The wow starts.. when?

Well I've recently had a chance to check out a computer that had Windows Vista installed on it. Ignoring all the objections to the way MS has designed their new OS towards the singular objective of hijacking end user rights for the benefit of the media conglomerates who's support they're trying to gain..
Let's see what's happened with installing the shiny new copy of Vista Ultimate.

I'm told it installed unusually quickly. And then the next thing I heard was that it was randomly causing the monitor to blank with an error message that suggests that it was feeding it a signal that it couldn't sync too (most likely with too high a refresh rate).
So I take a look. First I was shown the "dreamscenes".. animated wallpaper that looks very pretty, except that it ran so jerkily that I practically got motion sickness watching water droplets trying, desperately, to move in a fluid fashion and apparently uses about 20% of the CPU's power. When you add in their DRM management task that has been reported to also use 20% or more power even when you're not doing anything that involves digital rights managed media then you've got almost half of your CPUs time being used already.
And then the screen blanked. And then came back with an info balloon that informed me that the display driver stopped responding. And then the whole system froze solid and required a hard reset to get it running again.

This is a fresh install of Vista with a minimal amount of add on software that could be blamed for causing any sort of instability.

MS has been running a media blitz that informed me that the "wow" would start now. Apparently Vista was supposed to be a bold new user experience. What I saw was a shiny user interface that looks nice but uses obscene amounts of CPU power just to support (and which also is a blatent Mac rip off, and please understand I'm no mac friend, although is MS continues down this path they may force me to defect to the Apple world), and such incredibly bad stability that a fresh install can't even run for twenty minutes without freezing solid.

I've since been told that disabling the Aero Glass interface has fixed the crashing and screen blanking issue. Isn't that lovely, the much hyped new user interface causes the entire OS to crash.


The truth is that chronic instability or CPU hogging is really the least of the problems of Vista. If you take the time to learn the full extent of what MS has done with it you'll start to see just what they're trying to do. They're clearly working towards establishing a legally enforced monopoly on PC operating systems, and are possibly trying to get the record companies to back them up if it comes down to another showdown with the US government on monopolistic behavior charges.

my what a long tail you have

I tried to find a different species to focus on, I really did. But I like these snow leopards too much.
Not a great picture, but it illustrates something interesting. Their very long tails, which can be used almost as a blanket to help keep warm when it gets very cold out.
There's something interesting that I've noticed about the leopards (this is true for the Amur leopard as well). I tend to pay attention to what everyone else around me is saying when I'm taking pictures of the zoo animals, in particular I'm interested in what the kids say about the animals. I've heard many people call the leopards cheetahs. This always baffled me. I'm sure I'm more aware of feline taxonomy than most people, but still I can't believe that a leopard looks like a cheetah to the average person. Especially the snow leopards, they're clearly built for the opposite environment of the cheetah, that is cold snow covered mountains instead of the African plains. I can almost understand when people call African Wild Dogs hyenas (even though they really are canine, while hyenas are vastly different animals slightly more related to cats than dogs). But leopards look nothing like cheetahs.
I should acknowledge at this stage that snow leopards aren't actually leopards at all. Amur leopards are a leopard subspecies, but snow leopards are their own species and are currently in an uncertain classification. They used to be put in the Panthera genus, but then were put in their own one, Uncia, where they became Uncia uncia. My joke was "the feline so nice they named it twice". But now some are putting them back into Panthera. The zoo in fact has two plaques that give their binomial name (the combination of genus and species used as the scientific name of an animal), and each gives a different one. Perhaps they were installed at different times and the later one used the updated name.
But here's the interesting thing. I'm incensed that zoogoers keep calling them cheetahs. I really have to restrain myself from correcting them, but I think correcting a mother in front of her little kid is kind of rude. But in my reading on snow leopards I've learned that they're thought to be more closely related to cheetahs than leopards.
Could it be that the people who call them cheetahs were picking up on some similarity that I wasn't catching? Maybe they both share longer than average tails, although for somewhat different reasons.
Otherwise I can't imagine why people would think cheetah. Is it just that that's the only spotted cat of the big three of the big cats? By that I mean lions, tigers, and cheetahs, the big cats most often featured in tv shows or in movies (I can think of at least two movies where the plot centered on a particular cheetah).
Maybe I'm reaching for an explanation since they call the Amur leopards cheetahs too.


