The United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Explorer v4.5, is providing a tremendous amount of details with the stated 1m/pixel in the United States (but only 20m/pixel outside of the US).
Since the Earth surface is about 510,065,600,000,000 square meters (according to Wikipedia), this leads to a total of around 1,188 giga-pixel world image (plus some more details in the US which is 400 times more precise).
There is a race with competing Google Earth and others to get the most details, and this will ead to ever increasing sizes.
One of the most important and still one of the most poorly applied tasks of computer calysthenics in the world is data backup. Usually, it’s only when you discover that you lost your important data that you remember that you should have been backing things up. A little too late…
Requirement
What are the qualities of a good backup?
It’s done regularly
It contains useful data (and only them)
You can easily perform a restore operation
If you look at these qualities, it is easy to see why so often we do not have the right backup sets. Problems abund:
I forgot to run the backup
I did not have enough time, so I backed up only part of what was needed
I can no longer read the backup set or I can’t find the restoration tool
The Roumazeilles solution
Advantages
We can’t over-stress the importance of being attentive to these problems. But it is sometimes difficult to find a good solution. I could explain how to backup with expensive and complex software tools (or even hardware solutions), but I decided to give you a tip about how to do fairly good PC backups, as I do it right now. My method has plenty of advantages:
Free
Works with all Windows versions
Uses no complicated software (you don’t need to click on the advertisment messages appearing around this page)
Works automatically, even if I forgot or I’m hard pressed by some kind of other emergency
Backups only the important data, but all of them
Restore uses NO special tool and needs even less competence (the most sensitive operation is the safest and simplest)
What are you waiting for?
Your answer: “Please, tell us what is this miracle solution?”
NeoOffice is a OS X port of OppenOffice.org by a group of developers who have thought from the beginning that the Main OO.o team was taking the wrong tack in offering X-11 support on the Mac.
Aqua-native, includes both PPC and Intel binaries, allows Spotlight to index both content and metadata of OpenOffice and OpenDocument files.
Importantly, NeoOffice v2.1 arrives on March 27th, and it will immediately include support for Microsoft Office 2007 document formats.
As I reported previously PDF Creator, the free PDF producing tool, happens not to work for Vista. However, it has been published a possible workaround (unconfirmed officially) to this problem.
Install pdfcreator in ’server mode’ as ‘xp compatible’ and then tell it to ‘render output on client’ machine, and set the sharing to the default share name.
I intend to leave soon for a safari in South Africa. My Konica-Minolta Dynax/Maxxum 7D will come with long tele lenses (a Minolta APO 200mm/2.8 and a Minolta APO 300mm/4). As I intend to shoot wild animals that will probably be always a little too far, I also bought a 2x converter from Minolta specially adapted to these nice white lenses.
One free side-effect of using permanently a 2x converter on the 200mm lens is that when I will be willing to move to the 300mm (unfortunately, I will loose the AF coupling since I don’t have enough dough to have an APO 300mm/2.8), I will not even expose the sensor to the ambient dust.
Isn’t it nice to use the 2x or 1.4x converter as a kind of anti-dust cap? It works on all brands; With Konica Minolta as well as with digital cameras from Canon or Nikon.
Maybe not if you are shooting landscapes with a wide angle lens, of course… But with buffalos and cheetahs?
We previously had some fun with Japanese bras convertible into a small bag in 10 seconds. We were more or less assuming that weird ideas like that had to come from Japan. But the virus has spread much more than initially expected. Here is a company that sells bras that need electrical power because they use light to help attract the average Joe.
NASA astronomers conscientiously collected hundreds of photos taken by the wide angle camera and the planetary camera of the Hubble telescope in 1995 and 2003. By filling the gaps with the help of a computer program, they produced an amazing video where we clearly see the cloudy planet and several of its satellites moving in front of her.
For the first time, researchers simulated the explosion of a white dwarf. White dwarf stars pack one and a half times the mass of the sun into an object the size of Earth. When they burn out, the ensuing explosion produces a type of supernova that astrophysicists believe manufactures most of the iron in the universe.
According to Digitimes listening to Taiwan industry sources, Europe would be about to introduce a customs tax of 4.9% specifically for digital cameras including the ability to record videos. A small price increase to expect in June or July this year on imported cameras (Sony, Canon, Nikon, Olympus, etc.) but it would not involve Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras that are not featuring that kind of ability.
After the First World War, the toy cars started to be democratized. This led to today’s collectors for these objects intensely linked to a past time when game consoles did not yet replace the muscular energy used by the young driver to propulse his car.
Those who are lucky to read Chasseur d’Images, French photo newspaper (on real pulp paper), European leader on this market, will remember that they just read a comparison of the sensor cleaning of Olympus E-series, Sony Alpha-100, Canon 400D, Pentax K10D and K100D.
Important conclusion: It’s better than nothing, but there’s only the Olympus able to meet the self-chosen requirements. Sony and Pentax are very disapointing.
But the idea was not isolated and the PixInfo.com web site rushed to do about the same test. With the same cameras, of course (except the K100D). But they pushed forward with:
A total 25 dust cleanings/shakings
Two air blows
One direct sensor cleaning with a swab and chemical product
Unavoidable conclusion: Olympus is nearly as efficient as chemical cleaning, and ensures that you never need to blow air on the sensor. For the others, the air blower is still better than newer technology and the swab cleaning is unavoidable. Apparently, everybody concurs: The ultrasonic technology (Olympus) is -by far- better than other sensor shaking solutions.
HD Photo, this is th new name of the image format from Microsoft that they want to replace JPEG, PNG, Raw and GIF. It was previously known -at launch time- as Windows Media Photo and it is now fully integrated into Windows Vista.
Adobe Photoshop will support this format through a plugin to donwload from a Microsoft web site. For the time being, this is only a beta version for Windows, but a Mac version is under preparation.
The format should be natively supported soon (within 12 to 18 months!) by digital camera manufacturers. It works with both Photoshop CS2 and CS3.
PS: Really! everybody is trying to stick HD to anything that remotely looks like image-related, even when there is no objective reason for it (apart from the media attention magnet it becomes).
John W. Backus, designer of the Fortran computer language just died at 82. The software developers from the oldies will remember this language that revolutionized scientific calculus and programming, even if it is now pushed back (not unused, but less used).
Some (even more exceptional) will remember his participation to language theory with the Backus-Naur Form.
The chariman and CEO of Canon Taiwan (Satoshi Yahata) told yesterday in a press conference that his company had the firm intention to take more than 50% market share for the Taiwan’s digitial SLR market.
Everything points to this being also the same for the worldwide market where Canon no longer wants to be perceived as the follower (Sony had announced a very ambitious policy a year ago at Alpha 100 launch) and they do not intend to let Nikon, Sony, or the others take over the lucrative business.
Are you looking for information and news about digital
photogaphy and digital SLR cameras?
They are now grouped again in my new web site YLovePhoto.com.
Previous Entries
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Explorer v4.5, is providing a tremendous amount of details with the stated 1m/pixel in the United States (but only 20m/pixel outside of the US).
After the First World War, the toy cars started to be democratized. This led to today’s collectors for these objects intensely linked to a past time when game consoles did not yet replace the muscular energy used by the young driver to propulse his car.
