Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Friday, June 15, 2007

Sigma SD14 reviewed: promising, but not quite there

Augustine: example of great tech that missed the consumer/user boat...

from Engadget by Nilay Patel

We've been hearing about Sigma's SD14 14.1-megapixel DSLR with that nifty Foveon 3-layer image sensor since last year, but it looks like all the hype was just that: Popular Photography got their hands on a review unit and wasn't too impressed. Although the cam earned high marks for color accuracy and image quality, the reviewers didn't see the full potential of the novel image sensor -- JPEG shots were rated on par with the 8-megapixel Canon Digital Rebel XT, while RAW images actually had less detail in them than shots taken by the 10-megapixel Nikon D80. The reviewers also knocked the slow image processor, which they found produced blocky JPEG images at higher ISOs and took 8-10 seconds to clear its buffer after shooting just six pictures in burst mode. Although the Foveon sensor is promising, the review concludes that you're probably better off spending your $1,600 elsewhere -- not exactly a ringing endorsement of the "fundamentally better technology" Sigma and Foveon promised. Read - Sigma SD14 review Read - Foveon X3 sensor review

baby monitor swipes NASA shuttle feed

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Looks like Summer Infant has a whole lot of explaining to do after one of its baby monitors has reportedly been able to "pick up black-and-white video from inside the space shuttle Atlantis." A Chicago-based mother probably had uncomfortable flashbacks to Signs after her newly purchased monitoring system chose to broadcast video of the mission right on the screen, but a NASA spokeswoman has already deflated hope that it was somehow coming directly from the shuttle. Apparently, a live feed is also available on NASA's website, which is leading investigators to focus on more earthly origins -- the mom, however, will probably just cancel her cable and keep on watching intently "to see what happens next." Thu Jun 14, 4:52 PM ET

PALATINE, Ill. - An elementary school science teacher in this Chicago suburb doesn't have to turn on the news for an update on NASA's space mission. She just turns on her video baby monitor. black-and-white video from inside the space shuttle Atlantis. The other still lets her keep an eye on her baby.

"Whoever has a baby monitor knows what you'll usually see," Meilinger said. "No one would ever expect this."

Live video of the mission is available on NASA's Web site, so it's possible the monitor is picking up a signal from somewhere.

"It's not coming straight from the shuttle," NASA spokeswoman Brandi Dean said. "People here think this is very interesting and you don't hear of it often — if at all."

Meilinger silenced disbelieving co-workers by bringing in a video of the monitor to show her class on Tuesday, her students' last day of school. At home, 3-month-old Jack and 2-year-old Rachel don't quite understand what their parents are watching.

"I've been addicted to it and keep waiting to see what's next," Meilinger said.

Summer Infant, the monitor's manufacturer, is investigating what could be causing the transmission, communications director Cindy Barlow said. She said she's never heard of anything similar happening.

"Not even close," she said. "Gotta love technology."

uuhhh... should the NBA hire him?

iPod blamed for stealing the thunder from contemporary art

from Engadget by Darren Murph

If you've been yearning for controversy, why not meet Mr. David Hockney? Commonly know as "Britain's best-loved living painter," Hockney has suggested that the proliferation of the iPod has been a primary contributor to the recent "fallow period of painting." He insists that today's society is "all about sound," and even mentions that people are turning off their eyes and ignoring contemporary art whilst "plugging their ears." Put simply, he believes the modern "decline in visual awareness" rests heavily on Apple's own cash cow, and further stirred the pot by insinuating that it led to "badly dressed people" who cared not about lines nor mass. As expected, a spokeswoman for Apple Australia refuted the claims, and while we certainly have seen no shortage of brilliant creations since the iPod explosion, there's always two sides to the canvas.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Taxes: Pay your estimated taxes online

from Lifehacker by Gina Trapani

The June 15th tax deadline looms, which means freelancers, sole proprietors and other misc income-making individuals and small businesses have an estimated quarterly tax payment to make. Up until now estimated tax payments were one of the last things that I wrote a dead tree paper check for; but it turns out I was living in 2001. The US Department of Treasury offers EFTPS, an online payment system that takes electronic estimated tax payments. The catch is you have to enroll online and wait up to 15 days to get your PIN number via snail mail, so it's already too late for this payment deadline. Also, not sure about other states, but California's Franchise Tax Board also offers online payment, too.

