Still pictures? That’s so 20th century. Camera makers must figure by now that if they don’t have high-definition video, they don’t have squat, and Canon’s latest models are no exception. Canon added to the pile of pre-PMA 2010 announcements on Monday with its newest low-end SLR, the EOS Rebel T2i. This camera has a new 18-megapixel sensor, […]
Still photos? That’s so 20th century.
Camera makers must figure by now that if they don’t have high-definition video, they don’t have squat, and Canon’s latest models are no exception.
Canon added to the pile of pre-PMA 2010 announcements on Monday with its newest low-end SLR, the EOS Rebel T2i. This camera has a new 18-megapixel sensor, a Digic 4 processor, and can shoot full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) at 30fps. It can also shoot standard-def, 640 x 480 video at 60fps, or blast out full-size 18 megapixel stills at 3.7fps.
It’ll cost $800 for the body only, or as a kit with Canon’s popular, low-end EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens for $900.
The press release doesn’t say the size of the T2i’s image sensor but it’s almost certainly the APS-C standard used in previous Rebels, or 22.2 x 14.8mm.
The T2i follows on the heels of last year’s not-so-surprising hit camera, the Canon 5D Mark II, which was one of the first single-lens-reflex cameras to shoot HD video, following the pioneering Nikon D90.
But the real power feature of the 5D Mark II was its low-light sensitivity, which let you take decent pictures in low light by dialing the ISO up as high as 64,000. While the T2i doesn’t go quite that high — and the quality of its images at high ISO levels remains to be seen — it does support ISO settings up to 12,800.
Not in the market for a big-ass SLR? Canon’s also got a handful of pocket cameras that shoot HD video, even though these only do 720p: the PowerShot SX210 IS, PowerShot SD3500 IS, and PowerShot SD1400 IS. (A fourth model, the SD1300 IS, doesn’t shoot HD video.)
The $350 Canon PowerShot SX210 sports a 14x optical zoom lens that goes from 28mm (equivalent) at the wide end to 392mm equivalent.
The $330 PowerShot SD3500 has a more modest 5x zoom range but starts at a very wide 24mm equivalent, and its 3.5-inch LCD is more massive than most.
Both cameras have 14.1-megapixel image sensors.
The SX210 and T2i are scheduled to be available in March, and the others in February.
Researchers at MIT have demonstrated the first laser that uses the element germanium. The laser, which operates at room temperature, could prove to be an important step toward personal chips that move data using light instead of electricity, state the researchers. “This is a very important breakthrough, one I would say that has the highest possible significance […]
Researchers at MIT have demonstrated the first laser that uses the element germanium.
The laser, which operates at room temperature, could prove to be an important step toward personal chips that move data using light instead of electricity, state the researchers.
“This is a very important breakthrough, one I would say that has the highest possible significance in the field,” says Eli Yablonovitch, a professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department of the University of California, Berkeley who was not involved in the research told Wired.com. “It will greatly reduce the cost of communications and make for faster chips.”
Even as processors become more powerful, they’re running into a communications barrier: Just moving data between different parts of the chip takes too long. Also, higher bandwidth connections are needed to send data to memory. Traditional copper connections are becoming impractical because they consume too much power to transport data at the increasingly higher rates needed by next-generation chips. Copper also generates excessive heat, and that imposes other design limits because engineers need to find ways of dissipating the heat.
Transmitting data with lasers, which can concentrate light into a narrow, powerful beam, could be a cheaper and more power efficient substitute. The idea, known as photonic computing, has become one of the hottest areas of personal research.
“The laser is just totally new physics,” states Lionel Kimerling, an MIT professor whose Electronic Materials Research Group developed the germanium laser.
While lasers are attractive, the materials that are used in lasers currently — such as gallium arsenide — can be difficult to integrate into fabs.
That’s given birth to “external lasers,” says Yablonovitch. Lasers have to be constructed separately and grafted on to the chips, instead of directly building them on the same silicon that holds the chips’ circuits. This reduces the efficiency and increases the cost.
A germanium laser solves that problem, because it could in principle be built alongside the rest of the chip, using similar processes and in the same factory.
“It’s going to take a few years to learn how to integrate this type of laser into a standard silicon process,” states Yablonovitch. “But once we know that, we have the ability to have silicon communication chips that have internal lasers.”
Eventually, MIT researchers believe germanium lasers could be used not just for communications, but for the logic elements of the chips too — helping to build computers that perform calculations using light instead of electricity.
