News for Wednesday, 2 May 2007

Couple of days ago during the Financial Quarter Report conference, Steve Jobs reiterated that most customers want to own their music, and are not massively interested by a subscription-based music sale for iTunes. However, he also stated "never say never"...
For once the future of iTunes might have been roughly drafted by Pascal Cagni, Head and Vice-President of Apple Europe in an interview to the French business newspaper "Les Echos". He spoke about iTunes and future discussions with right owners of video contents. In this short interview one can spot interesting information:
- Apple TV could play DivX movie in the future
- iTunes Video will be launched by the end of the year, and Pascal Cagni already warned TV channels concerning the availability of movie on iTunes and their appearance on TV, Apple intends to exclusively deal with movie producers.
- There will be a physical Apple Store in Paris and in other EU countries, but for the time being, as for other European countries, Apple France push the "Apple Corner"-dedicated area in consumer electronics supermarkets and distributors.
- the iPhone will only be available directly from the Apple Store, same restricted distribution channels than in USA.
For sure discussion between Apple - movie producers - TV channels will be hot during this summer, as many EU TV channels are also movie producers, including film and series...

The flash memory market keeps exploding, but remains a higly competitive field for a couple of manufacturers, trying to capture the largest piece of the cake. To do so, they have to cut their margins while maintaining a high level of innovation.
Samsung announced to have started mass production of a 2GB Multi Level Cell (MLC) chips. To reach such capacity, Samsung moved its engraving process from 60 to 51nm, and increased information density by storing 2 bits on the same memory cell, unlike the SLC (1 bit/cell). In addition, Samsung speed up the current slow MLC data transfer to reach 30MB/s in writing and 8MB/s in reading mode (instead of 17 and 4.4 MB/s previously). Samsung pushed MLC quite close to the performance level currently available with SCL 60nm: 33MB/s reading, 13MB/s writing mode.
Last but not least, to use such memory, devices will need to have their firmware updated to support 4 bit error-correcting code (ECC) in 4 KB pages.

Artlebedev keeps the buzz around the OLED-based keyboard active by announcing that the first sample are expected to the manufactured in November; but in small numbers... 200 units in November and December, with 400 units planned in January 2008. This small volume production fits with the expected demand of this highly priced product: US$1536. Pre-order will be opened on May 20th.

Thanks to GS for this information. Silent wings, a soaring simulator is now available for windows, Linux and Mac OSX in UB.

Silent Wings is developed together with leading aerodynamic, mathematical and soaring experts in Norway and Germany. This collaborative research has made it possible to create a product suite with unique power and characteristics.

The application seems to be graphically appealing, not to say amazing, and offers many features, such as fly online with your buddies and replay your real-flight GPS logs!
A trial version is available (2 weeks) and while the entire application costs 69€. Direct link to the official website: http://silentwings.no/

In a press release, Apple confirms that Steve Jobs will kick off the next WWDC on Monday, June 11, 2007 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, 10h00 local time (19h00 CET).
He is expected to unveil information about delayed Leopard, including unknown features, while officially launching the iPhone. Apple could also postpone the introduction of the Santa Rosa-based MacBook and iMac models till the WWDC, but it might be a bad idea as PC manufacturers have already started to offer notebooks based on recently released Centrino evolution.
Last but not least, we will be at the WWDC to provide the best live coverage possible.

Addonics offers the 5X1 eSATA Hardware Port Multiplier (HPM) allowing users to plug up to 5 SATA/SATA II HD on a single eSATA port.

In this small box, the HPM is compatible with any SATA controller, RAID or non RAID volume. It will allow video editing addicts or professional users to benefit from the SATA transfer speed in RAID5 setup, and could be used by all owners of a PMG5 or a Mac Pro by moving an internal SATA port outside of the case.
The product is available from Addonics website for US$119: http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sahpm-e.asp

In case you missed it from your software update panel, Apple released the Security Update 2007-004 v1.1.
It is available for PPC and Intel-based Mac, as well as for Mac OS X 10.3.9 client.

Security Update 2007-004 is recommended for all users and improves the security of the following components:
AFP Client
AirPort
CarbonCore
diskdev_cmds
fetchmail
ftpd
gnutar
Help Viewer
HID Family
Installer
Kerberos
Libinfo
Login Window
network_cmds
SMB
System Configuration
URLMount
Video Conference
WebDAV

This update might be necessary due to the previous update of QuickTime.
[update]
Dana, one of our valuable forum members, sent us additional information:

SU 004 v.1.1 is only necessary for those users who have not already installed SU 004.v.1.0. If you have done so, Software Update will not download and install it. On the other hand, Quick Time 7.1.6 is for everybody.

Apple released another update dedicated to Mac Intel and aiming to improve AirPort Extreme compatibility:

This update is recommended for all Intel-based Macintosh computers and includes compatibility updates for certain third-party access points configured to use WPA™ or WPA2™ security.

Apple released an update for QuickTime, available on the software update panel, or from Apple Support download page:

QuickTime 7.1.6 delivers numerous bug fixes, addresses a critical security issue with QuickTime for Java and includes support for:
- Final Cut Studio 2
- Timecode and closed captioning display in QuickTime Player
This update is recommended for all QuickTime 7 users.

This update weights around 40MB, and might fix the recently identified flow in QuickTime.

DivX released the new version 2.0 beta 1 of its DivX player. This test version, partially localized, could be interesting for Mac Intel users since it is the first one available in Universal Binary. This new version is also reported to support DRM-enable DivX.
To download DivX Player 2.0 beta 1: here