Previous EntriesGraffiti, it’s a… fun… crime!
(Saturday, March 31st, 2007)
Thanks to Neatorama
Fabrice Hénon, photographer
(Friday, March 30th, 2007)
Fabrice is an amateur photographer I have been wanting to present to you for months already. You should visit his gallery (please, take not that it is “not safe for work” and may be classified as slightly erotic).
Security issues line up for the end of the month
(Friday, March 30th, 2007)
This is what some surprise that we see today a number of unrelated security/software issues converging around the end of March. This is what I got today; Chilling.
- Just out of the box, the AMD-ATI Catalyst 7.3 drivers for the Radeon graphics cards happen to have a big bad bug that may randomly crash Vista right at boot time [1].
- Animated cursors in Windows XP SP2 create a security issue for users of Internet Explorer version 6 or 7. No solution yet at Microsoft. [2]
- It may not be a bug for all: It appears that there is a way to never activate Windows Vista. [3]
Not the time to rush…
All (known) bodies in the Solar system larger than 200 miles in diameter
(Friday, March 30th, 2007)
Alan Taylor created a nice representation of the largest bodies of the Solar System (it takes into account the new classification used since last Summer). A really good job of Photoshopping many images together in order to produce what could easily become a landscape poster if somebody decided to print it.
Monster DSLR comparison guide
(Thursday, March 29th, 2007)
| Reviewed cameras |
| Canon 30D, 5D, Digital Rebel XT (350D), Digital Rebel XTi (400D), 1D Mark III , 1Ds Mark II |
| Nikon D200, D2Hs, D2Xs, D40, D40x, D80 |
| Fuji FinePix S5 Pro |
| Olympus Evolt E-510, E-500, E-410, E-330 |
| Pentax *ist D, K100D, K110D, K10D |
| Samsung GX-1L, GX-1S, GX-10 |
| Sigma SD-14 |
| Sony Alpha DSLR-A100 |
This is not everyday that a web site makes the effort to compare 26 Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras in one single article/review. Nevertheless, this is what GearDigest (affiliated to the excellent Tom’s Hardware of good fame among PC enthusiasts) does today. This is an orgy of cameras between $600 and $7000 (around 600-7000€)! Are missing though: Panasonic and Leica for being late and the Fuji S3 pro that is -surprisingly- considered a specialty camera for infrared.
The guide contains several pages of explanations and of theory on the advantages of the specificities of the SLR and DSLR cameras (the journalist visibly does not expect its readers to know much about that photo technology and compensates with the clarity of his writing).
unfortunately (but this is understandable for a general public audience – rather than photo enthusiasts), the comparison is done essentially at the limited level of technical characteristics. Nonetheless, this is a very wide review of the photo DSLR landscape of available products and it will ease the initial sorting between the many offers.
Link.
Top 10 infant mortality
(Thursday, March 29th, 2007)
The other day, I was looking at the list of the ten countries most hardly hit by infant mortality (according to the CIA World Fact Book 2005). The top 10 (or should I say Bottom 10) is:
- Angola (197.8 for 100 births) after a civil war between 1975 and 2002
- Afghanistan (163.07 for 100 births) in a more or less continuous war since the entry of soviet tanks end of 1979
- Sierra Leone (162.55 for 100 births) in a civil war since 1991 (The UN forces retired in 2005, without having obtained peace)
- Liberia (161.99 for 100 births) in a nearly permanent civil war since 1989
- Mozambique (130.79 for 100 births) in civil war and in war with its neighbours from 1975-6 to 1992
- Niger (119.69 for 100 births) in a state of political instability since 1974
- Somalia (116.70 for 100 births) in war with Ethiopa or in civil war since 1977
- Tajikistan (110.76 for 100 births) in a civil war from 1992 to 1997, with stationned troups from Russia, US and France since 2001
- Mali (109.47 for 100 births)
- Guinea Bissau (107.15 for 100 births) in a civil war since 1998
Is it me or almost all of them are in war zones? Cause or consequence?
Io is still the prefered destination for volcano watchers
(Thursday, March 29th, 2007)
Io, a Jupiter satellite, has long been the only place -out of good old Earth- where presently active volcanoes could be observed presently. It fascinated me even when the satellite was joined by other bodies in the Solar system.
