News for Monday, 3 May 2004

Thx to Taz and Gui92's ability not to sleep in a time of crisis, macbidouille's server has been fixed.
Thx to them and to all those who encouraged us in this hard time.
Our new server is more powerful, more reliable, faster and we shall prove it during next keynote.
It is not a xServe and this arose quite a debate on our French forums. We understand the criticism made, though people have to understand too we had to choose what would fit us best.
If we could switch to the xServe, we'd do it gladly. Yet doing it now wouldn't have bestowed us with the ability to offer you what service it takes.
Now Macbidouille/ hardmac server has a raid 5 SCSI with 10000 TPM disks. That's the best thing such a site as ours would need.
We would never have believed the fact Macbidouille is hosted on a x86 server using Linux would start such a controversy, especially since it has been the case for years.
Reading people who felt like discussing our fondness for Apple surprised us (almost painfully at times) . Without giving a certain date, we'll switch to a xServe solution. It would also take Apple's machines be more oriented on Web services:
- provide Raid 5 SCSI hardware on 3 channels
- provide spare parts that are easy to get, quckly available and at a normal price
- provide a machine the very day you buy it
- enable deactivating services that are useless for such applications, such as graphical interface.
- lower costs. The configuration we chose, though top of the notch, cost 50% less for identical performances.

IBM shall announce today the release of their first Power 5 server unit.
This new chip would perform quite better than the Power 4 it replaces (and from which the G5 comes from)
One most expected feature is, like on Pentium 4, the hyperthreading system, ie the ability to use a CPU like a Bipro. As the Power 5 has two cores (2 CPU in one), the system would see 4.
Apple shall use the PPC 975 in the near future, which derivates from the Power 5.
Knowing what difference there is between Power 5 and Power 4, in terms of performances, should allow us to know more about Apple's global future.

Merci à Bob pour l'info

On heise, a german newsportal, they say that among John Kerry's advisors, there isn't only Warren Buffet but also Steve Jobs. The advisors are supposed to deal with such questions as commercial deficit or 'how to create more jobs' . Kerry would focus and help enterprises in the new technologies sector. A similar had been instrumental in Jobs' founding of Apple. One shouldn't forget that Kerry's forerunner, Al Gore, works on Apples supervisors board.

I received my new iBook 12" 1 GHz on Friday. Yet a big task had to be accomplished : tear apart from the iBook 800I sold in a basic configuration, its Superdrive, a 80 Go HD and the Bluetooth module.
I thus had to open both machines, which allowed me to compare.
It would seem Apple wouldn't change much apart from the CPU of course.


- The CPU/GPU heat dissipator looks slightly different.
- There are now 256 Mo RAM instead of 128, stuck on the motherboard.
- Good news, Apple changed the plating, making things quite easier to close an opened iBook.
Compared performances benches will come later on.
One last important thing. The iBook will not boot on Panther 7F44 : it requires the version that's delivered with it.

The famous French news journalist PPDA presented a subject on the Sasser virus. On top right, the picture displayed.... an iMac :)

It would seem some don't know yet a Mac won't be infected.

A new PC Virus PC called Sasser started its carreer lately ; it won't use the mail, but attacks on the FTP port. Millions of PCs are probably infected already. It doesn't seem this virus is dangerous, yet nobody know for sure yet.
I'd noticed last week using Net Barrier an incredible amount of scan ports occurred on my machine. Over 50 in a few days [that's what I get in a single day !]. Those are probably infected machines trying to know if my PC might be infected too :))
Yet no Mac OS machine might.

Dear readers,
As you will have noticed, hardmac.com wasn't available for a few days.
We're sorry we couldn't tell you earlier why we'd disappeared, nor how
long it would last.
Our server (hosting both the French and the English versions of the
site, macbidouille.com and hardmac.com) was down : it was due to last a
few more weeks, yet we had to anticipate its replacement in quite an
unexpected way...
Now things are fixed up, thanks to the wonderful job done by the guys
in charge in our team. The new server will be able to face the demand
-for both the upcoming WWDC and Paris Apple Expo... stay tuned, we're
back !
Kalomir (on behalf of the translation team)

After many a trouble, that $*]+"|@ hard disk we thought had died on us has been resurrected by Gui92 and I just finished reloading the last 10 days of lost news... The RSS feed are also back since early afternoon.
IMO, the salvation of our glorious website is complete (at least for what you can see, there still are lots of back-end services that need be set up again), but if you find things that don't work as they should, please send me an email.
w00kie@macbidouille.com