Is the rich-hued Kodachrome era fading to black? – Yahoo News

Is the rich-hued Kodachrome era fading to black? – Yahoo News

I have been privileged to have shot a few rolls of Kodachrome in my life and I can say that there is an organic warmth to the transparencies that is nearly impossible to duplicate with digital capture systems.  You can see some of the legacy by looking at Kodachrome products available from Amazon.

Among the top results available, at the time of this writing, we find over 2,000 books available on the subject and Paul Simon isn’t the only musician to record a musical tribute to the venerable film format.  Anyone from the pre-internet era will be instantly familiar with the signature combination of warmth and detail that was captured in the pages of National Geographic with Kodachrome as the film of choice for their award winning staff photographers.

If you have any stacks of old Kodachrome slides, gathering dust somewhere, you might want to make sure they are protected because they are about to become, quite literally, irreplaceable.

 

How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers – What’s Really Gone Wrong with Wall Street

So, the New York Times had a very good explanation about how the big investment firms screwed up and helped put the global markets into their current state.  It looks like the whole thing boils down to computer operator error. Yep, investment companies had account executives who were misusing their risk management software that was designed to warn them when a particular investment was about to go under.

How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com

All I can say after reading it is, finally a rational analysis that explains the cause of our current financial crisis and puts the responsibility right where it belongs, on the shoulders of the people who work the markets and their failure to properly operate their own risk management software.

I hope I have the wisdom to avoid similar mistakes in my own endeavors.  G-d willing, we will all learn some valuable lessons from this financial disaster that will help us improve our world.

 

Amazon’s imdb.com allowing free film, TV viewing – Yahoo! News

According to this article, Amazon’s imdb.com allowing free film, TV viewing – Yahoo! News we will soon be able to view over 6,000 titles for free on Amazon’s “Internet Movie DataBase” at http://www.imdb.com/

A quick look at the imdb homepage shows no mention of this big move, which would pose a definite threat to the entertainment industry.  There is also no mention of the story on Amazon’s front page, so it is interesting to see this being reported by  Reuters.

The article even claims that some of the new fall shows will air on the IMDB website before they premiere on traditional broadcast networks.

There is no mention of wether these programs will be for subscribers only or supported by advertisers, but I think, with this announcement, it is safe to say the IPTV revolution is in full force.

 

Psystar Open Computer unboxing and hands-on – Engadget

So, if you haven’t heard  yet. Last week some company, called Psystar, announced that they are selling a PC made from off the shelf parts that comes with Apple’s Mac OS X installed and running. Obviously, the whole tech world has been holding it’s breath waiting to see if this is for real. Many investigated and found some fishy changes of Psystar’s address in a 48 hour period. 

Anyway, it looks like Psystar has actually delivered the first of it’s product and Engadget has the first un-boxing and test results of one of these controversial machines here:

Psystar Open Computer unboxing and hands-on – Engadget

Anyone familiar with Apple’s history of vigorously protecting their intellectual properties is anticipating a swift response from Apple’s legal heavy weights, but so far, none has materialized. Others are speculating that Apple will simply issue an update to their OS that would disable its ability to run on these new, unauthorized Apple clones.

Either way, the tech world just got a bit more interesting.

 

Mac vs PC – Benchmark and Speed Tests – PC versus Mac – Apple, Windows Reviews – Popular Mechanics

I occasionally am asked why I prefer Mac OS X to Windows and no matter what explanation I give the response is often that Macs are “too expensive.” Well, Popular Mechanics would beg to differ with that assessment.

Mac vs PC – Benchmark and Speed Tests – PC versus Mac – Apple, Windows Reviews – Popular Mechanics
The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means for the price of the Gateway you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway’s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot—and still save $100.

They also determined that the Macs booted, launched applications, surfed the web and were generally faster than their comparably equipped PC counterparts. Then, to add insult to injury, they used Apple’s free Boot Camp application to install, run and test Windows Vista running on the Apple Macs and they even ran Windows Vista faster than their PC competitors!

So, yeah. I prefer Macs to PCs.

X^P