Thursday October 12, 2006

- DVD sellers put pressure on Hollywood - Lionel - 16:49:59

Source : http://www.mercurynews.com

The arrival of movies on the iTunes Store didn't please American DVD resellers. Their spokesman sent a warning to the majors.
To sum up, they want rebates that migh apply to online sales to automatically apply to physical ones too. If not, they threaten to reduce their exposure of DVDs, potentially hindering their sales.

Here's a new battle between traditional sales channels and the new was offered by the Internet. If the majors cave in to the online movie resellers demands, they will have to significantly drop prices of older titles, even those who still sell well. Or they'll have to maintain high level of prices for films made available for download.
In any case, this would impair the results of legal, paying online music services, especially the way Apple make it. It is still currently much more interesting to buy a DVD than a movie from Apple. The DVD offfers a higher resolution, menus, bonuses, and many languages and subtitles.

[translation by Kalomir]

- Fake DVD+/-R 16x for sale - Lionel - 16:37:15

Source : Digitimes

Fake blank 8x and 16x medias, branded TDK, can be found in Taiwan. They were reportedly made in factories that theoretically can't produce medias better than 4 and 8x. Actually, there are only 5 manufacturers only that master the technique to make 16x medias. Yet with the evergrowing demand for such medias, while it's getting down for slower ones, some second zone manufacturers took the risk of artificially modifying the specifications of their products in order to make more profits.
We do not know if such "overclocked" medias will eventually reach other latitudes.

[translation by Kalomir]

- A video of the Mac mini update @ Apple Expo 2006 - Anthony - 16:22:51

If you didn't come to Paris those days, you might not know we made a live upgrade of a Mac mini during Apple Expo 2006 on our "Pommier" stand. This Mac mini was upgraded from its original configuration (1.66 GHz / 512Mo / 80 Go - 5400 rpm) to a respectable 2 GHz / 2 Go / 100 Go (7200 rpm). It is Lionel who realized it, while Guy was filming and projecting the video on screen. He then edited it, and you'll know be able to download it :it lasts 17 minutes, was compressed in H264 and weighs 31 Mo.

Here it is : MacBidouille_Upgrade_MacMini_H264_200Kb_320x240_15i.mov

[translation by Kalomir]

- Apple Expo 2006: some results - Lionel - 16:17:52

The official figures about the Apple Expo 2006 have just been released.

This year's event welcomed 46,210 visitors. Those results maintain Apple Expo as the premiere IT event in France, even though they show a marked declne compared with 2005, when 56,543 visitors attended. The number of pre-registered attendees increased over 2005, though.

The Keynote live from the US on the Tuesday night, the low number of new products announced, Apple Europe's clumsiness (they drove journalists to London for the live event) and the almost total lack of advertising (save for the iPod), all contributed to this disappointing result.

Even if they don't support this event as strongly as in the past, Apple should at least attempt not to cause it any direct harm.

[translation by Kalomir] JCJ

- PCI-E 2.0: one more step toward total virtualization - Lionel - 14:21:27

Source : news.com

PCI SIG group, which is in charge of PCI express normalization, has published revision 0.9 of the PCI-E 2.0 standard. This means there are only a few months to go before its final ratification.

This proposal brings a lot of new stuff:
- The bandwidth of each line will be doubled, from 250 to 500MB/s. Thus a PCI-E 16x will be able to reach a theoretical 8GB/s.
- The power of of the video cards will be significantly increased, up to 250-300W.
- A newly designed PCI-Express cable will allow the remote (10m) use of external components.
- A new function called "Input-Output Virtualization" will facilitate the virtualization of PCI Express devices. The first to come to mind is that of the graphic card. In this case, software like Parallels will be nearly as efficient with 3D Windows apps as one started on Bootcamp.

Sure all this will take some time to become true, but it really seems to be on the right track.

[translation by Greg] JCJ

- Parallels: New Beta Version - Lionel - 09:13:47

Source : XLR8yourMac

Parallels has released a new beta version of its virtualization application, numbered 1940.
It is now compatible with all MacIntel, independently of the amount of RAM installed.
In addition, this new version supports the current beta version of Vista and Leopard. To download it: http://www.parallels.com/en/download/desktop/


[translation by Linathael]

- Sony Stops its LCD Display Business - Lionel - 09:11:01

Source : Hardware.fr

After stopping the production and its business network for the SONY-branded LDC displays in the US and in Japan, SONY has officially announced the end of its worldwide business related to LCD screens.
The reason is of course the strong competition between manufacturers, coupled with smaller margins. This might have a negative impact on the development of the future LCD display generation based on the LED-backlight technology for which SONY was a leader.


[translation by Linathael]