News for Sunday, 9 May 2004

ATI and NVidia war has gone ferocious. It would seem every means is allowed to win over the other, even unfair ones. Otimized drivers would artificially increase benchmark softwares results, and now overclocked cards for the press...
Hence the Radeon X800 tested on various Internet sites woudl have been overclocked by ATI. Yet NVidia would seem to have done the same with their Geforce 6800.
So, the tests to be done in true life environment with commercial cards would probably give inferior results, save for those who'll manage to realize as good overclocking as those - factory made - on specially designed products.

Apple Care published a document about a consumer satisfaction study. The laptop figures were published in March, those for desktop computers will be in June.
According to those, Apple's customer service would be considered the best of all by the consumers.
Here's the Billboard:
For desktops
1 Apple (first in all categories)
2 Gateway
3 Dell
4 HP
5 Compaq
For laptops
1 Apple (first in all categories)
2 IBM
3 Gateway
4 Dell
5 Toshiba
6 HP
7 Sony
8 Compaq
This image drawn from the presentation PDF shows that Apple is making progresses while Dell stumbles.

This is probably a kind of revenge after Dell's recent attacks on other issues.

The news is so huge nobody quite seems to believe it yet.
Intel will abandon the development of their "Tejas" CPU which was alledgedly almost finalized.
The firm would adopt a Dual Core technology instead.
It would thus seem Intel would have come to a dead en in frequency hop strategy. They thus have to multiply CPUs in order to be able to continue following Moore's law.

We had tested on March 16th the Fast DVD Copy software, a one-click video DVD copy software. We were extremely disappointed with very poor performances of a $100 soft, and we weren't the only ones.
That's probably why, less than two months later, a version 2.0 is announced bringing improvements which deal with what we didn't like at that time:
- improved reading compatibility for the created disks
- no more region lock on disks
- multiprocessing is supported for encoding.
....
A test version is available for d/l:
http://www.fastdvdcopy.com/en/download.php

Many readers let us know there are no more iPod mini in New York !
All resellers have sold out theur stocks and none of them know how long this will last.
We hence can't believe we'll have more than a few of theses products in Europe in July.
Apple shall probably give its "original" iPod a revamp so it may win sales over the mini !
Without this being a rumour, this shall not take long, considering the numerous iPods sold on Refurb last Wednesday are new, not refurbished products at all !

GP had a good surprise when he received his PowerMac G5.

The optical drive is now a Pioneer 107. Apple has probably no 106 in stock anymore, which is normal as they're not in production anymore.

Two security consulting firms prompted Apple to be more specific in their security leaks announcement.
They regret the company is so minimalist in their alert bulletins, don't say enough about the leaks and their dangerosity.
If Apple really want to conquer new markets, their biggest challenge will be to communicate to a larger public, and a less dedicated one than the current MacUsers who ordinarilyu are fans.
Apple will have to answer direct journalists questions, clients remarks, competitors reproaches.... a real firm communication, that is.

On the Forums, several readers have discovered that the 5400 rpm optional hard drive in their Powerbooks had 16 MB of cache (TOSHIBA MK8026GAX). That's a good news, as their performance are way better.
Only those trying to get the most out of their laptop will want to replace it with a 60 GB one at 7200 rpm.

The first tests of the Sony double layer burners, the DRU-700, emphasized a problem which could make it less expected by burning fans.
It takes 45 mn to fill a 8.5 Go data disk. The speed is only 2.4x and the final stage is extremely long.
During the same time, using a 8x burner, it is possible to burn 4 simple layers DVDs. While the DL medias prices are still so high, the simple layer burning still has a rich future.