News for Friday, 1 September 2006

Codeweavers has announced the release of the first public beta version of Crossover, their business retail solution of Wine for MacOSX. As a reminder, Wine, well known in Linux world, allows a user to launch Windows application without having installed Windows thanks to an API emulator that calls them "on the fly".
Already this beta version gives some ideas of this ambitious project. We have successfully launched and use Photoshop 7 and Half Life (using OpenGL), Aymeric, a reader from our forum has reported to us to have successfully launched AutoCAD LT 97, BricsCAD, OpenOffice, Inkscape and Microsoft Office Pro 2003.
As you might have noticed it, all those applications are quite some years old; as one could have expected it, but if it is a success, developers will update the API emulator allowing the use of more recent applications. So
The list of supported application (tested and certified) for the MacOSX version of Crossover is available here, but it does not mean that other applications might work.
Finally, as for all beta version, Codeweavers is expecting comments and feedback from beta testers in order to deliver a final version that will be the most complete and stable one.

In august, price of DDRII RAM modules have increased by 22%. This tendency should not change till the end of the year (beginning of the new university/college year, as well as the Christmas period).
So, if you need RAM modules, buy them now, the price should start increasing again in 2 weeks.

TDK keeps pushing the limit of the Blu-Ray storage capacity, which has now reached 200GB. To establish this new record, TDK has developed a media featuring 6 layers of 33.3GB each. Originally, the storage capacity per layer was 25GB, but TDK improved burning quality bringing physical media capabilities to their limits.
Of course, such media is more a technological achievement than a real product for the market. Indeed, battle of the blue laser-based DVD burner is now over yet, even though the HD-DVD format seems to relatively inactive recently.