News for Wednesday, 31 August 2005

Here's Olivier talking:

VLC Media Player team begs for a donation so they could get equipped of a G5 mac, in order to develop the support of their optical output.
For the moment, they can't test it, and it is a shame.

Given the huge bonus brought to the Mac by VLC, help them buy a G5 would be the least of things. And why wouldn't Apple be part of it ?
To read more:
Forum.videolan.org

some good news for the people of the States, until the end of October Apple will make it possible for them to test a Mac mini for 30 days. After that you will have the choice of buying the machine, or giving it back.

Apple really makes the Mac mini a Trojan horse that will allow people to taste the Mac and especially the qualities of Mac OS X. Let's hope such an offer will soon be available in Europe.

Microsoft it seems chose their camp. Windows Vista will be made a keeper of the law that would forbid playing files that it's illegal to use. To such an extent that the system would be able to deactivate video display in order to make impossible such a delictuous use.
For Marcus Matthias, chief of multimedia division from Microsoft, there's no alternative to this. Protections will get stronger and there will be many.
If that's Hollywood behind this very strict line, Microsoft and their monopoly seem to be quite eager to make it true.
Yet if one day consumers have no choice of what they could buy, or even rent as this has come to be trendy, they will still have the choice not to buy products they'd find too restricting to use.

According to the French newspaper Le Figaro, the iPhone Apple is about to introduce on September 7th would go by a rather strange name, RokR, to be pronounced "Rocker".
It's not that the sole announcement of an ITMS compatible phone would be disappointing in our view, yet it's hard to bet it could create such a revolution for mobile music than the iPod did.
It would also be very difficult to find it in France at a cheap price with a GSM contract. All our providers are already related in some way or another to majors in order to sell songs, or simply ringtones, at a much higher price than 99 cents of euro.

Today is Wednesday, it is RefurbStore’s day in Europe. One can buy with -20% discount PMG5 SP 1.8GHz, or PMG5 dual 2.0GHz and 2.3GHz models; as well as Xserve RAID and Xserve G5 2GHz.
The PMG5 dual processors might be a good deal for users needing such machines urgently since they are equipped with the Radeon 9600 as well as a x16 double layer DVD burner. Of course one can also think that such offer is the first sign of the future introduction of 970MP-based PowerMac G5, as soon as for AppleExpo in 3 weeks.
[update] : avoid choosing the trouble-maker PMG5 1.8GHz SP, it has serious problem with Tiger.

Using the DVR-108, we made a 4x burning test (HERE)

It took us a total 27min02 (lead-in and finalization included) to fill the whole 8 Go of a DL media.
Using the DVR-109 and the same 2,4x medias we managed to burn at 6x.

Took us only 19min04 to fill the DVD with 8 Go data.
As the DVR 110 inaugurated the 8x burning of DVD+R9, we wanted to give it a try too.

As the picture shows it, the 110 accepted to initiate a 8x burning on a DVD+R9 Verbatim only certified 2,4x.

If the estimated time was promising, itt finally took a disappointing 18min20 to fill the DVD.
Actually, burning didn't proceed at constant speed, but in ZCLV, with many steps. It started at 6x on the first 10 % of the first layer, then it went to 8x before it went back to 6x 10% before the end of that first layer. Then this whole process of 6x-8x-6x started again on the second layer. Including the layer changes when the burner marks a pause, those 6 steps resulted in a loss of time and a final gain of only 44 seconds.
It is anyway possible that this burner won't have to slow down when using the next double layer medias, certified for higher speeds. We'll test it when they'll be avaliable for sell.

Acccording Engadget, Creative reportedly sold in Japan 3,700 Zen digital players infected by the virus W32.Wullik.B@mm.
This virus on the HD could potentially harm any PCs upon connecting to the player. Creative will probably have to beg for more money from Apple to counter the commercial impact of this misadventure.

Powerlogix release an upgrade for 100 MHz bus G4s for a cheap $279. Their PowerForce55 has a 1.4 GHz 7455 CPU, with 256 Ko of L2 cache L2 and 2 Mo L3 cache.

If the pic shown by OWC is accurate, the card seems to have inherited the design and the heatsink of the first ones this manufacturer used to sell some years ago (voir notre article de novembre 2002). That's probably thanks to this recycling they could lower that much their price.