Archive for June, 2006

A web site with plenty of amazing optical illusions (but not as much as the Optical illusion category of my own web site, of course!). More than enough to loose yourself, or to loose your steadiness.

Straight lines

Often known as “hara-kiri” the Japanese ritual suicide is more a dramatic art with very strict rules and conditions than just killing yourself. This page gives you a good insight about it.

Seeing the recent launch of the new Sony Alpha A100, some people asked me whether they should buy immediately a Konica-Minolta Dynax/Maxxum 7D or wait a little more for a Sony Alpha A100. So, let’s try to summarize the situation.

My motto, seeing the short delay, Wait for image quality. the Alpha A100 will not be perfect, but if you really are tempted, Sony A100 is good enough.

Alpha A100 advantages:

• Larger resolution : Sony will allow you to easily print in A3 size (instead of a good A4).
• Sensor auto-clean
• Light-weight camera

Dynax/Maxxum 7D advantages:

• Superb viewfinder (if you come from a non-digital camera, you may find using most other cameras - including the Sony Alpha A100 - like looking into a keyhole).
• Very robust mechanical design. It’s heavy but you know that it won’t break if you are rough with it.
• Price falling down since it was discontinued. There are great stock-emptying offers for new cameras and the second-hand market is following. Astounding offers while it lasts.

Both cameras are currently difficult to get. Sony will appear at the end of July (possible shortage at start, pre-ordering only for now). Maxxum/Dynax is fast becoming impossible to buy new (stocks are evaporating quickly).

All in all, I don’t think that this should really be an open question. Both cameras are strictly different and most people should have no difficulty in choosing. But, now, you know the reasons. It all comes from what kind of camera user you are.

News from The Inquirer: Vista will be the only Operating System supporting DirectX 10 (the latest version of the video-game-oriented graphic support software). This is bad news for those intending to keep WindowsXP and willing to use the latest video games and entertainment software in 2007. You will have to switch to Vista, like it or not.

Even better than old-timers panoramic windshields, better than the glass roof of Peugeot or Citroën cars, here comes the gigantic panoramic windshield at GM-Opel-Vauxhall. The new Astra GTC will have a windshield going up to a point far behind the normal position of the driver and allows the Summer sun to enter easily the interior of the car.

Click on the thumbnails to see larger images from the GM press release.

Market concentration ahead! While Adobe just announced buying Pixmantec the designer of RawShooter, a very good utilities program to handle RAW files (digital photography images, uncompressed, straigth out of the digital camera sensor).

For me, this looks like food for thought. Indeed, while buying a product (partially) in competition with its own, Adobe is actively participating to a reduction of competition and diversity of its adversaries. For the graphics company, this is a very obvious and needed move. There’s no question about that. But, for the photo user, there are two ways to analyze this news. An optmistic and a pessimistic. The optimist reader will think that digital photography is now mature enough that competition is no longer needed (and possible) on such very small periperal tools, and they will soon be fully integrated into larger software programs (Photoshop following Microsoft on the path to integration of more and more software tools - simultaneously frightening some of its competition). The pessimist reader will see the offer diversity being reduced significantly like the consumer choice.

I’m more on the optimistic side, but I will let you choose your side.

Source: DPReview.

I am not sure this is a priority for the normal Internet web user, but blog authors may appreciate the recognition brought by Google with its specialized search engine for blogs: Google Blog Search.

I need to look into this quickly now that Internet Explorer 7 is seriously ready to reach all of our PCs. There will be news, there will be chanes and uour web sites may suddenly break down because of that.

For it, RegDeveloper offer its help with an article on preparing your web site for the arrival of IE 7: “Getting your site sorted for IE 7“.

This is simply the aim of an InformationWeek article. NAS (Network Attached Storage) solutions exist to connect 1 Tera-byte (1000 Mega-bytes, dang!) of hard disk drives to your network, but you normally have to pay more than $1000 or 1000€.

Here, they show us how to build a DIY data server from a basic PC, a box big enough and four standard hard disc drives. The Operating System will be GNU/Linux for costs reasons, but it could be Windows as well and then beget a PC work station with an awful lot of data storage space.

Easy and cheap, this is the way to go!

It’s not only that when creating a web site you have to make it as easy to use as possible, but these things seem not to change with time. WebMonkey gives us a fine list of these mistakes no web designer should allow himself:

• Links that don’t change color when visited
• Breaking the back button
• Opening new browser windows
• Pop-up windows
• Design elements that look like advertisements
• Violating Web-wide conventions
• Vaporous content and empty hype
• Dense content and unscannable text

After expressing my concern about the future of the Minolta photographic system (with Konica-Minolta recently leaving the photo market, orphaning KM digital single lens refelx cameras like the Maxxum 7D), it was opportune to come back on this while Sony just presented its first Digital SLR (DSLR), the Sony Alpha A100.

I sincerily believe that the arrival of the new camera is very good news for Minolta fans (as I have been for years). Sony just demonstrated its will to enter this market with all needed power and courage. Even if the Japanese manufacturer certainly has lost most of the brio it had in the Akio Morita years (time when Sony shattered preconceptions with the Walkman whose brand quickly became a household common name), the Sony Alpha A100 has taken critical strategical steps to serve the prosumer photo market.

Instead of starting with an easy-to-design product which would be a replacement for the previous Dynax/Maxxum 5D and Dynax/Maxxum 7D, Sony chose to start at a logical price point (just below $1000) but with very distinguishing features that may appear as terrible competition:

• A 10 M-pixel sensor (straight to the high-end)
• In-body image stabilization associatd to sensor cleaning by shaking the sensor (a nice differenciation feature)

If you add to it a notable effort to launch a whole set of optical lenses (about twenty of them, including new Zeiss-designed primes ; flashes), you start to see a broad picture of Sony decided to reach the head of the pack of high-end photo camera manufacturers.

This is an attractive market where financial margins are still enough to feed an innovative company. But it is also a market where Canon and Nikon will not let anybody else approach the meal that is served for them. Sony just decided that they wanted to be #1 in the Digital Single Lens Reflex camera market.

We can wish them luck, indeed. It won’t be easy. But nobody can say that this is a half-baked attempt. For us, observers of Sony or Minolta users, it means that Sony’s will is real and it is no longer necessary to worry about the future of the Minolta system. In the past, Lords, Earls, Baronets have been known to give their title to a worthy commoner in order to ensure the continuity of a lineage. Minolta probably found a worthy heir.

Hearing about all news about all GNU/Linux distributions was a micro-nightmare up to now (there are so many of them around the Internet that you cannot check them all). But there is a mere web site where you can get the right information but in a signle location: