The depth of field looks about right for 105mm and f10 at that distance. Longer lenses have shallower depth of field than wide angle lenses. If it was shot with a 35mm or even 50mm lens, that flag would be more in focus.

It's properly off-center as far as classical composition goes. The common compositional technique of the Rule of Thirds says that the subject should be at the intersection of two of the lines that divide an image into thirds horizontally and vertically. Obama's eyes are located at the top right thirds, right where they "should" be. That's not to say you can't break this rule... it's just that a pretty "conservative" portrait like this one will tend to stick to the rules.

As a pro photog, the reason for using f10 is to create enough depth of field to get the entire prez in focus. With a 105mm lens, depth of field can be quite shallow. I can practically guarantee that at f10 and 1/125, there were flashes involved. The EXIF will read that the flash didn't fire, but that's because the photographer was likely using external flashes hooked up to the sync terminal. The camera doesn't know about those flashes, so can't write about them in EXIF.

Actually this is useful to me! There's a bug in my phone (Touch Diamond) that won't show a blinking LED for a new email notification unless there's a sound notification too. I don't want my phone making a noise every time I get an email, so this silent ringtone would be perfect for me. I'm going to give it a try.

I built my own using a Sempron CPU and motherboard, 3x500 GB hard drives in RAID5, and 1x80GB hard drive for Linux. Management is simple with Webmin. It's fast too. Data transfers over Gigabit Ethernet are steady at about 28MB/sec. RAID5 means I can just add more drives for more storage when I need it, and the array will rebuild itself.

I couldn't, because I'm a pro photographers and I need something heavy duty for processing photos. but I know plenty of people who could... people who use the computer on a casual basis for email, word processing, web surfing, facebook, etc. That tiny form factor is especially appealing for a lot of people! Of all the millions of netbooks sold, I'm sure a huge percentage of those were to people who use them as their only computer.

I used this on Air Canada earlier this year while I was commuting between Montreal and Hamilton. I had the boarding pass code thing on my Blackberry. It was a bit of a pain because I had to wait a few seconds for the graphic to display on the screen. Then they had to find a security official who had the special scanner for it. It doesn't seem like much, but waiting 30 seconds in an airline security line seems like an eternity when you've got a lineup of anxious travelers behind you, stepping on your heels. I prefer printing out my boarding pass and just showing it to security. It's much faster.

Seems like printing photos immediately is the only reason to have one of these cams, so the 5MP resolution should be more than adequate. It's a fun idea... I'd like to see how it evolves into other form factors.

Sony doesn't want to compete with Asus, but I bet it will produce something that looks like a netbook. It'll probably cost about $3000 though.

That looks amazing. I subscribe to zip.ca in Canada, which is almost identical to Netflix. I really hope MS hooks something up with them so we Canuckistanians can enjoy the streaming deliciousness...