. . . cont'd April 16, 2006 Show Notes Bird Pics, Editing with ACDSee Tight Is Right. That's should be the motto of all wildlife photographers, amateur and professional alike. If you're shooting too wide, your camera will have a harder time deciding what to focus on and how to expose the shot. Of course you can move your camera's focus point off the subject to get the exposure you think is best by depressing the shutter button halfway and holding it. Of course that may also make it more difficult for the camera to autofocus on your subject when you move back to it and recompose. However, if you shoot your subject tightly in the first place, the camera will have less background to deal with, less contrasting or conflicting lighting to deal with, and that means you can concentrate on your properly focused subject and press the shutter button at just the right moment. Do this as often as possible and we guarantee you'll end up with a much higher percentage of sharp photos.

Bye-Bye Windows 98 and Windows Me

That's it—you're done. If you're still using Windows 98 or Me, it's time to dump the chump and move on. Microsoft will officially drop support for 98 and Me effective July 11, 2006 although it may still be possible to obtain bits and pieces of support as later as July 31. Don't think you can hang onto your aging hardware either. While it's possible that your vintage 1998 Pentium 233MMX computer may actually be able to install and run Windows XP, it will in fact run v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. That means you have to replace (not attempt to upgrade) all of your computers. While your Windows 98 and Me machines may be running fine for now, there will be no more updates, no more patches and no more technical support of any kind from Microsoft. As well, very few computers from 2004 (much less 1998) will even come close to running Windows Vista. Our advice? Sweat out the August to November period with your old stuff, then start looking for deals from Dell, HP, Gateway and so on because they'll all be selling computers with Windows Vista preinstalled, making it easy for you to make the full leap. Here's one of several dozen news releases.

Clockless Processors? It's Not Just of Interest to Geeks!

English May Not Rule the Internet Forever

Is your web site (and your business) truly global in scope? Do you care? If so (and if it's genuinely necessary for the success of your business), are you able to communicate with customers and enquiries from around the world in a language other than English? If not, you're not truly international.

• An old but prescient article from 2000. It appears to be coming true.
• Here's an excellent, well researched article on E-Learning and Language Change from the FirstMonday web site.
• Last and by no means least, here's an excellent citation from Wikipedia on the subject.

This isn't the end of the story. As over a billion Chinese citizens lurch however crazily toward Internet connectivity, and as Indonesia and India retrench their already massive telecommnications infrastructures, you're going to start seeing more and more references to web sites which offer English only as an afterthought. Start making good friends with your nearest ESL neighbor now, because you're going to need an interpreter one of these days. English may be the most technically advanced language in the world, but it is not the language spoken by most of the people in the world (yet?). We'll find out for sure within the next five years.

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