If it seems like I'm obsessing about this too much, well, maybe I am. But I've always loved the less popular big cats. I've always felt that lions and tigers and cheetahs received an unfair proportion of attention. They're always the token big cats.
Well I feel it's time that the other felines get some attention! Actually, I feel that the jaguars in particular are amazingly beautiful animals, I'd be plastering their pictures all over the place if I could get access to them.
But I can sure do my part to promote Amur and snow leopards. And I'm working on the elusive clouded leopard, which Brookfield also has.

one down, six left

Well, time for another of those downer posts. I'd been wanting to post another zoo shot, and although I just did a big cat picture I really like big cats and wanted to add an Amur Leopard picture. So there it is, thank you Brookfield Zoo for making your enclosures so photographer friendly. This was actually shot through a sort of nylon mesh barrier, but I've gotten quite good results using wide apertures and just blurring the mesh into obscurity.

Now for the downer news. The Amur Leopard is critically endangered. There are estimated to be 25-34 of them left in the wild. And until recently there were believed to be only seven females left. Now they're down to six after someone shot one and then clubbed it to death.
Check out a version of the story here
Here's the thing. It's not like it was hunted for a trophy, or for its pelt or anything. Not even for chinese traditional medicine (I try to respect traditional cultures, but when you hunt animals to near extinction in order to supply faith medicine I draw the line). It was killed and the body was left behind. No point to it at all.

I want to stress something about zoos that I think some animal rights activitists are getting tragically wrong. YES, I'll admit that in some cases animals do not have a great life living inside a zoo. I do not enjoy seeing large predators pacing back and forth inside their enclosures. But there's more at stake than just one animal.
Brookfield has what appear to be a mating pair of Amur Leopards. I don't have any inside sources of information so I don't know any details, I can only assume that they're trying to breed them but that they may not be having any luck. Although I couldn't help but notice that for the past few months I've only seen one in the enclosure. I'm hoping that this means that the female is pregnant and has been separated from the male. Captive breeding programs are the last ditch effort to save species from extinction, or restore animals that are already extinct in the wild. What the animal rights extremists seem to fail to realize is that zoos are doing the best they can with the limiting funding they possess. Shut them down and numerous species would suffer. If you want to debate the whole "good of the many being more important than the good of the few" argument then feel free.. but by trotting out individual cases of suffering animals and using them to argue that zoos should be completely shut down they're showing a woeful lack of understanding of the big picture.

the moment I made contact

The fact that you can post pictures to this blog system is actually what finally drove me to start up a blog. I am a compulsive amateur photographer looking for ways to expose my work to the general public in an attempt to validate my abilities.
So here I go. To start off with I present my favorite snow leopard. The explanation of this picture is that my local zoo, Brookfield Zoo, located in Brookfield, Illinois, was going to have a photo competition and I was on a mission to get the best pictures I possibly could to see if I could win.
So on March 26th, 2006, I set out to begin my quest. After stopping by a camera store to pick up a new lens that I felt would round out my lens selection for zoo work I strode boldly forth into the zoo. And since I had little experience in that sort of thing, I basically took pictures of EVERYTHING.
However one event stands out in my memory. Have you ever seen the movie "Fierce Creatures"? In it there's a scene where Jami Lee Curtis' character encounters a gorilla which has escaped from his enclosure. Of course at first she's frightened, but then there's a whole scene where the gorilla gently touches her in a sort of curious manner, never threatening her, and she's overcome by the experience. She walks outside in a daze and a group of zoo employees see her and ask what happened to her. She's at a loss for words, and an employee who recognizes her expression suggests that she'd just "made contact". All the other employees react as if this is a standard thing that happens to people working with animals like that. I'd always wondered if that was a real thing that happens to people who work in zoos. Not suddenly encountering escaped gorillas, of course.. but if there was some moment where people experience a deep connection with animals like that and that moment is a sort of shared experience among zoo workers.
Well here's a picture of that moment for me. I don't work at the zoo, but even from the public side of things the same experience seems to occur.
I had been all over the zoo (except for the bear area, which I completely missed because it's kind of tucked away in one corner), and as I said I was just taking every kind of picture I could think of. At the end of the visit I reached the snow leopards. They have a very good snow leopard enclosure which has a large viewing window, on the leopard's side there's a ledge located right next to the window where the leopards like to perch. It's close enough where you could literally reach out and touch them if not for the barrier of glass.
I had been taking pictures of the snow leopards for some time. I've always been a bit of a feline fan, so it was hardly a surprise to find myself captivated by them. I had to work in cycles, taking pictures when I had the area to myself and then backing away to make room when other groups showed up. I didn't want to block the window for the kids.
All through the day I'd seen people tapping on the glass of the various windows, trying to get the attention of the various animals. During one of my stand back and wait cycles I couldn't help but watch this one particular cretin tapping on the glass, trying to get the leopard to look at him. He was there with children, as an adult he should have been setting an example.. instead the best he can do is tap on the glass trying to wake up a resting leopard, ignoring the signs posted all over the place begging that people such as him in fact do NOT tap on the windows.
The thing is, this leopard was clearly used to this kind of juvenile behavior. I wish I knew if it was the male or the female, I hate simply referring to it as "it".. but it's the best I can do. Anyway, it refused to react to the tapping. It wouldn't even swivel an ear in response. Rather than realize that it was futile (and annoying) this guy decided that the answer was to make more noise. Having exhausted his range of tapping he moved on to pounding on the glass.
Still no response. The thing is he kept on pounding. The leopard wasn't moving a muscle, and this guy kept on pounding on the glass. I had this thought about who exactly was supposed to be the intelligent creature. The leopard clearly understood what was going on, it knew that there was no point in paying attention to the noise. This guy didn't even realize that much, his train of thought appeared to be "the kitty isn't responding to my pounding, must pound more" repeating on an infinite loop. Eventually he gave up, or more to the point his kids had probably gotten bored and they moved on.
Alone once again I walked back to the glass and raised my camera. It was a tricky shot, the glass wasn't exactly clean, besides which to shoot a leopard lying on the ledge you have to shoot through the glass at a strong angle which isn't a good idea overall, you're just asking for chromatic aberration or other distortions.
But the leopard opened its eyes and looked at me. The incessant pounding from the idiot failed to elicit any response at all, but standing there in silence I was apparently worthy of attention. For a moment all I could do was look back at the large, densely furred feline. That was the moment where I made contact. To me it was the feline body language equivalent of saying "hey, how's it going". So I said hello back.. yes I talk to animals. I'm sure they don't understand the words, but there's the possibility that they'll understand the tone I use. In this case of course the words probably didn't even penetrate the thick glass, but.. such considerations did not occur to me at the moment.
Eventually I managed to get back to the task at hand and snapped off some pictures. They ended up being some of my favorite pictures ever, and I came close to entering one in the photo contest. But I could only enter one picture, and I had to make a tactical decision and go with a bear shot that I felt had a stronger emotional impact (my personal experience that gave me the emotional tie to the shot doesn't really help with the judges).
As I take every opportunity to mention, I placed second.
The snow leopards continue to be some of my favorite subjects. They're not always accessible, being cats they do seem to like to sleep for most of the day, often in places where I can't get a good angle on them at all. But every so often I get a really good angle and fire off ten or twenty pictures or more (oh the joys of digital photography) and consider the whole trip worthwhile on that event alone.
I should mention that if you click on the picture you can access a higher resolution version of it.

