News for Thursday, 19 May 2005
It seems that the current talks between Toshiba and Sony have ended in a no-exit way. Both companies have decided not to move away from their current positions; there is no way to start discussing of a compromise... So the future DVD format war will take place. Sony has already announced that its PS3 will sport a Blu-Ray drive, with back compatibility to current DVD and CD formats. However, HD-DVD products (media and drives) should be available from Sony's competitors before the 1st Blu-Ray-related product will be manufactured. So at the end, customers remain in trouble, not knowing what to choose...
By
linathael.
Original by
Lionel
- 19/05/2005 09:04:15 CEST - Category: Overclock
The website
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~silasb/macbat/ has published a quite interesting "mod". They have successfully designed a battery-powered Mac mini, making it possible to use the Mac mini on-the-move. Of course, to save battery lifespan, they have replaced 2.5" HD by a MicroDrive, and removed the DVD drive.
But at the end, it works!! Even though it still needs some improvement regarding the procedures to refill the battery and boot the computer.
June 22nd, NVidia will introduce the 7800, successor of the 6800 in the high-end market.
Although the jump of frequency will not make you wet your pants (430 MHz vs 400 for the 6800 Ultra), pixel pipelines count will increase to 24 (currently 16 on the 6800), and the number of vertex engines will be upped to 8 (6 for the 6800). The onboard memory will be run at 600 MHz (vs. 550).
So, not a revolution, but enough to foresee performance increases of around 40%. No chance so far to get one of those on a Mac, since it will only come in PCI Express.
Western Digital has just announced the release of a new hard drive of 250GB, with a SATA II interface and 16 MB of cache. The drive also features WD own noise reduction technology, called "advanced acoustic and quiet operation".
The WD2500KS will sell for US$199.
That's a well needed boost shot for WD, who recently has been trailing behind in the hard drive arena.
By
kurisu.
Original by
Lionel
- 19/05/2005 06:14:05 CEST - Category: Mac OS X
Cisco did their homeworks, and have just released a Tiger compatible version of their VPN client. Note that this release still has issues with dual procesor machines in Tiger (but works fine with those configurations in Jaguar and Panther)
You can download the client from here, provided you have a Cisco password :
http://www.cisco.com/cgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/vpnclient-3des
