Archive for May, 2006

An article from the Raw Story titled “US military, intelligence officials raise concern about possible preparations for Iran strike” seems to be complementing my previous paper about a future nuclear war in Iran.

What is interesting is not that military is preparing the war (they are asked to prepare all kinds of options with plans, organization and tests) but that it seems that preparations have gone as far as allowing the organization of advanced support inside Iran. This is the usual spy job but, seen in the context of the ever-pressing effort of the US administration on the UN during all this Spring, the mind starts to put things in place and we begin to see that this could well be a real intent.

In August 2003, American armed forces found in Iraqi more than 30 military planes buried in the sand of the desert (no doubt to protect them aginst the attacks of the American forces during the second Gulf War). The Aerospaceweb.org web site presents us photos of the extraction.

This is sufficiently weird and funny that I wanted you to have a look at the image of the work. Apparently, the American spies were quite happy with it since the buried planes were from a very recent technology (and Russians would not really appreciate it).

It is always difficult to find the right GNU/Linux distribution for a specific need (There are so many of them around the Internet!). This is why I wish to show you a web site where you’re supposed to answer a few simple questions to be directed to the best possible distribution for your Linux needs.

This is not because we are on the web that we are not interested in reading newspapers. On the contrary, reading a web site like Roumazeilles.net proves that you may be quite interested, first, in reading.

I collected a few web sites where you can get some professional publications that invite you to join their readership for free.

• French-oriented publications
• Scientific Computing World for computers applied to science (international version)
• Europa Science Ltd. is a magazine publisher specialising in European scientific, technical and medical markets, with five titles currently published
• Electronic Design News
• Reed Business Information is North America’s largest business-to-business information provider, covering 23 market sectors with more than 100 market-leading publications and 75 Websites.
• TradePub: FREE Trade Magazine Subscriptions & Technical Document.
• French-speaking electronic Press

Bonne lecture !

Tired of running around to cancel spammers messages since I setup the feature of comments on this site, I decided to reinforce the filtering policy and to setup an automated filter. For that purpose, since I use WordPress, I chose Akismet whose operation is very efficient. The vast majority of the SPAM is simply detected. Some (those where Akismet is not certain) end up in the moderation queue - I must give my own advice. Recommended to fellow bloggers.

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.