Archive for February, 2006

Willing to install a Home Cinema configuration (that was an old dream of mine), I decided  to buy according to my limited budget. Here is how it turned to be and how you can do the same.

Video projector

I started by buying a fairly good video-projector. You should always be sensitive to what is producing the image that you will be looking at. Knowing that my appartment is adorned with very large windows that cannot be blocked with shutter blinds, I needed a very bright and powerful projector. I bought a Sony VPL-CS5 (the more recent VPL-CS6 are still very bright). It’s only drawback is the noise level produced by its fan. I would not recommend it out of this need of extreme brightness.

Anyway, it is very beautiful in his cool pearly white paint.

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Beware, this web site will not be overflowing with images and colors. It is about the technicalities of printing technology. Interesting anyway.

A tutorial on printing.

Microsoft just announced that there will be a grand total of 6 different versions of Windows Vista.

This is an approach well known of marketing specialists. A product is on a competitive market, the price goes down (or up) according to the laws of free market. If the market is not competitive, the price may also go down if the public perceives some clear value to the product and agrees on a set price. Microsoft sells a product whose perceived value is going down continuously (the competitive pressure from Apple and from GNU/Linux may explain a lot of it). After adding more and more new features (to the point of being just bloated, sometimes), that leaves mere tactics to avoid the direct competition: Make the comparison impossible.

The promoters of mobile phone have learned that lesson and apply it everyday. You need to increase the number of offers, options and contractual services. So, Microsoft decided to look at the issue with six versions, not counting the additional services like subscriptions to anti-virus or anti-spyware database updates.

Let’s try understand which one we should buy. I bet we’ll need a decoder and a computer just for this simple task.

The Adam Kasley web site draws images of the small buttons that you may need for your own web site. Simple and easy. Merely what you want without knowing where to look for it.

Music friends, noise friends, sound friends, ear sportsmen and sportswomen, here you will not need Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule, BitTorrent, or soulseek; In short, no P2P or Warez wbe site, your old wbe browser is enough. You will only find good old links and download and listen to music coded in Ogg or MP3 format, freely offered to the public by their authors or with their approval… Full songs, not small 20 second excerpts. Being for free is not illegal per se, and the usual talk that anything that is not online MP3 merchants is pirates and hackers is not satisfying ( even more when we do not find what we want in the supermarket).

All in all, it’s worth looking around here (and elsewhere). Browsing around, you will find artists as good as the ones whose names are more known to the masses, direct from the producer.

On MP3legal you will find lnik collections to artists websites of top quality. They are welcoming your very legal download. Feel the thrill of being legal and forget the Top 50 hits for an hour or two.

You can also listen to a lot of music from the Web Radios.

And some free legal movies! All from DivxLegal.

It’s all good (and mostly in French, but you will not mind).

Mirrors:

• http://musique-legale.info/

It has just been confirmed that currently the existing graphic cards on the market will not be able to play High-Definition DVD. Even when they display an HDCP-compatible label. As said on Darknet.com:
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The Trusted Computing Group announced it will be publishing a specification describing how hard disc drives will include Digital Rights Management (DRM) to support the Trusted Platform that is being pushed in preparation of PCs that will be completely secured against free flow of information and to avoid hackers and pirates to steal information. This is targetting MP3 music copiers, industrial spies and set-top boxes hackers.

The implementation will include the use of internal memory on the disk drive that will not be accessible from the PC itself and may contain important information about the status of the disk (e.g. bad sectors) and encryption data or software.

See also “Does Trusted Computing provide security for users or from them?” from TG daily, where famous technical security expert Bruce Schneier comments negatively on where Trusted Computing (TC) is coming.

Trusted Computing Platform is an initiative that is going to help the media companies (music, movies, etc.) securing the media they sell in a strong way. Essentially, it’s intent is to keep everything encrypted to avoid users to have a direct access to it. This approach promises to stomp out pirates.

The problem is that, as a mere user, you will also be prohibited from doing a number of things that you consider quite normal today. As a matter of fact, today, when some content is protected, there is always a way to access it (for example, if you plug the output of your DVD player into a computer video acquisition card you are able to make a copy of the DVD you play). Trusted Computing Platform mandates that the equipment, the software and the media have all to play together or refuse to play. If your DVD player does not see a TCP-compliant video acquisition card it will not accept to send data.