EFTPS Onlne Franchise Tax Board (CA)

Shoestring opportunity

Augustine: now that there is SO much content, filters and trusted sources become ever more important to help users cut through the cr*p to get to the good stuff (i.e. the stuff that is relevant, usefu, or interesting to the individual user); nothing else matters. from Seth's Blog by Seth Godin

TV Guide was purchased for more than $3 billion, back when a billion dollars was a lot of money. At one point, it was worth more than ABC or NBC.

CMP, like many other trade magazine publishers, is busy consolidating, laying people off and closing magazines as they try to move to digital.

Put those two facts together and there's an opportunity. In fact, a bunch of them.

Who is curating YouTube? Who's the TV Guide of a world with a million channels?

We don't need someone to point us to goofy edited scary car ads. What we need are tiny, specialized sites that obsess about specific industries. Is there a good video every day about how to do better real estate sales? If there isn't, there soon will be. Or for heart surgeons?

For every segment where there is currently a trade magazine, I believe there's an opportunity to build a blog-like, woot-like, ad supported page that finds the good stuff. Jeff Jarvis, who ironically used to work at TV Guide, is already doing this with politics.

Like most opportunities, this one will be obvious later. And then it'll be too late for most of us to get in.

Stealing $3 billion from Wal-Mart

from Blogging Stocks by Peter Cohan

Filed under: Wal-Mart (WMT)

Thieves have stolen $3 billion worth of stuff from Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) in the last year, according to the AP. That's enough to make a pretty good size company but it represents less than 1% of its $348.6 billion worth of sales in the last year.

It turns out that Wal-Mart is not the only one suffering from the problem. Theft cost retailers $41.6 billion in 2006, according to a joint study released Tuesday by the National Retail Federation and the University of Florida. The study found that the theft rate as a percentage of sales rose to 1.61% of sales in 2006 from 1.60% in 2005. So at 0.9%, Wal-Mart is relatively tough to steal from.

Interestingly, it turns out that most retail "slippage" comes from employees. Specifically, employees stole about 47% of the dollars and customers swiped about 32%. Administrative errors accounted for 14%, supplier fraud accounts for 4%, and the remaining 3% is unaccounted for.

Continue reading Stealing $3 billion from Wal-Mart

Kodak High Sensitivity Image Sensor Tech

from News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

Kodak Image Sensor Solutions has today announced a new Color Filter Array (CFA) layout (and image processing path) as an alternative to the widely used Bayer pattern which should provide higher sensitivity. This new layout features one 'panchromatic pixel' (monochrome) to every colored pixel (red, green or blue) and there are three proposed layouts. Kodak ISS are presenting this as a technology solution which can be applied to any size, megapixel count or type (CCD / CMOS) of sensor. Kodak claim a one to two stop improvement in sensitivity, the tradeoff is of course color resolution which is effectively a quarter of the traditional Bayer pattern. This interesting development will of course only be proven when we see it actually implemented and we can compare it to traditional Bayer.

How To: Track your Flickr page views with Statr

from Lifehacker

Ever wondered how many people are perusing your Flickr photos? Statr is a web-based application that will track the amount of page views your Flickr account receives.

Statr for Flickr allows you to track and plot page views statistics for your Flickr account. Graphs are automatically updated on a daily basis and can be linked from external websites.

Getting started with Statr is a breeze -- all you need to do is grant Statr read access to your images. It takes Statr a day or so to collect data before it will begin displaying your page views. Unfortunately, Statr is a little simplistic and only displays page views. It doesn't give you any information about uniqueness of visitors, visitor frequency, visitor location, etc. If you're proud of your Flickr traffic, Statr also generates some in-line HTML so you can showoff your Flickr traffic graph.

