Monday April 30, 2007

- EU to Harmonize Anti-Piracy Laws - Lionel - 12:19:46

Source : CDR Info

Last Wednesday, the European Parliament adopted a legislation aiming to harmonize criminal sanctions for the infringement of intellectual property rights in the EU. Those sanctions should apply only to infringements leading to commercial profits, and should exclude piracy committed by private users for personal and non-profit usage. Maximum penalty might reach 300,000€ and 4-years' imprisonment, while for less serious infringements, penalties could include criminal and civil fines associated to 100,000€ financial penalty.

The adopted text is now to be discussed by national government representatives at the European Council before being applied in all national legislations for avoiding the current situation with variable penalties for the same infringement of intellectual property rights (900€ in Greece and 100,000€ in Holland).

[translation by Linathael]

- Photoshop: Flow Inside - Lionel - 11:36:10

Secunia reports a vulnerability identified by Marsu in Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3; due to an error within the handling of Bitmap files (e.g. .BMP, .DIB, .RLE) and can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow via a specially crafted Bitmap file.
As the vulnerability remains unpatched, Securia prompts photoshop users to avoid opening untrusted Bitmap files. We do not know precisely but it will affect most likely affect the Mac version too.

[translation by Linathael]

- Intel to Speed Up the Release of Penryn? - Lionel - 11:11:08

As reported by Intel, ramping up of the 45nm engraving process for mass production of next generation Core 2 Duo, aka Penryn, is well on track. Today, TG daily reports that it could even be ahead of schedule, as Intel could release first batches of Penryn as soon as July 15th. According to a NDA, the first pre-release Penryn CPUs could be available on this date with initial sample shipments are scheduled late Q2.
So, first test and reviews on the Penryn will be available on July 15th, and we will be able to evaluate the improvement and performance gain due to the 45nm process. For sure, the finest engraving will be interesting for the Quad Core Penryn expected to hit the shelves by Q3-Q4 2007.

Intel probably decided to speed up the availability of the Penryn to compete with AMD Barcelona. Mac users could benefit of the such race for performance for desktop CPU if only Apple would decide to adopt Penryn in iMac or in a consumer-oriented Mac Pro model to come...

[translation by Linathael]

- Can Apple Sustain its Growth? - Eric - 10:09:25

Couple of days ago, Apple unveiled its financial results for the last quarter, reporting revenue of $5.26 billion and net quarterly profit of $770 million. Apple shipped 1,517,000 hardware units and 10,549,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 36 percent growth in Macs and 24 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter. If it was the most profitable March quarter in Apple’s history, the most impressive result was pointed out by Steve jobs "The Mac is clearly gaining market share, with sales growing 36 percent—more than three times the industry growth rate".

While Steve Jobs could speak about the current success of Apple, maintaining the steady state of Apple profitability is another story and recent information could bring new light concerning the sustainable development of Apple in the future. We can not be accused of not supporting Mac users and the community, but Apple might have problem to control its growth in a near future. The recent postponing of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard till October while it was expected during months to be introduced at the WWDC, a event dedicated to developers, illustrate one of the current weakness of Apple. while offering its own OS and hardware, Cupertino hardware and software R&D teams are rather small in comparison to other key players on the market. While Apple explain the delay for Leopard by the investment required to release the iPhone on time, we also think that the recently introduced Apple TV has required some serious R&D resource, and as Apple did not recruit any new stuff, it had to relocate members of its R&D teams. Without counting the development linked to the introduction of future Santa Rosa-based MB and MB Pro models, as the long expected update of the Mac mini, Cupertino R&D teams are simply too small to keep up with the release of new and innovative product. Recruiting now new talents would probably slow development even more, as skilled members will have to train new comers in the R&D departments. with Apple's policy to keep the highest secrecy level on its future projects, one can not expect Cupertino to outsource some of its R&D work. While motherboard design is carried out in collaboration with Intel and might require much less work than in the past on the Apple's side, it is still present and important as illustrated by the motherboard of the Mac Pro.

It is clear that Apple will stick as close as possible to Intel CPU roadmap to update its hardware models, but user should be prepared to see expected products to be further delayed in the future simply because Apple can not keep developing/updating/introducing new products at the current rate without investing heavily in R&D and hiring more resources. We should not be afraid of such slow down as it is the proof that Cupertino is not following the "quick and dirty" policy so often used by computer companies in the past, and still today.

PS: If Apple needs help for speeding up OS X 10.5 localization into French they know how to contact us; we are ready to help (even sign NDA)

- Internal evolution of the Core 2 Quad CPUs - Lionel - 09:41:24

As time goes by, CPU manufacturers improve the production of their processors, by subtly modifying their dye or their manufacturing process. It allows either an increase in frequency, a better productivity or a diminishing power consumption.
This last point has been improved by Intel on Core 2 Quad Q6600 (4 core CPUs). Thus improved, their thermal dissipation just went from 105 to 95W.
A 10% gain is quite notable and will allow an easier cooling. It's likely that these modifications will be applied to other 4 core CPUs such as the Xeon, in the future. It might even be the case already in the 3 GHz Xeon 5365 that Apple fits in the Octo Core Mac Pro.
As it is, while the 3 GHz Dual Core Xeon dissipates 80W, the 4 Core model only dissipates 150W instead of the logical figure of 160W. So here again 10W have been gained.

[translation by pmax]