News for Monday, 17 July 2006

The UMD film market is going poorly. They have not sold enough films in this format, which is understandable. The films are only viewable on the PSP, and so one must purchase a DVD if they wish to see the film on a TV. Sony tried to save this format by offering DVD + UMD bundles, but these cost around 40 euros, which is almost the price of the two discs sold separately.
The latest Sony initiative in this domain is extremely likely to signal the death of the UMD video. In August, the company will start selling 1 and 2 GB memory sticks. These devices will by accompanied by software making it possible to compress and copy certain DVD films sold by Sony Pictures. It will be necessary to enter a code present on the DVD to enable the transfer.
One problem: this software will not be compatible with the Mac... Mac The Ripper will thus be useful for many years, even if we can no longer speak about it once the DADVSI law is in effect.

The film of the explosion of a Dell portable and the photos taken from it have really hurt the manufacturer.

In order toget through it as well as possible and to shed light on this serious problem, Dell has asked for the aid of the American government, more precisely the authorities in charge of consumer safety.
It is already known that the explosion was caused by the battery. According to Dell, there is nothing exceptional about these batteries; identical ones are found in many other portable devices.
You have probably already figured out that Dell, in its actions, has two goals: to shift the blame and to give the impression that the problem could be more universal. And, technically, unless the problem is related to the charging or management of the battery by the machine, it was the correct thing to do.

The claim at the beginning of July that they'd discovered a leak in Mac OS X 10.4.6 caused Symantec more trouble than reknown. Actually, everything seems to prove they barely compared the update to 10.4.7 that actually fixed it, to "discover" it.
Here they come again about Mac and security in their Weblog.
To sum up in a brief statement, let's say they justify their warning through concrete examples. It's not that good when you look at these closely though. They first start by complaining about the Mac community desapprobation whenever someone says OS X security might be jeopardized.
This whole thing isn't very convincing, as as professionals they admit (how bad...) they use the word "virus" for everything security leak including spywares and the like... They actually chose to use the one that would frighten people the most!
Yet we have to agree when they claim there's definitely no invincible OS, and that to believe so would be a dangerous illusion.
We'd be the first to inform you about such an issue or potential danger that could end up in losing data or simply control of our machine. We just wish that any warning given was real, and not only concerns things that could lead to something potentially harmful under paranormal circumstances and after an update.

Apple was probably not expecting such a success for the iMac17" Education model. For less than 1000 euros, many users have chosen this model instead of the other iMac models or the Mac mini. Of course, Apple's margin on iMac Education is probably not as big as on other hardware models.
As a consequence, apple has removed the iMac Education form the AppleStore. The model still exists, but schools, universities or eligible institutions will have to order it directly from Apple.
We think that most of the iMac Education owner are/were eligible to AppleStore Education; nevertheless Apple has decided to better control sales of its iMac Education model... it is not good to sell too many of them...

The NDA covering Core 2 Duo (Conroe) has expired, and one can now find plenty of tests on the web related to the new Intel desktop CPU.
All of them confirm what we already knew. This processor is a really high level performance CPU while draining less power than competitors.
This is an additional information to better understand Apple decision last year to move to x86 CPU.
Among all tests, AnandTech's one is as usual well documented: AnandTech

The partnership between Nike and Apple for the Nike + iPod Sport Kit is designed in such a way that you have to buy Nike shoes to get the sensor.
The website podophile.com shows how to adapt the sensor to non-Nike-branded running shoes.

A bit of Velcro, a bit of sewing, and it is done, you get iPod-compatible shoes.
Let's see if Apple will modify the iPod firmware to ensure that you are using the receiver with a sensor located in Nike shoes. ;)

First a report from Aprezman.

I have just discovered a quite amazing bug in Word (part of Microsoft office). If one types the following sentence: "T'es avec moi ou pas ?", the application crashes! This phenomenon happens with Word 2000 or 2004, on a G3, G4 or Core Duo-based Mac.
Could not test it on a PC, but it remains a quite amazing bug.

You could reproduce the bug easily with Word 2004. The question mark is not required for having the application to crash.
The bug is still effective without the automatic spelling option.
It would be interesting to know if this French sentence will also affect other language Word versions (German, UK, etc...), or if the translated sentence leads to the same symptom in local Word version.
It is weird...