Archive for September, 2007

How to meet the amateur photographers? Nowadays, you must go to the Internet. Even better, Nikon decided that the right place was were most amateurs were naturally going: Flickr. Nikon decided to venture into direct information inside Flickr ; They opened a kind of photo club on the web site:

This is a quite good idea: Go and create a kernel of passionate users in love with the yello logo brand where they assemble most easily. Go and organize meetings, exchanges, courses around the common photographic hobby, the Nikon Digital Learning Center.

THe news of the week on the CPU front line is definitely the arrival of new triple-core CPUs from AMD. There is an obvious wish to take the marketing and technical lead again on a ground where Intel was starting to appear as the unchallenged leader. But there is also an interesting technico-industrial approach.

When you manufacture a quad-core CPU, it is quite common to find on that it not working properly during the tests. So, what do you do with this slice of non-functional silicon that you cannot sell as a quad-core CPU? A triple-core CPU! Instead of loosing the silicon slab that they wanted to sell to the highest bidder, they can sell it for a definitely lower price while grabbing a lot of media attention. It puts AMD on the fast track again!

RAID storage is a good way to ensure a good security for your data: Two or more discs are used to give some redundancy and be sure that in case of a single drive failure you can still access your files (it will not protect you against deleting the files, though). However, the problem is often that RAID storage is very expensive or very complex (buying an expensive appliance, setting up a complex PC configuration). So much so that a normal user (a photographer willing to protect her zillions of digital images, a student willing to give reliability to his MP3 and DivX files, etc.) will not do it.

Now, Iomega is proposing a solution for an external RAID at a bargain price (It’s available in a 500 GB model with street pricing as low as $240). Tom’s Hardware’s SmallNetBuilder is giving it a run and tells us all about it: Tiny Terabyte RAID: Iomega 1 TB StorCenter Network Hard Drive Review.

It’s been quite a question: What will DirectX 10 bring that DirectX 9 will not have? For the Multiplayer Crysis, the answer seems to come from Total Crysis (they have a Crytek press information).

Physics and day and night cycle: With DirectX 9, you will not be allowed to break havoc on the trees and other vegetation (it seems that it is not really related to the capacity of DirectX). Time-of-day changes will not be implemented for DirectX 9 servers.

All of this is a matter of development choice and you have to wonder what pressure Microsoft put on Crytek to make such choices… that will help sell Windows Vista (the only OS officially able to run DirectX 10).

This is the calculation done after a poll realised by ORB, the British poll company in Iraq, and asking the following question to 1481 people aged 18+: “How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.”

The answers:

None 78%, One 16%, Two 5%, Three 1%, Four or more 0.2%

If you use the last census figures (more than 4 million homes in Iraq), it allows to reach 1,220,580 deaths (more than a million, right).

Unfortunately, this is well in line with the figures published at regular intervals by The Lancet (medical journal) that presently evaluates the death toll to around 600,000 from medical data.

The original Deltoid article applies a few additional checks to ensure that this is not skewed and it stays in line with reality (you should always have that kind of caution with statistical data), but it is easy to understand why Irakis are not happy with the presence of troops from US, UK and allies. Since 2003, they are reliving the nightmare of the Iran-Irak war, but they are under occupation. Go wonder why they are not receptive to the arguments from the Bush administration…

101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed, a strange list for software developers. Thanks to CodeSqueeze.

You wanted to be able to produce those pro presentations with PowerPoint. But Microsoft Office seemed to expensive to buy it, so you decided to download an illegal (but free) version. No! Hold your horses. Real solutions are appearing all over the place.

Up to now, you had the possibility to use Open Office (which just went to version 2.3). This free desktop suite is compatible with Microsoft file formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and gives you the ability to do nearly everything that PowerPoint does. And -we have to admit that- we do not use a lot from PowerPoint (bullet lists and titles).

But Google joins the race with the arrival of Google Presentations, which their online answer and free again (and more legal than any botleg copy downloaded from BitTorrent, DirectConnect or similar P2P network). There was already a Google Docs application suite; It is now complete.

Have fun with your free download of… PowerPoint competition products.

