It seems that despite all my lack of bad experience in this context, many digital photographers (specifically using Digital SLR cameras) have been suffering from dirt sticking to their camera’s sensor. This produces dark blotches on clear zones of the image (like in the light blue sky of your landscapes).
Today, I found a nice little article describing how to clean a sensor. I did not do it, but it seems quite easy to understand and to apply.
It’s all over the place today: German MusicLoad revealed that 75% of its customer support calls were about complaining around the problems created by the inclusion of Digital Rigths Management (DRM) in the MP3 files they sell.
Coming from a company that is living from the sale of legal MP3s, it has a lot of weight. Up to now, that was repeated in many circles, but the music major producers where denying it or downplaying it. Now, it comes from one of the inner circles.
We told you that DRM is annoying (or more) the legal-minded user who bought a DRM-infected file, but leaves the pirates able to plainly use the files in the most usual and natural way. More than one user decided to download the file from P2P just to get rid of the annoyance.
I have at home an “English patient” DVD that repetetively refuses to start in my Home Cinema PC (I don’t have any other DVD player). Maybe I should download a copy from BitTorrent, leave the DVD box on its shelf and watch the movie.
My suggestion is not “go and pirate!”, but it’s call to arms for the marketing departments of these music producers. The customers want music, they are ready to pay for it (look at iTunes and MusicLoad, to name two), but they don’t want the hassles of those protections. Being blind to customer needs is a doomed approach to business. Start listening and P2P will become less of a problem (being free is not an overwhelming advantage: Perrier is selling bottled water and does not complain about the virtually free water on tap).
Is there a more explosive combination that a good Science Fiction flick synopsis/scenario and a totally sexy actress? In my opinion, not really. So, it is time to award the Roumazeilles.net top-10 sexiest actresses of the history of Science Fiction (sorted from the less sexy to the most sexy).
10 – Tina Turner (Aunty Entity in Mad Max 3, Beyond Thunderdome)
Is it normal that a mature woman, like Tina Turner, would appear here? Yes, because she’s still full of life and brings an erotic voice to a bad ass character that was central to the movie.
Tina Turner is full of life, a ravenous life, a shrieking life. She’s clothed in metal and leather, and she moves as if there is no other woman in the world (and, in the film, it’s nearly true). After a few years, this movie is still worth watching just because of her presence.
You certainly noticed in the flood of SPAMs that is probably arriving in your mailbox as in mine, that many of them are promoting stock exchange securities -that you usually do not know about. This is generally part of an elaborate (but old) scam known as ‘pump and dump‘. It consists in buying shares of a company (preferably on a small market), then to promote it like hell announcing huge value increases just to make it happen (pump) just to sell your shares to the victims while they rush in (dump).
It works best if you attack a company whose stock is circulating in very small quantities (they are more sensitive to small changes of market opinion). You buy at the lowest possible price over a long period of time; You convince your victims that the stock is undervaled and will go up, so they rush and make the stock climb quickly (most victims then become even more convinced that the information was right). But you are the only one able to profit from it since you are the one selling. Later, the victims are left with value-less shares that nobody wants to buy (and certainly not at the price of the recent transactions). The crooks can make a lot of money out of such a scam taking advantage of the individual victims (they gave their money to the scammers) and of the company (it will probably take a long time before the bad reputation earned by the stock at that moment can be cleared and come back untarnished).
The SEC thinks they found the solution: Recently, for 35 companies stormed by such SPAM campaigns, the SEC simply banned trading. It may not bring the complete solution, but it gives time for information to flow and the potential victims to be informed of what is happening before they go and make fools of themselves. The hope is to force scammers to loose their information advantage, leaving them with stock at their real value instead of an inflated one. Normally, the scam works on a period of one to two weeks (a short period of time that is acceptable for a trading ban).
Parallely, the Feds succeeded in catching people that were running similar scam but using hacked brokers accounts.
You may remember when I previously wrote about a nice little Windows utility for Mind Mapping (a simple way to organize your thoughts and to direct brain storming sessions).
Today, thanks to Download Squad, if you are interested in this technique, I can recommend that you have a look at the following tools that are available online. They look quite good (look and feel is important for such tools).
MindMeister is quite efficient and very complete. The mind maps can take about any form.
bubbl.us is less complete, less flexible (it has an intrisic hierarchical architecture that may not be necessary), but it compensates this with a very pleasant interface.
