Have no fear the D300 is here

The shipments of D300 are all over the world now heading to people who will enjoy their new cameras. Clearly the earlier post about a 3rd party battery is key here. Keep that in mind. If you need any lenses to go with the camera, do some research as there are plenty of good choices out there and some not so hot ones, so tread carefully.

Memory cards

We can see migration and development in the memory card area toward larger and larger memory cards. The compact flash, the memory stick pros etc. Now the question is whether the consumers should bite. On surface it makes sense as there are fewer cards to carry to store the data that is recorded on digital cameras, camcorders, mp3 players etc. however, it is possible that a card will go bad, now looking from this angle, having a single 4 gb card vs. 4 cards 1 gb each is now a much more favorable proposition. Similarly to losing a card etc. So when you select the memory cards for your gadgets keep this in mind as you make your purchases.

Black Friday ad leaks...

It is an interesting thing to see all of this internet posting and traffic about black friday shopping and leaked ads. What is the big deal? Is someone planning to get in line like on Monday in anticipation of say Wii sales? Come on!!! The regular ads come out on Thursday and there is plenty of time to pack lunch boxes and stuff and park in a line to get that $20 DVD player or something. What a waste of web space storage and internet bandwidth spending it on the black Firday stuff.

Generic batteries....

So you bought this fancy camera or camcorder or a laptop PC. Spent quite a bundle. Now the question is whether Nikon, Canon, Panasonic, Dell, HP or other manufacturer designed the equipment that expects their brand of batteries or you can purchase a 3rd party one. We clearly know from the Dell and other problems a few years back that the batteries sold under many brand names come from one or two sources across many manufacturers. In the laptop scare it was SONY that was the culprit, if I remember right. So now, what is the difference to you? Well obviously the 3rd party batteries cost less in some cases quite a bit less. So is it worth it? In theory all batteries follow the same path in that they look inside like this (courtesy of Panasonic):



In practice perhaps a manufacturer of the equipment tweaks the schematics just a bit, or allows for tolerances different than the 3rd party supplier. In my mind the bottom line is that use of 3rd party batteries makes sense provided that: (1) you do your homework on the manufacturers of the batteries (2) you don't buy the lowest price ones from the 3rd party list. I personally will go with the Nikon supplied ones into my D300. Saving $20 is not worth it for me to do the research in (1) and (2) earlier.

PCs are power hungry

One of the things that is not talked about in the discussion about "green" stuff is how much power every one of our PCs consumes. Sure, companies with large data centers are looking at this and trying to get efficient power supplies in their system. Some companies put power supplies in a separate room from the server room so that all the heat from power supplies does not cause increase in data center cooling costs. Well...with the invention of Skype and such products, more and more people have their PCs on all day long. Most PCs have a 400 W power supply. I know I know, the laptop machines don't consume as much, but it is only recently that the laptops have breached $1000 mark, which in today's reality $1000 is a large amount to pay for a PC. Apple still disagrees, but PC makers have gone down to probably $400. However, many people still have desktop machines, myself included and the power supply in this machine is definitely taking quite a bunch of "juice" to run. One way to improve the world would be to devise an inexpensive and very efficient power supply so that it can be put into the desktop machines as a replacement. Someone like a local utility or energy board could sponsor this program.

Apple Leopard....

I remember the key note by Steve Jobs a few years ago about migrating to Intel CPUs. I watched it on Quicktime and it was a good show. Fast forward a year or two and Apple devised a scheme where users can run Windows on their Macs. Very cool indeed. Of course along the way, Mac OS was described as much better, faster, quicker, prettier etc. than windows. With the latest incarnations of Windows and Mac OS it is interesting to see that Windows will still run on a Mac but Mac OS will not run on a PC. Why is that? A quick search on the web will reveal that it is not a technical issue. In fact is it a choice Apple has made. Each Mac has a chip in it that is examined by Mac OS installation software. If the chip is there, the machine is a Mac, the software will install. If the chip is not there, the machine is not a Mac, the software won't install. Why would Apple do such a thing? Development costs to make Mac OS really compatibile with all the PC accessories out there? May be, but could be remedied by working with hardware manufacturers, after all Mac OS is better, faster, quicker, prettier etc. than Windows, so manufacturers would love to do this work. Seriously, manufacturers would do this development as much of the drivers would be portable from the Mac platform, plus Max OS running on a PC would spur additional PC sales. There are other reasons perhaps, but only one comes to my mind and that is that Apple is afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid that once Mac OS runs on a PC, people all over the world will find out what has been only argued to this point. The crux is pricing of Apple hardware. It may be better, it may be faster etc. etc. Once Mac OS runs on a PC, we would not be relying on comments from Apple or Apple zealots. We could spend $149 or whatever it is and put it on our PC and find out for sure. Surely there is something to think about when an entry laptop running windows is $300 and one running Mac OS is $999. So here is a business opportunity for you...devise a little card or USB gizmo that plugs into a PC and allows people to install Mac OS on their PCs. The work on this has already started on the internet, but so far it is a painful process. For now, judging by Apple's actions to lock Leopard to the Mac hardware, we perhaps got another point about Apple's belief about how strong their hardware offering is and it is not an encouraging vote of confidence from Apple.

USB storage

It is interesting these days how popular the USB hard drives are becoming. First it was the solid state "key fob" drives that can now take several gigabytes of data. Now the regular hard drives are put into enclosures and can be attached with USB port. However, outside of a basic back up function, are they really that useful? Really? The drives can surely offer storage that is easily accessible, simply plug into power and USB and off you go. However, given the size of files today's digital camera's produce, videos and even e-mail, it is critical that this data is not lost in case of a drive failure. As such simply attaching a drive to USB to store those precious pictures from the honeymoon is just not smart. Individuals who go this route are just asking for trouble along the way. Let's explore another shortcoming and that is data sharing. More and more gadgets like PS3, XBOX and normal cable boxes will now display media from home network on the TV as well as play music from the home network on the home sound system. If one uses the USB attached drive, the drive has to be carried from the computer room to the TV room. Alternatively, one can keep the computer on, with average PC having a 400W power supply it is rather wasteful to go with the PC on option. SO where does this leave us? Network attached storage also known as NAS. All we are talking about here is a case that will take a few hard drives. Then the case is plugged into power and the network and voila, there is available storage for all devices on the network to use. The NAS boxes offer redundancy in a way that preserves data when one drive fails. In addition they consume much less power than a full blown PC. The issue here is really the size of the NAS "cases" as most will allow only 2 drives i.e. the "original" and "the mirror/copy." Which is not that great, given that $100 buys a 500GB disk at the moment. Moreover, as people grow their data need they may want to buy more drives. The cases that take more than 2 drives are pricey for what they do. Here is a business idea -> cheap NAS devices. Sell them for $100 with 5 hard drive slots. Case is probably $15, power is $15 and some minor electronics. The thing can run Linux to make for a cheap OS and off we go. You heard it here first....