Archive for October, 2007

Andrew Wilson gives us a little moment in black and white with fluid feminine forms:

Among PC gamers, there is a pattern of wondering whether you should go to Windows Vista and DirectX 10 (the latest technologies of Microsoft) as your gaming choice or you’d better stay hooked to Windows XP (currently the preferred gaming platform). There are now a few games allowing a fair comparison between both solutions and we see a few comparison popping up on the web. One of the most complete and detailed just came from HotHardware in an article titled “The state of DirectX 10 - Image quality and performance” which uses several of the more visible DirectX-10-compatible games to check how they perform both with DirectX 9 and DirectX 10.

• Bioshock
• Call of Juarez
• Company of Heroes
• Lost Planet
• World in conflict

The results are quite interesting, I’d say:

• Bioshock demonstrates that DirectX 10 is much better at water ripples, smoke (”soft particles”), but the game looks about the same in both environments.
• Call of Juarez shows a slightly better contrast management and better water effects (rivers), but most of changes seem to be dependent on developer’s choice to implement differently the two versions.
• Small objects and grass look better in Company of Heroes when DX10 is used. But it seems a very light improvement.
• Lost Planet for XBox 360 is set in an icy world. Furs are nicer but it is not obvious if the other differences are improvements or… only changes.
• World in Conflict makes a good use of prominent advantages of DirectX 10 (soft particles, clouds, shadows), and adds a few game features that could probably have been present in DX9 too (like the dual-screen support of mega map).
• But what is most shocking is to see that performance is nearly always worse in DirectX 10. It goes from near identical speed to a 50% performance hit in a number of configurations (only one game displayed a definite performance improvement while using a DX10 path, Lost Planet, and that was only when the DX10 exclusive graphics options were disabled).

You have to wonder if so subtle effects (they are not noticeable in the heat of the game) are worth the price of new hardware and new software. DirectX 10 is bringing a few nice improvements, but titles that make a real difference are still to come.

You have a web site, you want to see its traffic growth (it appears that this is the number one way web site creators spend their time: They track each and every little traffic change with stat tools). I offer you here a frighteningly long list of ways to satisfy your worst statistical perversions.

This is too big!

Yomiuri Shimbun/AFP/Getty Images, via ScienceBlog Select.

Ok! This is useless for myriads of Internet users except the web site designer that wants (needs?) to test a page under different versions of Internet Explorer, but the installer built by Yousif ontains IE3, IE4.01, IE5, IE5.5 and IE6. Not bad!

Install multiple versions of IE on your PC

We are told that the newest version of Nero 8, the disc burner software for CD and DVD (I love that silly “Nero: Burning ROM” tag line). It does everything, but we are still left wondering whether it’s not a little too xpensive when we could download it for free (but legally).

For some time already, I have been recommending CDBurnerXP, free software program that I found always able to do all the burning jobs I threw at it. CDBurnerXP just received an upgrade (download CDBurnerXP 4):

• Support for burning Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and Double layer DVDs
• Support for FLAC audio files
• Disc to Disc copy for audio and data
• Save discs and compilations as ISO files
• Support for WPL playlists

But there is even more freedom: InfraRecorder is not only free but also open source. It runs under Windows and can be downloaded freely.

Stop looking for a pirated version of Nero 8. Download it for free, just better: free and legal.

The scientists at the Imperial College of London learned that the separation of France and UK (today known as the Channel) is the result of a gigantic 200,000-year-old flood. A large ridge present roughly along the Calais-Dover line (Weald-Artois anticline on the picture below) was then holding a glacial mega-lake.

When it broke down, the ridge let go a major flood that dug a large part of today’s Channel. It must have been quite an impressive sight!

Source: Futura-Sciences.

Thanks to USGS and NASA, we will have one of the most detailed photo of the Antartica continent. Using images from the Landsat 7 satellite, the researchers created the most detailed, high-resolution map of Antarctica. This results in what is now known as the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA).

Using several images of the same location, they have been able to remove clouds from most of the map, but also, they gave a very clear view in near real-life colours (a difficult aim for most of satellite imagery): Natural colour at 30m resolution (or black and white at 15m resolution).

All in all, this is supposed to help scientists observe this region of the world that is critical for the understanding of global warming and its future effects on human life on Earth.

The result is at http://lima.usgs.gov.

Thanks to Science Daily for this information.

Microsoft would have us believing that the hybrid disk drives (containing a standard magnetic disc drive, some Flash memory and the usual cache memory) are the solution to all world’s problems (including hunger and poverty), the culmination of technology finally allowed by Windows Vista.

The basic principle of adding Flash memory to a disk drive is to provide some kind of cache memory buried less deeply into the disk system and that the Operating System (Windows Vista) would be able to use at will to improve disk system performance.

Thanks! But no thanks! It increase the cost and the complexity of the whole PC system. Where cache memory was a simple mean for the disk sub-system to optimize its operation without asking anything from the Operating System (it only sees a slightly faster drive), Flash memory of hybrid disks add one more task to Windows. Even worse, Windows already use several cache systems to optimize disk susb-systems. They all rely on the DRAM central memory of your PC; They are able to adapt to the size of the memory, to the user behaviour, to the list of active tasks/programs. But here, without even removing any of that feature (which is easily forgotten because it is nicely embedded) another layer is added.

Seriously, rather than buying a hybrid disk drive with all its added costs, I recommend that you go and invest into some more central PC memory. A little more SDRAM is what has the best impact on your PC performance (including the visible performance of the hard disk drive).

Last minute: Now, disk manufacturers are willing to explain that this is not because of thechnology that the hybrid disks are not more common. It’s merely that Flash memory prices are too high (!) and you should put more than the ususal 256MB usually found nowadays in hybrid models currently on the shelves [1].

The National Geographic just published the awards of the Best science image competiton for 2007.

Five images showing how science can look nice.

The world’s biggest helicopters:

Via AerospaceWeb.