Buy a new digital camera
Deciding in buying something new and costly is always hard. It happened to me, when I wanted to buy a new digital camera, as I grew more interest on digital photographing. To make sure that I get the most of my money for a good camera, I had done some research on the net about some of the cameras. And I had decided to buy Kodak Z612 as my new camera, after considering the quality and money factors.
Before buying the camera, you can take a look about the user reviews. One of the popular website for digital photographing is Digital Photography Preview. There you can find editor reviews about the cameras and also the comments from the owners. You can also take a look at the forum.
After reading the review of the camera, you might also consider to take a look at the performance of the camera, what can it really do. For that, visit flickr.com. Flickr has a camera finder section, at which you can find the photos taken by a respective camera.
After you have decided which camera you want to buy, don’t just go to the camera shops and compare the prices. Take a look also at the online offers in Internet. In some cases, the price offered in Internet is more favourable compared to the conventional shops. Happy shopping!
Dogs sniff DVDs and VCDs – Malaysia in fighting piracy
Two sniffer dogs will be on duty in fighting against music and movie piracy in Malaysia. Hah, what a brilliant idea! If dogs can sniff bomb, why not the polycarbonate disks! According to ZDNet, Malaysia is the first country to use this method.
“The arrival and deployment of Lucky and Flo will make Malaysia the first country in the world to test the capability of dogs in detecting optical disks in hidden compartments or shipments,” he said at Malaysia’s biggest air-cargo center, in Sepang outside Kuala Lumpur.
ZDNet
Lucky and Flo are the name of the dogs, which has been trained in Northern Ireland. Unfortunately, the dogs can only sniff the disks, but cannot distinguish between, CDs and DVDs, burned and replicated disks, or legitimate and pirate disks. But it is very useful in looking the disks in unregistered containers.
In my opinion, the most effective way to get rid of piracy is to sell the disks at the same price with the pirated ones. Maybe they can produce two version of disks, high quality and low quality. The low quality is the same quality as the pirated disks with the same price. At least they can still make money with it, and the consumers have more choices to buy the videos or musics.
Related links:
Malaysia uses sniffer dogs to fight piracy
Office 2007 or OpenOffice.org
Yesterday, I went to Mediamarkt for window shopping. And I was interested with the newly released Windows Vista and Office 2007. After looking at the prices, both cost a lot of money. Windows Vista Home Basic OEM will cost you 99 Euro and Office 2007 Home and Student Edition about 150 Euro. I cannot afford that and I am already satisfied with what Windows XP can give. Now, should I buy Office 2007 because I don’t have any original copy of Office and I just formatted my computer.
If Office 2007 were only 10 Euro, I will definitely buy it. Unfortunately, it is not and it will never be so. As a solution, I downloaded OpenOffice.org 2.1. It took not much time as the file is only about 90MB. After installed it, I find that OpenOffice.org is not a bad solution. You can open, edit, save all MS Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
OpenOffice.org comes with word processor (Writer), spreadsheet manager (Calc), presentation manager (Impress), database module (Base), drawing tool (Draw), and math equation editor (Math) . And the best part it is much much cheaper than Office 2007. It is free actually.
OpenOffice.org performs not bad as a competitor to MS Office. Although you can see more functions on MS Office and lots of bug in OpenOffice.org, but they are all what you paid for. If you want stable and rich with functions software, spend some money and you will get it. But for me, just to write a normal report and make a simple presentation, OpenOffice.org is more than enough. By the way you can pay a visit to OpenOffice.org website.
P.S: There are also some efforts to localize OpenOffice.org to Malay language, but I think that the status of the project is inactive. You can check it ms.OpenOffice.org.
