Archive for June, 2006

All old readers of this legendary American publication (which was the world’s most read computer magazine during years before falling down into a more common on line edition) will be happy to hear that CMP publications (the publisher) decided to accept Byte.com readership without subscription.

Champagne to celebrate the return to public life of Jerry Pournelle, Martin Heller and the others!

This is what Mail on Sunday tells us about the manufacturing of iPods from Steve Jobs’ company that is using advertisments asking us to Think different with the assistance of left-wing political idols as prominent as Gandhi or Chavez.

But the 200,000 Foxconn workers, one of the Chinese suppliers of Apple, would be paid only 50$ per month (which is low even for a Chinese wage).

The attack may not be supported by a lot of evidence for the time being, this may look like a very common practice in the assembly manufacturing sub-contracting industry, but Apple could (should?) feel forced to have the highest industry standard, knowing their political posture. In this context, Apple announced to MacWorld UK that they would be investigating the issue.

If you want to see photos of Paris by night, I have collected some of them on a specific page of my web site. They have been there or quite some time, but some people seems to have difficulty finding them again. So let’s help.

Eiffel tower – Tour Eiffel

This is the mere symbol of Paris: The Eiffel tower, more than two centuries old is standing there.

(Click on the thumbnails to enlarge the image).

The other photos.

This is the sheer number of web sites as counted in the beginning of June by Netcraft.

Do you remember the time when Altavista was proud to have a search base of 10 millions pages? The web is young and still growing fast.

It’s going to be a nice time for you all ready to buy a new computer (or a new CPU processor). It seems that Intel and AMD, out of ideas to compete directly, are preparing a nice little price war.

According to Bloomberg, Intel started it with an upcoming price cut that could reduce the cost of some components by 60% on July 23rd. It seems that this is a needed move to clear stock of ageing processors in preparation of the arrival of the newest technology: Conroe (Core 2 Duo - also known as dual core processor at a reasonable price). This would be a natural move to fight against the growing market share of AMD (in the recent months, AMD succeeded in jumping over the 20%-barrier, preparing to get one third of the world’s processor shipments).

But what could have been a major Intel stock clearance action seems to be prompting a slashing answer from AMD. This time, this is the Inquirer suggesting that AMD price cuts could go into the 50% area. And this should be happening on nearly all socket-939 and AM2 products.

Usually, the two processor giants take turns in cutting prices while new technology is moved out of the plants. Sometimes, a significant price slash is seen to improve local stocks or to clean up financial statements. But it seems that the thing is going to be a bit wider than usual and we could be facing several months of entrenched battle where both sides toss Press Releases at each other while trying to impress the public into buying more silicon. After our comments in a previous article on AMD, we think that this could lead to interesting rebates all over the place in the coming months. This Summer and Autumn may be very nice to the consumer in all of us.

If you are looking for a new computer, my advice is thus to wait a few days and to make sure that you buy only after the new price lists are applied into the distribution channels. Your CPU could be nearly half the original price. It’s worth it. The consumer is king of the CPU market now.

28th June, Google will initiate the operation of GBuy. There was a persistent rumour of the interest of Google to go foray into the PayPal market. It seems that GBuy will be a new payment system (exactly like PayPal from eBay), but it will also be connected to the global search engine. This could give some little advantages to the Internet users (some search results will be tagged as using GBuy – supposedly better or easier to use) or to the marketing people (linking search habits and consumer habits could lead to an as-yet-unseen marketing power).

Everybody expected eBay/PayPal to fight back (the best defence is attacking): Look for eBay AdContext, the new advertisment proposal by eBay (in direct competition with Google AdWords – used on this web site).

Things will soon become very interesting for the external observer.

When you started using your camera, you shot everything. Today, you are out of ideas, out of models. If you’re photo-bored, there’s still one trendy thing you can try.

You only have to… (more…)

Didn’t you already need to write a map for a few friends that you invited to your home or some even less obvious location? This is a little nightmare to do it by yourself. You probably went to one of the mapping web sites (Mappy.com, for example), you printed, cut-n-paste, etc.

This is over! Your own personalized map is ready thanks to PinInTheMap (Pin in the map). In a minute, with the technical assistance of Google maps, you can simply and freely do it with two or three clicks only.

You want to know where I live? Just look at the satellite photo:

• on the Google satellite map
• Or in Google Earth

“A brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke”. That’s the decription given by a farmer who happens to have witnessed the fall of the largest meteorite in Norway’s recent history. It hit the ground on a mountainside in Reisadalenon the 7th of June. An astronomer compared its destructive power to that of the Hiroshima bomb (less radioactive fallout).

Source: United Press International.

