News for Tuesday, 28 March 2006

It is now official, Avie Tevanian, who was already working with Steve Jobs at NeXT and has been a keyplayer in the development of MacOSX, is leaving Apple.
Officially, Avie, the Apple Computer's Chief Technology Officer, is leaving the company to "pursue other interests".
Steve jobs is loosing one of his closest collaborator together with Phil Schiller.

Dedal, one of our forum members, has made an interesting discovery when looking at the specification of the 30" Apple Cinema Display:

I have just seen on the Apple site that the panel used for the 30" model has been modified: the brightness is now 400 cd/m2 with a 700 contrast ratio; while it was previously 270 cd/m2 and 400 respectively.
Specification are now identical to the Dell 30" LDC display. So is Apple responding to Dell's offering or it is due to the LCD manufacturer?

We will let you decide which hypothesis is the right one :)

Couple of days ago, Dell has announced to have acquired Alienware, a well known high-end PC manufacturer.
Dell is already proposing the first configuration originating from this acquisition:

For 9930 dollars (without taxes), you can get the model shown on the photo (rather weird design...)
It sports:
- Pentium 4 dual core 3.73 GHz overclocked at 4.26GHz
- 4 GeForce 7900 GTX 512 MB in SLI
- 2 GB of RAM
- 2 Raptor 150GB in RAID 0, and an additional 400GB HD
- an AEGIA card
- a 30" LCD display
and of course a keyboard and a mouse
You will of course have to buy a hear protection if you have to use this machine for a long time.
Dell is probably trying to change its image of "cheap" PC manufacturer.

The website Sudhian has compared 3 cooling system dedicated to GPU. The first one is the Zalman VF700-Cu that we have already installed on a GeForce 7800 GT, then a more recent model aka VF900-Cu, and last but not least the famous Accelero from Artic Cooling.

If the Accelero is indeed the most silent cooling system, it is not the most efficient for controlling the GPU temperature. The best for this task : the VF900-Cu, providing the best cooling/noise ratio.
So you know which device to use if you plan to overclock your graphic card.

Dell is probably the strongest competitor for Apple, not only for hardware, but also for the LCD display market.
Dell has entirely refreshed its LCD display offer, and its new 24" model features a much better panel even supporting the HDCP.
In October, a 27" model should be available with a pixel definition that is currently found only with 30" models.
Apple should seriously refresh its Cinema display models, maybe at the NAB (April 24th-27th).

Like any other videogame company, Ubisoft is constantly searching for new talents.
The [French] company has decided to launch an internal referral system where employees can be rewarded if they bring a new talent in... rewards include money [up to $2000] and "for a limited time" some iPods.*

That's a good way of recruiting people, since it saves on HR money, and then you get people that might be more motivated if they have been told by a friend working in the company than by some advertising/headhunting company.

[*moose: now let me think a bit... so the flyer makes it look like the iPod is THE ultimate reward you can get... well, I'll take the couple grands and buy meself 6 or 7 of them ;-) ]

Many people have old broken down portable computers. Often, the LCD panel still functions, but for lack of parts, it remains unutilised.
Kiryu, a member of our team and very qualified on electronics, initiated on our forum (in French) the project to make an interface in order to re-use these panels via a VGA connector. The thing might appear straightforward, but this project, started in December 2004, only has just succeeded, with the assistance of Bladebillou and other members for the realisation of the PCB and the software part.


They still hope to largely improve the performances of their interface, and then put on line all the necessary information to make it.
Man, this is what MacBidouille/HardMac is about!

New record for InPhase!
Thanks to their holographic storage technology, they succeeded in storing 500 GB on a 12cm disc, the size of a CD.
However, the first market products will "only" handle 300 GB and be reserved for the professional market, considering that the burner will cost about $10000 and each media $100.
On the long term, the capacity should reach 1.6 Tb.

The MIPE (Micro-portable Etudiant / Laptop for Student) offers the French students to buy a computer for 1 euro per day - it seems to have inspired Apple in the US.
On their Education website, they propose a very similar offer, making it possible to acquire a Mac for $1 per day (thank you Piou).

Loan is very expensive thought, since the annual rate is 12.99%...
[translator's note]This offer is also available for teachers, which isn't the case in France

Thanks to Stéphane for finding this funny article on "Connecté", published by Intel.


The best is inside!
First result of the collaboration between Intel and Apple, the MacBook is using a Core Duo processor, the latest processor from the chip maker. The machine is completely identical to the current model, based on a G5 and is as well available with a 17" or a 20" screen monitor.
[/translation]
Quite a mix of the specifications of the MacBook and the iMac Core Duo.
Ouch, this will probably hurt Intel's new prestigious partner...