News for Wednesday, 8 March 2006

We have already discussed many times about the HDCP that will protect HD video content in the futures. In order to play such HD movie on a computer, one will need both a compatible graphic card AND a compatible display, in other words they will have to incorporate in their electronic components a specific chips.
Currently, there is no graphic card available with such chips, so to play HD movie, you will have to buy a new graphic card... The first manufacturer to propose such a compatible graphic card will be Sapphire. It will be based on a X1600 Pro GPU, featuring a HDMI output that will replace the DVI.
For the Mac, neither the graphic cards or the Apple Cinema displays are currently compatible with the future HDCP...

Yesterday, ATI has officially launched its new high-end notebook-dedicated GPU: the Radeon X1800 Mobility.

The new monster features 312 millions transistors vs. "only" 157 millions for the Radeon X1600 Mobility. The XT model has 16 Pixels Pipelines vs. 12 for the X1800 (also 12 for the X1600). It also get an additional vertex shaders unit compared to the X1600. The XT model is clocked at 550MHz vs. 450MHz in the non-XT model.
The main difference between the X1800 and X1600 is the memory bus that goes from 128 to 256 bits, doubling the theoretical maximum data flow rate between the GPU and its dedicated memory.
This is the perfect notebook-specific graphic card to find its place together with the Merom in the future MacBook Pro revision (potentially at the end of 2006).

XLR8yourmac has published results obtained by a Mac mini core Duo using the Cinebench tests. Some of those results are particularly interesting:
Shading (CINEMA 4D): 301 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Software Lighting): 1088 CB-GFX
Shading (OpenGL Hardware Lighting): 550 CB-GFX
OpenGL Speedup: 3.62
As shown in benchmark results published by Ars Technica yesterday, OpenGL Software performance a much higher than the OpenGL hardware performance: in other words the CPU is much better than the GPU for graphic rendering...
In fact, the processor is delivering better graphic performance than a Radeon 9600 or a Radeon 9700 Mobility. We would obtain better performance with games by allocating one core to graphic rendering while the remaining core will manage other tasks; than using the integrated GPU.

Thanks to Sylvain for reporting that Logitech has entered the fashion mouse market with its last small-sized mouse models.

If the first one will fit perfectly with a Barbie doll, the second one looks quite common for a Mac users... its name is Leopard... as the name of the future version of OSX 10.5!

AnandTech has been able to test the future high end desktop processor from Intel during the Intel Developer Forum. They have run a head-to-head test between a Conroe E6700 (2.66 GHz, 4 MB L2) vs. an Athlon 64 FX 60 (overclocked to 2.8 GHz, 2 MB L2) using games and audio/video encoding tests as benchmarks.
On average the Conroe is 20% faster than the AMD-based system, despite the fact that the Conroe does not integrate a memory controller.
Good signs for the future Professional Mac models that should be released by Q3/Q4 2006.
The full article: here

On the 22nd of February, a Swedish site started a contest to see if someone could hack into Mac OS X.
It took only 30 mins for a hacker to successfully utilize an exploit.
The hacker used a fault that had not been reported about Mac OS X.
We don't have any details about this fault nor on the version of OS X affected, although this is probably preferable, since it isn't corrected.
Like every operating system, OS X probably has a number of potential exploits; it is as inevitable as finding water in the bottom of a boat. Apple needs to be quick in reacting to fix these.
[UPDATE] Obviously, things were simplified for the hackers, as they had SSH access to the machine. The exploit was actually an escalation of rights to become root, and not really penetrating the machine.
Therefore the fault is less critical as it requires preexisting access to perform the exploit.

Following a post on the 13th of February where a reader spoke of the inability to receive faxes with an iMac G5 and an Apple external modem, Jean-François has sent a solution to us.

It is very simple to receive faxes
After some tests on a machine, I realized that the modem rings, but does not pick up.
Then I thought, why not try setting it to answer after 1 ring?
Eureka! The computer receives the faxes.
I tested the fix on 2 computers which were experiencing the problem, and it worked for both of them.
But if you set it to anything higher than 1 ring, the modem does not answer.

This is not always practical as one must know when a fax will arrive, but at least this is a solution which makes it possible to receive faxes.