Even if I persist in advising you not to pirate-copy MS-Office, not to download Word, Excel or PowerPoint but to download OpenOffice for free, I can’t resist to the temptation to give some echo to a Microsoft proposal.

Steal Office!

MS-Office is still out of reach for normal people around $400 (for this price you can consider buying a computer). But Microsoft hides behind this slogan a proposal just for students starting September 20th: $60 for MS-Office, it’s a steal.

Not sure this is really a steal, I keep recommending to download OpenOffice for free…

Mad is the only adjective you want to use with the guy. and probably about Linux, since Saikee installed no less than 145 Operating Systems on his PC, including 137 different GNU/Linux distributions.

Linux.com published a good post giving three ideas about how to optimize your GNU/Linux distribution performance.

My job at Johnson Controls (world-class automotive equipment manufacturer) have me travelling quite significantly these days. Currently, it’s leading me often to Brazil (we have a manufacturing plant in Gravatai, RS -near Porto Alegre in the South of Brazil).

I’ll take advantage of the next trip there to extend it with some photo tourism. Thanks to Objectif Nature, I’ll be visiting the Pantanal and the Amazonian forest in search of good wild-life photo opportunities (if you want to join there are still some available seats on this one).

You can expect new images from this trip here in November.

Iceland ministry of fisheries, Einar K. Gudfinnsson, decided that whale hunting -who started again in 2003- had no longer any reason to be. The reasons probably lie between the international opposition to whale hunting, lack of internal Iceland market and lack of exports to Japan.

Source: Futura-Sciences.

Strange coincidence in the recent press releases about DVD discs.

For the first time, the industry group that manages the licenses for the DVD format (the DVD 6C Licensing Group or DVD 6C) decided to revoque the DVD patent agreement of Chinese manufacturer Chaoyue (Jiangsu) Digital [1]. They must have been doing really ugly things to loose even the right to try and manufacture DVD players.

Apparently without any link, we also learn that researchers from the Tsinghua University of Beijing created a new high definition DVD disc format. Quite similar to HD-DVD, its name will be CH-DVD (China DVD?) and it will contain some specifically Chinese patents and IP. But this is not the first time Chinese authorities tried to start a new format in direct competition with an international standard. The most recent being the EVD that roared to replace the DVD [2].

For those of you who missed the detail: The Nikon D300 is slightly more expensive than its direct competition (Sony Alpha 700 or Canon EOS 40D), but it won’t be available until mid-November of 2007. The Canon is already available (in small quantities, though) and fully released. Nikon lovers will still have to wait a little more.

Some fear that the D300 will not be in quantities before the beginning of the year but nothing seems to support such a notion.

Update : it seems that Nikon won’t be able to meet its initial release date. You can expect the camera to be available in December (can you spell “last minute Christmas shopping“?). Furthermore, the European price will take a 200€ increase. All this points to a limited manufacturing capacity (at least compared to the expectations of the public).

A few days ago, it has been released publicly that a new Flash memory card format is arriving. I can see the John “Consumer” Doe thrilled in anticipation of yet another new card format: UFS. I can imagine that it will solve all existing issues with dozens of previously existing -and incompatible- memory cards.

This is going to offer a vastly improved speed for the users. To quote from the press release: “Today, users experience a three-minute access time for a 90-minute (4 Gigabyte) high-definition movie; with the new standard, this would be reduced to a few seconds.” Do we care? Will the movie run faster?

Of course, it is touted by its promoters as a giant leap in technology and the universal memory solution (do I hear “snake oil”?) I need a little more than a long list of supporters to jump and shout joyfully…

Right! This is the ambition of Rotten Tomatoes to present us with the list of the 100 best reviewed Science-Fiction movies.

After all, even the most cool-headed men can sometimes appear identical to the most futuristic Sci-Fi authors. The promoters of a mad Japanese project make it obvious with this tower (should I say “sky-scrapper”?) of 13,000ft high that could welcome no less than a million souls. A tower that Taisei Construction Corporation (TCC) intends to build in the Tokyo bay in Japan.

I am not prone to vertigo, but I would still be worried if I had to evacuate such a building…

Source: Futura-Sciences.