While trying to answer the question: "How to kill the iPod-iTS ecosystem", both companies having their own online music stores in France decided to go the extreme way: sell music tracks without DRM protection. So, I can play them independently in iPods or with other digital music players; as the chosen format is MP3.
Such a move was also partially due to Apple's decision not to license out FairPlay to preserve the iPod-iTS lineage.
Of course Music Majors would not have left the FNAC or Virgin Music to offer such DRM-free music on their stores: such unprotected music tracks are coming from indies' catalogs.
If this campaign turns to be a success, then it might convince some Music Majors to reconsider the option of DRM-free music tracks. Of course Apple might be impacted directly in France if large Majors move to unprotected music track; but Apple France might also react by removing protection on corresponding catalogs.
Last but not least, the profitable part in the iPod-iTS ecosystem is the hardware, not the iTS itself, so it might very well be that sales of iPod increase following DRM-free music tracks are made available from other stores.
While Apple Expo Paris 2007 was originally planned to take place on September 18th-22nd, new dates have been announced: September 25th-29th.
As usual, it will take place at the "Parc des Expositions" Hall 5, Paris, Apple will have a booth at least as big as the one last year, and we expect to be present among "Le Pommier" (Apple tree) to meet you there; hoping organizers will offer us a better location than in 2006.
JCJ
Gotchi, who was looking for a reliable storage solution for the Mac without investing more money in a Xserve, explains his excellent
bidouille in
this article.
[this article was actually written Oct 16, 2005]
Seagate decided to fight against its image of non-innovating company, and within the last couple of months introduced many new products.
Today, they announce the first 2.5" HD featuring a rotation speed of 15,000rpm.
Of course it will not be suited for being installed in a notebook (yet?), as the Savvio 15K will be available only as a SAS interface and dedicated to small size servers. It will be offer with 2 storage capacities: 36 or 72 GB.
The
PCI Sig group unveiled specifications of the PCI Express 2.0 format.
These new architecture improvements include:
- Dynamic link speed management allows developers to control the speed at which the link is operating
- Link bandwidth notification alerts platform software (operating system, device drivers, etc) of changes in link speed and width
- Capability structure expansion increases control registers to better manage devices, slots and the interconnect
- Access control services allows for optional controls to manage peer-to-peer transactions
- Completion timeout control allows developers to define a required disable mechanism for transaction timeouts
- Function-level reset provides an optional mechanism to reset functions within a multi-function device
- Power limit redefinition enables slot power limit values to accommodate devices that consume higher power
- The PCIe Base 2.0 specification is available for download at http://www.pcisig.com/specifications/pciexpress/base2/ (only for registered companies).
With this new format, bandwidth of each PCI-Express line is doubled (from 256 to 512MB/s); however even with the latest graphic card models it was far to be saturated.
Last but not least, the PCI-Express will be able to provide more power, making it possible to avoid using additional power line for the eager graphic cards found in our computers; but with nVidia and ATI it might only be temporary...
Of course PCI-Express 2.0 will be back compatible, and Intel should offer first dedicated chipsets in 2007, so we should quickly see them in our Macs.
