News for Thursday, 6 May 2004

Hereafter is a message from Meijin who is reporting a good news for our Japanese readers.

A list of countries that you have posted some days ago has shown that the Mac community in Japan reads MacBidouille/HardMac regularly !! Some readers in Japan will be perhaps interested by MacShogi : it is a Mac OS X database application for shogi (Japanese chess) games. It is possible to enter, replay, modify games of shogi in the same way than ChessBase for western chess. Many professional games are available in my website for those who only want to learn or study shogi. MacShogi is in a beta state, it should be a beta for some time : I need to add many features but the actual version can already do many things. MacShogi is available here :

http://www.macshogi.com/

Starting next month, Seagate's Barracuda SATA HD will integrate a new function/feature named: Native Command Queuing. It allows instruction to be reorganized while the are queuing in order to optimize their executions.
Based on a test, a NCQ HD @ 7200rpm could challenge a Raptor 74GB, and that's quite a result!!
This function/feature could be really useful for MacOSX-based computers since the system and multitask processes are performing numerous disk access request.

A Spanish video games retailer was considered innocent in an lawsuit opposing him to both Sony and Microsoft. He was sued for selling Mod Chips, allowing its customers to play with imports games and downloaded ones.
Even though the judge admitted that such a behavior could represent a crime against intellectual property rights, he finally decided that the Spanish law has a lack of precision that can lead to judge it legal. Indeed, the law on inellectual property rights and "code hacking" doesn't include video games and TV equipments.

A reader from XLR8yourmac has successfully flash his Pioneer DVR-107 DVD burner only using his Mac!!
To succeed, he has first installed the burner in a USB box, then has flashed the firmware using Virtual PC on his Mac.
This is a good news for those who do not get easy access to a PC (yes, it can happen).

Taiwanese producers have received orders from Dell and HP for double layers DVD burner. Those orders have to be delivered from next month.
But Pioneer seems to be late regarding the double layer DVD-R. Apple might have to make a choice, either continue to support DVD-R, and wait extra month before being able to equip PM, iMac and PB with DL DVD burners, or "switch" and propose DL DVD+R burner as a BTO...

According to manufacturers, the demand for slim DVD burners (used in laptops, for instance) will surpass the demand for combo drives towards the fourth quarter of 2004. They are re-arranging their production lines to match that trend.
Currently, a slim combo drive costs US$ 55-60 while the price of a 2x slim DVD burner is double. One can expect a steady price drop over the next few months.

Henry sent us the ADSL offers and their monthly fee in the Netherlands.
Download/Upload/Euro Pricing
7.8M/1024K/79
4M/1024K/65
2M/1024K/59
1M/512K/49
He subscribes to the 79 euros offer, downloads at 900KB/s at peak while he can upload at 128KB/s.

According to IBM's documentation, the PPC970Fx is supposed to have a consumption of 20W at a speed of 2GHz.
However, the reality is different. The monitoring utilities of the xServe G5 log the processor's consumption in realtime. In idle mode, the consumption is a mere 15W. But under full load, it peaks at 44W.
A Powerbook equipped with this processor would approximately run out of battery power in an hour, with fans blowing all the time.
We shall wait for a less power hungry revision...

Thank you Olivier for the info.

This little box plugs on USB Runs on Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) only On a line equipped with caller id services, one can have a personalised answering message or call system with options : press 1 for customer service press 2 for technical assistance etc.

http://www.ovolab.com/phlink/

If you ever brought your iPod with you to the beach, you know how the sand can damage the finish and get in the way of the controls.
For all you beach go-ers, http://www.drbott.com/ now offers the LiliPod for 3G iPod.

This hard shell protects your iPod from shocks and is waterproof.

Many of you that received their new iBook or PowerBook are wondering whether Apple forgot to include the installation CD in the box, since the now standard recovery package from Apple only features 2 DVDs
However, from now on, we will have to get used to the fact that both iLife and Mac OS X come bundled together in new computers.
Same goes with the Apple Hardware Test CD, the diagnostic tool for the Mac, which can be accessed by booting on the DVD #1 while holding the option key.
Open Firmware will then prompt you to choose between the recovery partition, or the Apple Hardware Test.

Taiwanese manufacturers of blank medias will start mass producing Dual Layered DVDs. Good news, they mention DVD+ and -R, despite the apparent lack of progress from Pioneer and the DVD Forum.
Nevertheless, the price of these medias won't come down for a while, since Philips (DVD+R) and Pioneer (DVD-R) totally locked their blank media manufacturing patents.
While in the past, it was more or less possible to avoid paying royalties, this time it will not be.

Thank you Jean for the tip
iTunes 4.5 introduced a new feature that however clever, can become quite annoying, quite fast: those arrows present in the library that link the former to the Music Store's information about artists, related songs, etc.
But, if you click on one of those arrows while maintaining the ALT key depressed, you will jump within your own library instead of to the iTMS (which would just frustrate non-US users anyway).
So, while using the ALT key each time is fun, you can change the default behavior of those arrows (taken from Mac OSX Hints).
Open the terminal and type the following command :
defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES
If you ever want to get back to the original behavior, enter :
defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool NO
Easy, painless.

Tuesday there was a demonstration during a conference for Longhorn hardware engineers. To try and remain as objective as possible to describe what happened during this demo, i'll quote the serious Reuters agency :

Tuesday, during the annual Windows Hardware Engineering conference in Seattle, he (Jim Allchin, vice-president of Microsoft) proceeded to make a demo comparing work in Longhorn and Windows XP on two PCs. But as he asked the machine running Longhorn to open another application which is really demanding in memory as it contains numerous graphics - Quake, the famous shoot 'em up video game - the computer just froze. Allchin then estimated that the PC was slow and Microsoft hurried to claim that the demo worked fine during the tests.

However, the other part of the demo concerning Windows Media Centre was more successful. The Media Centre has no competition in sight, and there is nothing more frustrating for me than Apple's indifference towards the concept...
(Thanks Michel)