But University of California, Berkeley’s Yablonovitch says it is unlikely that light will replace electricity entirely. “I think we’ll be using light in conjunction with electronic logic circuits,” he says. “Light grants internal communications much more efficiently, but the logic elements themselves are apt to remain driven by electricity.”
iPhone App Devs Not Allowed to Use Geolocation Just for Ads Apple has posted a news bulletin for iPhone developers, informing them they may not use the phone’s geolocation features primarily for delivering targeted ads. What that means is if you’re playing a game that doesn’t use geolocation for gameplay, and all it’s doing is tracking your location to serve location-based ads, it’ll get rejected. (Many media […]
Apple has posted a news bulletin for iPhone developers, informing them they may not use the phone’s geolocation features primarily for delivering targeted ads.
What that means is if you’re playing a game that doesn’t use geolocation for gameplay, and all it’s doing is tracking your location to serve location-based ads, it’ll get rejected. (Many media outlets have reported that Apple has banned location-based ads altogether, which isn’t the case.)
The Core Location framework grants you to build applications which know where your users are and can deliver information based on their location, such as local weather, nearby restaurants, ATMs, and other location-based information.
If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.
Many apps currently serve location-based ads through AdMob, an advertising firm recently acquired by Google. Apple’s new rule implies apps using AdMob ads will get rejected if geolocation is not part of the software’s functionality.
In a statement provided to Wired.com, an Apple spokeswoman said the move was for the benefit of the consumer.
“The Core Location framework grants developers to deliver information to customers based on their location,” an Apple spokeswoman said. “This should be done with the customer’s permission and for a purpose that is directly beneficial to the customer.”
Many, however, have been quick to conclude that the regulation is a move for Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising company Apple purchased in January, to gain a leg up in mobile advertising against Google’s recently acquired mobile ad firm AdMob. It’s conceivable that Apple could indeed be improving the mobile ad experience for customers, the Core Location regulation could also be an effort to deter developers from serving ads with AdMob.
My friend Matt Buchanan of Gizmodo argues, “It’s not to protect you.”
“It’s not too much of a stretch to see Apple’s ad platform in the future being the ideal way to deliver ads in apps, which might offer perks like, state, location-based targeted advertising, or more dynamic ads than you can do now on an iPhone,” Buchanan writes. “It’s also not crazy to think Apple’s way is going to be the only way to get some of those features, like location-based ads.”
Updated 12:30 p.m. PDT with a statement from Apple.
If you’ve been looking for a case mod that’ll strike fear into all the other personal you come across, well, look no further. But be careful, this guy gets cranky when he needs to defrag.
A lot of us subject our computers to quite a bit of abuse. We overcrowd their hard drives and overclock their processors. We bang on their keyboards. We smudge their screens. If you want a case mod that’ll keep you in line, this one, taking the form of Kratos, the main character from the God of War game series, will do just that.
With Kratos’s unflinching stare burning a hole in the side of your head, you’re sure to always stay on task and treat your machine with respect. Or he’ll have your typing fingers. [Engadget]
Curious. Very curious. Eric Schmidt, head Googler, just Tweeted about his excitement for tomorrow’s Superbowl. But he’s not almost as pumped for the gridiron action as he is for a mystery commercial running during the third quarter. Here’s what he had to say:
Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone stated “Hell has indeed frozen over.”)
Well, color us intrigued. What exactly will Google be advertising, if it’s even a Google advertisement to begin with? A minimalist Nexus One spot? A rehashing of Apple’s famous 1984 ad? If you’ve any guesses, let’s hear ‘em in the comments. [Eric Schmidt]
Update: BusinessInsider spotted a blog post by search guru John Battelle which suggests tomorrow’s ad will be this one, entitled “Parisian Love”:
Sure, it’s sweet and all, but really? That’s it? Not to mention that the idea of running off to France to live a life of truffles and Truffaut and true love might not exactly resonate with the segment of our nation that will be tuned in tomorrow.
Sony wants to make an iPad clone, according to the company’s CFO Nobuyuki Oneda. Talking at a press conference in Tokyo, Oneda said of the iPad “That is a market we are also very interested in. We’re confident we have the skills to create a product.” It’s certainly no surprise that Apple’s long-expected announcement last […]
Sony wants to make an iPad clone, according to the company’s CFO Nobuyuki Oneda. Speaking at a press conference in Tokyo, Oneda stated of the iPad “That is a market we’re also very interested in. We are confident we’ve the skills to create a product.”
It’s certainly no surprise that Apple’s long-expected announcement last week would spur a slew of copycat designs — one of the trends at this year’s CES, which came *before* the iPad event, there were plenty of iSlate announcements, notably from Dell and also Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer (nice guess on the name by the way, guys).
Sony is one of the companies that could pull it off, too, with expertise in making well-built, tiny and great-looking hardware, even though it will be playing catchup, as Oneda adds “Time-wise we are a tiny behind the iPad but it’s a space we would like to be an active player in.”
The problem is the OS in general, and the app store in particular. Sony’s plan is to distribute content from an online store that will work with this tablet device as well as its PCs, TVs and Walkmans. But we suspect that the thing that has kept the tablet in Apple’s secret laboratories for so long isn’t the hardware (it is, after all, little more than a screen), or even the availability of content, but the software. Specifically, an OS designed to be free of the complexity of the modern Mac or Personal computer, to do just one thing at a time and to be very easy to use.
