Archive for May, 2006

All information points to June 2006 being the month when we will see the first graphics cards compatible with the HDMI standard for HD television and screens.

Up to now, none was available. But ATI and others are preparing their first HDMI-compatible cards and it seems that the price difference between HDMI-compatible and plain cards will be around 10-20$ (quite reasonable).

it’s been years that you can find on the open market DVD players that can be more or less dezoned (made insensitive to the differences between DVD bought on different continents – more compatible than the DVD standard would like).

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) decided this would end and, with that in mind, started an ongoing legal battle against the DVD player chipset manufacturers. Each time they can, and it’s been 6 times in the recent months, they challenge the manufacturer in court for not implementing correctly the so-called “CSS” algorithms or for leaving an open back door.

The most recent victim appears to be Taiwanese SunPlus, world second manufacturer of ICs for DVD players.

After Canon, here is the pro web site of Nikon: Nikon Pro Service.

As usual, this site is targetting real pros, but it could be useful for dedicated Nikon-loving amateurs.

This is not a full review of this great game show, but I wanted to point at a few of the important items that could be extracted from this event.

• Crysis, the new First Person Shooter (FPS) of Crytek (previously author of the much acclaimed FarCry) seems to be totally impressive with a crazy jungle environment where everything seems to be real (you can shoot trees leave by leave and the image rendering is amazingly good). I don’t know what kind of hardware we’ll need for it, though. (photos and test)
• Duke Nukem Forever is still scheduled for… later. This game will never happen (it already cost more than 8M$ and is still not getting out of the Dallas offices where it is supposedly developed).
• Lots of games have bought a Hollywood license: Scarface, Reservoir dogs, and the usual batch of Star Wars based games

Upon request, here is a link to the article I wrote previously about the short life span of CD-R discs.

The web site for photo professionals using Canon photo cameras: Canon Professional Service.

It may also contain information interesting people using other cameras, but really serious Canon-loving photographers should check this out.

For once, I will not even try to tell you what this web site is about. It’s written in Japanese and I have no clue (I only understand a few characters, far from what would be needed to buy a hard disc drive in a Tokyo specialized shop). But, it is a web site whose nice look and feel I appreciated.

Go visit http://www.shiroganeya.co.jp/, I loved it. You’ll have to click on the “broadband” button to see all the visit.

StarPort galactic empires is a Windows-compatible video game still 100% free to play. You have a fleet of space vessels and a galactic empire that could be crushed by its neighbours.

This is the announcement of Toru Katsumoto, Senior General Manager at Sony, in charge of the Digital Imaging Business Group.

In a publi-interview, he tells us that Sony does not intend to wait with the current large offer of existing lenses compatible with the Minolta lens-mount. They will launch 20 new lenses in year starting this Summer to complement the unannounced offer of digital single lens reflex cameras expected after buying the photo business of the dying Konica-Minolta photo group.

Baidu. This is the name of a company, of the largest Chinese search engine and of an open encyclopaedia just starting now in China.

While Wikipedia is actively censored in China, Baidu wants to offer an answer to the need for an open encyclopaedia written by its visitors. Wikipedia let everybody directly modify the articles of the encyclopaedia. So the content is quickly growing (more than a million articles in the English version and more than 250,000 articles for the French version), but there are two risks:

• The content may be false
• Freedom of speech is difficult to limit in such a context

For the first issue, Wikipedia is relying on the reaction speed of millions of visitors even if it has been proved that it is not always enough to ensure perfect lack of factual errors (but it works mostly anyway).

The second issue is a problem only in dictatorships like China. Democrats certainly will have been surprised even by the way I expressed the concern above. But Chinese political leaders decided to filter/censor Wikipedia. Consequently, Baidu decided to bring an answer by creating a sort of Chinese Wikipedia that would censor itself with the help of its founders announcing an editing policy that can be considered as very Politically Correct (in Chinese political terms).

Nothing is really said about who will apply censorship and how…

This is the utterly funny claim of an American blogger met in a random encounter on the web (Shelley the Republican).

Some American people have brought paranioa from a mental illness to a creative art.

Norvegians from Digit.no show what appears to be the first sighting of a Digital Single Lens Reflex camera Alpha from Sony. Probably a replacement for the Dynax/Maxxum 5D.

http://www.digit.no/wip4/detail.epl?id=91529

Maybe like me some time ago you think about taking advantage of some of the blog techiques without using the actual blog tools (I finally jumped into WordPress to ease my life as you can see).

In this case, you will certainly be interested in producing RSS feeds (if you don’t know what i’m speaking about I suggest you either jumped to the next page or fetch the information from the Wikipedia web site). I found a web site with details about how to create RSS feeds with Dreamweaver. Nothing awfully technically dififcult, but if you want it fast, you need to read it now. It’s worth it.

As you certainly noticed, my web site got a new feline theme based upon a photo taken in Kenya in April.

The small world of technical solutions to protect the copyrights starts seeing the same issues as the software industry observed fifteen years ago when trying solutions for software copy protection.

For example, we start seeing cases where two DRM solutions (Digital Rights Management) cannot live simultaneously on the same computer. This wasn’t enough that you couldn’t use the CD you just bought in any of the usual ways you’d like, now buying one CD may mean that you cannot use another. This is the kind of horror story that starts popping up like in the recent article from CDR-info which deals with the software conflicts between the technical offering of SunComm and StarForce (two providers of DRM techniques for companies willing to protect their audio CDs).

I guess that, like before, the industry will soon realize that this approach is putting more constraints on the legitimate user than real roadblocks against the hackers, pirates and casual crooks. But, we will see a number of customers bumping onto technical incompatibilities of all kinds, before the music and video industry starts seeing that this is actually limiting the sales growth.

The Luminous Landscape is a great web site with a lot of information on digital photography, excellent photos and nice reviews of related hardware and software.

I singled out a nice little article about what they call “the colour gremlins” (More commonly, this is known as digital sensor noise). What is interesting is that they present a nice simple way to reduce this problem in a way that allows to clean up the digital image of the noise artefacts (little coloured spots seen in high ISO images).

The technique is quite easy to handle. However, it is still better to avoid this situation and to use a low sensitivity (with less noise) or a better sensor (usually it means using a larger sensor like the ones found in Digital Single Lens Reflex or D-SLR).