News for Tuesday, 6 July 2004

During a closed conference reserved for Apple product resellers, Jean-René Cazeneuve, Apple France CEO, has announced that the iPod Mini will be available in France at the end of the month, at really attractive price.

From our reader MagicSeb:

Essentialy for professional reasons, I have subscribed to a newsletter offered through an american website listing industrial tools, some of these beeing security related. Now, I have recieved an announcement concerning a new product, a carbon monoxid detector, and should I decide to give the name of two users for this kind of device, including their e-mail address, then I may win an iPod. Quite incredible if you ask me, the iPod is just everywhere!

The iPod has truely advanced to the favourite incentive for all kind of promotions, used to attract some more customers. From music specialists to pharmaceutical laboratories, the iPod flavour is beeing accomodated just in every business.
In France for instance, le Conseil de l'Ordre des Médecins, the national medical association council, has accepted to consider the iPod a backup tool, quite certainly easing some purchase intentions.

French website 'Mac et Video' published version 1.16 of the zone-free firmware for DVR-107 today, including a flashing utility requiring OS X:
http://www.macetvideo.com/flashpioneerosx/flashpioneerosx.html

Thanks to Chistophe for this info:

As every year to celebrate the AppleExpo, Lycos is organizing a competition in partnership with Apple. This year, internet users can compete to win a PMG5 bundle with a 17" TFT display, as well as a Lycos Webcenter internet housing package. For competing, you need to submit your 400x300 visual, as jpeg format, on the theme: "digital music". You should sent back your visual production before August, 25th using the online form available on the website.

For additional info:
http://webmaster.lycos.fr/events/appleexpo2004/

Dan, a Macbidouille/hardmac reader from Argentina, has sent us photos of a brand new Apple center in Buenos Aires.


Not only the Apple Center is located in a beautiful 4-floor building where it occupies the entire surface; but it has also included all the design/characteristics of an Apple Store, this quite fashion, but probably a request from Apple.

thanks to Julien for this info.
UPC, one of the Belgian cable internet providers, is going to implement the new EuroDOCSIS 2.0 standard.
Once the network updated, and the compatible modem delivered to the consumers, they will have data flow rate up to 30Mb/s!! For the time being, we could find any information regarding the price for this offer.

CDRinfo has published a long test of the first available 16x DVD+R drive, the BenQ DW1600A. This drive, which can also write double layer medias at 2,4x, only needed 6"07 to fill up a DVD.
A quite desapointing figure in fact. The device reaches an average writing speed of 11,44x, whereas a 12x from Plextor almost reaches 10,32x.
You may want to check here. The maximum writing speed of 16x will only be reached towards the end of the disc. Sadly, 16x has more of a marketing hype, and it does not mean any true breakout in real world performances.

Macworld, flies back on the soon to be G5 Cluster installed by Colsa for the U.S. Army. It turns out that the reason the G5 was chosen is... the low power consumption, a very important point for a 24/7 setup. The article also reveals that 40% of all xServes sold, will end up in clustering projects.

Koubilai sent us the benchmark results of the G5 beta version of Cinebench on his new Dual 1,8GHz G5.
CINEBENCH 2003 v1
****************************************************
Tester : Koubilai
Processor : G5 Dual
MHz : 1800
Number of CPUs : 2
Operating System : Os X 10.3.4 (G5)
Graphics Card : ATI 9600 XT - 128 Mo
Resolution : 1600x1024 (Apple Display 22")
Color Depth : millions
****************************************************
Rendering (Single CPU): 255 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 445 CB-CPU
Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.75
Shading (CINEMA 4D) : 246 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting) : 691 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting) : 1249 CB-GFX
OpenGL Speedup: 5.07
****************************************************
...which is more or less what one could expect from a dual 1,8GHz G5. A good news for the people that were in doubt about the Logic Board used in those new G5s.

Source : linuxfr.org (in French)

Apple has made a lot of efforts to push the RendezVous technology on all platforms. Things aren't as easy as everybody thought, even with Philips backing up this standard, the adoption rate is slow.
And that's probably why Apple released the source code of their implementation of ZeroConf, compatible with Windows, Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Java.
We can now hope to see projects including this technology popping up everywhere.
[translator : Apple already provided the code for their mDNSResponder a while ago, that could be compiled on most *NIX platforms]