News for Wednesday, 28 June 2006

It might be a quite surprising for other HD-DVD supporters, but Toshiba, the driving force of HD-DVD consortium, has indicated to still be looking for an agreement with Blu-Ray Consortium.
What are the reasons behind such announcement? According to iSuppli, Toshiba might be losing 200$ on each HD-DVD player sold.
If the fact of having a single and unified format for Blue laser-based media/contents will make customers satisfied, it will for sure delay further their wish to purchase a next generation DVD player...waiting for the one-for-all device.
It will also push all players of the Blue laser war to negotiate an agreement that will satisfy all parties (and the faster the better).

Samsung announced to have produced a 256MB OneNAND chips using a 60nm engraving process. Beside storage capacity, the main feature is an increase of data speed transfer: Write 17MB/s and Read 108MB/s (roughly 4x faster than current NAND chips)
If such performances are not really useful for a digital music player, they become a really important feature to design a Flash Memory-based HD or to be installed on a motherboard for Intel Robson Technology.

Without much emphasis, Intel has added 2 new models to its Core Duo offer: the T2700 clocked at 2.33GHz. Its retail price is 637$ (for 1000 ordered units).
The second new model is a ULV Core duo, a.k.a. U2500 ULV, clocked at 1.2GHz; that would be perfect to power an ultra-portable notebook.

Available from the Software update panel:

The 10.4.7 Update is recommended for all users and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes for the following applications and technologies. It includes fixes for:
- preventing AFP deadlocks and dropped connections
- saving Adobe and Quark documents to AFP mounted volumes
- Bluetooth file transfers, pairing and connecting to a Bluetooth mouse, and syncing to mobile phones
- audio playback in QuickTime, iTunes, Final Cut Pro, and Soundtrack applications
- ensuring icons are spaced correctly when viewed on desktop
- determining the space required to burn folders
- iChat audio and video connectivity, creating chat rooms when using AIM
- importing files into Keynote 3
- PDF workflows when using iCal and iPhoto
- reliable use of Automator actions within workflows
- importing and removing fonts in Font Book
- syncing addresses, bookmarks, calendar events and files to .Mac
- compatibility with third party applications and devices
- previous standalone security updates
For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n303771.
For detailed information on Security Updates, please visit this website:
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798
.

[Update 1] Combo version are now available :
- Intel Version (215MB)
- PPC Version (145MB)
[Update 2] : In addition to Mac OSX.4.7 update, Apple has released a "MacBook Pro 17-inch SMC Firmware Update" version 1.1. (apparently restricted to 17" model)

This SMC Firmware Update adjusts fan behavior in the MacBook Pro 17-inch.
The updater application will be installed in the /Applications/Utilities folder and will launch automatically after restart.
Please follow the instructions in the updater application to complete the update process.

You probably remember in 2003 the famous 100 millions songs to win campaign co-organized by Apple iTMS and Pepsi.
At that time, coca-Cola tried to compete by launching its own online music store/cola offer in collaboration with Puretracks.com, but it was of course unsuccessful.
Today, it seems that Coca-cola has understood the lesson, and wants to team up with Apple. The partnership being negotiated will promote Coca-cola diet drinks; but:
- Good news: free tracks to win
- Bad news: Coca-cola ads on iTMS.

Less than 48 hours after its official introduction, the Core technology-base Xeon, a.k.a. WoodCrest is already a huge success. About 150 OEMs have already unveiled 200 server models based on this new CPU.

As shown by those 3 photos, they sticked to Intel reference board design, but in the future more exotic motherboards with WoodCrest support will probably be available.
On its side, Apple did not unveil anything yet; but about 12 month ago with the official transition to Intel CPU, it might be time for apple to introduce an Intel CPU-based Xserve, and for sure the Xeon WoodCrest is the CPU of choice.
To keep up with competitors, Apple has to unveil this solution quickly, maybe even today!?