News for Monday, 19 April 2004

We were skeptical when learning the new, very summertime Apple Expo dates. It seems we were mistaken and we're glad about that.
At that time, there have already been 25,000 persons subscribing on the site www.apple-expo.com, which is a record 4 months before opening.
No one wants to miss it as it will be the time Steve Jobs's promise of 3 GHz G5s will come true !
This year again, we'll be there with our friends of CMF [Communauté Mac francophone : French Mac users] on the stand of the Pommier [Apple tree].

At last !!!

AirPort Management Tools 1.0 is available for download.
Its use is to monitor the traffic and manage many base stations.
http://www.apple.com/

Thx to Eric who let us know it was now possible to buy a BTO 14" iBook with a 4x superdrive 4x on Apple Store. This option is 120 Euros.
A shame it isn't provided for 12" too. We did it after all !

Source : http://www.liberation.fr (in French)

US pension funds rule on all financial markets. Calpers, the California civil servants' fund (worth US$187 billion), has announced it will stop supporting some companies, including Apple.
Calper's ire comes from an accounting detail: Apple (anf others) haven't counted its stock options program as expenses, while shareholders have voted a motion in that sense.
[p.s.: Stock market RULEZ...]

Thanks Samy for the info.
IBM is pushing the adoption of Linux in the US corporate environment.
They air a lot of commercials about the many advantages of this OS.
http://www.ibm.com/
After shifting to Linux, maybe a switch to OS X is the next move ? :)

The New South Wales (Australia) Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) will deploy 1200 G4 iMacs across 140 registry offices. The Mac has been chosen thanks to OS X and the huge number of Open Source software titles available.

NVidia is currently getting rid of their old range of Geforce chips, to prepare for the new products and inflate their turnover for this quarter. This "spring cleaning" is artificially boosting RAM prices. Since a video card has between 64 and 256MB of memory on board, multiply this by a few million graphic chips, and you get a huge quantity.
For your guidance, Micron, big memory chips manufacturer is still overtaxed in Europe, which doesn't help bringing the prices down here on the Old Continent.

Thanks Gile for the heads up.

3D Matrix 1.5 has just been released (info was featured in the ADC newsletter). 3D Matrix is a great software for modeling (similar to Gmax, the 3DSMax mod). It is available on many platforms : Iris Silicon Graphics, Mac OS X, Red Hat Linux, Solaris and Windows 98/NT/2000/XP.

http://www.digitalscores.com/3dmatrix/

Karl Lagerfeld 'modelled' for the French edition of fashion magazine "Elle".
He once again talks about his love for the iPod

The French text reads :
"These sweats are for someone that never jogs [talking about the clothes on the picture] even if the metal grey color is very chic, it is not for me. However, I love iPod, I have fourty of them. I recorded all the music I love on them."
40 iPod, that is a maximum of about 1,5 TB of music, or roughly US$400,000 at the iTunes Music Store. That is, of course if Apple can provide that much music.
[note from kurisu]
Do you remember when Steve said that one client spent like 30 grands at the iTMS and he couldn't give out the identity of that person ?? well, I think we have a winner here... cha-chiiiing !!!

For Final Cut Express 2 users out there, a software update is available through the preferences panel :

What’s New This update fixes an issue with some cameras caused by conflicts between timecode breaks and dropped frames, resulting in incomplete capture. It also improves QuickTime movie export when there is blank video in a sequence. Final Cut Express 2.0.3 is strongly recommended for all users of Final Cut Express 2.

According to The Inquirer, ATI should release their X800 graphic chip on May 5th.
The pro version will be running at 475Mhz and use 900Mhz DDR3 RAM.

IBM confessed they have some manufacturing issues in their East Fishkill facility, plant which makes G5 chips. The results when using 300mm waffers still leave room for improvements.
This explains the delays for the xServe G5 and by extent to the G5 Powermac, which still haven't been updated to use the PPC 970 fx.
It is very disappointing to see how Apple once again gets out of luck. The progressive shift away from Motorola was leaving hope that problems related to processors were a thing of the past.

Sony, partnering with Toppan Printing announced last week that they managed to produce a Blue-ray disc holding 25 GB worth of data and made of 51% of paper.
The goal behind this is 2 fold. First, the waste resulting of the manufacturing process is going to be drastically reduced (every year, some 20 billion cds are manufactured) and second, the costs should drop considerably lower, since in its present form, the price of a cd is highly dependent on crude oil prices. (the polycarbonates used are a derivative)