News for Monday, 19 September 2005

It's been months now that the owners of rev. 2 1.8 GHz SP G5s mono have been expecting Apple to bring them a solution for the incompatibility of their machine with Tiger.
If those people have hoped for weeks that their problem would be solved, they're starting to despair and wonder if Apple will be able to remedy it at all.
We're not lawyers, but according to French law, this problem is no less than a hidden defect. Here are some excerpts from the Code civil [which we shall not translate... French version only, yet if you'd like to know more about what we suggest our French readers should do, don't hesitate to use Babelfish :D]:

ART 1641:Le vendeur est tenu de la garantie à raison des défauts cachés de la chose vendue qui la rendent impropre à l'usage auquel on la destine, ou qui diminuent tellement cet usage, que l'acheteur ne l'aurait pas acquise, ou n'en aurait donné qu'un moindre prix, s'il les avait connus.
ART 1643 Il [le vendeur] est tenu des vices cachés, quand bien même il ne les aurait pas connus, à moins que, dans ce cas, il n'ait stipulé qu'il ne sera obligé à aucune garantie.

Of course, none of our readers would have bought this machine if they'd known it wouldn't support a new system !

ART 1644:Dans le cas des articles 1641 et 1643, l'acheteur a le choix de rendre la chose et de se faire restituer le prix ou de garder la chose et de se faire rendre une partie du prix telle qu'elle sera arbitrée par experts

Unless Apple deals with their issue in a very short time, we invite our readers to ask for a full refund of their buying, unless they bought this machine with Tiger, or after some sites published info about this issue with Tiger. In that case it's the rule of article 1645 that follows:

: Si le vendeur connaissait les vices de la chose, il est tenu, outre la restitution du prix qu'il en a reçu, de tous les dommages et intérêts envers l'acheteur.

It's hard and will require negotiating with Apple, but you might also ask for assets for the prejudice.
Beware as article1648 might eventually be favourable to Apple:

L'action résultant des vices rédhibitoires doit être intentée par l'acquéreur, dans un bref délai, suivant la nature des vices rédhibitoires, et l'usage du lieu ou la vente a été faite.

We're sorry it lead us to quote law texts, but we sincerely think this problem is unacceptable from any company, and especially Apple. All the more so that all those who bought a SP 1.8 GHz G5 are those who, out of financial reasons, chose to buy an entry line Powermac, and will most often keep their machines far longer than other people, for the same financial reasons.
Anyway, how could you keep faith in future products of a brand, if you can't guarantee it will last?

Fuel cells are hot product since couple of year and are supposed and/or predicted to revolutionize the market of mobile electronic devices.
Toshiba has demoed a methanol-based fuel cell prototype for MP3 players :

The first prototype, based on flash memory, sports a tiny fuel cell (size 23x78x10 mm) with 35-hours battery lifespan.
The second prototype, based on a microdrive, with a larger fuel cell (60x75x10 mm) is announced with 60 hours of music playback.
Those fuel cells are using almost pure methanol, so such a system is not risk-free, and if it becomes commercially available, it will for sure be forbidden in some places, such as airport or in planes; without forgetting that methanol is highly flammable;
One will have to wait till 2007 to find fuel cells in shops.

Last week-end, the iPodLinux project made one step forward to the video iPod.
Subproject VideoPlayer now allows the reading of videos with sound and colors on the Photo and 4G iPods, or with grey tones on older ones. Sound support was only abailable in iPodLinux latest builds, hence it will take a quite long and hard hand installation phase. I also put HERE an unofficial installer FOR IPOD 1G, 2G & 3G ONLY that installs the latest binaries (don't use auto updates provided by the installer !). BEWARE, this is only for the most daring of you, we won't provide any support. There is always a risk of losing data, and especially your music library.

As for functionalities, this video reader only lacks the support of compressed videos (the iPod will only read specially encoded videos for now), a better sound-image synchronization, and the support of the latest iPods video output.
To try video on the iPod, you will have to get video samples on iPodLinux or to encode your own films by yourself using mencoder (for gey screen iPods, it will require an additional pass with a specific tool.)

It seems that the website HardwareAnalysis that claimed to have released the first test of the Radeon X1800XT couple of days ago, had in fact never touched the future ATI GPU. Indeed, ATI might have not started to deliver the reference X1800XT graphic card to the websites yet.
It is impossible to know if HardwareAnalysis released a fake test, or if they were abused by a bad source.
ATI fans might see it as a new hope for the future flagship of the canadian GPU company.