News for Thursday, 17 November 2005

The phenomenon now exceeded from far the sole Mac world. Thousand of Internet sites will now speculate about a possible MacIntel release as soon as January 2006.
It's the time when Yonah CPUs will be available from Intel. And it would actually be quite fitting in a Mac mini.
We already said what we thought of those rumours, where you don't know exactly if speculation created rumour, or rumour created speculation, or if both of them are independant. So in an overall view of what's been published, if a Mac X86 is to be released by the beginning of 2006, it will be a Mac mini.
We won't give any more opinion, but instead we might think about what might be pushing Apple to do it, or on the other hand what might prevent them from doing so.
Let's start with the "no way" version of things:
- Releasing a Mac X86 immediately could have a devastating effect on PPC machines sales, as long as a global migration won't be done.
- Apart from Apple's own softwares, very few are already in universal binaries. Their performances will be quite impaired by the Roseta emulation.
- Even if Mac OS X X86 seems to be stable, it hasn't been tested much yet.
- Apple will then be in frontal competition with Microsoft, and will then have to ensure that this Mac performances will be sufficient, or their recent new architecture choice might lose credibility.
The pros now:
- Apple would show their choice wasn't as premature than some thought at first.
- Apple would offer an entry line MacIntel at a very cheap price, allowing people, even reluctant, to chose it at a low financial expense.
- Many developpers, who don't have access to test machines, might start developing and optimizing their softwares for this new architecture.
- Given the fact the Mac mini is basically not a very performant machine, this could help hiding some optimization failures.
So, in our view the question is still open.

The iPod 5G seems to be sensible to electromagnetical interferences caused by mobile phones. According to a news by Engadget and the various comments, the sound volume of this particular iPod generation might vary when close to a mobile ringing or in communication.
Various testimonies suggest this problem will occur when those phones use frequencies between 850 MHz (USA) and 900 MHz. It seeems that interferences will be related to the click wheel, as turning the iPod in "hold" position will end any interferences.
The site displays a video corresponding to the issue. You'll clealy see volume variations on an iPod placed against a cell phone.
[Upd.] Thx Philippe for giving it a try:

I just tried on my Black 60Go Video iPod with my Nokia 8800,
sound variations occur when you come close with the phone from above, but won't happen from the side or beneath the iPod.
And it won't either happen when the iPod is on "hold".
Most importantly the effet will happen from as much as 10 or 11 cm, it will fade when the cell is further.

[Upd. 2]Yesterday, we had the opportunity to test this interference thing by ourselves.
It is actually quite impressive, just moving the communicating cell around, a few centimetres from the click wheel, the sound will brutally move from an extreme to another.
When you get used to the technique, you'll even be able to choose if you wish to increase or decrease volume...
More than a few cm away the magic fades, and the same when you do it on the side or behind the iPod.
In order to be able to test it thoroughly, we made the test in a place where reception was poor, almost to be disconnected, which means the mobile would use its maximal emitting power.
So this seems to be more of an anecdote than a real flaw. A car radio or a HI-Fi device are far more sensible to a mobile phone. And you won'complain then for the sound that comes out from speakers when you get a phone call.

The new PCI-Express-based PMG5 might be a problem for some users wishing to keep their current external peripherals.
For the users needing more than 2 SATA HD, there is now a solution (thanks Nico):
Highpoint is proposing a Mac driver for its RocketRAID 2320 card. It is a PCI-Express card supporting up to 8 SATAI or II HD. It manages hardware-RAID 0,1,2,5 and 10.
For additional info:
http://www.highpoint-tech.com

Pioneer is selling two models with a slightly different name DVR-110D and DVR-110. The difference is only the capacity of reading and writing DVD-RAM by the DVR-110. But you can turn your DVR-100D into a DVR-110 relatively easily.
Do not forget that we are not responsible for any damage that could occur while you try to repeat our experiment.
Hereafter is the System Info window related to the DVR-110D:

And what is displayed by Toast when we insert a finalized DVD-RAM:

But when we tried to erase it, we got the following message:

After flashing the DVR-100D into a DVR-110:
The system info panel acknowledge the support of DVD-RAM for the flashed drive:

And Toast is also displaying updated features:

To notice, the media is not mounted as a DVD-ROM as before, but as a DVD-RAM.
When erasing the media we then get the following message (erasing):

How to transform the DVR-110D into a DVR-110.
We have prepared an archive including all the required resource to flash your 110D drive with the firmware 1.22 (the latest one). This firmware is in addition "region-free" (thanks to the dangerous brothers for this work and to Las Vegas for DVRFlash on Mac!)
1) Download and unzipped on the desktop the following archive :
DVRFlash110.sit. (1.1MB).
Open the Terminal and type :CD leave a space and drag the uncompressed archive into the Terminal window; then press Enter.
2)Then enter exactly the following command line (you can copy-paste it, be sure not to have another Pioneer drive plugged to your computer):

./dvrflash -ff PIONEER RA143010.122 RA143110.122

You will have to confirm the command twice, then you will have to wait till the end of the process. Do not touch your computer in between, neither switch it off.
Once the procedure is over, you have a DVR-110 able to read and burn DVD-RAM at 5x max speed.
PS: this procedure is not necessary if you do not use DVD-RAM
PS: you can revert the procedure by flashing the firmware back with the 110D version.

Following the scandal generated by the hidden CD audio anti-copy protection (see this news) launched by Sony, the Japanese Giant had to propose a way to uninstall this spy software.
But according to the popular rule, the worst is to come... indeed the ActiveX control, that removes the rootkit installed by the anti-copy spy software, does not erase itself after performing its task...
As a result, the patch leaves an even bigger opened door for potential exploits.
In such a context, Sony's offer to replace the audio protected CD by normal audio CD is of course not really stopping the scandal...

This information will not make Sony happy; definitely November 2005 is a really bad month for the Japanese Giant.
While Sony has been fighting to keep the first place for the digital audio music player, leaving the second place to the iPod; the recent launch of iTMS in Japan has dramatically changed the figures: the iPod owns 60% of the mobile music players in Japan! So one consider that Sony Music by its decision/strategy has impacted the performance/results of Sony Audio device Division…

Two days ago, we'd learn that the taxation on the Nano would drop to 8 Euros.
Today, Le Figaro lets us know this would be effective on December 1st, when the decision wil be published in the "Journal officiel" [Record of laws].
Most excellent news for Apple that won't miss Christmas sales in France.