News

December 2005

A photo trip? A portable storage device: Still looking for the ideal tools needed by the travelling digital photographer, today I started to check these little portable hard discs/drives that allow to quickly empty your Flash memory card that filled up too soon into a much larger capacity small hard disc, the portable storage device. And I think that there is a clear winner despite the apparently very similar feature lists.

The bigger, the nicer: An absolutely adorable baby hippo was orphaned by last year's tsunami. He found an adoptive mother. Ahem! Well, maybe not. He actually chose his mother but Mother Nature is not always checking the details and the baby hippo turned his love toward a century-old male giant tortoise who did not ask for it but tolerates well these warm feelings.

DRM #20 (Australia): The down under country is considering the legalization of such common practices as recording a TV show or copying to MP3 a CD you bought. This is supposed to be the private copy exception. You can probably expect the music majors to fight it.

WINE at last in Beta status: WINE, the Windows emulator for Linux (it allows the execution of Windows software directly in the GNU/Linux environement), finally leaves its previous alpha status (purely under development) to present itself to the Internet masses. It is probably worth testing again this tool which has an enormous potential for all those who are willing to leave Microsoft without abandonning all their software applications behind them.

Previous tests were not satisfying, but now is the time to try again.

DRM #19 (Surprise vote in Paris): The French minister of Culture (M. Donedieu de Vabre) just tried to pass a law to organize and encourage the use of technical means to protect against copy all multemedia data files (in short, DRM tools - Digital Rights Management) in order to preserve the copyright of artists. He got a major surprise.

Two amendements were presented and voted without hesitation (with a wide support including from the governing majority); They legalize the downloading under private copy under the condition of a global licence (see above "Why don't I want DRM #3").

Even better, this morning, while political observers expected a quick reversal when the Assemblée Nationale (in Paris) would open, this escalated into long talks and there seem to be no solution in sight before January 2006.

Maybe some MPs/deputies start to understand what the French social world is. When 75% of the Internet users vote for the global license and so many Internet users are regularly downloading music and video, it may just mean that we are all for the protection of the authors copyrights (paying a licence) but also for a merely simple technical and social solution (easy Internet download), but against imposing DRM solutions like the ugly beasts from Sony BMG and others.

References:

Les députés légalisent les échanges de fichiers sur Internet (Le Figaro)

Droit d'auteur: «Les députés ont pris conscience que c'était un débat de société» (Libération)

Bras de fer sur les droits d'auteur numériques à l'Assemblée (Le Monde)

A peine adoptée, la licence globale est déjà menacée

Légalisation du P2P: le gouvernement exige un nouveau débat

Coup de théâtre: les députés légalisent le 'peer-to-peer'!

Joyeux Noë et bonne année

User interfaces designed by an engineer: according to Dilbert, thanks to Xtian.

DRM #18: The now infamous quote from Sony BMG president Thomas Hesse, in the middle of the recent Sony fiasco:

Most people don't even know what a rootkit is,
so why should they care about it?

Total respect for customers...

“Legal despair” at LEGO headquarters: A Canadian judge just explained to the company who created and manufactured the small plastic cubes that their patent on building bricks has now expired. It's a pretty clear case of how patents work: An innovating company is awarded a specific protection to draw advantages from it but only during a preset time (after what the whole community can freely share and use for the good of all).

Dynax 7D tip #22: Tele-lens, do not move: As soon as the focal length grows, blurred images start to appear. This is specially important for animal outdoor photo where you always feel too far from the subject. Many solutions exist:

The bean bag, a mere bag filled with rice or dried vegetables, allows to set a reflex with a large lens on about anything (small wall, window, rock or dead tree trunk). Don't buy it in Europe. It's always easy to find locally, and you will give the contents to somebody in need before leaving.
Photo tripod. Forget it! Cumbersome, heavy, long to open, it will not adapt itself well to outdoor photo and travels.
Monopod. More or less sophisticated, it will go anywhere you go and it is a good compromise between stability and agility.

Why don't I want DRM #3: Or why nearly nobody wants it... A recent poll in France showed that 75% of the Internet users vote for the global license. As a matter of fact, it is simply a monthly payment of a tax that would let you forget about the matetr and keep downloading freely.Technical details should be polished, but in some places we're not far from it: radios pay in a similar way to put music on the air; In France, the redevance audiovisuelle is paid once to cover the costs of all public TV channels and shared between them; Many European countries apply a tax on empty media (tapes, CD, flash cards, etc.) that is redistributed to artists.

Paid once a month (a few dollars) by all the broadband users, the money collected is given to the artsits and the users can download freely afterwards.

Artists receive the money they earned, users are happy downloading. Only the RIAA is worried because music producers must then modifiy their business model. But it was computed that to ensure the same rights than today for all artists, it is possible to limit this to only a few dollars per month and per broadband Internet user. I'm all for it.

