News for Wednesday, 20 September 2006

Without an agreement between supporters of the HD DVD and Blu-ray standard on a unified product, and since no manufacturer seems able to create a universal burner, Warner decided to take the problem the other way round. They may propose future disks readable on the two types of decks as well as in DVD players.
Those medias would contain 3 layers. The closest to surface would be the Blu-ray layer. A HD DVD compatible reader will not be able to focus on it, and will hence go to the underneath one, that's compatible. DVD players will also have access to a compatible layer.
If this solution is elegant, it doesn't solve the problem, which could only be done for the sake of the consumers' by achieving a single format.

After Apple Expo last week which barely let us time to breathe, we finally managed to install a 3 GHz Mac Pro delivered at the beginning of last week.
As opposed to what we could read on some sites, migrating applications and users from a Mac PPC worked flawlessly. Only took, as usual, reinstalling some drivers and utilities.
The first surprising thing is the silence of this machine, although there's a Radeon X1900 XT card in. The only sound that can be heard is that of the hard drives. The sound level is barely superior to that of the first G4 Power Mac models. What a change as compared to G5s, even watercooled ones!
We didn't have a chance yet to run any performance tests, yet the machine proved incredibly fast on boot and more than reactive.
Our configuration isn't yet as we would like it to be. Reinstalling the system on a Raptor 150 will be the final step: when you've tried it, the access times of the original 250 Go HD look like forever and unacceptable.
A follow up very soon.
[Upd.] We just made a test with a very surprising reuslt. We launched on the Mac Pro Altivec Fractal Carbon G5. It's the 64 bits version,which runs via Rosetta. This machine reaches 20 GigaFlops! A result that could be compared to an hypothetical 2.9 GHz dual G5. And very far from the 3.1 Gflops reached by a MacBook Core duo at 2.16 GHz!
[Upd2] Even better with a version that's not optimized for G5s, reaching 24 GFlops. Quite paradoxically, after the G5 Quad that reaches about 30 GFlops, it's the fastest Altivec machine...

Many readers expected this confirmation: the X1900 XT does support the portrait mode .
Many captures posted on Flickr show it. Here's one.

After having tested the first generation of iPod nano, Ars Technica has repeated the operation with the new iPod nano, according to the same procedure. It includes being together with keys in a pocket, dropped from various heights, washing machine session, and many other crash test settings.
Conclusion: the iPod nano 2G is rock solid, even though its display died after the "drop test"

Intel has officially announced the name of its first Quad-Core CPU for customer market: Core 2 Extreme QX6700, featuring 2 dual-core Conroe clocked at 2.66GHz on the same die. Its price will of course be very high US$999, and it should be available in November.
One will have to wait 2007 for additional Quad-Core CPU (and lower price).
For sure the Mac community will have to adapt and understand this relatively fast turn over of CPU. But one should also not forget that we have gain the possibility in most cases to exchange the CPU of our MacIntel. In addition real performance jump are seen only when moving from one CPU series to another, having 2.0 instead of 2.16GHz Core 2 Merom does not represent a big performance improvement.
But developers will have to adapt their software to benefit from multicore CPU, otherwise many cores will simply be not used in most cases.

A new beta version of Parallels (http://www.parallels.com/) is available for download. It improves Mac Pro support as well as compatibility with the last MS Vista builds.
However, the maximal amount of RAM to be used is still limited to 3.5GB; but one can now modify the RAM available without physically removing the modules. Enter the following command:

sudo nvram boot-args="maxmem=3500"

Following password and rebooting, the MacPro should be able to run Parallels without problems.
To restore the original RAM settings, simply enter the command again indicating the real amount of RAM installed.

Available from the Software update panel. It fixes booting issues as well as problem with Bootcamp.

During the installation process, optical drive trays will be opened and closed, so pay attention.
A Mac Pro SMC Firmware Update is also available from apple download website:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macprosmcfirmwareupda
te.html
You will need it only if the SMC version of your MacPro is earlier than 1.7f8. Recently shipped Mac Pro have a 1.7f8 SMC version. It adjusts fan behavior in the Mac Pro

As usual, when something is getting successful, Microsoft has to copy it.
So, Microsoft is going to release in the coming weeks its version of YouTube, its name: "Soapbox" (http://soapbox.msn.com).
It is currently only a beta version, but it expects to grab some of the visitors of YouTube (35 millions/month).
If IT and multimedia are competitive markets where everybody is trying to do the same thing than the other one, especially if it is successful, one has to admit that Microsoft does not know how to innovate, copying must be in their genes... the problem being that in most cases it is a "cheap and dirty copy".
When was it the last time that Microsoft released something original? I mean new, coming directly from their huge R&D Department and being successful?