Statr for Flickr [LinuxInside.org]

Researchers use magnetic fields to manipulate light

from Engadget by Darren Murph

We've seen magnetics used in everything from closet improvements to insomnia treatments, but researchers at the University of Alberta and the United States Naval Research Laboratory have found that "by manipulating electron spin using magnetic fields, they can turn off and on light that's being guided through metals." By looking deeper into the fields of plasmonics and spintronics, the gurus have discovered that this on-off light switch could be used for tasks such as routing infrared light in optical communications or processing radio signals in cell phones. Additionally, this system could potentially decrease power requirements for the devices it invades, and while a finalized product isn't quite ready, the team is already anxious to "build devices that can act as switches in a chip."

River Glow project detects pollution with style

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

We've seen pigeons that monitor pollution and cement that eats pollution, but for eye-catchiness and do-goodedness, it's tough to beat Soo-in Yang and David Benjamin's River Glow project, which provides a light show as it keeps an eye on water quality. Built with a budget of $1,000, the current bathtub-bound prototype system consists of an LED connected to uncoated fiber optic strands, which gets triggered when the pH sensor detects changes in water quality. What's more, the whole thing's apparently powered by a single AA battery, which is recharged using floating strips of thin film photovoltaics. Presumably, that'd be scaled up before it gets let loose in some larger waterways (as seen above), although it's not clear when or if that'll happen. [Via Inhabitat]

Samsung's 70-inch LED-backlit LCD television now on sale

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Samsung's gettin' busy this morning in Korea with the launch of their 70-inch Full HD LCD television. Not only is it the world's largest commercially available LCD, this 1080p pup also brings a 120Hz refresh along with Samsung's local dimming LED backlighting solution for a reported 500,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio... for whatever that measurement's worth. The LN70F91BD is another ACAP packer featuring 3x HDMI 1.3 terminals and a USB 2.0 jack for purposes unknown. Available in S.Korea only at the moment with worldwide sales starting in the second half of the year. Only ₩59,000,000 for the privilege which translates to about $63k or €48k -- chump-change for culturally ambiguous superstars. [Via AVING]

The 3D Real/Virtual World Hybrid: How Far Away?

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

How long will it be until we can stroll through the streets in a virtual world that is identical to our own? Given the state of a number of technologies, not very long. Over the last couple of years we’ve seen Microsoft Street Side and Virtual Earth as well as similar efforts from Google. But different technologies are now being deployed that are even more interesting that the results achieved from large companies taking and processing massive numbers of photos into now-standard 3D views.

Two standouts are Microsoft’s Photosynth Project and newcomer Everyscape, which Brady Forest wrote about today on O’Reilly Radar.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Sanyo LP-XL50 projector touts uber-short throw

from Engadget by Darren Murph

For those who picked up Sanyo's LP-XL40 wide-angle projector for its sensational short-range capabilities, we hope your wallet's prepared for an upgrade. The firm's newest LP-XL50 steps it way up by touting the ability to shoot an 80-inch image onto a screen with just 8-centimeters of space between the lens and the wall. Moreover, you can still squeeze out marginally smaller images from even closer ranges thanks to its newfangled optical engine. Specs wise, you'll find a 1,024 x 768 native resolution, 275-watt UHP1 lamp, 2,000 lumens, "blackboard mode" for mounting just above a classroom board, theft deterrent system to foul up those mischievous kids, a pair of VGA inputs, component, S-Video, and composite connectors, and a built-in two-watt speaker to boot. Unfortunately, it seems that you'll be waiting 'til late December to throw down your ¥600,000 ($4,931), but click on through for a few more looks for the time being. [Via AkihabaraNews, images courtesy of Impress]

Continue reading Sanyo LP-XL50 projector touts uber-short throw

GigaOM Top 10 Most Popular MMOs

from GigaOM by Blake Snow

WoW The attention surrounding MMOs (massively multiplayer online worlds) has never been greater. But it’s not just role playing games along for the ride; non-game, avatar-driven virtual communities are just as popular, if not by more, and we’re not just talking Second Life here.

