News for Tuesday, 29 June 2004

Microsoft is ready to offer the City of Paris a 60% rebate to keep the market of their OS and computer equipment. Actually, the French Civilian Service Secretary R. Dutreil had announced Paris was studying the opportunity of a full switch to Linux, as other European towns did.
Losing Paris would be an embarassing symbol for Redmond, as such a migration, if it succeeded, could inspire other French cities...
(thx Graing')
[Some say otherwise that this whole story is about getting better prices from Microsoft, nothing more. Actually we'll know in a few weeks]

The SCPP (civilian society of phonographical producers [roughly :)] ) lodged 20 complaints against X [means they do not have to know who exatly] against Internet users who made huge illegal downloads via P2P networks.
As they certainly do not want to raise the anger of all Internet users, the SCPP wishes those people were condemned to "dissuasive general interest tasks and dissuasive financial sentences", while the maximal sentence at hand might go as high to 3 years of jail and a €300,000 fine.
We know of a terrible sentence which could kill any music lover: assist the reherseal of Starac 4 [a popular "real-TV" show which displays some pathetic younglings, who believe they're gonna become great singers].

Sometimes you can really make a good deal on eBay. A XLR8yourmac reader has found a Dual 1.42GHz card from a G4 MDD and decided to install it in his single 1.25GHz. Of course, he had to increase the bus frequency of his mother board from 133 to 167MHz (thanks to an article we had published onhardmac.com).
If you want to know more (in english)
XLR8yourmac

Apple Store is now reopened, and you can look at the new displays.

The graphic card for the 30" Cinema display is a GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL !
Apple has stopped using the ADC connector, and a unique cable extending from the back of the display carries :
- video
- USB2
- Firewire 400 (only, we would have prefer FW800!)
- Power
the 30" Cinema display will be available only from August.
Price for Europe:
- 20": 1519€
- 23": 2339,01€
- 30": 3.859,00€ + the price of a GeForce6800 ultra: 689€TTC.
[Update]
Additional details regarding the new displays:
- a magnetic mounting solution for fixing the iSight on the new display will be available from this summer (available on the AppleStore or included with the iSight starting this summer...when does summer start for Apple???)
- if the 30" Cinema display will be available only in August, the 2 other models (20" and 23") will be available in 2 to 4 weeks.
- At the opposite to what has been written on different web site (including on Hardmac.com), it is not necessary to have 2 DVI plug to control a 30" display, but one particular DVI plug including 2 channels: Dual-Link DVI. This card includes 2 of those DVI connectors!!, so you can connect two 30" Cinema display!!
- response time is 16ms, and the contrast is 400:1 (vs. 350:1 for the old 20" , for info, it is 600:1 for the Formac 20" display)
- visible angle remains unchanged with 170°
- it is possible to fix your display on a wall thanks to an optional adaptor

The web site Materiel.be has performed a test, comparing 13 different graphic cards. of course, this test has been carried out on PC (we are far away to have such a choice on a Mac), but results can be extrapolated for Mac. Of course, there is a GeForce 6800...
Materiel.be

The keynote video feed is available in QuickTime/mpeg-4.
www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc04

Benoît sent us a scan of a DELL add.

If this USB plug doesn't remind you something, look below at the Apple iPod USB plug...

It's exactly the same... nice try DELL

we quite often show you ads for PC stuff using Macs... Toniof95 has found that great one:

SONY invites you to a series of conferences promoting its PRO solutions for business, including its VAIO line of laptops... but surprise surprise! it doesn't look like a VAIO on the picture... wait, it's a LOMBARD G3 PowerBook... even outdated Apple laptops still remain more stylish than recent PC laptops ;)

For the sckeptics, here is a shot of the original Lombard.

The OSX Performance developper toolkit have been upgraded to 3.5.2: they now add support for 970FX processors.
WARNING: we strongly recommend to only use them if you know what you are doing.
http://developer.apple.com

You might remember when Apple released Sherlock, a blunt shameless rip off of Watson ? Well, as everyone knows, history repeats itself with the new Tiger feature called Dashboard, which seems to be the same animal as Konfabulator.
Same thing : making it possible to develop widgets in javascript and XML, with screen licking graphics.
One thing's for sure, Apple did not buy out the company behind Konfabulator nor did they hire the developers. Anyone else smelling some legal actions soon ?
Let us remind you that Konfabulator is developped by the same person that was behind kaleidoscope, Arlo Rose, who participated in parallel to the development of Apparence Manager of Mac OS 9.
And, while we are on the subject... Watson has just been sold by its author to a "large" company that still remains anonymous. This company should release a Watson based application by October 5th 2004. A few people are guessing that SUN is behind all this, rather than Apple. We'll see... but anyway : coincidence ?

As with all Mac OS X updates, Server also brings its share of new features.
- As with the client version, 64 bit is the key. All the better since the new 64bits kernel can address in theory up to 4TB of physical RAM.
- ACL (Access Control List) is part of the game now, and it makes a lot of sense for file sharing services, and the cherry on the cake is that it is fully Windows compatible.

- On the go, you leave with your files, even if they were on a remote disk. Once you come back, the files are automatically put in sync transparently, for both the mobile user and the computers on the office network.
- Jabber based iChat server with optional encryption.
- Weblog server based on the Open Source project Blojsom.
- Software Update server, which will be serving local content to an intranet as well as serve Apple updates, all in one panel.
- Migration from a NT server in a few clicks : user folders import, access permission setup, printers, etc.
- Xgrid integration
- A few other niceties such as a spam filter for the mail server, Open Directory 3, an assistant to setup an internet server (NAT, VPN...), network interface bridging (note from translator : finally!!) for transparently combining 2 or more internet access lines.

Even if Steve did not talk about it during his Keynote, Xcode 2.0 will be bundled with Tiger.
The new features are consequent :
- Xcode automatically generates a graph of your application/project based on your code, and gets updated in real time as you type your code.
- Revamped documentation, with live updating from the net.
- gcc 3.5, with auto-vectorization, meaning that even if your code has not been written for Altivec, it will take advantage of it !
- 64bits integration, making it possible to create Fat Binaries, containing both 32 and 64bits version, a bit like during the 68k to ppc transition a few years ago.
- Java code auto-completion
- Remote debugging console. You can have your app running on one Mac and the debug output sent (optionally encrypted as well) to another Mac. this will ease the development of full screen apps.

Airport Express will come together with a 4.0 update to airport software "suite". If we do not know when this update will be made available, it is already possible to download the documentation.
This paper goes into details about all the possibilities of Airport Express, and answers a rather essential question : yes, Airport Express can act as router and thus share an Internet connection on its own ! It is not only merely a bridge/repeater as previously thought. It also looks like the Airport Admin utility is going to be useable transparently on either type of base station (be it Extreme or Express). Hard to justify the cost of a full blown Aiport Extreme base station for the casual user now...