He alludes to Kodak’s chequered history with digital cameras… it turns out Kodak invented them in 1975, but didn’t start selling them until 2001.

Google have announced the Anita Borg scholarship programme is now running in Australia, offering A$5000 scholarships to women studying at undergraduate or postgraduate level in computer science in Australia.

One of the oldest games software houses in the world, let alone Australia, Melbourne House is in trouble, and likely to be sold/offloaded by Atari in the near future.

Another example of where being geek luddite is good: Dans Data on why the latest and greatest X mega-pixel cameras aren’t good value for money. I’m sticking with my 3.1MP Canon A70, thanks — for web and domestic use, it’s great.

Nothing lasts forever. This page logs the deaths of free email services: Free email DeathWatch.

One thing he noted is that acquiring a digital camera turns you into a shutterbug; I would suggest spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a camera has that effect, but the zero-cost of each individual photo certainly does help. He notes that in bangs-per-buck, film beats digital – and he’s right. Not only are digital cameras more expensive to acquire for the features you get, but (at the time of the article) processing costs were higher too. Couple that with the poorer image resolution you get from digital images (super high-end digital cameras are only now approaching the image resolution of $20 compact cameras) and you would have to be nuts to go digital.

Unless you don’t actually process your images. As a general rule, I don’t. In the last eleven months I’ve taken… let’s see… 10,327 images (I was wondering what would happen to the camera when it rolled over 10K images, because the manual hints that you might have to re-format your media; turns out that’s not the case). Recently Cathy and I took advantage of a Harvey Norman promotion and trebbled the number of images we’d printed, to a total of 200. We might have spent $50 on printing all up. That would have bough 240 frames of analogue film in processing costs, but we only printed out the winners. If the full 10K images had been processed we may have spent $2000 on processing. That’s a bunch of money. I suspect I would have husbanded my shots more if I’d spent the same amount of money on a film camera. In fact, there’s no way on God’s green Earth I would have spent that much money on a film camera. Something about perceived value differences. Anyways, the camera has been fun, and I think given the thrashing it’s been getting, I’ve been getting value for money from it. Which I’m a little surprised by, because it was a lot of money.

For me, the big advantage of digital is that I can learn to be a better photographer at no marginal cost. And Paul says that at National Geographic, photographers average 350 rolls of film (almost 12600 frames) per story, with an average of 10 published. So, if I was a professional grade photographer using professional equipment, one in twenty of the photos I’ve printed would be magazine quality.

Meanwhile, Texas is suing, possibly for $100K per violation… times 2.1 million CDs sold??? (Thanks Lana)

Jeff “Llamasoft” Minter contributed some of the visualisations in the XBox 360 media player.

Research at the University of British Columbia has come up with stitching software that many say out-performs that provided with digital camera software.

Anyways, I knew when I bought it the 300 runs USB 1.1 rather than 2, and I can live with how astonishing slow it is to transfer pictures.

And the rapid shot buffer is only 4 shots, but I knew that.

And writing to the flash card is slow. Shooting at high resolutions and taking a rapid collection of photos do not go hand in hand. I didn’t know that, but the camera is quite a step up from where I was, so I can live with that.

And the RAW format! Nothing seems to understand it, not even Photoshop. Why have a lossless format if nothing can read it? Just store the things as TIFFs, for the love of God!

But the freak-out thing is the level of OS support for digital cameras. In XP, just plug in random USB memory stick and it works. Plug in a camera, XP says “hey look! A camera! Got a driver?”; if you say “no”, XP says “oh well, forget the camera then. It certainly can’t be anything like all those memory sticks. You’d be wanting to plug that super expensive SLR camera in so you can use it as a web cam, and I need drivers for that. You certainly wouldn’t want to be ripping the images off it to free up the flash card.” XP then proceeds to become unstable, requiring cold boots to get better again.

XP is such crap. So I loaded the drivers, and all the shitty Canon image manipulation software (excluding Photostich; that’s amazing, purely amazing).

On another note, why doesn’t my camera have a built-in MP3 player? How hard would that be? All that lovely flash memory and great thunking battery going to waste…

Oh. Final tip: to claim the GST back on “duty free” (modern equivalent) purchases over $1000, you need a tax invoice with your details on it. Or more precisely, the traveller’s details. Can be a trap for young players.