News for Thursday, 27 April 2006

Source: http://www.01net.com[in French]

While Gigabit Ethernet isn't really becoming widespread, IEEE 802.3an [what a mouthful] should be adopted in july, and it will open the gates of 10 Gigabits Ethernet. If it is already possible to reach such bandwidth on fiber-optics, the new standard will allow it on "standard" RJ45 Ethernet cables.
"Standard" because said cables will have to be CAT6 instead of the lowly but widespread CAT5. Maximum distance between two devices will be around 37m.
We can still wait a couple years before seeing this on our desktops and laptops.

In a desperate attempt to lure customers into buying HD thingies, Warner announced they will release movies on "dual" discs.
On one side of the disc, you get a classic DVD movie, while on the other side you get an HD-DVD version.
While compatibility with older DVD players will be ensured, these discs will cost $39,99, a mere $11 more than the same movie on a regular HD-DVD... [and by the way, what is the point of watching a movie in regular DVD format if you have am HD-DVD player???].
Let's face it: the main enemy of HD movies is not DVD, it's the war between the two competing "standards", namely HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Discs. Thus customers are a bit reluctent to shell out somewhere between $500 and $1000 for a player that might get awfully quickly obsolete, if the competing format wins...
Mac Users will have no choice but to follow Apple, which advocates Blu-Ray [along with Sony...]. All the more so that HD-DVD movies will use Microsoft's DRM scheme, which is very unlikely to be ported to MacOS... [but then, HD-DVD players won't run Windows, so the DRM software will be of the "on-chip" style, which means it could be embeded in HD-DVD players for computers, who knows]

On their website, http://home.sc.rr.com shows photo of a disassembled MacBook Pro, and what is displayed is VERY surprising:


This is a usual beginner's mistake!! There is on the CPU, the GPU and the chipset 5 to 6 fold too much thermal paste!
The thermal paste is there to ensure a tight contact between the electronic components and their dedicated cooling system, in other words it has to be as thin as possible. If there is too much of it, one will get 2 problems:
- a thick layer as shown on photos will behave as a thermal insulation while it was suppose to enhance heat transfer between the component and its cooling system, as a consequence, the cooling system will be less efficient and will probably have to fully active most of the time even for moderate CPU load.
- the thermal paste used for the MacBook Pro contains silver (Ag), an excellent additive to enhance thermal transfer, but also a good electrical transfer material. In other words, if the thermal paste brings into contacts several components, one might have serious electrical microcircuit created leading to hardware instability (crash, problem to boot, freeze ...). It could explain the reports of “sudden switch off events” experienced by some MB Pro owners.

Thanks to Flight to report that SIA Software Company has released SmaartLive 6, its Suite of serious measurement, analysis and system alignment tools for the pro audio, acoustical consulting, engineering and performing arts communities, and it is now also available for the Mac.
http://www.siasoft.com/

Sony has sold a license of its application LocationFree to the company Kaga Electronics in order to port the application to the Mac platform.
The LocationFree Base Station is getting popular in Japan. Once you have plugged this base station to the web, to the TV or to your computer, you can immediately get access to all data streaming through it.
But it does not work only locally. You can also get access to your base from anywhere in the world, you simply need an internet connection; in this case, the base will compress the video signal and stream it as a server.
To get access to this video stream, on simply need a terminal: a PC, a PDA, a PSP and soon a Mac.
For additional information about LocationFree:
http://products.sel.sony.com/locationfreetv/flash.html
To be noticed: This is a quite major change in Sony policies regarding Mac support, Mac users were considered for years as negligible, but it seems that it is not the case anymore...

A Samsung executive is claiming that the company has been chosen by Apple instead of PortalPlayer to provide the chips that will power the next generation iPod (32 bits ARM-derived processor)
with such CPU one could expect new advanced multimedia function for the future iPod models.
For additional information about ARM processors:
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/