I did not yet have time to evaluate it formally but, on the paper, it seems that YAPB (Yet another photo blog) is a plugin allowing ot easily build a photoblog based upon WordPress (the size of thumbnails is configurable, WordPress themes are still usable, but there is no galery).
Webcron is an automated task service at set hours. If you know Unix or Linux you already heard about the Crontab. Webcron is a Web adaptation of this well-known Crontab. But nothing complicated at all!
Webcron allows you to do tasks at set hours by looking for a page on your website. For example, save your database, therefore you only have to prepare a script database_save.php that saves the database to a file. Add then a task to you Webcron to do the http://www.domaine.com/sauvegarde_base.php request.
For the technically inclinded gamers, Crytek published an interesting PDF file providing information about CryEngine2, the graphics real-time rendering engine/motor behind Crysis, their upcoming First Person Shooter (FPS) game. It’s a bit deep, but you may learn a thing or two about what makes your prefered game tick.
Along with the graphics technology data, you will also find new images out of Crysis (they needed example, wouldn’t they .
Following the current trends about LCD panels is quite interesting. Currently, on professional trade publications like DigiTimes, we keep hearing one simple message:
The price of the LCD panels is falling down in 2007, except for small sizes.
Essentially, it translates into: the LCD TV sets and screen displays are going to see plumeting prices in 2007. The relative slow down of sales and increased production capacity leads to a price war that should be favorable to the buyer (you and me). However, on the smaller end of the market, things are slightly different. Laptops are fonder and fonder of relatively small size screens (14″, 15″ to 17″) but they strive for better resolution and this is still in limited availability. The laptop prices will not go down parallely.
Today, the glass path in the sky will soon allow you to walk suspended over thousands of feet of empty air in the Grand Canyon. Grand opening: 28th March.
This is not every day that in the midst of announcements of more disappeared species we learn of the apparition of one of them. These days, the news of a species discovery is flowing through the ranks of nature scientists. The clouded leopard of Borneo is now considered as separate from the the other feline species of South-East Asia.
Nevertheless, this animal also enters the list of endangered species with only a few thousands of them living in the primary forests of Borneo, and thus exposed to the immediate reduction in size of their habitat.
In the context of a campaign to protect whales from intense hunting and killing all over the world, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society created a gigantic image representing a life-sized blue whale that you can check in details from your computer.
Lelouch never revealed who was the driver. The speed is not as high as the feeling of it, but the police was definitely not informed in advance (neither the people passing by, nor the pidgeons).
OpenOffice, the free desktop suite competing directly against MS Office, reached an important milestone with the availability of version 2.2, Release Candidate 3. This time, we believe, the officiel release of v2.2 is near.
Some of the most sensitive improvements were expected by the users:
Calc should improve notably the management of dynamic pivot tables from Excel origin Excel (a powerful tool that is too often under-appreciated or ignored).
PDF files: More control possibilities/options, including the ability to generate in-PDF bookmarks.
Adaptation to Vista for a better compatibility.
Appearance of SQL requests inside requests for the database manager.
Stability improvements on the Mac version (along with size reduction).
Better compatibility with Slackware, NetBSD, Linux 64, Linux SPARC.
I admit I have been surprised when I recently read the official recommended requirements from THQ for their upcoming FPS game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Shadow of Chernobyl:
Minimum Requirements
None given, but compatible with DirectX 8 (as well as DirectX 9).
Recommended Requirements
CPU: AMD Athlon 64×2 4800+ or Intel Core 2 Duo
Graphics: 3D Hardware Accelerator Card Required – 100% DirectXR 9.0c compatible 256MB (Geforce 7800, for example)
RAM: 1GB
This is a much higher level than expected for such a game. It means that most of us would have to upgrade to a top-notch PC hardware to play well. They indicate that it should scale down well (because of the lengthy game development, they say!). But I don’t know. THQ does not even gives a minimum requirement. Let’s assume that it will work well on a single-core CPU (it should be the case).
We thought that last year’s story of burning and exploding laptop batteries from Sony was a dead one, but everybody is speaking about this now: A MacBook burned while charging its battery. And this is not one of the batteries recalled by Sony. The problem may not be fully under control.
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