Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Do you need a serious digital camera? It is only a prototype, but Fuji has a nifty 20.8 megapixel back for your medium format camera. A professional photographer friend sent this link noting that if it works as well as it should and costs less than $20,000, he will buy several. Moving to the real world the new four thirds standard should fit nicely between point and shoot cameras and the high end exotica. (the naming is bizarre -- the aspect ratio of the imaging chip is 1.333 and the diagonal measurement is about an inch) While it looks impressive and offers the change for lower priced high quality optics, I have a significant investment in Nikkor 35mm lenses. I'm waiting for a reasonable full field digital 35mm camera body that I can afford. Perhaps in a year or two... 5:38:28 PM     It is amusing watching the WiFi announcements - some of them seem without clue. Imagine sitting down at a McDonald's and surfing with uncomfortable chairs (much has been written on making ergonomics undesirable to rotate customers), screaming kids and no powerstrips to go past the 1 hour "free" surfing before you pay. I have been visiting WiFi hotspots for nearly a year and would claim that the McDonald's announcement is not different from the old argument of getting eyeballs - someone is trying to show a large number of hotspots, even if it doesn't make sense. To make something work you need to supply a comfortable area to work an expectation that the customer can loiter long enough to work power outlets if people are to be around for much more than an hour (which begs the question - why not ethernet plugs?) easy access and billing proceedures (the best is unbilled dhcp ... many of the wireless access providers require the user to go through loops to get a low quality experience for which they are charged) unadulterated net Most of the fee based schemes I've seen are lacking. The best places seem to be those that are provided as a service for the consumer rather than another way to squeeze nickels. Think pay toilets vs clean restrooms for patrons. There is a danger of giving consumers a bad experience with WiFi and loosing your main business to businesses that offer good WiFi. These people should also try to understand why so many people who have WiFi equiped laptops are not using the for pay hotspot services. McDonald's needs to be worring about rebuilding their business by focusing on what is broken. They seem to be a very poor match for this. I am a strong believer in wireless net, but I'm also realistic enough to note that the current boom may be just that - a boom with a bust (for most of the companies) on the other side. The winners have to understand how and why customers will use this. The average freenet seems to have much more sense than the average $20 million startup. 10:28:45 AM     The science of networks - an interview with Duncan Watts of Columbia. People have a local view of the world. I have my friends, and everyone else is "out there" somewhere-I don't know about them or care about them and certainly can't affect them. The science of networks is the antithesis of that world view. You affect things out there and they affect you. Sometimes that's good because you can draw on resources that you didn't know about yesterday, and sometimes it's bad because you get affected by a disease or your computer crashes from a virus, and the only thing that you did wrong was buy Microsoft. So, the world is both small and big. All these metaphors are true, and the trick is to figure out an analytical framework that's precise enough to give you some traction on these problems. 6:05:06 AM     AOL is working on something like Tivo for cable customers. It strikes me as a pretty lame substitute that guarantees a good deal of control for the programmer rather than the user. It might work well for awhile, but the relentless fall of disk storage costs may well place it on the junkheap of barely clueful technologies. This is far too little and in two or three years it will be too late. 6:04:51 AM     Is there anything more hubric than Dow suing Bhopal survivors? If this is true (and Dow's record in the past is not great), it places in my top 10 hubric acts list. 6:04:37 AM

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