News for Friday, 8 October 2004

The SCPP (Audio Producer Society) has launched in June (in France only) series of legal actions against 50 internet users accused of "sharing music via P2P network".
According to this society, those users have placed thousands of music tracks on their share folder. Of course those legal actions were leading to police home searches which were according to the official statement "polite and without any violence".
We do not know if it is directly linked but one of our reader has been facing such an adventure recently...hereafter is a summary.
One day, early in the morning, police officers rang at the door and his wife who was the only one present welcomed them. They declared acting following complaint of "illegal music sharing via internet". His wife was immediately arrested because her name was used for the internet contract. His son was picked up from the college by the police, and also arrested. He was finally the last one arrested.
What was the reason of such an action?? to have downloaded 1 music file in May 2003 via P2P networks…
The police after having seized HDs, let them go home.
Ten days later, HDs were sent back to them, with indication that the legal procedure was cancelled because no proofs of such piracy could have been found!!
We have of course omitted details, but in summary a complete family has spent a full day in a police department, in a prison cell, accused of piracy, treated as criminals, for at the end...nothing!!
Welcome to France, the Human Rights birthplace country...

thanks to Jérôme to report that since last Wednesday, a smal cluster of 33 Xserve Dual 2GHz is running at the IRISA, Paris.
More details or info are available from their website.

Gilles just got a message from the Apple Store. His Geforce 6800 DDL equiped G5 has left the factory. He will probably be the first person in France to receive it.

Thank you Charles for the heads up
VPC 7 works nicely on Macs, unless you are the (un?)lucky owner of a machine with more than 2GB of RAM. If that's the case, the software starts to act funky, and even if somehow it can start, it will always crash.
There are to workarounds :
1) Physically remove some RAM of your machine
2) - Go to Library/Extensions
- Move "virtualpcosservices.kext" to your desktop.
- Go to Library/StartupItems and remove (or rename) "VirtualPCOSServices"
- Restart
Please note that this trick apparently doesn't always work.

During the CREATEC expo, Pioneer introduced its Blu-Ray burner for computers. This device will hit the shelves in 2005, and will have the following specs : DVD+/-R at 8x, DVD +R9 at 2.4x and BD-R at 2x.
We have no further details at the moment.

While the supply of overwhelmed by the demand of LCD screens, some manufacturers have decided to build new facilities to meet the demand. Those so-called 5th generation facilities are getting ready to mass produce, so 2005 will witness a rise of the supply, especially in large sized panels. To counter an over production, some panels will be used in LCD TV sets as well, but that might not be enough to avoid surplus.