News for Wednesday, 27 September 2006

Thanks to MArtin for this info.
Greenpeace has launched a major action against IT/computer manufacturer for some times already. They have asked an independent danish laboratory to perform toxicological test on several notebooks.
Those tests have identified numerous toxic compounds, in large amount in HP notebook but also in MacBook. According to the analysis, customer-dedicated Apple notebook model is massively contaminated with tetrabromobisphenol A. This compound is widely used and incorporated in polymers as a reactive or additive flame retardant.
If the WHO has concluded that

Contact of the general population is with products made from these polymers and would not result in significant uptake of TBBPA. Furthermore, the acute and repeated dose toxicity of TBBPA is very low. TBBPA is poorly absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract. The risk for the general population from TBBPA exposure is, therefore, considered to be insignificant.

they have also defined rules for people manufacturing TBBPA-containing products as clearly stated hereafter:

* Workers in the manufacture of TBBPA and products containing the compound should be protected from exposure by means of engineering controls, monitoring of occupational exposure, and appropriate industrial hygiene measures.
* Environmental exposure should be minimized through the appropriate treatment of effluents and emissions in industries using the compound or products.
* Disposal of industrial wastes and consumer products should be controlled to minimize environmental contamination with this material and its breakdown products.
* If TBBPA-treated material is incinerated, it has to be done in properly constituted incinerators running at consistently optimal conditions.

Greenpeace has decided to launch an really active campaign against Apple, in order to get Cupertino-based company to react to such problem: http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/procreate-video.

Apple has just released an iTunes update (to version 7.0.1, 25.7 MB, via the software update panel).
This update should fixes some issues that appeared with iTunes 7 (such as second view covers as reported to us by Lumo).

iTunes 7.0.1 addresses stability and performance issues with Cover Flow, CD importing, iPod syncing, and more..

The RefurbStore is full today, one will find refurbished iPod, iMac Core Duo, Mac mini as well as MacBook Pro...
Be careful, this RefurbStore reflect the recent hardware update as well as the forthcoming ones (MacBook Pro). So think twice before buying something ;)
RefurbStore

Hereafter is a report from jefftrep.

I have installed four 750GB SATA2 HDs in my brand new MacPro. Then I have added one 250GB SATA2 HD to one of the 2 extra SATA2 ports available on the motherboard. I had to cut a piece of the front fan to make it possible to install the cable. I am going to look for another SATA2 HD in order to add a 6th HD. To power the 5th and the forthcoming 6th HD, I have been using the power line available from the optical drives.
I can not wait to get my Decklink HD card!

Hereafter are benchmarks performed with the Disk Speed Test utility provided with the Decklink. I have been running it 15 times with different RAID 0 settings (32k, 64k, 128k, 256k block size), and variation in read/write was not higher than 2 MB/s; so it is really stable and reliable. In a near future I will probably try to setup an internal RAID 0 based on 6x 750 GB SATA2 + un ATA HD for booting. MacPro are great!

Last week, a MacRumors forum reader was reporting to have identified that the Airport chip in his iMac Core 2 Duo was compatible with draft 802.11n thanks to a Broadcom chip.
When looking in the MacPro, we have identified the same chip, a Broadband BDR4328, compatible 802.11 a/b/g and draft n. Apple is currently only providing drivers to support b and g wifi format, but once a new driver based on the final n format will be available, the Mac Pro should be able to use it immediately.
Broadcom does not provide reference for this card, but it seems to be the same one used in Dell computers.
After having downloaded Dell drivers, we have installed the driver after modifying the driver to install it via WinXP
After rebooting we obtained confirmation of our hypothesis:

Once upon a time, not so long ago, Intel was foreseeing CPUs running over 10GHz for a close future (actually now behind us). Facing a technological dead-end, the manufacturer has sinced turned back and completely revised its performance enhancement policy. The Intel Developer Forum, which takes place from September 26th to 28th in San Francisco, is an oppotunity for the company to make announcements and talk about the future.
And now it seems the future is multi Core full speed ahead... Intel though speaks of releasing soon CPUs with 10 to 100 cores. Let's just keep in mind that future and technology have their own pace of evolution and don't get dictated by enthusiastic announcements.