News for Sunday, 23 October 2005

In a TSR radio show Nouvo, it was reported that Switzerland could follow the same irrelevant way than France regarding a extra tax applied for MP3 player. The SUISA claims that such a tax is required to compensate the lost in revenue due to the private copy; the problem being that nobody really knows how the tax will be redistributed. A tax already exist for media (CD : 5 eurocents, DVD : 40 eurocents).
The amazing thing in this story is that some Music Majors, especially SONY, are against this additional tax, claiming that this tax already exists and is included in the cost of music tracks bought from online music stores! So we would have 2 taxes for the same thing... The SUISA answers that it will also cover illegal downloading, but this would mean that any owner of a MP3 player is according to SUISA a pirate! Simply amazing!
It is obvious that one should find a way to help artists/musicians spoiled by pirates, but it should not be done by applying a "blind tax", as mentioned by the President of the SWICO (Zurich-located Technology Lobby).
If you speak french,
here is the link to this excellent radio show.

Beginning of October, French Universities have banned Skype from their computer network. Some were suspecting that it was for security reason that the government took such a decision.
It is now the CNRS (National Center for Sciences and Research) that has forbidden the use of Skype from any of its computers. The reason : skype is not safe, and third-parties could listen to your discussion.

Thanks to Robert for this information:
The LSI Megaraid cards sold by Apple with the Xserves are standard cards of revision D. They work also on PC. The LSI SCSI 320-2x card has been tested with 6 HDs (3 HDs per channel) and shows 30% improvement over the results obtained with the SATA card in Raid 5. Quite surprisingly, the SATA 300-8x card is not performing better than the SATA 150-4x coupled to 4 HDs. This is probably due to the limitations of the HDs themselves. In addition, the software included with OSX does not make any difference between SATA and SCSI versions.
So the RAID 5 Pc card are probably working on Mac with OSX thanks to a "universal" BIOS.
The Mac compatibility of the LSI SCSI 320-2x card allows Powermac to get access to a highly performing solution for storage units; something quite unusual on Mac. Indeed, since 2 years, adaptec does not provide any support for its high-end cards 29160 and 39160. But those 2 cards are quite unstable on most of Powermacs; and in summary can not really be used in a professional environment (without counting that they are quite expensive).
So LSI is offering RAID 5 solutions complementing the already existing ones from ATTO (UL4S and UL4D) in SCSI 320 and Acard (AEC-67160M and AEC-67162M) in SCSI 160.

Even if Apple wishes to keep the secret surrounding its future x86-based computers, Intel does not really care, and provides additional information related to the Merom, the processor which is supposed to power the fist x86 PowerBook; while its brother Yonah will find its place into x86 iBook.
- The Merom will have a 14 stages pipeline, much shorter than the 31+ of a P4.
- The Merom will be a dual core processor
- even if both core can not communicate via a dedicated bus; it will be compensated by a shared L1 cache and an unified L2 cache of 2 or 4MB. It will allow processors to communicate without going through the motherboard bus, so far the size of the exchanged information does to go beyond the L2 cache size.
- Despite the end of the netburst architecture, the Merom will integrate some of the technologies developed around the P4 such as Hyperthreading.
- One will have to wait till mid-2006 to see the first Merom, whereas the first Yonah should be on the market for Q1 2006.

We missed an interesting new feature of the new PowerBook G4 : the Safe Sleep mode.
What is it? When you put your PB into sleep mode, the function Safe Sleep automatically saves the contents of RAM memory (desktop settings, open applications, and other work in progress) to the hard drive; it prevents any data lost due to potential power failure when your computer is in sleep mode.
To test this function, turn your new PB into sleep mode, wait few seconds (till you do not hear the HD), then remove the battery. Wait until the flashing diode stops emitting (plenty of time to place a new battery), then place back the battery, and open up your notebook. You should see the following screen for a couple of seconds:

It displays the same windows/desktop as it was before turning the computer into sleep mode, while featuring a progression bar in the lower partof it, translating the recovery process of all information from the saved info on the HD and their transfer back into the RAM. It is a really fast process.
For more information related to this feature, read :
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302477

PowerMacs G5 dual core
At a first glance, the new PowerMac G5 looks pretty cool, mostly because of the dual-core and PCI-Express technologies. However, when you look further, you wonder a bit what the gain will really be for us users.
Let's start with the only real pro from my point of view: the power provided by dual-core on the high-end PowerMac, the Quad, which has the equivalent of four CPU. Even for the other ones, benchmarks (see here) have proved a significant increase in performances even if dual-core CPUs only have one data bus for two cores (it seems to be balanced by the 1MB cache for each core and the data-rate provided by DDR2 EEC).
PCI-Express (1 PCIe 16x, 1 PCIe 8x, 2 PCIe 4x) is a good thing for the future but as for now there is not a single Mac-compatible card using this format yet (the older ones are not compatible anymore either). On top of that, only two cards are available, including one which costs €1770! More about graphic cards here. Now we can just wait for ATI and NVidia to open their range of PCI products to Mac.
Apart from its design, the casing is poor, as usual. Only two hard-drive bays and one for the optical-drive. This is a real burden for a professional-oriented product.
As for the price, no change except for the high-end (the Quad) whose price was raised by USD300.
PowerBooks G4 "HD"par Val
It's a simplified range. There used to be 5 of them, now it's only 3, and the CPU frequencies remain the same. The 12-inch PowerBook is unchanged and corresponds to the former 12-inch SD. Each PowerBook now comes with built-in Superdrive.
The 15-inch comes now with digital line-in and digital line-out, and 128MB of DDR SDRAM for the video, which allows built-in support of the 30-inch Apple Cinema Display.
The 15-inch and the 17-inch Powerbooks do benefit from slight upgrades. Thus, the increase of screen resolution was a smart move and doesn't hamper the readability: there are now more pixels on the 15-inch PB than there used to be on the 17-inch former one (1440x960 vs 1440x900) and the new 17-inch PB now has as many pixels as a 20-inch Apple Cinema Display (1680x1050).
According to Apple, battery-life of the 15-ich and 17-inch PB has increased by two hours. Given that the batteries have remained the same, it could be a side-effect of the DDR2, which is less power hungry than DDR, and especially of its lower frequency (333MHz vs 533MHz). It is also probably the result of an overall optimization.
It's a shame that the G4 is still a 7447A instead of the 7448 which has more Level 2 cache memory (1MB vs 512KB). Even more when you know that the PowerBook G5 could have existed. The GPUs as well remain unchanged: no Pci-Express. We'll have to do with the ageing Radeon Mobility 9700 & GeForce FX 5200.
However, as long as you don't need a blowing computing power, these PowerBooks are still a good deal given the upgrade of the built-in features for the same price.