Archive for December, 2006

The computer that really started the revolution of our societies, ENIAC, officially turned 60 in 2006. Before closing the door on this year, I wanted to celebrate this birthdate with its museum.

All that without forgetting that those of us who are more than 40-year old saw the birth of pocket electronic calculators. With ENIAC, they moved us from a world where calculation was done manually or with a slide rule, into a world where computations are no longer used for adding and multiplying but to communicate together.

While 2006 closes slowly, I want to thank all the visitors of Roumazeilles.net. I want also to wish you an excellent year 2007.

I hope that you will walk into a new year of light, photography, technology, software and computers for your greatest pleasure and for your sheer happyness. Be sure to share those wishes with your dear ones.

Yves Roumazeilles
Your webmaster

Sorry for those of you who are not in love with GNU/Linux and Unix (exclusively in their command line version), but I could not resist to this:

From xkcd.com

Direct from Taiwan: A truckload of DDR RAM has been stolen in Taiwan. Manufactured by Hynix, this is a job of no less than 306 millions dollars!

Source: DigiTimes.

Posts about EOS 40D: EOS 40D initial scoop All of them

Let’s try a prediction (I was about to say prevision). While the end of 2006 was clearly marked by the lauch of digital cameras to attract some of the less wealthy to digital single lens reflex cameras (or D-SLR) with new products like the Canon 400D (Rebel Xti) or the Nikon D40, I can foresee a beginning of 2007 with a flood of high-end digital single lens reflex cameras.

We are alweady waiting for the Sigma SD14 (unfortunately delayed by a hardware bug, they say) and the Fuji S5 pro that should be quickly followed by an impressive Pentax K10D (10 MP, all-weather hardware preparation, stabilised image sensor with dust removal and excellent color image quality). Now, I can see the arrival of the high-end replacements from Canon and Nikon. These companies did not say anything yet, but the rumour has it that the Canon EOS 30D will soon be replaced by a new EOS 40D that is eagerly awaited by Canon lovers.

There were even some additonal rumours coming from South Korea a few days ago: An article posted on Egloos.com.

But there is even better. December is the month of a promotional campaign for the Canon EOS 30D: 150 euros coupon when buying an EOS 30D. The last time we saw something similar it was in November 2005, a promo coupon for the Canon 20D just 4 months before the launch of the Canon EOS 30D. So, I’d say that we are 3-4 months from its replacement (still named 40D by the street).

I let you choose if this is another rumour (we are indeed waiting a long time for this new beast from Canon) or if there fire behind the smoke.

PS: Please note that the 40D name seems to have such a high probability that a BKphoto advertisment [PDF] even used this name a few weeks ago (no price given, just NC - Call us).

Certainly not very original (hi-speed cameras have been able to film very fast phenomenons for years), but they are still very impressive images:

After all, even if this is a publicity stunt with not a lot to relate with real-life driving, the photos of the SUV towing one of the biggest air planes in the world are still impressive.

I was preparing a small post to talk about what I was envisonning as the future of anti-piracy measures included in HD DVD and BluRay DVD. According to me, there were two possible angles of attack:

• Break the AAS coding on the disc itself.
• Use the weaknesses of the HDCP protocol that is a requirement in all HDMI conexions to protect the trasmission of high-quality digital flows.

I admit that I was ready to comment more on the second issue to remind the theoretical flaws (already mentioned here in: “HDCP/HDMI broken or nearly broken“) and the technical blunder it was becoming for graphics cards, monitors, Windows Vista and others.

But the news are faster than me: A programmer hidden behind the muslix64 psuedo just posted on a Doom9 forum a small Java application, BackupHDDVD, claiming to crack the AAS protection of a HD DVD. It is preparing a second version on 2nd of January to improve on it (for the time being only video is fully cracked). ‘DVD Jon’ Johanssen promissed earlier to work on cracking AAS (he had broken the Content Scrambling System (CSS) protection system of DVD a few years ago). Apparently, he was too slow.

It is now easy to forecast that High Definition DVD will be cracked, opened, decoded, pirated and thus distributed through various pirate channels in the very first days of 2007.

The video of the crack in action:

Whatever the skills you use in your professional life, the pre-hiring interview is a needed step that the candidate engineer will have to go through. They prepare themselves as much as they ca. But the hiring people usually are relying more on their habits or experience and they do not prepare interviews too much (with the usual exception of Human Ressources personnel).

But Engineers also meet the candidates (the opinion of Human Ressources cannot be enough when hiring for a highly technical position). After a few years, you collect a few ideas and questions that could be asked to the candidates in order to build an impression about the adequation between the position and the various candidates. Here is the output of my own experience in hiring for technical engineering positions.

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As a matter of fact, the holiday season seems to be a season of SPAM. This web site is receiving again a large amount of comment SPAM. I guess that the spammers are hoping to catch bloggers while they are distracted by more family matters.

Thanks to Akismet for catching all that. I only have to delete the stored SPAM.

Now that Google has bought YouTube, the issue is really what is going to happen. It is not enough to see a lot of traffic (YouTube has tens of millions of users rushing in to look at a myriad of online videos) to make a good business model (look at the 2000 Internet bubble that blew when people noticed that most companies only had traffic to offer but no income to rack).

So, is YouTube going to be a minor bubble in 2007? Maybe driving Google down, too? Some people may say so, but I am ready to bet on their success for a few reasons.

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This is the title of one of the worst movies ever filmed, according to the Internet Movie Database.