Ultra-fast imagery: When you're in a hurry, you've got to photograph fast. On the web site of the observatory of Miam-Globs.

Personnalize your M&Ms: The colourful little chocolate sweets now can be personnalized with your own text (you choose the colour set, too). It's already too late for Christmas 2005, but they could be used for next Summer mariages...

Photo safari? Think Professional support: While the Internet allowed to organize pretty easily a trip to the end of the world, some are more difficult. The life conditions are very different between a road trip from hotel to motel in the center of the United States of America and a hot desert or the exploration of a tropical river fauna. It is more and more common to find people lost with the rented 4x4 SUV in the remotest places (those that do not leave room for errors and trials of the amateur).

For my part, I intend to take advantage of Objectif Nature that has 16 years of experience in setting up photo safaris, nature travels. Also, they rent excellent professional hardware (including lenses) from Nikon and Canon, at a very reasonable price.

Photo safari? Think tele-lens: All the animal photography enthousiasts saw the digital era opening as a gift from God. The small size of sensors offers a focal length conversion factor of about 1,5. Thus, a Dynax 7D ou Maxxum 5D transform a 200mm f/2.8 into a stabilized 300mm f/2.8. Marvelous! And a good economy opportunity even compared to the possible need of buying a short focal length zoom.

Woah! Google grabs AOL: Just in front of the greedy eyes of Microsoft, Google seems to have taken 5% of AOL for a mere 1 billion dollars. Against this, AOL will get a specially favorable placement in Google search results (Something they never did before for nobody).

Source: The Register

Photo safari - Interesting article: in the December 2005 issue of Réflexe Numérique.

Opera may be bought by Google: As a matter of fact, everybody has been hearing for months now that Google may be looking seriously into the web browsers. Today, it seems (according to the rumour mill) that the best candidate is Opera.

Still my prefered browser. Always hotly recommended.

Nikon D50 or D70s: If you are unsure at the time of choosing between those two nice Nikon digital cameras (D-SLR), I believe that you should go to the D70s for two main reasons:

At Nikon, the exposure is made using a very large colour sensor which gave all Nikon competitors a handicap in the recent years (there is nearly no subject that can stop the Nikon cameras to expose correctly with the help of the 1005 pixel sensor). But the D50 only has a cheap 420 pixel sensor that is not faithful to the famous reputation of Nikon.
The D50 has no button to test depth of field and this makes difficult to judge it without taking an actual picture. You may think that this is no longer a problem using a digital camera, but judging accurately fine details on an LCD screen is awfully difficult.

You asked the question. I answered. You can make our choice now.

Dynax 7D tip #21: Great viewfinder : I knew it, but I thought that others knew it without my telling; The Dynax 7D viewfinder (this is true of the Dynax 5D, too) is just excellent. After reading several articles speaking about these issues, I decided to summarize the Konica-Minolta advantages:

A massive glass pentaprism instead of the light pentamirror others use in the competition (it is needed to reflect ligth coming from the center of the camera to the viewfinder). Better efficiency = more light (Konica-Minolta Dynax 7D is nearly the best on the market and is way ahead of the competition in its price range, like Nikon D70s or Canon 350D/Rebel XT).
A good view angle (95% of the field).
An outstanding focusing screen (Accute Mate used by Konica Minolta for years now) that is universally known as the best product out of all the competition (ultra fine, ultra precise, ultra clear).

Big comparison between graphic cards: Tom's Hardware puts nearly all the PCI Express cards on the market in a straight competition.

A photo trip? Get another Flash card: It is not very expensive, and you don't want to be stuck out of memory right at the moment you see the elephant you were hunting or when the green ray flashes at sun set. My advice is to always have an additional Flash card just in case.

A million figures for PI: The most useless page of this web site shows the first million decimal figures of PI (Do you remember your math? PI=3.14 more or less).

All this is a kind of « virtual partnership » with French scientific magazine La Recherche whose December issue is titled : « Pi, le maître nombre » (Pi, the master number).

Maxtor, first at 1 Tera-Byte? At least, that's what they announced. Maxtor should be able to present this month two hard disc drives. One of them should be the first commercial product to reach the mythical abrrier of 1 tera-byte (1024 giga-bytes).

Presidential pals and backers, get a job: George W. Bush did not make friends everywhere, but we are starting to wonder why. His best pals clearly get rewarded in way that does not relate to their actual expertise. The CronyJobs.com web site shows you some of the best successes of this job seeking agency. Spend a moment to have fun or to wonder or to cry. It's worth being a pal of the American President!

CronyJobs.com

Dynax 7D tip #20: Konica-Minolta Maxxum/Dynax 5D and 7D user manuals: After receiving a number of requests to identify where could be downloaded the user manuals of the Maxxum 5D and 7D, here is the link you need:

All the manuals from Minolta on Dyxum.com
The support web site of Konica Minolta Europe where you can find a link to the page for online sale of manuals for digital photo cameras from Konica Minolta.

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December 2005

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