News for Monday, 27 June 2005

Nvidia is working on new graphic cards drivers that will be able to take advantage of multi-core CPUs, which would potentially result in up to 30% performance increase for video.
We hope NVidia will do the same for their Mac drivers, as though they don't have 970 MP, our professional machines have had two CPUs for long.
In that case, even games that are not optimized for dual CPU, ie almost every one..., might see their performances increased. This would also concern some professional applications.

According to a study conducted with 1,500 shops in Japan, the iPod has lost its leadership in front of Sony.
The Japanese manufacturer managed to take the lead of the segment of less than 10 GB MP3 players and bested both the iPod Shuffle and mini. Apple still leads on larger capacity players, but the company's market shares are also downsizing in front of Sony.
The coming months will let us know if this tendency is to be confirmed. In that case, slapping an Apple on players won't suffice for Cupertino to be the leader of the market. Apple will have to (at last) offer new functionalities and make its iPod more attractive than competitors' offerings.
[edited by Nate]

Event though in the last months ATI had caught up with Nvidia and gained money, hard times are coming for the Canadian video card manufacturer. During the last quarter, the company announced a loss of $ 8.5 million and a significantly decreased market share. Things will take time to stabilize, as their R520, which is supposed to counter the upcoming Geforce 7800, will not be available before the end of summer.
It has now become quite chronic that ATI and Nvidia alternately, and always faster each time, assume leadership of the most powerful graphic card, the one which gives the better image to the whole line. Yet this competition also results in an inunterrupted, fast-paced increase of GPU powers.
[edited by Nate]

What's nice with Intel is that Apple will never be powerful enough to prevent them from publishing very early roadmaps which we will hence comment with delight.
Their latest one mentioned new CPUs. So, you'll see that by mid-2007 the Kentsfield, a high end CPU, shall arrive. It should not derive from the PIV technology which has reached a dead end by now, but from the Pentium M which demonstrated it was possible to create something powerful without an extreme increase of frequency.
This would probably be a good thing to start with for replacing G5 Powermacs.
Still about Intel, x86secret published an article about Intel Dual Core CPUs, which will make you familiar with those. Keep in mind though that those who shall equip our Apple branded machines will probably be from the following generation.
http://www.x86-secret.com/

Hereafter is a report from Hervé who has successfully used Fotolook with his SCSI scanner while running OSX.4 Tiger.

Following your previous news to keep using "old" SCSI scanner while running Panther, and half a day of fight with the Tiger, I could successfully use Fotolook coupled to my SCSI scanner Agfa Duoscan T1200 while running Tiger!!
How to proceed:
- Recover extensions from 10.2.8 (see http://www.hardmac.com/niouzcontenu.php?date=2004-02-22#1619)
- 'display contents' of Tiger extensions, and replace them with Jaguar, but pay attention to keep Tiger 'info.plist' and 'version.plist'
-remove the following files:
/System/Library/Extensions.kextcache
/System/Library/Extensions.mkext
(they will be created after the next boot)
-repair authorization
That's it!
After rebooting, the system will inform you that it can not use one of the 2 modified extensions, but it does not matter since my scanner via the Adaptec CPI card is now recognized and works perfectly with Fotolook ;-)
when I will have more time, I will try to test other versions of the extension to avoid the annoying error message after booting.
it seems that apple has locked the use of the previous extensions via a procedure checking the version number: so all you have to do is to keep .plist and exchange the rest of the contents (SCSI jaguar).
It might be of interest for other Macusers.

If you live in a place where the summer heat already rages, you probably noticed just like us in France that your favorite computer's fans have been accelerating much as of late. So if you wish to help your machine live a long life, don't forget to remove dust from it. This is to do with every machine, including laptops.
On desktops and G5 iMacs, easy to open, do it before using an air blowing spray.
For other machines (laptops, G4 iMacs...), you might first use the spray on the fans' air cooling vents. Be careful to do it at least ten centimeters away from it, you're trying to eliminate dust, not to send it inside.
A final word for rev1 G5 iMacs' owners and especially those of October 2004. If your machine lasts without any difficulty during this hard period to come, it will most probably survive for long.

Neowin has posted a few comments and screencaps of the upcoming version of Internet Explorer 7, that will be bundled with Longhorn.

Apart from a strangely familiar metal/grey interface and a search (via MSN...) field on the top right....

... the other other other biggest feature of this innovative browser is RSS support.
If Apple's innovation through Safari could have been described as a big yawn, Microsoft's innovation can certainly qualify as sleeping pill.

Fred relates his recent experience:

Having bought an iBook this last May, I was eligible for the "Tiger up-to-date" program.
After a good deal of waiting, I got a mail from Apple, and yesterday, the delivery guy called to say he was dropping by.
At first, I thought "clearly this must be a mistake ! they sent me a second iBook ?! this carton box is huge !". But after opening said-box, i dig through the bubble-wrap thingy, and there it is, an envelope containing the Tiger DVD, manuals and an evaluation cd of iWork 05.
What a waste of space and material ! the enveloppe would have been more than sufficient !

Perhaps Apple feared that TNT would deliver the DVD in crumbs ?