Well, I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later.

So far nothing has happened yet, but an announcement made by Canon on Thursday stated that they are considering the move to stop development of new film camera models. This pretty much follows an announcement made by Nikon earlier this year that they would be dropping out of the film camera business and Konica who was dropping out of photography all together.

It just goes to show how strong the movement to digital photography is and in the end, only the hardcore now will continue to use film. I wonder if film will ever be gone, but one thing is for sure, for your average consumer, digital will probably the only way to go.

Microsoft brought in Robert Fripp to help record a number of sounds and ambient tunes for Windows Vista.

Could this be the new sound of Windows?

It’s pretty neat to see all the work and time that’s put into finding that perfect tune.

BTW, once you’ve clicked on “Browse the current site” you’ll need to delete the cookie for windowsmarketplace.com before you’ll get to hear that sound again.

Microsoft wants to replace the world standard of JPEGs with their very own Windows Media Photo image format. Leave it to Microsoft to try to change the way everyone works (isn’t that what they say in their commercials now? lol).

The Windows Media Photo format is expected to be a part of Windows Vista with support made available to Windows XP users as well when the new OS is released. An example shown at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference Wednesday showed quite a bit of promise, the biggest issue I see is that they have to get EVERYONE else on board. Software developers like Adobe… Manufacturers like Canon and Nikon… It’s a pretty big task if they want this to be a new standard in digital imaging.

Also mentioned in the article is licensing, how much the technology will cost to implement will be a huge factor. I don’t see this happening any time soon but maybe if they get this new format figured out and into the hands of developers and manufacturers, at the rate Vista is coming along, maybe this format will be out even before the OS. haha.

You know, for a Windows user, I sure do post a lot of Mac stuff on here… LOL
So here are a few neat things for you guys:

First one is for all you DIYers. iFixit.com has a nice visual guide which walks you through the process of repairing your Apple laptop, or Mac Mini on your own. Steps are easy to understand and they’ve included pretty pictures so you can see where you’re supposed to be!

Next, we have something that’s just… well. You’ll see.
Using your laptop’s sudden movement sensor, MacSaber 1.0 will make all the cool noises a Jedi’s lightsaber would! YEY! o.O Now, I don’t know why you’d want to vigorously shake your precious laptop, but if you ever wanted to, now you can and make cool noises at the same time! Here’s a video of someone imitating the StarWars Kid with their MacBook.

And no, I’m not talking Skype-to-Skype calls. I mean Skype-to-landline/mobile calls!!
From now until the end of the year, Skype is allowing any user to call any Canadian or US number as long as it originates from Canada or the US.

How cool is that!!?
Now I just need to get a better microphone so I can call my clients without having to rack up my cellphone bill

I wonder… For all of you who are outside of North America… Would Skype be fooled if you used a proxy server here and routed calls through it? I mean technically, Skype would think that your call is originating from wherever the proxy is… hmm… Alternatively, using an SSH tunnel or VPN would do the trick!

For anyone interested in adding me to their Skype list, my username is “dimensionzero-ca” Just let me know who you are and that you found me from my blog so I don’t ignore you.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index is a rating system which is created by counting the number of hits each language gets on the most popular search engines.

The search query is executed for the regular Google, MSN, and Yahoo! web search and the Google newsgroups for the last 12 months. The web site Alexa.com has been used to determine the most popular search engines. The word “tv” and “channel” have been filtered out here to avoid any interference with TV programs. Otherwise languages such as ABC and Scheme would have been highly overrated.

While it doesn’t show how much a language is used, it does show the rise and fall of the interest in each of the languages.

On a similar note this could almost be generated on the new Google Trends if we could only narrow the search like TIOBE has.