Archive for March, 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).

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…

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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