News for Thursday, 29 January 2004

The independent electronic music label "Warp" has just opened its own online store, the whole of the catalogue is available. The website is compatible with Internet Explorer for PC, Safari 1.0 and FireBird.
Prices are displayed in GBP for the UK, in Euro for the countries of the EC and in dollars for the US using your IP to decide which currency to use.
Subscription is easy: an email adress and a password.
The proposed files are of great sound quality as they are encoded with LAME in VBR and usually reach 205kbps in average.

The tracks are encoded with LAME using the ‘--alt-preset standard’ VBR setting - widely acknowledged to currently give the best trade-off between transparency and file size, but with the emphasis more on sound quality than file size. Bleep MP3s have an average bit rate of around 205kbps VBR.

A song costs 1,35 euros and most of the albums are 9,99 euros. Do notice that these files don't incorporate any DRM.
Warp's online store.
Enjoy the Download !

Thx to Frédéric and Pierre for those shots from the Midem [big annual mass of the international music market, which has been recently taking place in France].





The Apple Store would bestow an exceptional 15% rebate on orders made there.

Here's a new job offer of Apple in Ireland.

We're a Dublin based consulting sructure, spécialized in recruiting French for jobs in Ireland. We're currently looking for junior technicians bilingual French-English to do support on MAC products - the job being based in Cork. Good general knowledge in IT and a fluent English are required. The job interviews will take place in Ireland. Wages: 17700 Euros/year +benefits and advantages- The firm will help you moving and getting installed in Ireland. This is a real opportunity to start an international carreer in IT (spécialised for MAC). Please send us your curriculum vitae in English ASAP to : "cv@approachpeople.com"

We've been telling you many times already of the most probable successor of the AGP system, the PCI-Express bus.
Clubic has published an article about this appearing technology. You'll learn for instance that PCI-Express would theoretically be able to support external video cards (a great feature for laptops !), or that one of its versions would be aimed to replace the PCMCIA. In that case the flow will be as much as 200 Mo/s.

Most of the sites which have started broadcasting the ad Pepsi will put online during Superbowl are overwhelmed with demands.
Adrien put them online on a site which has an excellent bandwidth.
http://www.ads.mac-fan.com

Until now, the software publishers of repair application must constantly make evolve the CD of their products so that they can be used to boot the most recent machines.

With Disk Warrior 3.03, Alsoft frees itself of such a burden. Here is the testimony of Olivier:

Update a soft that is used in booting on CD.

They did it, that's really great! For all the ones it interests, this application creates a disk image in: Private:tmp:tmpDW301ImagemVc0im.dmg (size: 647MB) Then the image is mounted in the Finder, the CD is updated, serial, name and surname are required. After that, the volume is ejected, and a new CD is asked for.

This little revolution opens new perspective for that kind of application.

The site http://www.folklore.org/ has collected many little tales and stories (in English) dating from the period where the Mac was developped.
Their content is excellent, which actually caused their site is saturated.

Wine (for Wine is not an emulator) is a port of Windows API for Unix and Linux x86, designed to enable the use of Windows applications without using Windows.
A sourceforge project, called Darwine, is born, and supposed to bring that system on Mac OS X. Of course, the add of an emulation layer will be needed, because as opposed to most of Linux users, our Macs do not have x86 CPUs. To solve that, the team decided they'd use another sourceforge project, not necessarily the most efficient for PowerPCs, but an opensource one : Bochs.
There's still much job to be done, but their ultimate goal is to enable the use of x86 applications under Cocoa, without the aide of X11. A Windows emulation without Windows but using the Mac windows...
Question is whether performances will be high enough to compete with Virtual PC, though the developers real aim is for now the most tweaking part of the Macusers community.

Thanks to Christophe for the news
Canon's EOS1D has just evolved. The EOS1D [I]Mark II[/I] is now shipped with a 8.2 MPixels CMOS sensor. Even if its resolution remains under the resolution of the EOS1Ds (11.4 millions), le 1D II is able to shoot 40 images at 8.5 images/second !
Let's guess the price is going to be at the same level than the performances...

Indigo tried to connect his (her?) Nokia 3300 to a Mac running OSX.

The Nokia 3300 [aka N-Gage] is equiped with a 64MB MMC card, and the USB cable provided allows to mount the phone just like any flash card. You can then copy mp3 and AAC files to and from the phone. The files can then be listened to on the Nokia though the earphones or the built-in speaker, or be used as ringtones.

Apple just published on its website a page dedicated to the iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Program.
This program targets a number of iBooks manufactured between may 2002 and april 2003 (serial number UV220XXXXXX to UV318XXXXXX), showing the following symptoms:

* Scrambled or distorted video
* Appearance of unexpected lines on the screen
* Intermittent video image
* Video freeze
* Computer starts up to blank screen
If you are unlucky enough to have an iBook with this problem, contact Applecare or bring it to an authorized Apple retailer and they'll get it repaired for free, within 3 years of the date of purchase.
Get more details on Apple's website :
http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/
[UPDATE] one of our French reader tells us he had the problem with a UV319XXXXXX series iBook and was extremely pleased with Apple's tech support:

I own an iBook 900 with a UV319XXXXXX serial number. Apple replaced its logic board a week ago for those same symptoms (garbled display). It seems the yhave a bit underestimated the extent of the series concerned with the problem. Nonetheless, it took only 3 days between my dropping the iBook by my Apple retailer and getting it back in shape (Bravo!). Yoann Blériot