a look at the world of intellectual property theft

With all the talk of internet piracy and intellectual property theft, I think it's time to look at some theoretical scenarios that demonstrate just how complex the situation really is.

First off, the obvious topic of internet music piracy. The record companies like to suggest that every time a person illegally downloads an mp3 of one of their songs they're losing money. They're trying to equate it with theft of physical property.
That is clearly nonsense. I'm not defending piracy, not exactly, but it's not as simple as they're trying to make it seem.
I've heard of people who have pirated absurd amounts of music. I don't remember the number now, but I believe it was well above 10 or 20 gigabytes, possibly in the hundreds. This is a mind boggling amount of music, I honestly don't think I could find that much commercial music that I'd actually WANT to listen to.
But do you honestly believe that if piracy didn't exist such people would have purchased every single one of those CDs? Do you really think that people check to make sure they'd want to spend ten bucks or more on an album before they pirate it? Of course not, since it costs them nothing they can afford to download at will. As such any comparisons between what they're downloading and how much money the major labels are losing is utter nonsense.
On the other hand, of course some people will download music that they would have purchased if they had no way to pirate it. It does work both ways. But it's absurd to suggest that every pirated download is the same thing as stealing the same content.


Now for another far more interesting example. Let's take commercial software. In particular, let's use Adobe Photoshop as our example product. It retails for a cool $700.
Let's imagine that a theoretical individual has just purchased a point and shoot digital camera, and he's looking for software to process his digital images. There's no way he can afford $700 for such a function. He has other options, such as Paint Shop Pro for $100. But he wants to have Photoshop, since it's what all the pros use. So he pirates it.
Adobe would claim that they lost $700 in the process. But there was never any chance our theoretical individual would have payed that much, his digital camera cost less than half of that. He just wanted to play with the "professional level" tool.
In reality I think it could be argued that in such a situation the companies that produce the cheaper products have lost out. If piracy had not been an option the theoretical individual couldn't have purchased Photoshop, but he could have purchased Paint Shop Pro, or some other cheaper program.
Somehow I doubt you'll see Adobe complaining that people pirating their software are costing Corel (the distributors of Paint Shop Pro) money. They'll estimate the number of illegal copies in use worldwide and multiply that number by the absurd price tag they've attached to their product and claim that they've lost that amount through piracy, even though there's no chance that the pirates would have, or even COULD have, paid that much money.