Today NASA confirms us that Io is still the best place where you should go and spend your vacations if you want to go volcano-watching (or volcano-photographing) on live ones. And you will see pretty impressive ones, too.
The most recent tourist there returned a really amazing image.
LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) is an on-board photo camera installed in the New Horizons mission en route for Pluto that just cruised past Jupiter. It took advantage of the short time there to snapshot a few landscape photos. On one of them, Io shows nothing less than three volcanos simultaneously active. The one seen at the top (near the pole) blows a plume culminating at an altitude of about 180 miles.
However, be sure to check with your travel agent, the cost of the missiontravel may be counted in millions of dollars. And tell your boss that you will be out of the office for a few years rather than the usual one week leave for a more common tropical island vacations on Earth.
April 22: Start of the QuadCore price war
(Thursday, March 29th, 2007)
AMD is preparing its new QuadCore solution with the intent to fight back against the Core Duo CPU line from Intel (currently AMD does not have a sensible QuadCore solution, while Intel QX6800 is nearly alone on the high-end market). The code name is Barcelona. It should come out in the middle of the year (before Summer?).
What should Intel do? They decided to start removing from AMD any chance to draw a profit out of it: On April 22, they start cutting prices down -as much as 40% cut on the quad-cores. They intend to make it difficult for AMD to come back in the game.
End-customers will probably see plenty of opportunities appearing as soon as AMD products are out. And the prices will be attracting too.
Life Magazine dies on paper – reborn online
(Wednesday, March 28th, 2007)
This is certainly neither the first nor the last paper magazine lost, Life Magazine was a major landmark in the landscape. At the center of its fame, was the excellent quality of its photographs. Time announced that they would publish online the 10 million images of Life Magazine (no date yet). It should be a major event since a large number of the best photographers of the 20th Century have cooperated with Life Magazine.
Shocking news: Cheetah attacks BBC reporter
(Wednesday, March 28th, 2007)
Simon King, BBC presenter of Big Cat Diary, was recently attacked by a cheetah. It is a very unusual behaviour for an animal who tends to be easily afraid by large animals like a human.
Read it all on BBC (video here).
I am not unhappy that it did not happen to me last time I met a female cheetah:
Photo Marc Wunderlich
Added comment: Now, people start saying that the cheetah must have been rabid. While I understand that it is always a good health security measure to protect the bitten human with shots -just to avoid taking any risks.- why don’t they start assuming that running around a wild carnivorous animal is a weird way to avoid accidents?
Prints fade resistance test
(Wednesday, March 28th, 2007)
PixInfo.com, The hungarian web site prefered by photographers of the world, juts published a new comparison article. This time, they wanted to check how digital prints fade after one year of exposition to sun light. They stopped at 11 months (shame on them!) but the results are speaking in impressive words.
The English article (You were afraid of reading it in Hungarian, weren’t you?)
The boars were bisons
(Tuesday, March 27th, 2007)
Two Swiss hunters recently killed two bisons in Bealrus. Aged 57 and 63, they were arrested because the bison is an endangered species and is protected in Belarus (as in many other locations).
Their excuse: “Sorry Judge. We thought they were boars…” Now, it seems that being dead drunk is becoming a fairly good excuse to be a truly incompetent hunter.
Source: La buvette des Alpages.
STALKER experience
(Tuesday, March 27th, 2007)
You wanted to know what this PC game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, is worth? After a few hours of gaming I tell you all about it.
- Minimum requirements: The informations given by THQ are mostly right. With an AMD Athlon XP 2600+, 1Go of RAM and an ATI 9800pro graphcis card, it is perfectly palayable in 800×600 and “Low” image quality. Some rare image stops and a reasonable image quality even if it is still pixelated and without any antialiasing, of course. As soon as I will have a much better setup, I’ll tell you more.
- Very good FPS playability. Moves are quite natural and fights are asking for your attention and intelligence; This is not always a game of shoot-them-first-and-think-later.
- The game is well internationalized right out of the box even if some of the Russian characters have a thick Russian accent that may be a problem for non-native speakers.
- I observed a small issue with the quick save (I did not find the option in the manula, but F6 is working): it is impossible to reload the quick-save if your name is contianing a white space. This would be solved by using a name without a space.
Information: Voodoo Extreme publishes a patch (v1.00001) for STALKER that should improve a number of the little issues found up to now.
