News for Tuesday, 11 May 2004

Hereafter is a new software from Open Source project which could disturb a bit Apple. Fabrice is sending us his comments regarding PearPC:

available here http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/index.html . I have tried during the night PearPC on my Pc P4 2.0GHz. It works with windows, but it is very slow. I have successfully booted with the original Panther CD1 disk (screenshot).But it does not work with my Gentoo Linux (or I did not find the right setup) According to osnews, some users are quite satisfied with the overall performance; to my point of view performance are really poor; of course it is still the version v0.1. It might also be that I could not activate the JIT. PearPC developers indicate that they need a PowerPC/Big Endian computer in order to perform the required changes necessary to make it functional for on a PowerPC. For additional info, look at the following article

ThermographX, the temperature monitoring utility, has been updated.
It now can read off of the newest Apple laptops. Here is a screenshot of a 12" 1 GHz G4 iBook.

For the kicks, I was trying to see at which temperature the CPU fan would be triggered. So, after 50 mn of Altivec Fractal Carbon, the little bugger came to life ! and that was at a surprising 75°C ! The PPC 7447 are built to run safely at up to 105°C. This might prove interesting to overclockers.

Thanks Guillaume for the picture.

This has been taken yesterday in the Apple Store Soho, where, as you can see, iPod mini are available. Let's hope that it is not a single isolated occurence. The more iPod minis avaliable in the US, the bigger chances we poor European have to finally be able to get them.
Guillaume adds :

Thanks to the Apple Store Soho staff for letting me take the pictures, because it took me quite some time to get this shot. After waiting in line for 40 minutes...

Thanks to Calle for sending the following info :

Hi, I read about the ADSL fees in the Netherlands reported by Henry that you published on hardmac.com. Compared to Swedish fees they are quite expensive... Here are the DSL fees of Bredbandsbolaget (one of the most respected and popular Swedish ISP's): Download/Upload/Type of DSL/SEK price incl. 25% VAT/Euro price incl. 25% VAT 24Mbit/1Mbit/VDSL/449 SEK/49.3 € (VDSL allows a maximum distance of 1.2 km from the nearest phone exchange. ADSL allows 5.5 km) 10Mbit/1Mbit/ADSL/399 SEK/43.8 € Bredbandsbolaget doesn't have lesser bandwidth services than 10Mbit for private customers but the ISP Bostream does: 2,5Mbit/0,8Mbit/ADSL/449 SEK/49.3 € 1Mbit/256Kbit/ADSL/298 SEK/32.7 € 0,5Mbit/128Kbit/ADSL/248 SEK/27.2 € 256Kbit/64Kbit/ADSL/198 SEK/21.7 € Subtract 20% of the prices and you get the price excl. Swedish VAT.

It is indeed very cheap compared to France and Southern Europe in general.
[reported by kurisu]

SONY just revealed wht people are already dubbing as a potential iPod killer.

Here are the VAIO Pocket VGF-AP1 specifications:
- 20 GB HD
- color 2" LCD screen (320*256)
- Li-ion battery with 20h lifespan
- USB 2. Can be used to download pictures from SONY cameras.
- 195g
- Size: 115,2mmx63,3x17,2.
Like always, that player only reads ATRAC3 files, although MP3, WAV and WMA unprotected tracks can be converted by SONY's SonicStage music center app. Still, that ATRAC limitation is one of the major obstacles to SONY's real start in the market.
Add a hefty $500 price tag and that will make it even more difficult...
More details (in Japanese):
http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/VGF-AP1/