Archive for September, 2007

The unreadable figures used to describe the performance of DRAM memory certainly need to be explained precisely. If you are ready for some technical reading, I invite you to DRAM latency explained on The Inquirer.

We find more and more of these graphic checks that are supposed to protect a web site against the programmed automatons. the idea is to ask a question that (intelligent) human beings can answer and a (silly) automaton will not. But sometimes, the author of the web site goes a little too far and you wonder who on Earth would be able to answer correctly the question.

Some examples of Captchas gone mad.

Grant Hamilton has a nice web site of abstract photos taken in Polaroid.

A super-tele-lens is a high-end beautiful piece of glass. Consequently, this is both expensive and fragile.

LensCoat offers protection hoodies for the front lens of your super-tele from $13 to $25. To visit.

An American student, Andrew Shaner, curently preparing his PhD thesis, created a YouTube video to present the elements that scientists have to show that water was available on Mars and may (still) be available.

Source: Futura-Sciences.

You don’t have such a need everyday of your life. However, when you need to translate a small Flash program, when you want to grab elements that the graphics design agency failed to deliver with the Flash program you got, it’s time to decompile a Flash application. And there’s a good solution: Trillix.

This is becoming weird. A few years ago, if a graphics card manufacturer brought a version of a graphic driver specially prepared for a specific software, everybody cried wolf and it was a scandal, a benchmark cheat and unwelcome optimisation to favor results on a specific measurement. Today, all this evolved significantly. Did you notice haw many version of the graphics drivers are officially targeted to some precise video game (and published just after its launch)?

In the spotlight: Sony Alpha 900 Canon EOS 5D Mk II Nikon D700 FX Download Nero for free

This seems to become a rush for getting the most information from the publisher. nVidia or AMD? An upstream partnership then allows to have a driver optimized for this game or that one (hopefully for this demo of a video game, even before the game itself is ready).

Comparison becomes more and more difficult. Think about it: How can you be sure to buy the right graphics card for your set of PC video games? You must be sure that there was at least two months between the game(s) launch and the tests published in the press (and check that the reviewer actually used the latest version of the driver package). This was epitomized by the recent delivery of an AMD driver, several months after the launch of STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl (AMD does it again with a new driver for Quake Wars : Ennemy Territory), to push the performance up by 10% to 20% on this game. This is no a little detail if you notice that it is common to see a $100 price difference between two graphic cards that have this difference in performance.

Is it the sign of a matured market? I doubt it. I believe that it is more a rush for performance where the driver developers are loosing ground against the hardware (graphic chipset) developers and the game developers. Time has come for chipset manufacturers and game developers to cooperate more (is it possible?) or to ease the work of the driver designers (but the Windows Vista drivers do not bode well).

The toughest part of staying secure with your software programs is to know when to go and fetch a new patch/update that is critical to the security of your computer. Secunia brings the solution with Personal Software Inspector (PSI), a software application that checks the updates for the software programs that interest you.

Want the top news you’re interested in without opening up a browser? There is a way to do it in just six steps if you are willing to exploit the RSS feeds made available by most news web sites.

Instructibles (via Download Squad).

The Pentaxian.com web site just opened and welcomes the Pentax-lovers in a community-based environment.

Rock stars do not have a quiet life. But they often have violent or surprising deaths. When you’re a star, you need to stay one even in the process of dying.

The 50 Most Awesomely Dead Rock Stars.

But as if this was not completely obvious, there is an English scientist (he’s from Liverpool John Moores University) so bored at Science that he decided to study this issue seriously. And what did he find? That those guys are more susceptible to dying early; That they have too much of everything very early; That they overuse all of it (including drugs and alcohol); That this is “excessive behaviour” and not safe.

Pompous understatements…

Sometimes, science goes hand-in-hand with the most romantic story. This is the case of the two Mars rovers sent by NASA to the red planet. Their mission has been extended and extended while they strived well beyond their official life expectancy. Nowadays, they are out of a large dust storm that had all scientists worried. Nearly completely out of sun light for days, they feared it would be the end of their life.

But the two sturdy little metal beings are awake again after months of sleep (to reduce power consumption to the lowest and most secure level possible). Both Opportunity and Spirit are ready to start again!

Go robots, go!