So, if you want to make a personal backup copy of your DVD you will not be allowed to do it. If your music file is downloaded on your TCP-telephone, you will not be able to put it on your MP3 player. The fact that you paid it up front will only mean that you agreed not to be able to use it in more ways than what the seller accepted beforehand.

The big (or not always so big) media companies want to create a corporate playground where you will be allowed to enter on their own rules. The market will have to decide whether or not this is a success. But if it works like they want it you will forget about what made the growth of the PC market: flexibility and availability of zillions of easy-to-develop new extensions. We may move from a cheap PC market to an expensive video-game/TV-decoder kind of market.

Nikonians is the name of an English-speaking web site about digital photo cameras holding the yellow brand mark. New, forums, galleries, everything.

After all, it’s not only a matter of downloading a lot of MP3’s from the web. Sometimes, if you avoid the top-50 list of songs, you could be finding a lot of tracks that will be satisfying your thirst for music in a legal way: Many artists offer their music for free and this is the objective of the 1 Million Free and Legal Music Tracks web site to help you find them. Legally recommended.

This is a rather good surprise for the normal users of PC. Microsoft is rumoured to prepare a rating to evaluate if a PC will be able to provide a good, bad or excellent experience with Windows Vista. A PC rated 1 will be providing a minimal experience, a PC rated 5 will be near perfect offering all the bells and whistles that Vista can provide.

The formula behind this rating is not known. It will probably include the performance of the graphic card, of the CPU, the amount of memory and disk space. Of course, it may be a little rough and imprecise, but it should help people know what to expect from the PC they will buy for Vista (remember that you will probably have to buy a new one to run Vista conveniently – see my previous posts).

More information on TG daily (Tom’s hardware).

Nikon Precision just announced the delivery of equipment to etch silicon at the 55nm level. A major step in the direction of ever more integrated circuits.

There are many web sites showing a photograph per week, but I usually do not find a single reason to come back the following week. In general, the quality level is rather poor, when it is not frankly low. But this time, I found a shiny gold nugget (Photo.net). The photograph of the week is often striking, interesting or surprising.

Lost, by Francisca Rivera

If you own a digital photo camera from the Nikon brand, you will certianly be interested in finding the forums of NiconCafe.com. All subjects are freely discussed (hardware gear is currently more about Nikon D200 and other digital single lens reflex cameras or lenses that would be attached to them than about compact digital cameras or analog ones) and you will also find image galleries.

How many images, how many repetitions of the same photos will we need before publicly admitting that the American autorities in Irak (and maybe in Washington) went overboard and that the image of western democracy is torn down by the acts of those soldiers who told they were coming to bring democracy, peace and freedom to a country who did not ask all that flood and with powers that have nothing to do with Churchill depiction of “the worse system, except all others”.

Let’s hope that the next American elections will bring some hope. In the mean time, I am ashamed that some people may think that a freedom lover could be associated with the Abu Graib acts.

According to The Inquirer, it is a wooping 50% of all current PCs that will not be able to display the nice new graphic interface of Windows Vista. Be ready to buy a new graphics card in just a few months for this.

This could become a real problem for Vista because one of the best reasons to upgrade Windows has always been to have the added pleasure of the newest graphic candy that a new version brings to the old operating system.

Her Majesty’s police force is worried by the promised arrival of Microsoft Vista and its feature to protect data on a PC hard drive by sophisticated encryption methods – to a result of leaving a foreigner unable to read any information from the PC hard drive. As a matter of fact, this feature could well be helping bad guys (the usual suspects: terrorists, child pornography amateurs and spy-pirates) to keep their data outof the prying eyes of the police investigators.

Scotland Yard would have been asking Microsoft to provide them with a backdoor into the system in order to allow them to watch the contents of an encrypted hard drive without the password or the help of the owner (rather needed if you want an easy police investigation).

We will see if Microsoft gives in to the friendly requirements of the official authorities (taking the risk to jeopardize the ultimate security of the data protection feature of the upcoming Windows Vista). I believe that they will not, but your opinion is as good as mine here.