News for Thursday, 26 August 2004

Some could have though that Apple will take the first opportunity to stop using G4 processor or Freescale products. It seems that the reality is different. Freescale employees (Freescale being the new name of Motorola semiconductor division) have received a message...hereafter is a part of it:

...What: A custom Apple store has been setup specifically for Freescale including many of Apple's best selling products. Buy the latest Apple technology, from iPods to iMacs, at a discount with Freescale's Apple Employee Purchase Program (EPP)!
How: Create your own personal account to buy Apple products at http://www.apple.com/eppstore/freescale . Savings will be reflected upon final checkout for all Mac promotional purchases and pricing shown reflects EPP discounts.
Who: Freescale employees in the U.S.
Why: Apple acknowledges its strong partnership with Freescale and extends this offer as a way of saying thanks.

In summary Apple is proposing special price on Apple products to Freescale employees to acknowledge an strong partnership...so it is hard to imagine that Apple is proposing such advantages to stop it in few month...

Yesterday, we were reporting a test of the DVR-108 performed by Clubic.com? The only missing part was a 16x burning test due to a lack of supported media.
Hopefully the famous Nils has published a firmware patch (version 1.06) in beta test. In addition to transform the DVR-108 into a region-free burner, it also allows all burning speed for all media.
Hereafter is the place to get this firmware:
http://forum.rpc1.org
Currently, you will still need a PC to flash the firmware of your DVR-108, since DVRFlash version 2 is still not available on Mac.
We have performed the test with DVD -R 8x Verbatim.

It took us 6min 58 to burn 4.4 GB at 16x on a DVD-R media (time recorded between the click to launch the process and the sound notifying the process end).
To determine the gain in time between 16x burning speed vs. 12x, we have performed a second test. At 12x, it took 7min to burn the same amount of data, so you hardly see the difference.
In order to be sure that this was not coming from the firmware, we have done a second test at 16x while monitoring data flow rate with Perfboard

The final data flow rate fits indeed with a 16x burning process. But the monitoring gave us the reason of such a small gain in time. The DVR-108 is burning at 16x only the last 300/400MB. But every time that the burning speed changes and increases, the burning process is paused for few seconds, which annihilate the gain obtained with 16x speed.
We have read on RPC1 forum that the firmware 1.10, not yet available, will improve this transition state by few seconds. At the end, as you might have already understood, the 16x speed is more a marketing aspect than a real technology breakthrough for the users.
We could not perform a double layer DVD burning test, since we did not have enough media for that, but as shown below, Toast recognizes perfectly a DVD+R9 media (a prototype media from Ritek).

Few weeks ago, we were presenting a small application supposed to determine the RAM usage of your ATI graphic card. At that time, we were quite disappointed, but it is back with a more mature new version:
ATI_GETRAM_NOINSTALL.sitx

Some computer users are still hesitating between a CRT and a LCD display.
Hardware.fr has compared 2 high end models from both technologies with in deep test.
One will realize that if TFT displays are more expensive, their power consumption is much lower than a CRT model, and the price difference will be quickly erased.
Hardware.fr

We received a number of reports from people who encountered problems with the G5 voltage issue. Many hubs didn't survive the encounter with the Overpowering FW400 port of Death, and two 2.5" enclosures that were bus powered have been sent to roast in electronic Hell.
All the victims thought that the quality of their cheapo devices was the culprit...*

*[translator's note: and they were probably right, since said cheapo devices didn't support the full voltage range of the FW400 standard...]