I feel that our current legal concepts of intellectual property (which to some extent apply to software as well as music or movies) are inadequate in our digital world. I have no easy answers on how to reconcile the conflicts that are arising, but I just don't think that stubbornly sticking to the irrational claim that piracy is exactly the same as stealing physical property is realistic. I'm really not attempting to defend pirates either.. I'm just sick of seeing the comparison made between downloading a song and stealing a CD from a retail store.

open letter to the major music labels

I have a message for the record companies. Today corporate greed is at an all time high, yet still their actions have gone beyond my tolerances. They've been using the mainstream news media to deliver their propaganda for long enough, now I'll use this media to get my message out.

To the people responsible for the reprehensible actions of the RIAA, namely the record companies that support it:

It's time you know that I'm boycotting your products. You will no longer receive a single cent of my money until you change your behavior. You've been blaming piracy on your plummeting profits, well now you can thank your own heavy handed efforts at using scare tactics to intimidate the public into purchasing your highly overpriced product.
This is actually nothing new for me, I've been sick of the astronomical prices you've been demanding for years. But your increasing efforts to threaten the general public have made it clear that you have no idea that you're only hurting yourself further.
The obvious defensive reaction to this statement would be to suggest that I'm simply a pirate who doesn't pay for music anyway, that I'm only reacting to your scare tactics.
That is not the case. I can literally say that I have piles of CDs. I've never counted them, a rough count suggests I have over 150 in one spot, with potentially about that much or more scattered elsewhere. I never claimed organization was my strong suit.
The trip to purchase music used to be a part of my routine. Music is very much a part of my life, acquiring new music was almost a way to add new richness to my existence. Also, in my hobby of writing fiction, I use music as a source of inspiration. So every new disc I brought back was the potential to explore new worlds.
Even before my official boycott the simple fact is it was becoming harder and harder for me to find anything I was interested in. In retrospect my CD buying era came at just the right time, even as I was purchasing the contents of my collection it was becoming harder and harder to find those albums in stores.
So you'll understand if I'm less than sympathetic to your complaints that people don't purchase enough of your music anymore. You don't even make most of the music I'm interested in available in stores. Of course I won't purchase it if it's not there! Online CD sales are not an excuse, the whole point of retail music sales is to make the music available in stores.
Perhaps you'll try to deter me by trying to evoke my sympathies for the artists. That is a tricky subject. I have no idea how much an artist makes off of a single CD sale. General opinion is that it's less than a dollar, anyone I ask tends to guess that it's far less than a dollar, perhaps less than ten cents. Feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken.
So it seems to me that YOU are the ones that are hurt the most. I'm sorry that the artists don't get their ten cents, but most of the money was always going to you anyway. And I can not accept that situation any further. Your holding the artists up as a hostage does not make me more willing to deal with your unreasonable demands.
I in turn have my own list of demands, to let you know what you need to do to end my boycott.
1. Cease and desist all attempts to bully the public, including the manipulative lawsuits which you know the average citizen can't afford to fight, thus allowing you to win by default no matter what the facts are or who's right or wrong.
2. Drastically cut CD prices. I would consider five dollars a more realistic price. Let's face it, it costs less than a dollar to actually manufacture them. Perhaps the cost could be allowed to go up to six dollars or so, to allow the retailers to take their chunk. At the same time the amount of money going to the artists can not be reduced at all. If you drastically increased the artists chunk I could consider a further minor price increase acceptable.
3. Cease all support for the RIAA. The RIAA has shown itself to be nothing more than a puppet organization which does your dirty work for you. If you cease such activities you should have no need for it, and you could save money by ceasing the funding that it currently consumes.
4. Stop taking "royalties" from the purchase of writable optical media and mp3 players. Such profits also make your complaints of piracy ring rather hollow. You're taking money from people who purchase CD-R media, as far as I'm concerned you're stealing as well. I don't care what the law says, it's clearly something your lobbying forces paid for. If you want to have the right to complain about people taking your intellectual property without paying for it, stop taking money from people who are purchasing products that you have nothing to do with.
5. Apologize. I want a public apology, preferably covered by the same news media you've been using to disseminate your propoganda.

In the mean time, I want you to consider the fact that the Internet has made it easier than ever for independent artists to distribute their products. Whether it be for downloaded media or simply running their own online CD store, it is easier than ever for artists to produce their own music and distribute it without the help of a bloated organization which takes most of the profits for itself.