News for Thursday, 10 November 2005

Yesterday, FREE (one the leading French Internet Providers) has announced the availability of the "Max DATA transfer" settings for its ADSL2+ Offer. So if you have a good quality connection, and that you are close enough to the DSLAM, via your "FreeBox" you will be able to reach 24Mbit/s, in other word you can download form Apple website software updates at up to 2.5MB/s
If you think that this is still not fast enough, you can have a look at Cité Fibre, a company offering in Paris an optical fiber-based network.
For 49 Euro/month, you can have symmetrical 20Mbit/s data transfer speed (2.5MB/s in upload and in download). You can also buy additional 10Mbit/s for an additional 10 Euro/month. As the Japanese know, since they have already fiber-based networks in big cities; the theoretical limit is 100Mbit/s.
Afterwards, the question is: is it really useful for a home internet connection to reach such a high data transfer speed?

After supply difficultues were announced concerning 2,5'' HDs, we just learn the same for 3,5'' HDs. Once again, the cause is increasing sales of computers, and not only that, as more open public equipments using HDs come to the market, especially TV recorders that replace good old VHS.
The HD tariffs, ranging from 160 to 250 Go capacity, significantly increased.
And Christmas won't improve it, where increasing prices for such devices are expected, but also for LCD and Plasma TVs, which only just raised affordable prices.
The world football championship in Germany, in 2006, will not call for a less tense market by the beginning of next year.

On the site Sterlinganderson.net, you'll find a long series of pictures showing how to modify the colour of the apple on an alu Powerbook.

It is identical to the tweak cilwang, member of our French forums, realised using a simple supermarket plastic bag.

Apple just slightly modified their LCD displays in keeping with the EU ROSH directive. From now on, newer productions won't contain any more lead. Aspect and performances will remain identical. Only some spare parts will be changed, which accounts for the fact that those displays will internally be called ''DVI Late 2005''.