News for Tuesday, 11 July 2006

Blazouf, who already performed a detailed test of the K750i last year, is back with a in-depth analysis of the last Sony-Ericsson model, aka K800. In addition, he provides details on the procedure to synchronize this mobile phone with a MacBook.

To read the test (in French, but with so many photos and a simple text, that babelfish should be understandable): http://www.pixellum.com/...

Intel has presented its future projects and goals. The company is expecting to manufacture by 2010 CPUS sporting up to 32 cores. They will of course feature large cache memory to feed them up.
The main question now: who is the developer able to write his program to benefit from 32 cores?
To our point of view, there is only one proper answer: Hardware Threading
To cool down excitation, we should remind you that couple of years ago, Intel had predicted that by 2010 CPU will be clocked around 20Ghz...
It remains a prediction, and only the future will tell us if it was a reliable one or not.

The main difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is the size of the protective layer on the media. The HD-DVD is 0.6 mm, while it's competitor is only 0.1 mm. It is the low thickness which allows a greater storage capacity by minimizing the losses in the laser.
It is also the 0.5 mm variation which renders both products fundamentally incompatible. Indeed, the laser diodes are calibrated to be focused at a certain fixed distance. To try to read the media of the other format will make the laser near-sighted or far-sighted.
Ricoh claims to have made a major development towards creating a multi-format reader. Its laser is capable of modifying its focus point via an adaptable lens, a kind of progressive bifocal lens (to make a very approximate analogy).
This laser is also capable of reading DVDs and CDs, whereas current readers have 2 separate lasers to do that.
Ricoh also talked of working to manufacture a laser with the same properties for burning. But the work is said to be quite complex since the lens that is used absorbs much of the power of the laser, causing losses and undoubtedly thermal dissipation.

Enfocus has just launched the latest version of its PDF preflight software, PitStop Professional 7.
This new versions offers quite a few improvements long awaited by users. Among the many innovations, we are particularly interested in the outline text feature (finally!), placing a pdf into another pdf, and verification of file and view settings (overprint preview for example), which shows whether the image will be shown on screen correctly and allows the correction of various corresponding parameters (it is however regrettable that this function is not also integrated in Status Check, the free Certified PDF verification plug-in).


The user interface, which is notoriously complex, was updated, in particular global changes and action scripts (now classified by category, with the addition of a search engine), as well as the navigator, which highlists the biggest problems with the file and allows errors to be corrected directly in its pallet, without having to look in all the different menus in the application.



You can download a 30 day demo HERE.

Lately we've been criticizing Apple's machines, portables in particular, for their defects.
These problems aren't only happening at Apple, even though we have only been focusing on them. To prove it, we are going to speak to you about a car today.

Car buffs will immediately recognize this picture as being of a Mercedes SLR. It is a 626 hp monster, capable of reaching 200 km/h [124 mph] in 10.6 seconds. It costs a trifling 500,000 Euros.
It seems that Mercedes has just announced the recall of these cars for a small electronic problem which can cause a fire in the alternator.
This problem shows that even super expensive items are not perfect. We hope that, just like Mercedes has to, Apple can learn from its mistakes in order to not repeat them.