Every few years a company tries to add scent to computing. Last time around, I wrote about Digiscent and its innovative scent portal, or something like that. Today Trisenx is working on a plug-in device to add scent to email. On top of a gut wrenching $300 price tag, just the mere thought of scented Spam is enough to put us off email entirely.

According to PC World, “Canon, Konica Minolta, Nikon, and Olympus all announced 8-megapixel cameras aimed at advanced photographers.The new cameras are expected to ship this spring and to be priced around $1000.” Hmmm, so 8 million pixels is 3264 x 2448 and a picture size of up to 23MBs. In other words, that’s huge.

Source: EFF “Consumers suffered a setback to their digital rights today when a California federal court sided with the major motion picture studios in ruling that a company creating tools people can use to make backup copies of their DVDs is liable under copyright law. Citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the court ordered 321 Studios, creator of DVD backup tools, to stop selling its DVD Copy Plus and DVD-X COPY products within seven days.”

From the Intel Developers Conference comes new information on Intel’s High Definition Audio (HDA) spec that includes support for up to 7.1 channels, DVD-Audio support (multi-channel 96KHz/24-bit, two-channel 192KHz/24-bit) and dynamic jack configuration (jack-sensing.) Dolby also announced several new logo programs for motherboard audio hardware makers and C-Media took the wraps off its first HDA-compliant codec, the CMI9880. Holla!

“Promising to do for golf what the ATM did for banking, the new TeePod Information System from 4everSports, based on the VIA EPIA VE5000 Mini-ITX mainboard, enriches the game of golf by providing a revolutionary web-based scoring, information, communication and management system all in one.”

Let’s think about this for a minute. It’s a good thing to bring electronics to golf. People have been craving that jump in technology ever since Microsoft Golf appeared, haven’t they? No more mulligans, no more mistakenly entered scores, all those things for which golf clubs have suffered ignomious fates are now in the power of the microchip. But ATM machines? Does that mean if you’re a guest playing on someone else’s course you’ll have to pay an extra green’s fee and then the course you’re actually a member of will then charge you an additional fee because you used someone else’s?

According to Reuters, “Cisco Systems Inc. unveiled a system for its Internet-based telephones that promises to allow real-time videoconferencing with television-quality images for less than $200 per user.” Proving once again that VoIP is heating up, and maybe even the holy grail of telephony: the video phone.

Notice, if you will, the distinct lack of fanfare with which Intel’s next iteration Pentium 4, codenamed Prescott, arrived. Why, you ask? Well, 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz versions of the 90nm CPU, according to Intel, may perform the same as the larger (130nm) Norwood processors at similar clock speeds. Huh? Hey, would I lie? (No, I wouldn’t. It’s actually slower in some cases compared to the older Norwood version.) Of course, that flies in the face of everything we know about CPUs when you double the internal L2 cache, as has been done with the Prescott, and shorten the internal data pathways, ditto. What gives? Intel was a little roundabout on the reason, relying on that old fallback, “Well, the current software doesn’t make use of the extra SSE instructions, yada-yada-yada.”

Some say its because of the Prescott’s longer pipeline. Some say Intel put a toll booth on the data plaza. Whatever, Prescott shrank (in size) and grew (in L2 cache) so Intel could make versions faster later on, hitting that (currently) magic 4GHz mark. It’s really no big deal except there are bound to be some unscrupulous hardware vendors hiding Norwoods under the giant processor fans in their PCs for sale when you should be getting Prescotts. (They’re priced the same and, well, you have to get rid of old inventory somehow, don’t you?) Eyes open, folks.

Yahoo annouced that it was dumping search darling Google in favor of its own search engine Inktomi. According to Reuters, “Yahoo recently has made major investments in the sector with acquisitions of search provider Inktomi and Overture Services, a key Web-search advertising company. Its conversion project began late Tuesday night with the U.S. Yahoo site and will continue over the next several weeks.”