Sunday January 15, 2006

- Why we have no official info on the MacBook Pro's battery life - Lionel - 11:44:32

This afternoon, Apple invited some journalists at a presentation of its new products at EBC in Paris. If we weren't invited, we had some "unofficial"correspondants attending.
And they did ask Apple about the new notebooks' battery life.
Their answer is quite interesting: the machines that were demoed are only prototypes and the final versions are still under development. They thus don't have any hard numbers on the battery life of the final products.
The disappearance of FW800 has also been discussed: Apple said it would have required them toi build a specific FW800 card (Intel does not support it), and that they had no plans for it [moose: well, down the drain goes Apple's autonomy to innovate.]
Let's hope they hurry up and finalize (but not rush out) their machines before the official release date (within a month.)

[translation by moose]

- Pod Radio Remote has a bug - Lionel - 11:07:20

Readers have reported a problem with the iPod Radio Remote's RDS system.
It's quite a bug: the RDS works only on USA setting, where frequencies hops go by .2MHz. In Europe, they go by .1MHz, meaning that if you set your iPod Remote on USA mode in Europe, you won't be able to tune on EVEN frequency station. And if you set it to EU, you won't get RDS.
Des lecteurs nous ont signalé un problème lié au RDS de l'iPod Radio control.
Let's hope it can be easily fixed through some patch or other, or Apple will have to replace every single Remote sold in Europe.

[translation by moose]

- 802.11a on Intel Macs - Lionel - 11:01:33

An Apple internal doc mentions that the WiFi devices in the new Intel Macs supports 802.11a, but that the OS won't support it.
The reason is simple: Apple now uses an Intel WiFi card which supports 802.11a/b/g. But Apple has never supported 802.11a, being an extremely uncomon protocol, which is, moreover, not compatible with b and g networks.
Intel kept the 802.11a compatibility because they were amongst the first to promote this protocol.

[translation by moose]

- CD 's future is not what it used to be - Lionel - 10:09:02

Source : http://www.cdfreaks.com/

A physicist working for IBM Germany made experiments to evaluate the life expectancy of CD-R. According to his findings, it would range between as low as 2 and 5 years depending on the quality of the media. The culprit is the organic layer, which deteriorates faster than expected.
This is all very worrying in a time when CD and DVD are massively relied on for the storage of whole parts of our now digital lives.
Just to be sure, I extracted my oldest CD-R from the deep end of my closet. It was burnt more than 9 years ago, on 20th October 1996. It is still perfectly readable and copying it was a piece of cake. Apart from the absence of exposure to light, it hasn't benefitted from any special storage conditions.

Future will tell if the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one will be labelled "post-history" for lack of any traces.

[translation by Greg]

- First DVD-RW DL on the market - Lionel - 00:47:19

JVC announced it would soon deliver the first DVD-RW DL disk, which will be able to store 8.5 GB of data. Aimed at the DVD handycam market, an 8 cm version of that disk will be able to store 2.6 GB of data.
If you're interested, you'll have have to look for a compatible DVD burner or a firmware update. But don't hold your breath: the writing speed is only 2x and the process will take more than 3 hours and 30 minutes.

[translation by Greg]