About
a year ago, Intel had announced that it will support FireWire 800 format in its future chipsets (announcement came couple of weeks before Intel transition was made official by SJ at the WWDC 2005), such as D955XBK (or also the one in the MB Pro 17").
Among Mac-dedicated websites, we were probably the only site explaining that FireWire 800 will still be supported in the first Macintel Pro hardware offers, waiting for the eSATA to become more popular, and for users to move to eSATA or SATAII solutions.
Microsoft had released drivers for WinXP allowing the support of FW800. It was not really stable, and during one of the numerous WinXP updates, FW800 was silently removed.
Things might change with Vista, since some Intel chipset are supporting natively FW800, Microsoft will bring FW800 drivers directly with Vista. It will not be directly available with Vista 1.0, but it will come with one of the forth coming updates...
On
Somethingawful.com forum, one user has decided to completely disassemble his MB Pro in order to remove all excess of thermal paste.
Before starting this operation, the temperature of the MB Pro 1.83GHz was measured at different locations.
hinge: 54C; bottom side (the one in contact with your legs/knees): 50.8C.
Once the excess of thermal paste was removed, and the notebook re-assembled, temperatures were measured again at the same locations: 39.9C and 36.6C respectively. In other words, 14C cooler!! this is a huge difference.
Does not mean that the MB Pro is not producing heat anymore, but its cooling system is (finally) efficient to perform its task.
After months of negotiations, Apple announced that they had renewed contracts with the four largest record companies to keep selling their songs via the online music store iTMS for 99 cents/track.
This is a real victory for Apple, especially with Napster trying to gain market share by proposing some "free downloads".
But there is a slight change, not mentioned by most of Mac-dedicated websites:
iTMS users will be granted to listen all songs in streaming mode, with a single limitation being: can not listen more than 5 times the same track. This new system will be available thanks to ... Ads on iTMS. This system to be implemented in iTMS was strongly supported by Majors, probably a way for them to get control back over their own music catalogs and get stronger to negotiate in the future with Apple...
While the SLI technology allows users to get GPU performance boosted by using 2 graphic cards in the same computer, nVidia has started to promote its new technology flagship: Quad SLI. This is a new step towards the maximal performance of graphic cards, as it is meant by its name; you simply get the power of 4 GPU while having only one output.
To achieve it, nVidia is using dual GPU-based graphic cards.
Clybic has tested this new solution:
http://www.clubic.com
Of course it is a beast, but as mention by the author of this test (in French), it is not of real interest except to play GPU-demanding games in max resolution (2560x1600) on a 30".
In addition, such graphic cards are rather heavy (2 GPU + huge cooling system), not recommended for all PCIe slots.
To conclude, it is a marketing-oriented technology, since the price is this system is simply too high; but it makes use of an old technology originally developed by 3Dfx, before being acquired by nVidia.
