Archive for May, 2007

“What’s my line?” was apparently an American TV show of the siwties where contestants were asked to recognize the guest star by asking questions that had either Yes or No as answers. This time, the guest was Salvador Dali. You have to admit that the vast diversity of his activities and of his abilities make the game real tough.

This is the right question to ask. I waited quite some time before writing about a bizarre issue with Windows Vista. Initially I thought that it was a small bug to be quickly corrected by Microsoft: file copying, file deleting and file moving is apparently very slow in Vista. When we say slow, understand “10-50 times slower than in Windows XP”. Normally, this is a nearly impossible change between two versions of the same Operating System (XP and Vista) and such a bug should be corrected quite easily. But it seems that Microsoft is unable to explain what is happening (let alone correcting the issue).

This is so abnormal, that I start to kick the paranoid mode in. One of the explanations I heard is that if Microsoft is unable to go into details and does not bring a solution is because this is not a bug but a side-effect of an intended feature. The most probable thing coming to mind: Windows Vista includes an extension to the file system that allows to handle more directly Rights Management (DRM and similar). In order to do this, they have to pay a price in performance whenever we want to access to a file.

So, is the long-copy/long-delete bug actually an intended feature of an Operating System hiding more and more anti-user devices? It is the more possible if you remember that before Vista launch Microsoft touted the feature allowing to add a peremption date to files (”file auto-destruct on 31st December next year”) or to limit access to only a limited set of users.

See also: The Register.

You should always read signs carefully. Those are a good example coming from an (Irish?) pub. I guess that the patrons have fun all night long just listening to the shouts coming from the Men’s Room and the Ladies’ Room.

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In our series of market predictions, here is an article at The Guru of 3D (titled “LCD TV prices hit bottom“) that explains why, according to iSupply industry analyst, the LCD TV sets won’t go much lower in the near future.

This rebound of LCD bare screens prices will probably have an impact on wide-screen LCD displays (16/9) for personal computers.

The recent news lead me to talk again about digital music and its cohabitation (or lack of) with network technology. As a matter of fact, we learn this week that our new French President is in favor of a strong action against pirated music and downloads. This is not very new, indeed, but the confirmation came from Nicolas Sarkozy quite early after his election. Nearly simultaneously (I see nothing more than a coincidence), Amazon just announced that they would start a new service of online digital music sales that would do completely without copy-protection system (DRM or Digital Rights Management) and would go 100% MP3-only. This is supported by EMI that decided to provide tens of thousands of music titles out of its international catalog.

I admit easily that I am not surprised to see a politician posturing as is expected from his image and adopt an attitude that is based on perceptions but ignoring technical and commercial realities. Nicolas Sarkozy is playing his part in the show as a right wing leader decided to fight all kinds of illegal activities. Nobody should be surprised here. But I contend that this is already an echo from the past and he is missing the light of the future.

Exactly on the opposite, Amazon recognized the commercial reality: Customers do not want those technical anti-copy measures. They go against the legal user (the illegal one does not even see this in the illegal but free MP3 files, of course); They do not stop industrial copy and intense distribution on the P2P networks for example, but they stop the buyer from playing the music title on a player that is nto pre-aprpoved or on the PC of the son’s bedroom, or on the CD-player of Mom’s car, etc.

Amazon, understanding this reality -and certainly also aware that online stores without DRM have better sales/user figures than the others- decided to go and fight directly the current leader of eMusic, Apple iTunes.

Wish them luck! If there will always be poor teenagers ready to sacrifice quality, ease of use, ease of purchase, elegance of the package, etc. (didn’t we copy LPs on dirt cheap tapes when we were young?), a good product will always be a hit.

And if some people insist on telling that the competition of a free product (illegal downloads) can only kill paying products (online music stores), I invite them to consider the tough/relentless competition between a product with a (very very high) price as bottled water and a product (nearly) free like tap water available in nearly all homes (at least in the developed countries). As far as I know, Perrier, Dasani, San Pellegrino, Vittel, Volvic et al. do not petition for a law prohibiting tap water. Those companies and brands offer a product with very notables advantages and make a nice profit out of it.

You already knew about the unreadable writings done (by and for extra-terrestrial beings) under the form of ground engravings in South America or crop circles in Europe and North America, but human marketing people will not let themselves outdone by little grey (or green) men for large scale communication:

Mauritanie has not the most developed train system. However, there is at least one train line exploited to transport iron ore that has the honor of seeing the world’s longest train.

Here it is in its full video splendor.

Be patient if you want to see it all.

The Internet Archive contains hundreds or thousands of movies. Today, they show a list of movies specifically about spiders. Weird, isn’t it?

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Borneo rhinoceros is certainly an endangered species with only a few dozen individuals alive. The first photo of one was shot only last year, but the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) project has published the first video staging a Borneo rhino.

Source: The Guardian.

Back from safari, I went and checked the web site of Michel & Christine Denis-Huot. Some new images from 2007. Most have been there already for some time. But this is regularly updated.

Copyright 2007 M&C Denis-Huot

This Friday afternoon, your mission is to be faster than the computer to bring your cursor into the target circle. This looks easy, but it’s more complicated than you’d think. It’s Cursor run.

Being propulsed to the home page of a famous web site like SlashDot or Digg is intensely satisfying for the author of a blog, but it usually results in an intense traffic storm for your server that may not survive to the typhoon even if it comes from friends.

DownloadSquad grouped some ideas on how to optimise your WordPress site around this risk or when you fall under that kind of pressure.