News for Friday, 6 April 2007

A virus was developed to specifically attack iPods running Linux has been discovered. When infected, it prevents the playback of music and videos on the affected players and instead shows a message alerting the user that their iPod has been infected.
The number of iPods that Linux is installed on is rather tiny, so this virus will have no "noticeable" impact.
In addition, in order to infect the iPod, it is necessary to connect to the iPod from a Windows machine.
This demonstrates that the problems is absolutely not a fault of Apple's systems, but with Windows which is used to transmit the virus and with iPodLinux which is not secure.
Il is more than likely that the next anti-virus updates will prevent its spread.

We keep receiving everyday reports from MacBook and MacBook Pro 15" and 17" owners facing problems with their Lithium-Polymer batteries.
For MacBook, the issue usually arises when the battery is totally empty, leaving not enough energy for its internal electronic system to communicate with the notebook. As a consequence, it is not recognized anymore, and can not be recharged.
The main issue with MacBook Pro battery remains the "inflating" or "swelling" problem, often linked to a reduced capacity or a quick discharging phenomenon.
If Apple keeps replacing defective batteries with new ones because all affected machines are still covered by the warranty, what will happen in a couple of months when the first 12 months will be over; will Cupertino act the same way?

If the Ready Boost Technology from Vista supposed to speed up booting procedure and launching application is not really convincing any reviewers beside Microsoft engineers, many companies have developed products for this technology.
The company Innodisk released an USB key which is designed to be plugged to one of the internal USB port located on the motherboard, avoiding this flash memory to be accidentally removed and leaving all external USB ports available.


Supertalent is exploring another way, and offer solutions to recycle internal IDE ports.

Modules with a storage capacity ranging from 1 to 8GB, with a 40 or 44 pins connector can be plugged horizontally or vertically to an IDE port.
Beside the imagination for developing innovative products around the flash memory, specifications, and especially the data transfer speed of those products are rather slow, and might even be so slow that it would prevent users to benefit of the NAND ultra fast access time.

During the last Apple Expo in 2006, ViewSonic was demonstrating a LCD display featuring an iPod dock located in its stand. Our friends from Hardware.fr reports photo of new products from ViewSonic illustrating that the company aims to pursue in this "iPod-ready/Made for iPod" direction.

The first product will be a video projector featuring an iPod dock, allowing to directly display video contents stored in an iPod.
The other product is a LCD display, with an "iPod style" design, featuring an integrated webcam, ViewSonic probably decided to offer Mac-dedicated LCD models, as Apple tends not to renew its similar products not so often...

D-Link announced the availability of a drafted 802.11n WiFi Express Card.

It will use one of the internal PCI-Express connector of the notebook.
We do not know if Mac-dedicated drivers will be immediately available, but one could imagine that Mac OS X could natively support such card. Indeed, the 802.11n Airport chips installed by Apple in its notebook models are also connected directly to a PCI-Express port.
The target price for this card should be US$119.99.
For desktop computer, D-Link will offer a similar card based PCI-Express 1x.

It could be interesting to have a driver developed for PowerPC-based Mac as it would allow owners of the last Power Mac G5 to add 802.11n to their computer. This card has a price: US$149,99.

While the Intel website does not contain any reference of a Quad Core Xeon clocked at 3.0GHz; our Italian friends from setteB.IT obtained some information about this CPU from Intel USA.
So the processor is not a ghost, it does exist, its reference is X5365. As the other Xeon 53xx it features 8MB of cache and is designed to work on a FSB clocked at 1333MHz. Its official price will be US$1172/unit for 1000 units ordered.
Its power consumption remains unknown, but it should between 120W (Quad Core 2.66GHz Xeon 5355) and 160W.