Be cautious: This patch looses all previous saved games.
Security: This patch is not present on the official servers of THQ. Its origin is still a little uncertain.
Dark chocolate is good for your arteries
(Monday, March 26th, 2007)
This is the scientific finding reported in LiveScience. Go and eat more chocolate. It won’t be perfect for your waste line, but it will be good for your health!
Photoshop CS3: Tomorrow
(Monday, March 26th, 2007)
The 27th of March should be launch day for the newest Adobe Photoshop graphics product line: Creative Suite 3 or CS3. Be prepared for more details from Adobe, but the products will not be shipping before the second trimester (and Q2 may mean just before Summer).
There will be new features and the important support of both Vista and PPC+Intel Apple Mac (Universal Binary). The news come with the information that CS2 (and quite a number of other Adobe products) will NOT be upgraded to support Vista. Either it seemed too complicated or not compelling enough for Adobe. You will have to pay full price to go to the new product.
Speaking of new, the official prices start to be known:
- Standard Design suite: 1269€ for InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat 8 pro
- Premium Design suite: 1999€ for InDesign, Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat 8 pro, Flash professional and DreamWeaver
- Standard web suite: 999€ for Flash pro, DreamWeaver, FireWorks and Contribute
- Premium web suite: 1699€ for Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat 8 pro, Flash pro, DreamWeaver, FireWorks and Contribute
- Production Premium suite: 1999€ for Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Flash pro, DreamWeaver, AfterEffects pro, Premiere Pro, SoundBooth and Encore
- Master Collection: 2799€ for ALL (InDesign, Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat 8 pro, Flash pro, DreamWeaver, AfterEffects pro, Premiere Pro, SoundBooth, Encore, FireWorks and Contribute
Old Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS routers running any P2P app
(Monday, March 26th, 2007)
|
The following note does NOT apply to WRT54G/GS v5/v6/v7s! Use the latest official firmware (1.00.9+) with those; They do not suffer from this specific problem (though they do suffer from different problems). |
A little bit of information I collected from the uTorrent FAQ.
The default firmware for Linksys (and all replacement firmwares except for the latest DD-WRT and HyperWRT Thibor) have a severe problem where they track old connections for FIVE days, which causes the router to hang when using P2P apps, or any software that generates a lot of connections. DHT only aggravates the situation because of the number of connections it generates.
You should upgrade the firmware of your router, if it has this kind of problem, using one of these:
- HyperWRT Thibor (14+) (54G/GL/GS only, excluding hardware revision V5 of 54G/GS)
- DD-WRT (v23+)(54G/GL/GS excluding hardware revision V5 of 54G)
But be sure to follow the instructions:
- Do not modify the firmware over the WiFi link (it may stop in the middle killing your router)
- Check what version should be used
- Follow the additional steps for the HyperWRT upgrade
- Follow the additional steps for the DD-WRT upgrade
A more perceptible digital divide
(Monday, March 26th, 2007)
A recent study from Parks Associates indicates that 30% of Americans do not have Internet access and… don’t want one.
We could draw the easy conclusion that one third of all Americans are even much more antiquated than their worst popular image. Various anti-americanisms would be only marginally reinforced from that. But I feel it would be surprising if this America-based ratio was very different from another population. Europeans could well be in a similar situation.
After all, if we are so many to be unable to live without a live Internet connection around us, wouldn’t it become trendy (next year of next decenny?) to tell that you do not have Internet and do not want it. Who knows?
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In the spotlight: |
Reality may be even simpler. Where you -my readers- and me are significantly immersed into the Internet, the web, the blogosphere and other connected worlds, some others for not really care about them. They did not taste it. Moreover, they may well have ways of life that do not require Internet (and there, I’m not describing cave men).
It puts an interesting light onto the expression of digital divide. It is important to remember that some do not have access to this powerful tool they are willing to use, but there are also people who do not want to jump over the line between the old economy and the new economy. We must keep in mind that they are not necessarily outdated and outsmarted. They just live slightly differently (or WE live slightly differently).
The only thing that I think will be a pity: The un-connected people will certainly not participate to this discussion (answers and comments below). By nature, they cannot. But others can give an opinion may be less authorized, but compensating by more documentation. What do you think?
Sources: Broadband Reports, Park Associates.
