News for Thursday, 23 September 2004

Laurent sent us a pic

The oldest Mac reseller in the island (says the boss) revamped his shop in the iPod way.
The way things are going, we'll soon find Macs at the back of an iPod center...

The release of DOOM 3 has been the firestarter for a boom in production of graphic cards. ATI announced a high increase in production of 9800 chipset, while NVidia does as well with its FX5900. Demand is mainly for AGP 8x, considering that this game is an ogre in term of raw graphic power, in order to remain fluid and pleasant to play. On Macintosh, let's hope the Geforce FX5200 Ultra shipped with the iMac G5 is going to be sufficient to enjoy this bloodbath without to many pixels. On PC, running in 1024 by 768, the screen refreshment rate is never over 15fps with this card...

Source : MacNN

The websitehttp://enjoyment.independent.co.uk has released the way the 99 cents are splitted:
- 62 for the Music Major related to the artist
- editors :8
- Apple's part: 4 cents
to decrease the price/track on iTMS, Music Majors will have to accept to decrease their margin.
[translator notes: amazingly enough, in France at least, it seems that Major's margin is higher in % for a track on iTMS than for a regular audio CD, whereas the manufacturing cost for them is lower!!!, another prove that they do not want legal online music stores to succeed...]

It did not stop, and we keep receiving reports about this iMacG5 noise.
Hereafter are what we are (almost) sure about:
- the problem seems to be specific for iMac G5 17".
- the problem does not affect all iMac G5 17"
- it is almost sure that the noise does not come from the HD, but rather from the iMacG5 PSU.
Apple might quickly have to setup an PSU exchange program such as the one launched for the PMG4 MDD.

Fred is proposing a new solution to test the bus bandwith fo the new iMacG5. Please test it in order to validate.

if you enter the following command line:
ioreg -p IODeviceTree -n memory -S | grep "ram-layout-architecture"
it will return 00000001 for an iMacG5 with 2 identical DDR modules, and it is also true on a PowerMac G5, but it will return 00000002 when executed on a iMacG5 sporting a single DDR module. If some iMacG5 users whish to test this command line we will quickly know if it is a way to determine if you memory bus is running on 64 or 128bits.

Blue Ray-based peripherals with 30GB capacities should start being available.
However, Sony should announce in short term, 100 and 200 GB version. 100GB version should be available by 2007. To have media with such storage capacity, Sony is using multilayer media, that way , the 100 GB version will have 4 layers, while the 200 GB will have 8 layers!
In a near future, competition between optical media manufacturers will take place on the number of layers possible to implement on a define media, and not anymore on the laser frequency. One will also need to develop lens allowing a precise focusing of the laser beam for each layer.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, as California State Governor, has officially announced that P2P software usage on California State computer is forbidden. He claims is supporting artist and actors against revenue lost due to P2P. It is amazing to imagine State employees using P2P software on their working stating, during their working hours... using and saturating Administration network capacities... Of course if policemen are doing the same, then there will be nobody to tack hackers down...