News for Friday, 28 April 2006

Apple via software update or for dowmnload on their site (http://www.apple.com/support/...) made available an update dedicated to the MacIntel.
It is supposed to improve the reliability of the KB and mouse on those machines. The MacBook Pro also has an update.
Let's hope this solves the problems some iMac users meet.

It is currently impossible to install two video cards at the same time in a Mac and have them work together on the same screen. It would require a compatible chipset,which could be expected in the Intel followers of our G5 Powermacs.
Yet if Apple wanted it, a solution could be found.

This card is a GeForce 7950 GX2. As others did before, it holds two 7900 CPUs working along.
What's new with it is that it directly interconnects the two CPUs, while the computer in which it is will only see one.
No more specific drivers or SLI/Crossfire required to use it.
Any PCI Express machine could take advantage of it.
We now know that Apple won't listen to their clients suggestions (as a little girl recently learnt at her expense). But having such a card would delight us.

Chunkyloop found these headphones in a Parisian electronics shop, which are also found online at electronics-wanted

If the logo and the apple had not been foil, one might have thought that Apple had decided to sell it's headphones at a low price.
It would not be surprising if these left from the same factory as the official ones.
[UPDATE] The 5 Euro price tag assures us that these are counterfeit. Apple would never sell one of its products so cheap, not even a rubber foot for the PowerBook.

Thanks to Edunn for the discovery.
At the Pearl website, you can find a webcam which looks an awful lot like the iSight.

Except for a few details, it is a good copy. It does not have a microphone, its resolution is only 300,000 pixels, and it is not compatible with the Mac.
But it only costs 29.90 Euros.

BenQ has announced that their Blu-Ray compatible burner, the BW1000, will arrive in the third quarter (like its competitors).
Unlike Pioneer, which will arrive around the same time, this one will also be capable of burning CD-R/RW, thanks to a three laser head.
It will burn single and double layer BD-R at 2x, DVD at 12x, and CD at 32x.
It will take 46.5 minutes to burn a single layer BD-R. This merits and explanation. A 1x Blu-ray is, in fact, the equivalent of a 3.26x DVD, or in other words a little more than 3.6 Mb/s.
According to analysts, the maximum speed that a BD-R burner can reach will be around 12x. Although it is unknown if computers and their hard drives will be able to provide a constant stream of 43.2 Mb/s. As you can imagine, at this speed a cache of some MB would not manage to smooth out the flow.