News for Tuesday, 4 October 2005

Last June, we'd let you know of NVidia will to release multithreaded graphical drivers, that would be able to take advantage of machines with many CPUs/cores. The first Windows versions of those drivers are now to be found on the Web.
Of course, those drivers won't double video cards performances, yet they'll improvements not to be neglected, even when softwares weren't optimized for multi CPU machines.
Let's hope such drivers will also soon be developed for the Mac.

Apple announced during a conference their quarterly results on October 11th. Once again excellent results are expected.
Sign of the times, whilst there's been no Keynote for the Apple Expo, the conference will be broadcasted live via a video webcast.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq405/

The first figures for year 2005 about online music selling are quite excellent. They tripled as compared to the same period last year, to reach 6.6% of the global volume of sales. For the first half of 2005 they reached 790 millions $ as opposed to 220 in 2004.
As could be expected, CD sales falter and lose 200 millions, not because of a loss of sales, yet thanks to some CD prices that dropped.
This proves the long range viability of this distribution system, though in the future it might harm CD resellers, if they don't manage to adapt themselves.
Of course, those figures won't prevent the majors to go on and attack people who download on P2P networks. On that matter, a 42 year old disabled person was sent to justice for downloading rap at night, which she strongly denies. She hence decided to counter-attack and in turn took law action against the majors and their ultra agressive ways. We'll let you know when the case is stated, it's the way they track downloaders that's at stake.

Quake 4 shout be available for PC on October 18th.

There is no precise date regarding its availability for the Mac, but Quake 4 being based on Doom3 graphic engine, porting the game should not be a big issue.
Of course it will require a lot of GPU resources. If you want to try it already prior to its release, a demo is available for download (over 400 MB file).
It can be found from either Ludomac or Jeux Mac