News for Wednesday, 7 June 2006

According to Digitimes, Apple has placed a huge order of NAND flash memory modules from several manufacturers. Such a large amount of NAND will fit with the release of a future iPod nano 8GB this month.
One can, of course, use these NAND modules for other purposes, but the current iPod nano models are about to be updated according to Apple's usual timeline.

The next big thing in PC gaming is not dual GPU graphic card, but Physics Processing Unit (PPU). In other words, an additional card with a dedicated physics engine and physics processor designed to "bridge the gap between static virtual worlds and responsive unscripted physical reality". The leading/inventor company in this business is AEGIA with its current hardware solution named PhysX (PCIe format). Most of the recent or soon to be released FPS games have adopted this new rendering hardware/software solution, and AEGIA is even providing drivers to be downloaded to improve virtual reality in more than 100 games currently available (you of course need to gt a PhysX).
Of course ATI or nVidia do not really enjoy seeing a third player trying to get a piece of the profitable and growing GPU market. So they are hard at work to develop an in-house solution to compete with PhysX.
To obtain such result without spending too much money in R&D, ATI has decided to modify an already existing GPU from its catalog into a PPU. Indeed, this card does not need to be more powerful than the GPU, since it does not manage 2D-3D display.
In the future, one can imagine that such PPU will be integrated to the graphic card.

Philips has been surprisingly silent in the past months regarding the Blue Laser war, even though it is a strong Blu-Ray supporter.
During the Compudex Show (Taiwan), Philips announced a computer-dedicated BD burner, aka SPD7000, able to burn all available media, including BD (2x), so supporting: CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD+R, DVD+R DL, DVD-R, DVD-R DL, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, BD-ROM, BD-R and BD-RE media.
This Philips TripleWriter should be available in August, but currently its price remains unknown.
Lite-On has also announced of its first BD burner (LH-2B1S) which should be available in Q3 2006. So the price competition between manufacturers should begin quite soon.
BD media will also be released in the same time frame (BD-R and BD-RE) in single or double layer format, providing a storage capacity of 25 or 50 GB, respectively.

JCJ

Intego has released 2 new products:
- ContentBarrier, Internet Content Filtering Application is now available in version X4. Its price 49,95€, or 29,95€ for the update.
- Internet Security Barrier Suite X4 AntiSpam Edition including Virus Barrier, NetBarrier and Personal AntiSpam costs 83€ and 54,95€ for the update version.
All applications are now available in Universal Binaries.
http://www.intego.com

If you are a fan of the single button mouse, then the following mod is for you:

After noticing that the electronic parts located inside a Mighty Mouse have the same size as the one found in a good old ADB mouse, Benjamin has performed a nice surgical transplantation adding all features of the MM while preserving the old fashion design:
http://bounav.free.fr/mods/vintage_mighty_mouse/