign me up!The Wall Street Journal reports that four of the major movie studios are in discussions with online video giant YouTube to sell streaming movie rentals, or possibly offer some movies free, with advertising. While the deals are in negotiation and far from finished, rental prices are said to be priced at about $4 per flick. Would you pay, or expose yourself to ads, to stream commercial films via YouTube, whether on your PC or via a home media center? [via Wired.com Epicenter]
I know a few law students who do not bring laptops to class for this very reason. In my own experience, one of the highest grades I got in law school was in a summer class I took where I only used my Alphasmart Neo for taking notes instead of bringing my laptop to class. It forced me to focus on the topic at hand by eliminating potential potential distractions. Worked like a charm!Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain may be in trouble.
People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found...
...after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.
"They're suckers for irrelevancy," said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Everything distracts them."
James Kendrick:Google has been skirting around the e-book world for years, starting with the book scanning project a while back. That project was not without controversy, and its fruits recently formed a partnership with Sony to provide a million books to the Sony e-book store. Now comes word that Google has partnered with British e-book retailer COOLERBOOKS to enter the game directly.COOLERBOOKS is the online store for British company Interead, and they already have a line of e-book readers for $249. The partnership gives Google a ready market, particularly outside the U.S. The COOL-ER reader looks to be a decent device, and according to the web site over 750,000 titles are available on the COOLERBOOKS site. Owners of the reader get a 25% discount on e-book purchases.
Google has the clout to give Amazon and Barnes & Noble a run for their e-book money. Game on.
LAPTOP's Netbook Buyer's Guide Video from LAPTOP Magazine on Vimeo.
I'm still happy with my Asus Eee 901, but agree with the guy in the video that 10-inch models are probably better for most people. (I can touch-type on my netbook's keyboard, but it is tiny!) I also think that most people should go for a netbook with a six-cell battery. I can often squeeze over 7 hours out of my netbook and it's wonderful not having to worry about plugging it when I'm on the go or in class. I also have an external monitor and keyboard I can hook it up to in my office at school -- effectively turning it into a low-powered desktop.
If your primary use of a computer is surfing the web or running word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation programs, a netbook is probably more than enough computer for you. Given their size, weight, battery life, and price -- it's no wonder these little guys are selling like hotcakes.
"In war-torn Chad, Niger, and Sierra Leone, adult literacy rates still hover under 30 percent, and children have a better chance of dying before age one than they have of graduating from high school."-- From Chapter 1 of Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations, by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel
A reading list for Greg Mankiw's freshman seminar at Harvard. (Books by GMU profs in bold.)(HT Don Boudreaux)
iPhone/iPod touch only: Not everyone can afford to stay in four star hotels when traveling, which is why hostels are a great lodging option. Hostel Hero helps you find and book hostels in 150 countries straight from your iPhone or iPod touch.The best part about it is that you can get it for free on iTunes.Each hostel comes with its own description (which is available in five different languages) and photos. You can also use the application's built-in Google Maps integration to help pinpoint the location of said hostel. Clicking on a select hostel offers you more details about the facilities including the above-mentioned photos and maps. More practically, the application lets you save and view the details offline, which will no doubt come in handy for more off-the-beaten-path type vacations.
To book a hostel, select the "make a booking" tab, then scroll through and choose your destination country and then city. Once you narrow down a hostel, book your stay using the app. Fair warning: To do so requires a 10 percent deposit and a booking fee to be paid in Euros, U.S. dollars or pounds. The remaining balance is paid at the hostel.
The average American spends about one hour at meals, and about the same time grazing — eating as a secondary activity to something else (very often leisure). But how does this differ across the population? Those whose time is valuable — who have a high wage — have an incentive to multi-task, to graze rather than devote their full time to meals.
Moreover, since setting up meals takes time (has fixed costs), higher-wage people have an incentive to engage in more incidents of grazing and have relatively fewer meals. This simple bit of economics describes what we observe in detailed data from the American Time Use Survey. It’s another illustration of how economic thinking can predict and explain phenomena that, at first blush, would hardly seem to be economic.
With the lack of monthly service fees and increasing encroachments into handheld gaming, maybe so...The iPod Touch might be hiding in the shadow of its big brother, the iPhone — both in volume, and revenue — but is it possible that the Touch is more disruptive than its cellular sibling?...The iPod Touch is a lightweight, highly portable music and video player, communications and gaming platform and, if rumors are to be believed, its next generation will include a digital camera for stills and video — and maybe even VoIP, all over its Wi-Fi connection. That’s a lot of power from a $229 device. It’s that easy access to the Internet through a Wi-Fi connection that makes the device so interesting...
The iPhone, of course, is also part of this platform, which is why Apple frequently combines the sales numbers of the two products. At last count, there were 45 million devices capable of running this “Wi-Fi platform” worldwide — also known as the sum of iPod Touch and iPhone sales. By comparison, Sony has sold 58 million PSPs, and Nintendo has sold 108 million of its DS handheld gaming device since 2004 — both gadgets have Wi-Fi, but not nearly the interactivity and multi-functionality that the Touch has.
It’s curious that the iPhone gets so much of the coverage, while the iPod Touch gets second shrift. The iPhone can make calls, but with free Wi-Fi networks popping up everywhere thanks to deals with ISPs — plus campus-wide Wi-Fi networks at most colleges across the U.S. — the iPod Touch is fast becoming the WiFi-enabled mobile device to beat.
(HT Chris Meadows)
Bring it on!...a growing number of technologists and video artists want to see Web video adopt the kind of open standards that fueled the growth of the Web at large. HTML, the markup language that describes Web pages; JavaScript, the programming language that allows forms, graphics, and various special effects to be added to them; JPEG, the standard for images--all these building blocks of the Web can be used by anyone, without paying fees or asking permission. This openness was indispensable to the creation and then the explosion of blogs, search engines, social networks, and more.A similar transformation of video would not just allow trouble-free playback of any video you might encounter. It would also mean that any innovation, such as a new way to search, would apply to all videos, allowing new technologies to spread more rapidly. And it would make it far easier to mix videos together and create Web links to specific moments in different videos, just as if they were words and sentences plucked from disparate online text sources: imagine linking part of a politician's speech to a contradictory utterance years earlier. "In 1993 people thought AOL's newsrooms were mind-blowing, because that's all they were exposed to," says Dean Jansen, outreach director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a nonprofit group that is developing an open-source video player called Miro. "Now they can write their own blogs and find and read hundreds of thousands of news sources and blogs, from all over the Internet. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this is the scale of change that would become possible if video [technologies] were totally free online, like text and images."
