News for Friday, 11 March 2005

The American department of justice just chose Corel instead of Microsoft to equip 50,000 posts in office suites. WordPerfect Office 12, according to them, is the best choice for the those who work on law issues.
Apart from apparently not significative loss this will be for such a huge company as Microsoft, this is a leak for their alledged invincibility, as others could start doubting they represent the only solution.

Apple found an easy way to deal with the iPod Shuffle after-sales service : no repairing, but an exchange. Ctrl lets us know of that.

I had an issue with the Shuffle, so I went to Apple/iTunes site and they kindly offered to exchange it.
They send the same model in exchange of my Shuffle, and I had to sign a letter stating I'd pay them the price, if in the following 10 days after I've received it I haven't sent the back the faulty one.
This is simply thrilling.

On October 14th, an Internet user was let free by justice, after the police had found 488 films burnt on CDs where he lived. The Prosecution as well as the majors had decided to go to appeal jurisdiction. Which confirmed yesterday this person should be released.
Quite a drawback for majors, as this decision will hinder all the law actions they're currently handling : as they'd never accept that, they decided they'll try and have the sentence broken (this is "cassation").
If you don't know how justice functions in France, just lean that cassation court won't have to decide about the affair itself (ie piracy), but on law, formal issues. If there's been a flaw in procedure, the judgement will be broken and a new trial would ensue.
[Upd.] Here's Mr Freeze quite professional comment:

The cassation court judges only about "law issues" of the decision, as opposed to judges in 1st instance and appeal who judge "in fact and following the law". 1st instance and appeal judges must establish what's "really" happened (X downloaded such song, burnt such soft...), then apply the law accordingly to the the facts (x is found guilty of illegal reproduction of copyrighted music). Cassation doesn't have to go back to the facts that were established: they study the law consequences attached to the facts the judges established. That's what you'll call the facts "qualification". Of course, in the appeal trial, a formal rule might have been violated, which cassation will condemn if there's an action in that direction; yet this is not the most common case: it's even the most insignificant as far as law is concerned!!
To conclude, in the case you've described, cassation could sanction the appeal court for for inducing wrong law consequences of the facts it has established, which is much more fundamental than a plain "formal vice": right itself would be then changed, and it's cassation arrest that will be reputed jurisprudence, instead of that of the appeal court... It is almost the most important moment of the procedure, and not some extra, optional moment of it.
So going to cassation could result in a change of the whole affair !!! If they say the facts required a condemnation because of a law violation, the appeal court where the ensuing trial would be held would have to judge the facts accordingly!

Apple long appeared as a pionneer using the SCSI when all PCs would use a very slow IDE.
Obvious economical issues as well as the rising performances of the ATA, made them go back to a more common policy.
Everyone thought the Serial ATA would eventually kill the SCSI. This appears to be wrong.
Soon the SCSI norm will go from parallel to serial, thus becoming Serial Attached SCSI. Its theoretical maximum output would be of 3 Gbits/s at first, then 6, and would allow a chain a 128 HDs.
Its fantastic advantage is that it would be possible to plug on a SCSITA bus a SATA HD, this will work flawlessly (without taking advantage of course of the SCSI ability, that is less CPU sollicitation). The choice would be between installing less expensive drives, or some with very high performances (at a cost), and mising the two will be possible as well.
The unique ability of housing 15000 T/mn HDs in a RAID Xserve would be quite a commercial motto for Apple. But is the brand still motivated enough to initiate elitist technological choices, for something else than CPUs ?
To read more about STA:
http://www.scsita.org

Apple has recently updated the CHUD Tools (tools mainly dedicated to developers). MacOSXrumors has identified in the last release a modification in the Processor Preference interface.
Hereafter are screenshots of the old interface (top) and the new interface (bottom)


One can clearly see without any doubt that space has been generated to display information for higher number of processors.
We have decided to go one step further, and we have been looking for the "red spot" file which is graphically indicating the number of processor:

Once identified the file, one can find 2 other "red spot" files generating 2 different pictures as shown below...a bit like if the original one was doubled...


With the official release of dual core processors by Intel and AMD for the second half of 2005, one can imagine that those additional "red spots" will support information related to dual-core processors in future Apple computers.

The vice-president of the Blu-Ray Disc Association (BDA) announced yesterday that Apple will become a member of the consortium’s Board. Apple has then officially chosen its side, between the Blu-Ray and the HD-DVD format supported by Pioneer, a historical partner of Apple since the first DVD burner.
It is too early to conclude, but one can ask if Steve Jobs' position as Pixar CEO have had any effect on Apple's decision.

Can you pick up the discrepancy on Alex's new Powerbook keyboard ?

Yup, yup yup yup... the " 3 " key comes from a QWERTY set.
Either Apple is out of AZERTY keys, or some light headed person mistook one key for the other...

We were a bit dubious at first, but it seems to be genuine : iPod Lounge reports form the Cebit, the "Super Shuffle" from LuxPro.

Looking identical to the iPod Shuffle, but featuring a FM tuner and a mic to record voice memos. It comes in two variant : 512MB and 1GB.
If Apple doesn't stop the launch of this device, things might get ugly very quickly for the iPod Shuffle. Here's the advertisement for this product :(source Macnews.de)

Steve Jobs and Apple legal must be fuming !!