Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

The following is a list of rumored/obvious products that could be made today with available technology but haven’t been due to some marketing or other non-technical reason.  We have the technology, we can build it, TODAY!  In case an executive from any of these companie’s comes by (haha), just know that in the even these products were made available, I would camp out like an Apple fanboi to get one on the first day.

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The new Canon 7D was announced today!  (press release here) The notable features of this new camera are:

• 18MP APS-C crop body
• 8FPS for 15 frames of RAW and 126 Frames of JPEG
• 19 cross-type af points
• Spot and Zone Focus (in addition to previous focus type)
• 63 Zone Full Color Metering
• 100% Coverage, 1.0 Magnification Viewfinder
• 2 Axis Digital Level
• Flash Controller
• 100-6400 ISO (Expandable to 12800)
• Dual DIG!C4 Processors
• 24,25 or 30 Frame 1080P HD Movie, additionally 50 or 60 frame for 720P
• Best Canon non-1-series weather sealing
• Indicated Retail Price of $1700 USD

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I’m already way behind on my new years resolution.

So I was watching the afternnon news.  President Obama was speaking in Northern Indiana to some workers talking about the hard hit RV industry and geneal industrial unemployment.  This is nothing new as the president is looking to bolster support for the new $800 billion bailout bill.  The thing that deserves note is the statement in the crawl that unemployment is at ~4.5% and Could reach 20%

Okay, so hopefully you know where I am going.  This is one of my biggest pet peaves.  Sensational shock journalism sells papers, but is not the way to good reporting.  This statement had no justifying or qualifying context.  It is possible that unemployment could reach 0% or 100% and any number in between.  I could justify a report that said the numbers were expected to reach 20% in the next 18 months or before they decreased again.  These are amusing statistics that do nothing but make the problem worse.  If you are a company and you are getting by, but not thriving, you will treat finances cautiously, which will prolong the negative climate.  It’s all confidence based, and telling people that the sky is falling is not helping.

Obviously I have oversimplified, but can we at least agree that nothing is added to the discussion by a news orginiaztion sensationalizing numbers with out having any context or frame of perspective around them.  Just saying there’s a 1-5 chance you will lose your job doesn’t help anyone.

I know I am one of the few people who cares about technology enough to realize when things are shitty and should be better.  I am even more in the minority as to people who actually articulate these thoughts.  Basically the cable industry used to be a no-brainer over satellite.  It’s still a clear front runner but it’s losing ground quickly.  My major desire from services is the ability to consume anywhere at anytime in my place of residence how ever I want.

The cable/satellite companies are just starting to realize this is not the 1950’s.  Most families have far more than one television in their house.  Hell, some families have greater than 5.  My parent’s home, just off the top of my head right now has 9 television’s in the house.  There are only 3 people living there, but that doesn’t change the fact that people aren’t going to physically pickup and move a TV when they can buy another (fairly good and large) one for under $300.  This is fine for basic cable but you can’t have any premium or extended channels on these TV’s without paying crazy extra money.

Basic cable is roughly $35 in our area.  It gives you about 65 channels.  (~$0.50/channel)  Digital cable upgrade will cost you $70 and give you one box and about 220 extra channels (~$0.30/extra channel) but you only get those channels on one television.  An extra box costs you $15 a month ($0.07/channel/tv).  This very quickly surpases the basic total at 3 extra boxes.  So just like satellite you can only get your TV on 4 TV’s – not to mention the incredible expense we are at now.  One could get 300 channels on 4 TV’s for about $60 – It would cost at least $115 for cable.  This is all pre-net or any other additional services.

Now cable doesn’t have NFL Sunday Ticket, but if it did – wouldn’t you like to be able to setup 4 or 5 TV’s on a sunday to watch all your games.  These setups would theoretically require the same amount of boxes.  It doesn’t cost them anything more to deliver these signals.  There is fixed cost associated with delivering the service to my house, how I distribute and discriminate the content from their is my business.  Give me control over my own house.

I will save the Big Ten Network for another rant.