Canon shocked the high-end digital camera world when announcing the Canon EOS 5D with its 12 M-pixel sensor of a full 24*36mm (also known as full frame). You lost the 1.5 conversion factor on the focal lenght of lenses, but the user grabbed some very neat advantages:

• A larger surface used to easily improve the resolution to 12 mega-pixels
• A larger surface used to increase the sensitivity and the quality of images

Amateurs and professional photographers immediately jumped into asking (more…)

It’s been some time now that I use that surprisingly good list of utilities from BootDisk.com. I wanted to finally share it with you.

Highly recommended.

Because, despite my repeated advice of migrating from Word (still expensive at Microsoft) to OpenOffice (freely downloadable and as powerful as MS-Word), you may still be using Word, I am giving you here the business letter template that I offered yesterday for OpenOffice, but adapted to Microsoft Word. With still the same advantages:

• There is a small mark in the left margin to show where to fold the paper.
• The address where to send the letter is located in a transparent box located as precisely as possible to guarantee full readability of the address from the folder paper sheet.

Good text processing work!

Nearly all users of a word processor have been faced with this minor annoyance of writing a passable commercial-like letter. But, worse, at the time of filling the enveloppe, you have to fight with a sheet of paper that would not accept to align itself with the address window of the enveloppe.

Today, I am happy to solve this dramatic problem for you (and it’s for free!). In order to save your patience and to avoid your determination would fail in front of this daunting task, I offer you a letter template (for OpenOffice v2.0) already prepared to the most common european standards and including two important advantages:

• There is a small mark in the left margin to show where to fold the paper (and you will not have to share map-folding knowledge with martian grey men – who are the only ones with the needed practical intelligence to solve this car driver task).
• The location of the address where to send the letter is designed in a transparent box located as precisely as possible to guarantee full readability of the address from the folder paper sheet (You will – still – have to put the paper sheet in the enveloppe with the address facing the right way. OpenOffice cannot help here).

Design and illustration activities often require the use of images. In that intent, photo agencies come to the rescue with their organized offer of catalogs, stocks, heaps of photographs sold for one or more uses. Unfortunately, not everybody have the financial wealth to purchase agency stock photos to illustrate a web site, a leaflet, or a small decorative item. If you do not have a top-of-the-heap requirement (agency photographs are of exceptional quality by definition) or if you do have the energy and time to dig a little deeper, there is the solution to buy from those photographers – often amateurs but not always – who decided to put some of their images in the public domain or under the Creative Commons license.

But the problem is still to find the images. Here comes a recently opened web site offering an image search engine targetting specifically those image types (freely available to all). Welcome to YotoPhoto.

you will still have to check the exact terms of the license contract requested by the author (and sometimes to verify that the model gave his/her agreement to the image use), but it will guide you on a fast path to many images. Quality is uneven to say the least (most photographers here are not professionals, many images come directly from Flickr), but the source is definitely interesting/useful and the glint of a jewel reveals itself to the trained eye.

The most common origin for the images you will find here is the group of the usual suspects:

• Flickr (where you will find a vast majority of amateur shots)
• Stock.Xchng
• Wikipedia (multi-language encyclopaedia containing much more than mere images)
• MorgueFile (whose content I really appreciate)
• freefoto.com

This is the wet dream of all serious user of digital photography cameras (or similar mobiel devices for digital music, portable movies, portable video game consoles). But it is very difficult to find a real comparison with real products. Well! This is what the excellent Dyxum.com web site offers in an extensive comparison of Compact Flash memory cards (and some SD cards, too).

Personally, I conclude from reading it that Sandisk and Lexar build very fast cards (but very expensive ones!). I noticed that Transcend who builds very low cost cards reach an impressively high level of performance and so offer a nearly unreachable performance/price ratio.

Polish magazine Fotopolis (www.fotopolis.pl) just published some images taken with the new Sony Alpha DSLR A100. They give a very first impression of the image quality of the camera.

Essentially, it is impossible to know the exact state of the camera and its embedded software may not be the final version. But the limited quality of 1600 ISO images may explain why Sony did not include a 3200 ISO setting on its Alpha A100 camera.

The most telling part is probably (in the full size image file that you can grab by clicking directly on the small size image presented in the article on the web site) the darker zones of the images. The noise is pretty visible there with a lot of colored artefacts that could be thought as the “grain” of this digital sensor.

But there are good news too in the lighter zones: No perceptible blooming. The high lights will be quite clean if they are kept at this level of quality.

Beware: the web site is very slow (probably a bit overloaded by the overall attention).

As my long-time readers know, Pegasus mail is my prefered email software. It’s free, it’s powerful, it’s nearly insensitive to security issues (partly because it does not have all the bells and whistles of others like Outlook Express), it’s for Windows.

Two important news about Pegasus mail:

• Pegasus mail goes to v4.31 (with new improved HTML renderer, better anti-phishing options, better image handling, etc.)
• Addition of a French language interface for v4.31
• Addition of a German language interface for v4.31

A very good program becoming even better.