News for Monday, 17 December 2007

The well known iPhone application iNdependence is now available in version 1.3. As a reminder, iNdependence is a Cocoa-based application for Mac OS X which provides an easy-to-use interface for jailbreak, activation, SSH installation, and ringtone/wallpaper/application installation on your iPhone. It's open source project under the GNU v2 license agreement.

Dec. 15/07 - Quick 1.3.1 release to fix the anySIM installation bug where the permissions aren't set correctly and so anySIM will crash when being run on the phone. Also added documentation for upgrading from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2 on a jailbroken 1.1.1 phone. See the CHANGELOG for details.
Dec. 14/07 - Merry Christmas! Version 1.3 is here to bring joy to the world (or at least make jailbreaking 1.1.2 much easier). Sorry, I don't have a 1.1.2 OTB phone to test it with, so I can't say if it works for those phones, but it certainly works fine on my upgraded phone. The CHANGELOG is here. Enjoy, and all the best to everyone for the holidays!

The new version allows users to jailbrake their iPhone with a single package where previously many were required. The new version will guide you through the multiple steps necessary to jailbreak your iPhone. Depending on your iPhone firmware, you might have to downgrade or upgrade it before running iNdependance. SIM unlocking is also possible for iPhone featuring firmware 1.1.1 and bootloader 3.9, so you can install anySIM.
For additional information, please visit : http://code.google.com/p/independence/

Information Week reports information about preliminary specification of the next generation of FireWire as released by the IEEE. Named S3200, it will use the same connectors and cables as the FireWire 800 while allowing data transfer speed to be sustained over 100m! While it should initially be quickly implemented for Pro-oriented storage market, before to being added to HD devices dedicated to consumers. Of course, we should be able to use it as a data transfer and exchange port, as soon as Apple will add it to our Macs (considering that Apple will add a TCP/IP layer to the S3200).
This new generation of FireWire might be officially finalized in January, and why not for the MWSF. While the USB3 is not out yet, it seems that the FireWire S3200 will already ready to compete.

In a press release, Mental Ray announced to have been acquired by NVidia:

mental images®, founded in 1986, is the recognized leader and de facto industry standard for visualization software for the entertainment, computer-aided design, scientific visualization, architecture, and other industries that require sophisticated images. The company's core product is the Academy Award®-winning photorealistic rendering software mental ray® which runs on a wide variety of platforms ranging from networks of workstations to parallel supercomputers, producing images of unsurpassed realism.
mental ray is the integrated rendering technology within such leading Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Digital Content Creation (DCC) software products as Autodesk's AutoCAD®, Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® Maya®, Dassault Systems CATIA® and Solidworks ®, and AVID Softimage®|XSI®.
…
mental images, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDA and operates under its brand and leadership team, including founder Rolf Herken as the CEO/CTO, from its headquarters in Berlin, Germany as well as its other worldwide locations in Europe, North America, and Australia.
As a wholly-owned subsidiary, mental images has autonomy in running its day-to-day business and continues to serve its customers in the dedicated manner it is known for. mental images develops and serves new business opportunities with its software and solutions business, including mental ray, mental mill® and RealityServer®, the platform product for the deployment of 3D web applications and application services.
The combination of mental images and NVIDIA united some of the greatest talents in the visual computing industry. This strategic combination enables the development of tools and technologies to advance the state of visualization. These solutions are optimized for next generation computing architectures and create new product categories for both hardware and software solutions.

One could be surprised by such move, however one should not forget current Intel’s goal to bring more realistic games to the market. Future of video games and 3D electronic entertainments might be already « ray traced ». Next generation of 3D rendering might be based on a completely different technology, requiring new graphic cards built around a new architecture; something Intel wants to launch: multicore-based cards allowing massive parallel computing (aiming to save power too).