News for Thursday, 4 November 2004

A report from Laurent.

Since a few hours, if you type a wrong URL, you might have the classical ERROR page...or you can be redirected to the website "RX Med" which is selling Viagra.
It seems that someone has misused a root server to redirect wrong URL to a specified web page. It does not work all the time (apparently it links to a series of IPs, among them only a few are linking to "RX Med" web page, probably to avoid saturating this web site I guess).
The bad part of this story is that all over the planet, DNS are sharing this info. In summary when a wrong URL ends up to "RX Med" web page, then DNS will now consider this as an info: all DNS are currently filling up databases of wrong URL which have been then "successfully" redirected to "RX Med" page.

Vendetta Online is a nice MMOG (Massively Multiplayer online Game) released only few days ago, and based on a story resembling Escape Velocity: one player, one spaceship, and a huge universe to discover; whatever is the alignment of your character (rogue, pirate, soldier, business-man, etc...). Simultaneously developed for Windows, Linux and MacOSX X (something quite unusual for a game) it works quite well even on an iBook 800MHz. The first 8 hours are free, so you have time to enjoy and test this game.

iPod Lounge has collected many reports concerning an audio defect which "can be heard in headphones when the iPod Photo's hard drive reloads its music memory buffer, and sounds like static accompanied by hard drive accessing noises, overlapping for several seconds the beginning of a music track". The problem seems to be present only when using a third-party head-phones with a non-protected plug. A temporary fix consists of adding a small piece of plastic/insulate between the iPod and the headphone plug.

McKool Smith,one of the US largest trial firms, is suing 12 computer games Editors/Developers for infringement of Patent #4734690. this patent is claiming rights regarding system which will allow to display 3D-like image on a computer screen. McKool Smith wish to ask money to all game developers which have created a game or a 3D rendering engine.
You think it is a non sense? you are not the only one. At least this trials will demonstrate how ridiculous is the Software Patent system, allowing patenting of anything, with broad claims...

Ever wanted to build an iMac from scratch ? Well, fancy no more my good fellows, we've just published the translation of the French article on the subject. It's available here :
iMac ATX
Translated by yours truly.

Source : Hardware.fr (in ze French)

After Sony, now Nec-Mitsubishi have announced the end of their CRT monitors (Trinitron, Flattron). Those were really at the top end of the CRT offerings, heavily used by video and design studios, the same people so reluctant to give LCDs a try.
Here's to hoping LCD technology will improve by leaps and bounds, otherwise those CRT monitors will become really sought after and outrageously expensive on the second hand market.

Maxime sent us the Xbench results of his newly received Powermac G5 mono 1.8 GHz along with a few pictures.

You will find it here.
Please also note that the final version of the RPC1 patched 1.14 firmware for the 108 is now available :
http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=30658