Mint Usability

Offtopic: While it doesn’t have too much to do with the usual topics in the blog, but as a Finn, it still touches me. Oh, wait. Actually, it has something to do with usability.

Anssi Vanjoki, the head of Nokia Markets unit, gave a speech today in Helsinki (Nokia exec: phones to make system cameras obsolete – Reuters) where he told that the camera phones would revolutionize the SLR (Single Lens Reflex – Wikipedia) market in near future. “There will be no need to carry around those heavy lenses“, Vanjoki said while pointing towards professional photographer.

Now, what gives? Could this somehow be possible? Are Nikon and Canon heading towards their impending doom? To answer that, we first have to figure out what does make SLR a SLR (apart from the definition, of course)?

What makes SLR a SLR?

Interchangeable lenses
The most obvious thing about SLR are interchangeable lenses. You might have wondered why is that so? Well, turns out there is a method in the madness: The simple reason is that because there is no such thing as a lens that can do everything (zoom, macro, low-light, wide-angle etc.). And, if there would be, the cost would be astronomical – we would probably be talking about tens of thousands of euros. Thus, not only it’s cheaper to get only the lenses you actually need BUT you actually can customize your camera to YOUR needs, which usually means something that’s a lot lighter to carry around.

Continue reading “Offtopic of the Day – Nokia: Camera phones will make SLRs obsolete”

Every now and then you just stumble upon something that you just can’t keep your mouth shut, even though it would be completely inappropriate to talk about it in the current context. Don’t you? I know I do. So… Enter the random thoughts part of the blog.

I spent sizeable chunk of today entertaining myself via YouTube. Me being the geek that I am, the entertainment didn’t involve videos that would actually have some entertainment values, instead amongst others I watched F-Secure Labs videos, featuring Mikko Hyppönen. Pretty interesting stuff, like the retaliation function of Storm botnet or the Targeted attacks; Using SQL injection (or any other type of attack) just for data gathering purposes (just like recon in the army), to prepare for the actual attack, thus making it personalized and more effective. Which email would you rather open, a random mail with weird topic or a mail from your coworker, talking about the project that you are working on? It seems to me that computer viruses are evolving on accelerated pace.

At the moment these are just couple of targeted attacks, and even those were directed to companies, the masses are still getting the anonymous “Click here” -link treatment. However, there is certain what if scenario where data gathering and “AI” are meshed together, and this might change everything in social webspace. Permanently.

Continue reading “Offtopic of the day: Viruses to permanently change social networking?”