So in an effort to cut through the hype and glean some context, here are the most popular MMOs in terms of active users or subscribers, based on publicly available data. These titles may or may not be games, but the medium has expanded far beyond Tolkienesque fantasy worlds. They all are Mac-friendly/Web-based with exception of Guild Wars.

1. World of Warcraft, released 2004 - 8.5 million subscribers. While Habbo is giving Blizzard a run, the numbers generally support WoW as the biggest MMO in the world. Important qualification, though: only 4 million are based in the West and monthly subscribers, while its 4 million Chinese players only pay roughly 4 cents an hour to play it in Internet cafes.

2. Habbo Hotel, released 2000 - 7.5 million active users. The Finland-based “social game” MMO popular with teens and growing fast. Look out, Horde!

3. RuneScape, released 2001 - 5 million active users. A Java-based MMORPG operated by Jagex Ltd. with over nine million active free accounts. Boasts one million paying customers. Fancy that.

4. Club Penguin, released 2006 - 4 million active users. MMO for the kiddies developed by New Horizon Interactive. The game shares similarities with other social environments like Habbo Hotel.

5. Webkinz, released 2005 - 3.8 million active users. Here’s a novel idea: create beanie baby like stuffed animals, assign them a unique ID, then create an MMO portal in which kids can spend even more time using your product. When kids graduate from Club Penguin, they go to Webkinz (or so I’m told.)

6. Gaia Online, released 2003 - 2 million active users. Not quite an MMO, not quite a social site, but founder Derek Liu has openly stated the networks desire to focus on social gaming. Forums make up 30% of the current site activity.

7. Guild Wars, released 2005 - 2 million active users. Another MMORPG made by the popular NCsoft out of South Korea. No Mac love here, but a lot of active users.

8. Puzzle Pirates, released 2003 - 1.5 million active users. Published by Ubisoft and developed by indy king Three Rings, Puzzle Pirates merges casual games with a rising interest in pirate culture. Puffy shirt aside, it’s working like a charm.

9. Lineage I/II, released 1998 - 1 million subscribers. Published by South Koreas NCsoft, Lineage was once the most popular MMO of its day. At one point total active users peaked at 3 million. A Western release in 2002 mostly fizzled.

10. Second Life, released 2003 - 500,000 active users. No introduction needed here. Created by Linden Labs, this virtual world features a rabid fan base, inflated numbers, a high influx of corporate doppelgangers, and lots of digital genitals. First life optional.

Other popular MMOs are sure to exist, particularly new-comers and non-localized Asian games that are sure to grow. Also, this list reflects popularity alone, not necessarily revenue models, though World of Warcraft is performing well on both counts.

For all intents and purposes, the most popular MMOs represent an estimated 50-75% of the total MMO market (30-60 million active users.) Is that enough attention to justify MMO’s recent surge of attention? Maybe not all of the hype, but definitely a large portion of it. And who wouldn’t want a piece of Blizzard’s reoccurring pie or another revenue model with a similar install base?

Interestingly, however, it’s apparent that no single business model is winning out. Subscriptions work well for MMORPG games like WoW that are more akin to crack cocaine than mere entertainment. But what about other non-game MMOs? How will companies bank on consumer attention in those areas? One thing’s for certain: with all the popularity surrounding MMOs several new business models are sure to flourish in the coming years, as it’s not just about games anymore.

*Of Western origin or with a localized presence here. “Active users” based on most recent monthly log-in figures when available. Subscriber numbers are not necessarily a reflection of active users. Figures compiled from Wikipedia (excluding, to the best of my knowledge, free trials, beta users, and web visitors without accounts.) Virtual Worlds News also referenced; Habbo figures taken from company spokeswoman, Second Life figures from most recent published stats. Special attention was given to notable MMOs in terms of where they stack up when looking at the numbers in addition to their popularity and/or high profile (i.e. Second Life.) Amendments and additions welcome.

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