Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Tamrac Evolution Series (Score 1) 282

Agreed, I just bought the Tamrac Evolution 9 bag and I'm very happy with it. Holds my Canon DSLR with battery pack/grip plus abut 7 lenses with a little room to spare. Yes, all that plus a laptop gets heavy. However, if you're going out from your base point to shoot, just load up what you need and leave the laptop out.

But having the room for everything is perfect for traveling so you can fit your laptop + camera gear into one bag that will fit in the overhead compartment of any airplane except maybe the small commuter jets. That frees you up for another carry-on or to just have one.

The zippered side panels are great for quick access to camera or lenses. And I've been very pleased with the options of wearing it like a backpack or with a single shoulder strap by reconfiguring the straps on the back.

The storage area at the top of the bag is great for everything else that won't go in the camera/lens compartment like lens hoods, batteries, power adapters, a mouse, etc. And the laptop fits nicely in the sleeve underneath it all.
Space

Submission + - Brooklyn Father, Son Launch Homemade Spacecraft (wpix.com)

Adair writes: A father and son team from Brooklyn successfully launched a homemade spacecraft nearly 19 miles (around 100,000 feet) above the Earth's surface. The craft was a 19-inch helium-filled weather balloon attached to a Styrofoam capsule that housed an HD video camera and an iPhone. The camera recorded video of its ascent into the stratosphere, its apogee where the balloon reached its breaking point, and its descent back to earth. They rigged a parachute to the capsule to aid in its return to Earth, and the iPhone broadcast its GPS coordinates so they could track it down. The craft landed a mere 30 miles from its launch point in Newburgh, NY, due to a quick ascent and two differing wind patterns. The pair spent 8 months researching and test-flying the craft before launching it in August. Columbia University Professor of Astronomy Marcel Aguera said, "They were very good but also very lucky."

Comment Re:Half subsidy (Score 1) 789

I was pretty mad about this at first, but after reading a lot of the comments here I have changed my thinking.

What really irritated me was after getting the announcement email from Apple, excitedly reading it, and seeing the pricetag for a 32GB model at $299, I was all set to buy it thinking, man that's a pretty good deal. So I click the link, enter my current AT&T plan data and wait for the page to load. Then it tells me the best I qualify for is $499 for the 32GB model. I just sat there, shocked. The text told me the soonest I would qualify for the $299 price would be January, 2010. It's not that I don't think the new iPhone 32GB model isn't worth $500... it's that the $299 pricetag was flashed around in my face several times before I got into the shopping cart. Then I felt like I was hit with a big FU stick. I was pissed. If they'd said $499 from the beginning there would have been no shock when I logged in.

Having said all that, I've now read a lot of the comments here on /. and it's given me some time to think. Yeah, $499 is not absurd for the product they're offering. I can only imagine the cost of R&D for some of this stuff. I, too, was one who paid full, hefty price for the original iPhone, then upgraded to the 3G within two months of it coming out and at a fairly decent purchase price. Part of me thinks that if I'm RE-signing a new 2-year contract with AT&T then why shouldn't I get the special $299 super-noob rate. The other part of me knows that it's because AT&T already knows they have me on contract and they have more to gain by getting new subscribers than they have to worry about losing existing ones. I'm a capitalist so I can understand that.

A lot of people have made sense here so I thank the /. posters for grounding my wild anger at the $200 difference between "advertised" price and real price. I just wish they had been more honest up front about $299 being only for new subscribers. You see $299, then go to check out and see $499... obvious reaction is WTF? But I love my iPhone and I really like Apple and AT&T has been pretty decent in my experience and I really don't want the government to have to bail out / take over either of them, so I'm sinking the $499!

Slashdot Top Deals

"Just the facts, Ma'am" -- Joe Friday

Working...