I think I just wet myself.

Canon just announced a new version of their flagship dSLR, the EOS-1Ds Mark II. Similar to the original EOS-1Ds, the new version has a 50% greater pixel count, reduced shutter lag, a larger frame buffer for faster continuous shooting, and uses the new version of Canon’s DIGIC image processor for better image quality.

Oh, and the body alone is about $8K.

Cyborg-in-Chief Involved in Gaming Novel Soundtrack Pt. 2

As I mentioned in a previous posting, I worked with composer/artist John Bergin recently to create a soundtrack to Traitor General, the latest Gaunt’s Ghosts novel by Dan Abnett. The Gaunt series takes place in the gothic sci-fi gaming world of Warhammer 40,000. John and I created a soundtrack (with John doing most of the heavy lifting) to accompany a limited edition hardback version of the novel. I wrote an article for The Black Library about the making of the soundtrack and interviewed John about composing the music. You can also see a title list and the full credits here.

Serial ATA microdrives

A consortium of storage manufacturers has announced a new
drive interface for tiny hard drives
meant to go into handheld consumer electronics like iPods and cellphones.

“The CE-ATA interface involves creating a new way to address the major concerns of consumer electronics manufacturers,” the news article says.

So does anyone else think this means drive manufacturers will be adding built-in DRM?

Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL

Wired has a story about Chatting AIM Bot, described as “a free service that lets anyone play a devious practical joke on a friend, in which an artificially intelligent AOL instant message, or AIM, bot carries on an innocuous, 10-minute conversation before finally lowering the boom and informing the unwitting human at the other end they’ve been had.”

The bot, which apparently IMs the victim using the capitalization-challenged, abbreviation-loving style common to 13-year-olds, then emails a transcript of the conversation back to the victimizer.

How the Floppy is like Fassbinder

It’s dead.

If the Associated Press says it, it must be true:

“Like the penny, the floppy drive is hardly worth the trouble, computer makers say.”

It seems just about everything else you can use to store data is faster, more reliable and holds more data than the venerable floppy disk, which isn’t even all that floppy anymore.