[geeks] fantasy christmas wish lists

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2001 at 10:20:43PM -0500, dave at cca.org wrote:
> jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu writes:
> 
> >On Tue, Dec 18, 2001 at 07:17:30PM -0500, dave at cca.org wrote:
> >> 	IBM-360 (any model)
> 
> >Why not a 370 or 390?
> 
> 360's on the top of the list. A 370 would be nice too.
> 390's too modern.

Haven't they been making 390s since the 70s?
 
> >> Realistic for xmas:
> >> 	New sony camera
> 
> >I didn't know that Sony made decent cameras.
> 
> They make so-so digital cameras, unless you have weird computers and
> have a hard time interfacing to anything modern, in which case they
> make *awesome* cameras with floppies or CD-Rs.

Oh.  You meant a digital camera.  I assumed you meant photons hitting film
kinda camera.  Yeah, those Sony CD-R cameras look cool.  I really dislike the 
floppy ones.  Well, they might not be so bad for their age, but they really
suck compared newer cameras.

My digital camera is a Kodak DC215.  The way I usually get stuff from it is via
Compact Flash.  This works nicely, but I could see it being a problem if you 
don't have any machines newenough/cheap enough to be trying to sucker you into
using IDE.  However, for those people who find CompactFlash difficult, the 
camera also has a serial connector, and it is supported by gPhoto2 (which 
should work on pretty much any unix, but I'd assume that they haven't actually
tested it on really old versions of AIX or SunOS).

I haven't noticed any major quality difference between this camera (often sub 
$100) and the newer, higher res cameras.  It seems that what's really needed is
3 CCDs, but that would nearly triple the cost, and it would be about as hard to
convince consumers of their superiority as it is to convince them that a 2Ghz
P4 isn't faster than a 450 Sparc or a 300 R12k.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd