Archive for August, 2006

Those hoping that the future graphic cards supporting HD-TV (High Definition TV) and being compliant with the HDCP encryption standard would stay easy-to-hack will have to forget about their dreams. Just one after the other, nVidia and ATI announced that they would not stay long with the graphic chipset + HDCP chipset solutions of today and would quickly bring integrated chipsets.

The hopes of seeing one or two hackers finding a way to trick these cards to display full resolution 1080p HD-TV onto a display not including the HDCP interface will have to llok elsewhere. It seems that HDCP will not be circumvented this way (or not for long, if it happens).

We just learned that the OpenOffice development team will show its desktop software suite running on Mac OS-X in the upcoming Apple Expo (next month in Paris). Welcome to the Mac lovers in the world of free Word, Excel and PowerPoint (we remember that Microsoft Office is seriously abandonned on the Mac nowadays).

Yesterday, RyanAir was offering a radical solution to the terrorist threats in planes. The idea is catching up.

Really! The way it goes in marketing departments all over the world, the Photokina in Cologne next month (from September 26th, 2006) will have nothing left to announce. At least, on the segment of Digital Single Lens Reflex (D-SLR) cameras. All the news will be out: Sony launched its Alpha A100 in July, Nikon just presented its fresh new D80, Pentax gave enough hints about the new K10D series, Canon called the press for its new entry-level DSLR camera (Canon 400D or Rebel Xti). Sigma was still missing, but it’s going to change.

Sigma started the promotion of its upcoming SD14 on the Sigma web site specially open for it. You’ll find a Flash teaser that doesn’t say much, but the use of a new sensor from the excellent Foveon X3 series (they decode the three basic colors on eah pixel leading to an improved resolution and an excellent color quality).

Shouldn’t the name point to a 14 million-pixel resolution? I’ll tell you more, when I have more.

Following the recent increase of security measures in planes and airports, RyanAir low-cost airlines are really fed up with the accumulation of silly measures intended to detect would-be terrorists attempting to board planes. Check-in is longer than ever and constraints on what passengers can bring in hand-luggage are becoming frankly ridiculous.

Why not go right to the natural conclusion of these efforts, advises RyanAir on its web site: Passengers should travel stark naked. At least, travels would become fun again.

As you probably already knw, I am also the adminstrator of a web site fighting against SPAM (SpamAnti.net). On this site, I have been promoting actively the use of a statistical mail filtering tool to sort SPAM out of your mailbox: K9 from Robin Keir.

But, a lot of us who tested some of the available tools (some of them are sold at very high prices) quickly observed that their efficiency is often quite poor. Sometimes surprisingly bad. So, how’s K9 going? Very well.

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Yet another new lens with a wide aperture: This time it is a zoom, APO 50-150mm F2.8 EX DC HSM. A long variation (from the standard 50mm to a small tele-lens 150mm). Nothing wrong in this zoom incorporating also an HSM (Hyper Sonic Motor) to allow quiet and high-speed auto focusing with full time manual focus override; Or maybe the fact that it should not be used with full-frame sensors, 35mm analog cameras, and other sensors of larger size than the common APS-C format (risk of significant vignetting).

The lens is fully compatible with the 1.4x EX DG APO or 2x EX DG APO Sigma tele converters.

Immediately available for Sigma AF, Canon EOS, Nikon AF, Sony and Pentax AF.

Ars Technica (one of my prefered web sites about PC computer technology) just published its perfect PC recommendation article. Obviously, perfection changes according to the price you are ready to pay for it. So, there are three different levels of PC perfection and each is described down to the finest details (what motherboard, what CPU, what hard disc drive, what graphic card, but also what mouse or what network card).

I am specially looking to the one titled “budget box” (whose cost must stay down to “very affordable”) and its possible equipment with either an AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+ dual-core processor or an Athlon 64 3200+ single core CPU.

Finally, Canon launched officially the new Digital SLR camera (Canon 400D or Digital Rebel Xti) that is supposed to be the spearhead of the company in this very valuable market. The Internet is glowing with reviews and previews of the new camera ready to oppose the Nikon D80, Sony A100 and Pentax K100D. Here are a few of them:

• Imaging Resource
• DPreview
• Let’s go digital
• DCresource
• ePhotoZine
• Pop Photo
• Zone Numérique

Did I mention that there are plenty of articles?

 

With a new Canon 400D body around 799$ (or about 799€), we can expect a hot battle for the leader’s position in the 10 mega-pixel market segment.

If you want to publish a web site, you may be interested by the following series of articles I wrote about how to quickly create a full-fledged web site using WordPress.

1. Get a domain name
2. Rent web publishing space
3. Connect web space and domain name
4. Configure the Apache server
5. Install WordPress
6. Call the search engines

Now, you can fill the new web site of yours. Wasn’t it easy?

For the roumazeilles.net domain, I published an SPF-compliant declaration (in the DNS Bind zone file).

roumazeilles.net. IN TXT “v=spf1 ip4:81.57.246.28 a mx ptr include:free.fr include:magic.fr -all”

You certainly heard that the magic key to Internet audience for your web site is the visibility in Search Engines. Unfortunately, this is only a small part of the landscape. Out of the small circles of Internet marketing honchos, there are many false stories and true rumours.

If you want to keep your mind clear, here are a few simple messages to store.

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For various reasons, I have been looking for software tools able to magnify an image or a zone of the computer screen. Here are some of the links I collected this way:

• The Microsoft PowerToys include a Windows XP screen magnifier that can be installed in the taskbar.
• ZoomAView – The Computer Magnifier!: A powerful, easy to use computer desktop screen magnifier. Features magnify zoom levels up to 32x, moveable, sizeable lens window, locked or “mouse-region” view, selectable cursor style, reverse colors in view (photo negative), and more.
• The Magnifier (by Iconico): Simple and easy to use, the Magnifier is always handy for when you need to see all the details. Magnifier has the following features: – Totally 100% Free! – No popup adverts or spyware, it really is free – Easy to use with any other program – Resizable magnification area – Adjustable zoom factor – Overlay a grid for quick alignment

You learned a few days ago that I had some problems with random errors in my Compact Drive PD70x flash card portable hard disk reader. It seems (I’m not 100% sure) that it came from dirty contacts between the hard disk drive and the electronics. I actually cleaned quickly those (thanks to Compact Drive for providing a little screw driver and using traditional Philips screws) and it seems that it did not happen again.

Sigma launches a new lens with a nicely wide aperture: a medium/short tele, Macro 70mm F2.8 EX DG. Certainly a good lens needed to draw some of the macro photo enthusiasts (1:1 ratio) and whose quality should be high enough to keep the flag of the EX line quite high (gold ring at the front of the lens). Notice that this lens includes a small ‘Focus Limiter Switch’ button to improve focusing speed in extreme conditions.

Beware: It should not be used with full-frame sensors, 35mm analog cameras, and other sensors of larger size than the common APS-C format (risk of significant vignetting).

Immediately available for Sigma AF, Canon EOS and Nikon AF. Sony and Pentax AF will come later.

According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is “an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the use of shared lists of user-created Internet bookmark lists“.

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Thanks to TG daily (Tom’s Hardware) we have a clearer view of the performance/cost ratio of dual-core processors these days (after the arrival of the cost cuts both from AMD and Intel).

Click on the thumbnail
to open a larger graph.

Things get clearer now. It becomes quite obvious that the old Pentium EE is completely out of the game today.

In the entry market (less than 200$), it is clear that the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and Athlon 64 X2 4200+ are really alone in front of the ageing Pentium D offer. But, around 250$, the Core 2 Duo E6400 from Intel are nicely set to attack the Athlon 64 X2 4600+ from AMD.

Finally, when looking at 350$ or more, there are only the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme from Intel left with a good performance/price ratio (but the cost is so prohibitive for a mere CPU that I wonder who’s really buying at this price point – at least, I don’t know any real buyer here ; You can tell me).

The rest of the information is available from the original article at TG daily.