In Europe, on the "Thalys" trains between Paris, Brussels, Cologne and Amsterdam, you get free WiFi on First Class and 6€ for an hour or 13 for the whole trip. Its based on 3G + satellite links.. Quite nifty... and the train regularly rolls at 300 KPH (190 MPH) on quite a few stretches of track.... (One engineering version of these trains actually has the speed record at 574 KPH - 3567MPH over a special stretch of a commercial track).

You can't beat the french for these kind of trains.. and while it's true that the US is huge, given the hassles of air transportation, a TGV-like system would really fit well on the northeast corridor for example ... (lets say, Amtrak's Acela but done well). NY to washington could be served in just over 1:15 minutes... downtown to downtown... Surely beats flying!

I've had a A75 and a SD400 fail their sensors. Both after 3 years of heavy use and both with at least 10.000 pics each. Both repaired at no cost by Canon, even 2 years out of warranty and out of their country of purchase. One came from singapore, the other from the us.. both fixed in argentina no questions asked. I've yet to see another vendor offer anything close to this level of support.

Im a happy ownder of an eos 350 as well.. no complains.

If only my G7 had raw and a decent battery meter... (without CHDK i mean. ;-) )

I'll just keep on coming to canon.

All my cameras have taken quite a beating... never a lens error.. never a problem. And again.. at least 10K shots and been in every corner of the earth.

Eric.. indeed... the 12xT1 / E1 controller struck me as QUITE odd... i bet this is more for a small router... Actually, it would fit perfectly for a BTS / Node B router (to carry 2G and 3G cellular traffic back to the operator's central office). All the encryption accelerators only help with that...

Pretty weird choice of ports IMHO.. but interesting. Yet, as you mention, nothing close of a MID or consumer electronics... Man.. there's even a CAN bus!

Cheers,

The GPS is already available in europe since some time. In fact, VW is selling the Polo with a PSP with GPS. See the ad here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov0I5kUrTcU&feature=related

The add-on costs 150€ with the software, which is pretty steep anyhow. The PSP + GPS bundle goes for 250€ which is much more acceptable though...

well over 50% of all ADSL lines -and variations- in the world come from ALU. The industry's first -and only- 100Gigabit/s per linecard router. 80.000 employees as mentioned... The world's most deployed IPTV video solution... #1 in market share in ATM switches and techology leader in Optical networks....

not to mention a tiny small insignificant thing called "Bell Labs"... out of which things like the transistor were invented..

Just wondering.. maybe they ARE indeed defending the patents... but they were not created out of thin air...

Yet irony has it... ALU is the sole distributor / integrator of Microsoft's Mediaroom IPTV software which uses the patents in question...

My 2 cents..

As a disclaimer... i do work for ALU.

A lot of HP, sun, and other servers can boot off a CD-ROM on your pc using just a web browser and a small java applet, not a 86 mbyte app. No fuss, no problems. The disc is seen as local for the pc. And works with windows, linux, or whatever you throw at it. And this is whith the server still off, just plugged in. I'll give in on the fact that bios based WiFi is pretty nifty though... but with no wired ethernet, they HAD no choice!

MSTV Already has a pc-based client available, although its only usable when the platform is under "development" and stops working once its live (commercial), but since its just a VM to what runs on the STBs themselves, it would not be hard to port it to the Xbox360. Plus, it could profit from Xbox's secure media handling features, so some very nice things could be seen on it. STB rental/sale is not usually a big business for IPTV telcos, so having your customers actually buy the STB for you would seem like a great idea...

Hackers... start your engines!