News for Tuesday, 29 November 2005

The RefurbStore will remain opened everyday till January 4th 2006.
Today, iMac G5 2GHz are available with 20 to 26% discount; as well as PowerBook from the previous revision with 20 to 28% off. PMG5 Dual 2GHz with 31% off and of course Xserve.
The shortest link to the RefurbStore

A reader from XLR8Yourmac has taken picture of the new cooling system of his Quad 2.5 GHz.

There is now 2 pumps while the tubing design is simpler than in the previous dual 2.5 and 2.7GHz as shown below:

Another photo gives information related to the manufacturer of this system : Cooligy.
This company has 2 main expertises:
- microchannel cooling :

The Cooligy system employs a fluid pumped in a sealed cooling loop. A microchannel heat collector is attached to the chip, efficiently absorbing heat generated by hot spots. The heat travels a very small distance into fluid flowing through channels in the collector, 20 to 100 microns wide each, which transport the heat away from the chip to a radiator, where the heat is exhausted to the outside air. The fluid then travels through Cooligy’s patented solid-state pump to complete the cooling loop.

- electrokinetic pump :

The design is based on an interaction between a fluid and glass. The walls of a fluid-filled glass tube carry a negative charge. That charge is balanced by positive ions in the fluid accumulating near the walls of the tube. When an electric field is applied along the length of the tube, the excess positive ions near the tube’s wall move parallel to the wall and push the fluid through the tube. The core of Cooligy’s pump is a glass disk with millions of paths through which fluid is pumped using this electrokinetic effect.

If Apple has been using both technology the current cooling system of the Quad G5 is probably the best one currently available for computers.
However, the required space to install such system has forced them to place the pump in front of the air flow. But it works perfectly anyway.

The French Parliament is about to rush the vote of a bill which may overturn basic freedoms we thought of as granted. It is the DADVSI bill (Authoring and related rights in the information society), which is a hardcore transposition of the EUCD European directive. It seems taylored to protect the earnings of the distribution majors.
Of course we are not law specialists and our goal here is not to proceed to a thorough analysis of the text. But for the record here are some of its deeply worrying parts:
- Web radios will have to include DRM in the streaming so as to make it impossible to record them.
- A significant number of free softwares will become illegal: DRM being a proprietary technology, it will be impossible to implement it as open source.
- Expecting P2P to be replaced by a Peer to mail system, distribution majors demand emails to be controlled.
This were just a few exemples to show how far this law is going.
To get a clearer picture of what this is all about, here is one the few articles available in English on the topic:
http://www.infos-du-net.com
A piece of my mind (in the following I'm not writing in the name of Macbidouille nor HardMac):
If this bill remains as is, I'll go take the street and demonstrate. I encourage you to do the same, leaving your computers behind for a few hours so we can go on using them. Our politics must understand that they're going the wrong way listening to these wealthy pipers instead of the people they're supposed to represent.

Those who ordered their G5 with a 7800 GT had seen their delivery time increased by one month. For once, Apple had been pessimistic or very careful.
Indeed, the first machines have been sent out (thanks to Maher for the screenshot)
"
As far as we know, expeditions have not been started in Europe. The Cork factory (where the G5 are assembled) is probably still waiting for these cards.

Luigi, one of our swiss readers, sent us a video of an old G5 dual 2 GHz and a new Quad 2.5 GHz working side by side. They are both equipped with 2Gb RAM.
He simultaneously applied on the two machines a blue filter on a 4 seconds HDV 1080i video.
The Quad took 26 seconds to apply the filter while the Dual took 1 minute.
For video professionals, the difference is really huge and justifies changing the machine.
To download the video:
testquad.mov.sit