News for Tuesday, 17 October 2006

Since yesterday, the website of Silicon Color displays the following message:

"We are pleased to announce that all Silicon Color technology and intellectual property, including FinalTouch color correction software, was recently sold to Apple. Maintenance agreements held by current Silicon color customers will be honored by Apple until they expire."

FinalTouch is not only a software package, but an integrated solution based on PowerMacG5 or MacPro (version released beginning of September), 2 Xserve and 2 Xserve RAID.
Such solution might be in the future integrated into existing Pro application proposed by Apple, such as FinalCut Pro. In addition FinalTouch Customers will benefit of the software and hardware supports from Apple.
Website of Silicon Color

Six years after experimenting its in-flight internet system, named Connexion, and allowing you to browse the net while flying at 30,000 feet, Boeing has decided to discontinue it.
This service was charged US$15, but apparently was not really requested by passengers, and costing more money than expected, so Boeing has decided to stop it by the end of the year, till then it will be available for free in equipped planes.

This story will never end for SONY; Fujitsu and Sharp have respectively recall batteries for their notebooks, representing 51,000 and 79,000 respectively.
It might look like a small number when comparing to the 8 millions battery units already recalled, but it keeps SONY under the light of news networks. It comes in addition to the delay of PS3 launch.
But it might go even worth for SONY in the coming months, indeed Toshiba has announced it will claim financial compensation...
Of course there is probably a link with the current fight between both companies concerning the Blue laser-based DVD, Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD.

In a new Technote, Apple explains how to setup a software RAID10 via MacOSX Tiger.

A RAID10 is a RAID0 volume composed of 2 RAID1 volumes. So you will need 4 at least 4 HDs to built such RAID volume. We do not recommend to use 2 partitions on the same drive to generate 2 virtual HDs, it will strongly affect performance.
If this RAID10 is not the most fancy nor the most performing solution, it is the easiest one to setup in a MacPro to benefit from both performance and secure data storage.