If this sounds like something that might take more than a few months to make, it is. That’s why we expect the upcoming tidal wave of tablets to be little more than multi-touch PCs with a jazzed up interface. In short, they’ll be a lot like a giant Nexus phone.
Like the Virgin Mary before it, an impression of a Nintendo DSi appeared on this piece of toast. Now it just needs a salami screen protector and a vegetable stylus and this mouthwatering gadget will be complete. [Tiny Cartridge]
A new app invites you to command your iPhone in the same way that Captain Kirk addressed the Enterprise’s personal. Siri, an artificial intelligence-based voice-recognition startup, launched an iPhone app incorporating its technology on Friday. With the app running, you can address requests to your phone verbally, asking it things like, “Will it rain this day?” or […]
A new app invites you to command your iPhone in the same way that Captain Kirk addressed the Enterprise’s computer.
Siri's visual interface displays a transcription of what you say, then hands the data off to an appropriate web service or search engine.
Siri, an artificial intelligence-based voice-recognition startup, launched an iPhone app incorporating its technology on Friday. With the app running, you can address requests to your phone verbally, asking it things like, “Will it rain this day?” or “Where is a good place for pizza nearby?” and “I’d like a table for two at Il Fornaio tomorrow night at 7.” The Siri app parses the sound, interprets the request, and hands it off to an appropriate web service, such as OpenTable, Yelp, CitySearch, and so on. It displays the results onscreen as it goes, giving you a opportunity to correct or adjust your request via onscreen taps.
It’s the most sophisticated voice recognition to appear on a smartphone yet. While Google’s Nexus One offers voice transcription abilities — so you can speak to enter text into a web form, for instance — the Nexus One doesn’t actually interpret what you’re saying.
The voice recognition and interpretation capabilities built into Siri have their origins in artificial intelligence research at SRI, a legendary Silicon Valley R&D lab that was also the birthplace of the mouse and of the graphical user interface. Spun out of SRI in 2007, Siri garnered a lot of attention for its ambitious plans to develop a virtual personal assistant. Actually bringing the product to market has taken quite a bit longer than expected.
In a demo shown to Wired.com, Siri responded swiftly to spoken requests, answering questions about restaurants, directions and the weather with relative ease. It’s well-integrated with about 20 different web information services, and Siri representatives say that their application programming interface will allow many others to connect in the future.
From our initial testing on an iPhone 3GS, the app was zippy and smooth. Siri understood broad requests like “Find Chinese food nearby” and more specific ones like “Find Nearest Chase bank.” Impressive, and much more efficient than searching for businesses in the Yelp iPhone app.
The Siri app is free, and the company says it has no plans to charge end-users; the goal is to make money from referring customers to services via affiliate fees.
Siri is available for download in the iTunes App Store. It requires an iPhone 3GS, because it relies on that phone’s faster processing power, but Siri representatives state a version compatible with the older iPhone 3G is in the works.
Do you know what type of organization that would deny you a fax—by sending you back another fax—to tell you the first fax you sent was upside down?
If you guessed the US Patent & Trademark Office, you probably work at the US Patent & Trade Office, or deal with them regularly. The relevant text is:
The faxed submission was received upside down. We’re unable to continue processing these images.
So we’ve a few assumptions we can make about the setup over at the USPTO. They either still take manual faxes, as in stuff prints out in reams of paper over in the bowels of some bleak office structure, or they take faxes digitally and don’t have the expertise to use an image rotation program to rotate the damn image so it’s right-side-up. Either way, it’s hard to think of a situation that reflects worse on the people who are supposed to be judging our society’s technological advancements based on merit. [BNET]
Frustrated after seeing his father try to make a replacement automobile key without the ID code, Steve Randall and Ted Schwarzkopf created the Electronic Key Impressioner. If it works, it could be great news for locksmiths. And maybe thieves too.
The Electronic Key Impressioner plugs into the car keyhole and, after aligning it properly, it connects with a computer via USB, sucking up the code after you choose the vehicle type you’re trying to crack. For now, it only work for Fords.
The key cloner will only be sold to authorized locksmiths. Randall states that their device will have to connect to the World wide web to work, so if it falls into the wrong hands, it could be deactivated remotely. Sadly, if history has told us anything, is that no matter how secure you think your system is, there will always be people capable of cracking it. [Popular Mechanics]
If you’ve been looking for a case mod that’ll strike fear into all the other personal you come across, well, look no further. But be careful, this guy gets cranky when he needs to defrag.
Frustrated after seeing his father try to make a replacement automobile key without the ID code, Steve Randall and Ted Schwarzkopf created the 
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