Thursday May 11, 2006

- Apple Store in France by the End of 2006? - Lionel - 22:50:42

Source : IFO Apple Store

While being interviewed for a local newspaper "Presse Océan", Pascal Cagni has indicated that a physical Apple Store might open in France before the end of this year. If a suitable location is still being investigated on the prestigious avenue "Champs-Elysées", such store could not be opened before 2007.
So Apple must have things almost ready and especially another location.
It might well be something similar to what happened in UK (as some rumors mentioned it already): In London, there is an AppleStore, and next floor, the location of Apple Europe.
Indeed, Pascal Cagni had already announced previously that Apple France will move from its current location "Les Ulis" in Parisian suburbs, to a more central location "in the heart" of Paris.

[translation by Eric]

- "Made For iPod": Apple Defines New Rules - Lionel - 14:48:41

In October 2006, Apple introduced the "Made For iPod" logo for all third-party iPod accessories. Of course manufacturers had to pay fee to Apple as high as 10% of the device prices in order to be allowed to use the marketing killer logo. Of course such royalties had generated tensions between Apple and historical iPod accessories manufacturers.
But according to Smarthouse, Apple has changed its policies: "Made For iPod" logo will now cost a standard fee of US$4 per product, whatever is the price of this product.
Such system will of course benefit for expensive iPod accessories, but it for sure make manufacturers of cheap iPod accessories upset; so we could see in a near future a substantial increase for iPod accessories costing around 15 to 20 Euros (such as adaptors, power cables, etc).


[translation by Eric]

- Samsung caught red-handed - Lionel - 08:41:17

Source : Daiilytech

Samsung marketed a mobile phone in Korea with a strikingly familiar interface.


As the photos clearly show, they quite simply used icons from Apple and Microsoft without authorization.
Although at the beginning Samsung ignored the criticism, the manufacturer has now decided to recognize its blunder and has ceased marketing this product.
One has to wonder what passed through their minds in taking this risk. Perhaps it was just an attempt for publicity?

[translation by jwa]

- A PCI to PCI-Express adapter - Lionel - 08:17:32

Source : Hardware.fr

Digital Cowboy is going to sell an adapter allowing the use of a PCI card in a PCI-Express slot in Japan.



If the adapter functioned on the Mac, it would be possible to reuse a number of half-height PCI cards, such as FireWire or ATA/SATA cards.
As soon as it is available over there, we will enlist one of our team members that live in Japan to perform some tests for us.

[translation by jwa]

- After MP3, Sony adds AAC support - Lionel - 08:08:55

One of the reasons why Sony has not succeeded in capturing the portable digital audio player market in the past is because of the proprietary Atrac format, which was only compatible with its products.
It was only at the end of 2004 that the MP3 format was natively supported.
Since that was obviously not enough, Sony has decided to add support for ACC.
Thus, music encoded with iTunes will be playable without any reformatting.
Note that the protected AAC format from the iTMS will not be playable.

[translation by jwa]

- The 17" MacBook Pro has arrived - Lionel - 07:58:59

Yann has the good fortune of having received his 17" MacBook Pro. He has posted some photos of the machine on his homepage.
http://web.mac.com...

Here are his first impressions:

Having used the 15" MacBook Pro, I wanted to reproduce my BootCamp installation on the 17".
The firmware is not up to date for the 17", I could not find anything on Apple's site for installing BootCamp for the time being

My first impressions are good, the screen is very high quality, the superior resolution being very practical for usage.
Not having a reliable measuring apparatus, I can only give you my impression concerning the temperature. I believe that it is as host as the 15" MBP. In regards to noise, there is no problem with this one.

We hope that a firmware update will be released soon.

[translation by jwa]

- Linux much faster than OS X for statistical calculations - Lionel - 06:03:22

Source : http://www.osnews.com

Jasjeet Sekhon compared OS X, Linux, and Windows using his statistical software.
With equivalent processors, Linux did much better than Mac OS X.
The slowness of Mac OS X can be attributed to its kernel, which is built so that the operating system runs as a separate process, but that unfortunately slows down the overall speed.
Of course, you should take these benchmarks with a grain of salt, as they are for a very specific situation.
However, this could add credit to the rumour spreading that Apple plans to change the kernel in the next evolution of the operating system.

[translation by jwa]