News for Monday, 13 November 2006

Everybody knows that Apple has move its Europe headquarter from Paris to London, where it is now located right above the Apple Store on Regent Street.
Of course, Apple has been asking its employees to follow the move, however not everyone could negotiate salary compensation to face the high accommodation cost in London, even compared to Paris. So at the end not all task force moved to London.
Now, once in London, one had to face a new problem: not enough space... Apple Europe Headquarter is too small to provide enough working space for all employees, without mentioning the lack of meeting rooms. As a consequence, some meetings are taking place in some nearby pubs, even dealing with confidential information... As a consequence, Apple Europe has decided to get additional space, but again due to the high renting cost in London, the new offices are located right at the airport in a industrial area. Back to the roots, as Apple Europe was previously installed in Paris at "Les Ulis", nearby one the of 2 Parisian Airports...
Concerning Apple France, always at "les Ulis", they have now plenty of office space, and are still waiting for their move to the center of Paris. It was originally planned to be Rue Scribe above the Paris Apple Store, but since this project is postponed, every thing is on pause.

While competitors such as Plextor have already started to manufacture 18x DVD burner, Lite-On announced future availability of a 20x DVD burner. Such burner might have pushed the physical limits to the end for both the drive and the media. This model in addition to burn DVD at 20x, will burn DVD-RAM at 12x, DL DVD at 8x and CD at 48x.
According to Lite-On, you will only need 5 minutes to fill a DVD media up at 20x speed, a maximal speed only reached at the end of the burning process (marketing…).
The most interesting feature of this burner might be its ability to burn DVD-RAM at 12x, since they have been used for years as backup system, and now with the "Packet Writing" technology one can use them as 4.7GB removable HD unit.

Disney announced that they have sold half a million movies through the iTMS in just two month.
They sound happy with the number, especially if you consider the fact that the quality is way lower than a DVD while the price is quite close.
We'll have to wait for the service to be extended to the rest of the world and also for the "hype effect" to fade out to be able to really know if the movie download service is really popular. And also let's hope that more studios will release their movies on the iTMS...
We have to say that we would find the service interesting if it offered HD content, since watching low-def content on a shiny HD display is lame...
[moose: it seems there's a downward trend with the switch to media download... it SHOULD allow for higher quality, but everything we are offered is lower: music is offered in 128kbps and movies in low-def... I'm not sure this is the right thing to do]

While the 17 incher has been announced at the same time as its 15" little brother about 3 weeks ago, shipping hasn't started when people have been receiving their 15" MBP a couple days after the announcement.
So whatever happended to the 17" MBP?
According to Ars Technica, Apple faces supply problems with some components specific to the 17" model. The question is which part is causing the problem...
Let's hope Apple can solve their supply issue, the wait is long for a product supposed to be available 3 weeks ago...

One of the reasons why PC games get rarely ported over to the Mac and, when they do get posted, arrive after a long wait, is because the vast majority of games for Windows use the DirectX game API, which is Windows-exclusive. Porting a game from DirectX to OpenGL is a major hassle and requires heavy rewriting*.
ATI (or shall we say AMD?) might change the deal [or not]. They offer an open-source tool called HLSL2GLSL (High Level Shader Language To GL Shader Language, Bless you!). It is aimed at easing the transition from DirectX to OpenGL. Of course, it's not a magical trick that will automatically transform your evil DirectX-based code into nice OpenGL goodness, but it should make porting easier.
Let's hope that it will be put to good use and that we will see more games coming to the Mac.
[moose: there have already been a bunch of "DirectX to OpenGL tools for the Mac, but this time it's not some small player releasing the product, but ATI, backed by AMD, so let's hope it's not just hype...]
*[moose: DirectX also offers an API for online gaming, which is why lots of Mac versions of PC games often cannot play online with their Windows counterpart]