News for Tuesday, 15 November 2005

ATI's upper-end X1800XT card has acquired a significant momentum without even being available on the market. ATI obviously has great ambitions for this graphic card. The chip manufacturor has indeed announced that the officially supported frequency would be upgraded: from 650 MHz to 624 MHz for the VPU, and from 750 MHz to 775 MHz for the RAM.
Not a big deal, one could say, but one thing is sure: ATI wishes as much as possible to match or overtake the NVidia Geforce 7800 GTX.
We can only wait for ATI, who was driven out of the G5 PCI Express market, to react and put forward its new products for Mac.

The last eMacs were shipped with a rather "exotic" drive, the Pioneer DVR-127D.
As the famous 117D was a locked 118, the 127D is in fact a 109. A reader from XLR8yourmac has successfully flash his 127D drive to resurrect it as a 109 bringing back all its features: 16x DVD burning speed + DVD-DL support.
One of our reader, Tayfun, reports to have successfully flashed his DVR-110D into a DVR-110 following our yesterday news; and in addition he confirms that he can now read and write DVD-RAM.

In spite of Apple deciding to take the Power PC out of its computers, this CPU still finds nice machines in which to be hosted.
The Blue Gene/L is a quite convincing example. With as many as 131072 Power PCs, this IBM system is the world's most powerful server (http://www.top500.org/). It has a computing power of 280.6 TFlops (up to 369) and is dedicated to the simulation of nuclear reaction.

The MIT has initiated a program to develop a $100 Laptop dedicated to children from the third)world countries.
Of course, with such a price it is not a beast nor a ultra fast laptop, but it does exist. To remain below the $100 line, the MIT has used all freeware/OpenSource offers to built a software package for this cheap notebook.
And Apple has proposed a big deal : free OSX x86 licenses for all notebooks!
The MIT has declined the offer due to their strategy to develop it with OpenSource solutions; but it is anyway a nice offer from Apple.
[update] thanks to colonel Moutarde, one of our forum members, who is currently at the
[MàJ] Merci à Colonel Moutarde, membre de nos forums qui est actuellement au World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis to have sent us this photo :

On the left carton-board-based prototype, and on the right the functional prototype.

Our friend Kurisu has sent us a report about the new success of Kodawarisan that has successfully recycle an "old iPod remote control" to make it compatible with the new iPod

Too achieve it, they have used the detailed information provided by iPodLinux related to the iPod connector.
If you wish to have a look at the "bidouille":
http://www.kodawarisan.com

Apple is discussing with Hynix about low density NAND chips to be used in iPod Shuffle (512MB and 1GB)
It seems that Apple would like to get a larger panel of suppliers for NAND chips, probably to avoid to be linked with a single provider, and also to avoid NAND chips-based product to be strongly impacted by any technical or business issue that could target this single manufacturer. Apple is also for sure trying to get the best offer between different competitors.

Apple is launching an Aperture Seminar campaign in Europe, and in Paris it will be on December 8th at "Tapis Rouge", 67, rue du Faubourg St Martin PARIS.
What you will learn during this one-day seminar:

Discover how Apple delivers a platform that is solid and secure, and how Aperture enables you to deliver your best work on deadline.
See how Aperture makes RAW as easy as JPEG.
Learn more about the innovative use of traditional tools like the loupe and light-table in the digital realm and how Aperture’s non-destructive image processing allows you to be more creative and flexible.
Find out how Aperture’s easy-to-use output tools allow you to get your work in front of the customers quicker.

Places are limited for these free seminars so you have to register to attend it:
http://events.euro.apple.com/
Select "Aperture seminar" if it does not appear in your language