News for Monday, 26 January 2004

Bluesby just sent us pictures from "the FNAC" shop in Toulouse.



They have used iPod ads to promote MP3 players. However 2 little remarks:
1- We are not sure that Music Majors will really appreciate the mention "Echangez" = "share" when speaking about music and video files...
2- Whereas the FNAC seems to be 100% pro Apple, in some shops you hardly can find any iPod models; except the 40GB one, the most expensive one. In the same vein, the "FNAC Digital" in Paris was still selling the 10GB iPod for 349 Euros, whereas this model is EOL, and has been replace by the 15GB model.....!!!!!!!!!
Translator notes : So Apple if you are reading those lines , please take care of your marketing/business alliance, in France, the FNAC seems lacking some iPod products...on purpose or not we do not know...
The FNAC is the biggest brand name for shop selling books, Hifi, video, computer,...

LaCie just announced the release during February of a new Big Disk Firewire, based on the new chip Oxford 912. LaCie promises performances up to 88 MB/s on its 500 GB hard drive.
We managed to get additional information about Oxford 912 from a trustworthy source. It is actually an Oxford 922 without USB 2 and optimised for performance. It supports natively (thanks to its firmware) RAID 0 on one canal (but not RAID 1). For instance, the Big Disk is made out of two chained 250 GB discs. According to Oxford, the maximum theoritical datastream is indeed 88 MB/s with RAID 0. The 912 has been particularly optimised for transfering samll files. It seems that bigger files won't benefit much (to confirm in the near future).
Furthermore, we know from a sure source that other discs manufacturers are about to adopt it very soon.

The Queen of England has decided to ennoble Bill Gates in order to thank him for the services he provided to schools, businesses in the UK.
He will soon become Knight Commander of the British Empire Bill Gates, the title of Sir is only for British people.
We can note that the British Crown and Bill Gates have one common ground: they both built an Empire.

In mid-February, the market of 8x DVD burners should be mature. If the products of some manufacturers might be a few weeks late, the competition will be high enough to serve the customer.
In February should also appear the first reasonnably priced 8x certified DVD media. But most of 8x DVD burners can already burn good quality 4x discs at full speed. Our partner Macway has begun to test 8x burners, and told us it works with 4x certified discs.
Let's hope Apple won't be made outdistance on this point. For all the ones who wish to install such a device in their old mac, there might be problems in computers older than G4 (B&W G3, and beige ones). Indeed, burning at such a speed requires a high and constant data stream, that such computers are not always able to provide. The cache of 2MB shipped with most of the burners is more a symbol than a real buffer...

If you're impatiently waiting for the iPod mini, http://www.cdw.com/ has something for you, to feed your iPod addiction.
You can download a PDF that will allow you to get your own mp3 player.

Once downloaded (HERE), printed (on a thick paper, for more realism), and folded, you'll become the "hypest guy" of your office/highschool/university/etc.
Let's hope the real one (the one with which you don't have to do "as if" you were listening to music) will appear as soon as possible...

ATI's future R420 will support three kinds of RAM: DDR, DDR II and DDR III
ATI made things big in order to perennialize the architecture replacing the Radeon 9xxx.
Indeed, when the new chip will be released, the top-of-the-range will be really expensive, since the market of DDR II is just rising.
The DDR III RAM is likely to be adopted much later for very high-end cards. Logically, the DDR will be shipped on low-range products.
Beyond forecasts, it's very likely to be one more marketing argument for ATI, in their raging war against nVidia.

Robert has a problem with GarageBand: the software would always crash when launched.

He finally found a solution on Apple's forums, that might be usefull for other people:
You need to go to
/Library/Audio/Plug-ins/Components
and remove all the plugins that might be in there... you'll also need to do the same in your local user /users/*yourname*/Library/Audio/Plug-ins/Components.
[note: remember to keep a copy of any file you might remove... they might be used by some other application]