News for Tuesday, 16 August 2005

The staffs of Mac4Ever , MacADSL, MacBidouille, MacGameZone and MacGeneration are pleased to announce their presence at Apple Expo 2005. Le Pommier, will accomodate you at stand D90-E91, from September 20th to the 24th, from 10 AM to 7 PM at the Paris Expo, Porte de Versailles. You will be able to meet the designer and writers of your favorite websites and you will be able to entertain yourself with other readers discussing topics such as your favorite fruit (or other things), far from the virtual world of the forums.
But this year, we will also propose to the sites of the mac community who wish to come present themselves at the Pommier stand. Detailed instructions will soon be available. Lastly, for all who will not be able to attend Apple Expo, a podcast will allow you to hear many of the sounds heard in the halls of Apple Expo.
Le Pommier : http://www.lepommier.info

According to X86secret, the Conroe, the processor which should replace the current Pentium4D, should be clocked at 2.93GHz at the beginning.
The Conroe will be proportionally clocked slower than the current Pentium4, but its architecture is based on Pentium-m, and it will be a dual core design with 2 or 4MB of L2 cache shared between both cores.
The Conroe should be available at the same time that Apple is expecting to add Intel processor into some of its desktop computer models.

Despite a quite active market, the price of DVD burner is currently very low, 16x DVD burner are around 35$ for the cheapest. Knowing that DVD +/-R will not be able to be burn at faster speed than 16x, improvements are only concerning DVD+/-RW and double layer burning speed.
To illustrate this information, the latest DVD burner from Pioneer, the DVR-110, can be found around 60€ vs. 45€ for the DVR-109D. However, the difference between the 100 and 109D is DVD double layer 8X support while compatible media are not available on the market yet (CD-RW 32x instead of 24x).
This war between DVD burner manufacturers might end up with only one winner, Lite-on. Indeed, after Sony burners produced by Lite-On, NEC has also transfer part of its production of DVD burner to Lite-On.
In parallel, HP has decreased the price of its LightScribe licensing, in order to attract more manufacturers to add this feature to their models. HP is expecting to boost LightScribe adoption, despite difficult and disappointing starts.
According to specialists, the war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD should not see real winner before 2007, so DVD burners will still be for quite some times the default optical drive in our computers..

This update has been delivered directly from ATI, and is concerning PCI and AGP ATI graphic cards (except Mobility models) starting from the first ATI Radeon till the latest Radeon X800.
Only retail RADEON Mac Edition graphics cards are subject to this firmware update. This update is NOT working on OEM ATI graphic cards.
Supported graphic cards:

* RADEON PCI Mac Edition
* RADEON AGP Mac Edition
* RADEON 7000 Mac Edition
* RADEON 8500 Mac Edition
* RADEON 9000 Mac Edition
* RADEON 9200 Mac Edition
* RADEON 9800 Pro Mac Edition
* RADEON 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition
* RADEON X800 XT Mac Edition

Requirements:

* Bootable Mac OS X 10.3.6 or newer system
* OSX 10.4.x Tiger : Safe Boot is required to use this ROM Update. Hold shift during boot to Safe Boot.
* Retail RADEON Mac Edition graphics card (installed in AGP and/or PCI slot)
* Firmware Update application file
* The computer MUST NOT be interrupted (shut down or power failure) during firmware update

The list of fixed bugs is quite long and varies a lot depending on the graphic card model: Info ATI PCI/AGP Radeon universal
Firmware August 2005
(Thanks Stéphane)

We're sure this tip will help a few people who got stung by a bad flash :

Hello everyone,
Happy as a camper with my new Pioneer DVR-109 XLB1, I decided to flash it with the latest firmware (1.57 at time of writing) and DVRUpdate2.1.1.
The operation having been frozen in the midst of completion, I apparently had "lost" my burner : DVRUpdate didn't see the drive as a burner any longer.
After a cold restart and a check in the System Profiler, the drive appeared with a firmware version of "0000" instead of the old "XLB1".
Well, after a stroke of genius I decided to try the official Pioneer flashing tool (for PC) with the original firmware, and lo and behold, it worked, giving me another chance to try the new firmware and DVRUpdate.

Security update available through S.U.

Security Update 2005-007 delivers a number of security enhancements and is recommended for all Macintosh users. This update includes the following components:
AppKit
BlueTooth
CoreFoundation
cups
Directory Services
HIToolBox
Kerberos
loginwindow
Mail
OpenSSL
QuartzComposerScreenSaver
Security Interface
Safari
X11
zlib
For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798

This update is also available for Tiger Server.