News for Tuesday, 4 July 2006

Thanks to Olivier for this report.

On the right is a photo of the "bad guy" from the last DreamWorks animation movie "Over The Edge". On the left side, you might have recognized Steve Jobs.
Similarities between the Apple's CEO and DreamWorks character are just too strong to be ignored from our point of view.
Not sure that SJ would appreciate to be compared to the bad guy named Verminator...
JCJ

CDR Info has released the test of the Pioneer Blu-Ray BDR-101A. If the burner is able to fill up a BD-R or BD-RW media with data in less than an hour, it is unable to read a CD! The reason? It does not have the proper laser beam for this purpose. This could be a serious missing feature for this burner when competitors will release their models.
TheBDR-101A cost arount 870 Euros.
Direct link to the article: http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specific.aspx?ArticleId=17415&PageId=1

A reader from XLR8Yourmac has reportedly found a way to stop the very annoying "whining" of his MacBook Pro.
In order to do so, he downloaded Mac OS X 10.4.5 IOUSBFamily.kext 2.4.0 extension and installed it on his machine.
Once the disk image is mounted, you'll find two installation packages inside. Use the one which does not contain "-log", that is: IOUSBFamily-240.4.3.pkg.
This off-hand method might not be very safe and we advise you to backup your system before proceeding to the "reverse update" of this extension.

Beside Boot Camp and virtualization, a third solution to run Windows apps on a MacIntel is on its way with CrossOver. Made by CodeWeavers, this software is based on the Wine open source project and does not require the installation of Windows. While this is obviously great, there are of course some limitations to what you can do, and some software - especiallly games - can't be run with it.
CrossOver will be available for $60 by the beginning of August. It is mostly aimed at those who need to use a couple of compatible Windows applications.
JCJ

Thanks to Whiletrue for the info and photos.

I am back from RockWerchter, a large rock festival in Belgium. Belgacom (historical Belgium phone/internet provider), which signed a partnership with iTMS couple of weeks ago, was present and promoting Apple online music store, with iMacs.
One could win free tracks from iTMS as well as iPods.

This is the way we like to see Apple surfing on the "iPod Halo effect" to sell more hardware, people should learn that Apple is not a "nothing but iPods company".

Some MacBook owners have seen the case of their brand new notebook turning yellow while being originally white after couple of days of use, especially in areas around trackpad.
A website aiming to collect all reports of unlucky owners was created to push Apple to acknowledge the issue and replace the case of faulty MB.

The problem is mostly affecting the very first series of MacBook, early adopters of the first Intel-based iBook might have been really disappointed.
[Exclusive update]
We have learned from our Apple sources the following points:

- there is only a small number of faulty MacBook.
- Apple has not acknowledges the problem yet, but proceed to case exchange on user request
- till now, the plastic used to manufacture MacBook case has not been changed
- Apple is currently investigating, and performing chemical and physical analysis of the yellowish cases. Once the problem will be identified, apple will officially acknowledge the issue and modified what will have to be modified.

Go Apple, launch a similar exchange campaign for the dead APX!

Originally predicted to be available in April, BenQ's first Blu-Ray burner should finally be in stores in August.

Specifications:
- single and double layer BR-R/RE 2X
- DVD-R/+R 12x
- DVD-RW/+RW 8x
- DVD -R/+R DL 4x.
- CD-R 32x and CD-RW 24x
The BenQ BW1000 can play CD while Pioneer BDR-101A can not; this could be an advantage, in addition to its price 799€ VAT (200€ less than Pioneer model).