News for Monday, 16 January 2006

We have tested the last SATA HD from Western Digital, The Raptor 150 in a PMG5 Quad.
This HD features a rotation speed of 10,000rpm, 16MB of cache and access time lower than 5ms.
Without giving you the conclusion before reading our article, this HD turns the PMG5 into another computer...

Raptor 150 in a PMG5 Quad

Steven Spielberg might not be able to participate in the race to the British Academy Of Films And Televison Arts Awards for his latest movie, "Munich".
The culprit? An over-complicated DRM system aiming at preventing the Honourable Members of said Academy to leak their screening copies on P2P networks.
Actually it was a double screw-up: first the DVDs were time-bombed and were sent TOO late, thus a new batch had to be made and sent again. BUT the DVDs of the second batch were Region 1-coded (USA) when the UK is region 2 (like the rest of Europe). So the Jury Members were unable to watch the DVDs. This is all the more ridiculous that each Member has a SPECIAL DVD player that can only play the DVD sporting a dedicated serial number (and vice versa: you can't play the DVD on any other player than the one it was made for). So they didn't really need the region-coding on top of that.
[moose: we knew everything about DRM schemes being a pain in the a** of base customers, but now that it starts messing with big shots in the media industry, maybe they'll become reasonable and develop some form of well-balanced scheme... well, let's hope Spielberg gets REALLY angry, that might make things move]

Thanks to Benjamin for this useless and therefore essential hack :)

I've just put online the article on my latest hack, which was to turn an old mouse into a bluetooth enabled optical one. Sure it is not really hot news but I think it might be of some use for hackers out there! :)

Now we'll be very much impressed as well if one of you guys does the same with an old ADB Apple mouse!
bluetooth_mouse

Philippe ordered his iPod Remote Radio the same day it was announced and he received it this morning. Here is his short review.

Like always, nice packaging. Pluging the remote adds a Radio line on the iPod menu (5G and nano). Frequency selection is done using the wheel (great precision) or using the left/right arrows (on the iPod and on the remote) for station hopping. The display uses RDS (where available).
In the iPod Settings menu, there is a new line to select your region (USA, Japan or Europe), relating to different FM bands.
The back of the Remote is made of great looking brushed aluminum and sports a clip.
The remote plugs in the iPod dock connector which means you can use the standard audio connector to plug a second pair of headphones.
The test was done on a 5G iPod and, yes, using your GSM close to the remote tends to mess things up and randomly change station or volume (!)
It is possible to store a station by clicking on the centre button (same way to remove it). You can then jump between stored stations using the RW/FF buttons.

Présence PC has a review of the latest SONY laptop, the VAIO FE11S* (inFrench).
This computer, just like the top of the range MacBook Pro, runs an 1.83GHz Core Duo chip. But then there are quite a number of differences:
- :( Mini Firewire instead of Firewire (meaning the port will not power external 2,5" FW drives).
- :( No optical out.
- :) The ExpressCard connector doubles as PCMCIA
- :) 3 USB ports vs 2 for MacBook.
- :( The 15,4" screen has a resolution of 1280x800 instead of 1440x900.
- It too sports an integrated iSight.
- :( The video card is a Geforce 7400 Turbo cache using shared system RAM instead of dedicated video RAM on the MacBook.
- :( The DVD burner uses a tray.
- :( External display connector is only VGA.
- Internal HD is an 160 GB @ 4200rpm vs an 100 GB @ 5400rpm
- Battery is a 53W instead of 60.
- :( It weighs 2.81 Kg vs 2.54.
- :( It is 1.1cm longer, 2.8cm deeper and 0.91cm thicker.
- :)) It costs only €1650 vs €2699 [NOT a typo**]
Interesting bit: its real-life battery life reaches 3 1/2 hrs for office use and 2 1/2 hrs for DVD playback.
If Apple by far loses the price war, they still dominate in terms of slimer and lighter 15" laptop.
*[moose: I love SONY products but why can't they come up with cool names anymore? Like Walkman and Playstation are icons, but who cares about an FE11S???]
**[moose: that is where Apple is gonna hurt, when they sell machines with similar innards for such a premium]